The Cavern Club has been overrun by overgrown beetles. Get down there and exterminate those vermin! You've no time for poppy rock. You're heavy metal heads with
Beat Up The Beatles is a 36-page dungeon crawl zine for a party of level 5 adventurers, designed for D&D but easily adapted to other systems. Pick it up and play it, equipped with everything a DM needs:
maps, traps, monster stats, NPCs and treasure,
clear mechanics, ready-to-read descriptions,
and enough Beatles references to make your intellectual property lawyer nervous.
Something's moved into the Cavern Club. And it won't stop playing.
Ulthvassar was once the cultural capital of Gorgonia. Now its venues are boarded up, its stages dark, all apart from one. Something monstrous lives on in its most infamous basement.
Four beetling beasts have taken up residence in the Cavern Club. Their names are Jinn, Smacca, Gorge and Fungo. You know them better as the Beatles. Every night, doomed souls descend the steps. None come out.
Your mission: go down into the depths of shadow and song and stop those bowl-cut big dogs of pop rock. Help hostages. Avoid traps. Claim treasure. And get the hell out of there.
The zine is a complete, ready-to-run adventure containing everything your DM needs:
20 fully described rooms across two floors of the Cavern Club, from the cloakroom to the pit
Two dungeon maps, designed in Inkarnate, for the DM to annotate and use at the table
4 original monsters — Jinn, Smacca, Gorge and Fungo — each with unique stat blocks, special abilities, and a MacGuffin that must be found and destroyed to stop them coming back
7 fiendish traps, from Pyrotechnics to the Cat Burglar, each with triggers, effects, and ways to disarm them
9 NPCs and side quests, including Lady Madonna, Father McKenzie, the Eggman, and Mother Mary
13 original magic items, from a Glass Onion to Norwegian Wood
Beat Up The Beatles introduces three mechanics that work so well you'll want to steal them for your other games:
The d20 Dungeon. At the start of the adventure, the DM rolls to determine the starting positions of the monsters, NPCs and treasure. Even the DM doesn't know exactly what's where. It keeps every session fresh, and it keeps everyone honest.
Rest and Recovery. This is not a dungeon where you pop off for a long rest whenever you feel like it. The music never stops. Sleep here and you might wake up somewhere very different. The party has other ways to heal — but they come at a cost.
The Escape Sequence. When the cavern starts to collapse, the players have eight turns to get out. Every turn counts. Every decision matters. It builds to a climax that your players will be talking about long after the session ends.
This is my first cross collab on BackerKit and I'm excited to "Come Together" with Bahab Balam 3D and his project, The Silent Graves - Victorian Sarcophagi for TTRPGs. Back both campaigns to get your hands on some great bonus content:
I've written an additional section called "Don't Let Me Down" where you find a bloated coffin containing a monstrous confusion of fans called the 'Addled Scruffs'. They have given their life to keeping the Beatles malevolent music alive. It cannot die until they do.
And Bahab Balam has thrown in the STL file for a bonus sarcophagus to go with this part of the adventure. I like the idea of keeping a dangerous dice set in there, rattling around like bones!
This is the 20th time that we've crowdfunded a book like this so we are familiar with how this all works, and have refined our process to make it affordable and efficient for our backers.
The zine of Beat Up The Beatles is already finished. Not just drafted, finished. Proof read, play tested, everything. All I need to do is add the names of my generous friends to the credits. This means that fulfilment will be completed as soon as the money comes through and the zines are printed. Digital rewards will be done even quicker.
If you select a physical reward (zines) then postage and packaging is NOT INCLUDED in your pledge.
Rewards will be fulfilled through our website as this is the cheapest option (and the process we have used on previous campaigns).
As well as running crowdfunding campaigns, we sell at conventions and, more importantly for you, through our website. Recently, with the help of our friends at Midnight Tower - they're lovely people, check them out - we've improved our shipping to make it more affordable for those of you not based in merry old England.
If you're interested in sourcing a larger quantity of our books for retail, please contact [email protected] and we can work something out.
Greedy Gorgon Press are a platonic throuple of TTRPG enthusiasts dedicated to bringing a little more rock and roll to your RPG romps. Like a literary human centipede, you don't know where one of us starts and the other ends. We bring a touch of barbaric rage against the machine, a hint of Megadeth saving rolls and a smattering of AC/DC to your, well, AC and DC.
We write games where music isn't just the theme — it's the engine. Every title in our catalogue, from the perilous I Fought the Boar to the irreverent Stairway to Heaven and the high-stakes Jailbreak, wears its heavy metal influences for all the fantasy world to see.
We write every room, every monster, and every magic item, NPC and trap. Yes, we may have an unhealthy addiction to puns, literary references and the sharp edge of swearing, but, what would do you expect? We're English teachers FFS. And what would you prefer? More AI soup?
Most importantly, we make games that bring people together. We're in the fun business!
I have added five of our zines as potential add ons. You can get them as a PDF or as a Zine (with the PDF also included). There's more information about each of them on the add ons page or a full breakdown on our website: https://www.greedygorgonpress.com/store.
