In January 2026 we presented the all-new Dead Air Bundle featuring English-language ebooks for Dead Air: Seasons, the post-apocalyptic RPG from Italian publisher The World Anvil Publishing about a Blighted world forever changed. YOU IGNORED THE WARNINGS and now the world has fallen. Humanity designed the Panacea bacterium to feed on pollution, but now the mutated Blight has pushed us to the brink of extinction. And even death is not the end, for the Blight reanimates its victims as near-immortal Awakened hunters. In this aftermath world of horrible Chimeras, Crimson Zones, Fungal Colonies, and Abnormal Mycelia, you face dangers, strangeness, and secrets not only of the Blight, but of your fellow humans. Inspired by ecofiction classics such as The Last of Us, Annihilation, and Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and community-building RPGs like Legacy: Life Among the Ruins and Mutant: Year Zero, Dead Air explores human ingenuity in difficult situations. Create your settlement like a character, then shape its development and the lives of its people. Seek community in a hostile world, and search for new balance after unavoidable devastation.
The Italian designers at The World Anvil Publishing (not to be confused with UK-based online campaign manager World Anvil) contributed the June 2025 Broken Tales Bundle. Strongly inspired by The Last of Us (a recent apocalypse, desperate communities, biohazard zombies), Dead Air’s danger feels visceral, fleshy, and unsettling. You face horrors at home and in the field. The Blight remains and grows, an organic syndrome that seeks to change all life. When someone dies, the corpse rises as a zombie. Strike it down and it repairs itself. Cut off a limb and it grows back. Time will not deal with them; they are here to stay. And should you manage to destroy one, it collapses and becomes an infectious mass, a Crimson Zone. Burn them? Well, that’s how you get more spores. Get enough spores in you and you begin to change, until one day you slip over.
Like Broken Tales, Dead Air uses the company’s Monad Echo rules, a strongly fiction-first system based on characters’ “narrative positions,” here amped up to handle grim survival action. This d6 push-your-luck system reinforces the dangers of this desperate setting. In Broken Tales your character succeeded automatically with any action, as long as the Narrator didn’t intervene. But in Dead Air you face repeated Crises and make frequent Checks against average, compelling, and demanding Opposition Levels. A situation’s Opposition Level dictates the number of successes you need to gain a Standard Outcome (your desired result), Outcome With a Cost, or Outcome With an Increment. In Broken Tales the number of successes you accrue was specified by your Attributes and Gifts – no die rolls required. You can also roll any number of d6s to generate additional successes, where every die rolled adds a success – unless any die rolls a 1, in which case the entire Check fails. Dead Air adds Advantage and Drawback Dice, conferred by Gifts or Threats, that adjust the success totals. The system has some additional means to affect the dice and numbers, but at base you pick your poison.
The 217-page Dead Air: Seasons Core Book focuses on characters and their communities, rather than the fate of the world. Your Community is a character in its own right, with mechanics, advancements, and Gifts. Through exploration you expand your Region over time, developing its appearance, inhabitants, and distinct Sectors. The play cycle alternates journeys to learn about the Region and time spent with the Community. The passage of time is marked by Seasons, each bringing new challenges and customs that gradually shape both the Community’s identity and the world’s environments.
This all-new Dead Air Bundle gathered almost the entire line to date – everything you need to build and protect your community, even as the spore-filled dead air in your lungs brings you ever closer to the end. There were eight titles in our Dead Air Collection (retail value $107) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Dead Air: Seasons Core Book, along with its Archetype Playbooks and Master Screen; the campaign expansion Brave New World; a set of solitaire rules, Solo Mode; the recent full-length introductory campaign Daughter of the Blight; and two short scenarios, Sweet Home and Wolf’s Eyes.
