In August 2023 we presented the Nightmares Underneath Bundle featuring The Nightmares Underneath, the old-school horror-fantasy RPG from Chthonstone Games. The physical world faces invasion by deadly “incursions” from the Realm of Nightmares that manifest as dungeons. To destroy the incursion, your fantasy adventurers must risk nightmarish curses, face the dungeon’s monsters, and loot its treasures. Use your loot to improve your home community, making it more prosperous and helpful for your expeditions into the ruins from the Age of Chaos, where you may find items of great magical power to banish the nightmares.
The Nightmares Underneath, a standalone game by Johnstone Metzger (Class Warfare, Adventures on Dungeon Planet, Wizard-Spawned Insanities), creatively adapts the systems common to old-school fantasy RPGs. In place of hit points your character has a “Disposition” score. Once your character runs out of Disposition, instead of dying, successive damage reduces your attributes, and may cripple or maim you. There are five alignments, instead of the usual three or nine, and they affect the way a character interacts with magic and social institutions. Initiative is rolled again each round, but only by the players – monsters always use the same initiative scores. Characters of any class may cast spells, though not necessarily well. Casters must roll to control a spell; a failed roll makes that spell harder to cast and may have unexpected results.
The Nightmares Underneath emphasizes the characters’ community – their social safety net, if you will. In a January 2017 review on his blog “Mazirian’s Garden,” Ben Laurance (Through Ultan’s Door) praised the First Edition of The Nightmares Underneath: “Probably my favorite rules innovation in this game is a nice early domain game of institution building. As PCs begin spending money in town, they build up the institutions where their coin flows, whether it’s a teahouse, druggist, university, court, or a necromancer’s guild. As the institution grows in stature, the player acquire contacts and gains more favorable interactions with them. There’s also a chance the institution eventually acquires the alignment of the character who funds it. I think this would be a lot of fun, and lead organically to intrigue and engagement with a richly developed setting outside the dungeon. There are also some fun rules for inflation and building resentment of the players.
“In short, you should buy this book. It’s beautiful. The setting is evocative. The core conceit of the dungeon as nightmare incursion is fun. The bestiary is nuts. And the rules are interesting.”
We presented the 2016 First Edition of Nightmares as well as City of Poison in the November 2017 OSR 5 Bundle. This new offer included both editions of the corebook, plus many additional incursions, monsters, and hexcrawls, for an unbeatable bargain price. There were three titles in our Nightmare Starter (retail value $45) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including The Nightmares Underneath core rulebook in both its First and Second Editions (plus the free edition); the straightforwardly named Dungeon Full of Monsters, written for Labyrinth Lord with conversion notes for Nightmares; and a 36-page book of dungeon incursions, City of Poison.
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got three Bonus Nightmares worth an additional $60, including the Nightmares spellbook The Nameless Grimoire, the large-scale wilderness sandbox setting Only Monsters Here, and The Metamorphica Revised, a system-agnostic resource to generate mutations for dark fantasy, horror, transhuman sf, post-apocalypse, and even superhero campaigns.
