Unleash chaos with MÖRKTASTIC BEASTS, a nightmarish art book and Mörk Borg bestiary, featuring 150+ pages of twisted creations from eleven visionary artists. Back it to summon these horrors into your doom-laden adventures!
Ekphrastic writing is the vivid, often dramatic description of visual art. Our project is a full-color fantasy art book, which leads with spectacular artwork from some of today's most exciting weird illustrators, that also functions as an artist-created compendium of creatures. In the crucible of the Flaming Hand, ekphrastic writing transforms visual art into something that can kill your party.
Rather than revisit known fantasy tropes, we begin with each established illustrator creating their own striking, startling, original artworks straight from the abyssal depths of the subconscious. Each piece is then given to Janaka to reverse engineer creature names, lore and abilities—and then Max Moon creates playable stats for them all!
The result: an artist-created compendium of stunningly illustrated creatures, spirits, and demons which have never seen the light of day or dark of dungeon before!
But it was built for 5e; it was too kind, too survivable. Mörktastic Beasts contains all the strange and epic encounters from the original, plus new creatures and new art—all of it redesigned, rebound, then dragged howling and grim into Mörk Borg compatibility.
When not sitting at a table, ravenously devouring junk food with our friends and rolling polyhedral die to determine heroic successes or tragic failures, some of the most fun we had growing up with roleplaying games was browsing the fantastic compendiums of monsters, which provided the countless deadly antagonists for our dungeon crawls and inter-dimensional encounters. The phantasmagoria of fiends, ghosts, fae folk, and mythic figures fed our imaginations while the accompanying illustrations brought them vividly to life.
Decades later, we still love to browse these volumes and it's clear that all those years of monster immersion have twisted—er, *shaped*—our creative identities. Now we're ready to call forth new monsters from the fertile grounds of our imagination, using the artistic talents we've cultivated over the years to share them with you.
Each spread pairs a full-page illustration with the lore and stats on the nightmare it birthed to create an art book that crawls off the shelf and into your tabletop's dying world. Our artist lineup includes: Jeremy Hush, Joe Keinberger, Ellie Livingston, Johan Nohr, Nathan Reidt, Arik Roper, and Skinner—with additional stretch goal art from Caustic and Saprophrial!
Your Beastly Illustrators:
Jeremy Hush draws from a wealth of sources and influences. An avid world traveler, and a recognized initiate of the heavy metal and punk scenes, Hush has been creating work for zines and bands for years. His work is haunting and beautiful, wild and chaotic, dark and saturated, but entirely unique. Influenced by the linear styles of 19th century prints and drawings, Hush’s pieces feel like Grimm fairy tales, in the most visceral way possible. They are raw but meticulous, conveying both an ancient solemnity, and the guttural impulses of a nightmare.
Joe Keinberger's work is largely influenced by mythology, folklore, classic horror films and an appreciation for the dark and macabre that can only be instilled by growing up through many a New England autumn. He uses a variety of media and techniques in his pieces, resulting in explorations of textural surface involving drawing, painting, sanding, scratching and carving. He presents these ghosts, demons and devils as they are: complicated beings with secrets to hide and protect, and histories forged in chains that bind them to the melancholy of the mortal world.
Ellie Livingston's goal in creating artwork is to put on paper the bizarre inner world that has swirled in her mind since childhood. She combines her radical love of nature, her childish heart, and her fascination with the surreal and the terrifying to create a world where pain and sadness coexist with beauty and humor. She aims to show tenderness in the bizarre and haggard through depicting broken and misunderstood creatures amid the beautiful and wild worlds they live in.
Johan Nohr is a Swedish visual artist and graphic designer whose work has become inseparable from the modern heavy-metal tabletop imagination. Best known for his art direction and illustration work in the creation of Mörk Borg, Nohr’s style is immediate, violent, funny, and unforgettable: a delirious collision of screaming color, ink-dripping filth, punk graphics, and apocalyptic fantasy. His work looks as if it has been ripped from the margins of a cursed zine, then sharpened into design with total control. Beneath the chaos is an exacting graphic intelligence, one that knows precisely how to overwhelm the eye while guiding it. The result is art that feels dangerous, iconic, and utterly alive.
Nathan Reidt's figurative works, sometimes depicting the forms of what are still recognizably people (albeit covered in growths, protrusions, and fleshy abnormalities), and other times bringing to life altogether more unusual beings, peel away at our conceptions of what being beautiful truly means. Rendered with an obvious love and attention to detail, Reidt’s creations skillfully toy with his audience’s emotional alliances creating a tug of war between the opposing sides of repulsion and attraction.
Arik Roper is one of the defining image-makers of heavy music (SLEEP, High on Fire, etc.) and visionary fantasy art. Based in New York City, he has spent decades creating work that moves fluidly between album art, poster design, illustration, typography, and painting, building a body of work that feels at once ancient, psychedelic, and deeply alive. Roper’s images draw from mythology, nature, religion, science fiction, and the dream-logic of classic fantasy illustration, resulting in worlds drenched in atmosphere and strange revelation. Whether working in black and white or in hallucinatory color, his art carries a rare combination of technical precision and otherworldly force, making each piece feel less like an illustration than an invocation.
Oakland-based artist Skinner creates psychedelic nightmare paintings that crash together fantasy, horror, humor, and raw ecstatic energy. Working across painting, illustration, toys, murals, animation, and installation, he has built a visual universe that is loud, maximal, grotesque, and strangely joyful. His monsters and demons do not merely menace; they pulse with personality, color, and a kind of unruly spiritual electricity. There is a feverish abundance to Skinner’s work, but also a real sense of craft and conviction beneath the chaos, as though every blazing skull and impossible beast has clawed its way out of some private myth and into full, glowing form.
The Heretical Priests:
Max Moon is a game designer, graphic designer, and co-founder of Flaming Hand, where he helps forge strange, beautiful, handmade works at the intersection of tabletop gaming, occult ephemera, and underground art. Through Max Moon Games—now an imprint of Flaming Hand—he has built a reputation for craft, atmosphere, and a deep sensitivity to the physical and imaginative textures of play. For Mörktastic Beasts, Max is handling game design and stats, translating grotesque visions into brutal, elegant mechanics and ensuring these creatures are not just unforgettable to look at, but lethal, playable, and alive at the table.
Janaka Stuckyis a mystic poet, performer, publisher, lifelong RPG player, and co-founder of Flaming Hand. Best known as the founding editor of the award-winning press Black Ocean and the author of four poetry collections, he works in the fertile borderlands between literature, ritual, and the occult imagination. His book Ascend Ascend was adapted into a live album with Lori Goldston and released by Neurot Recordings. In Mörktastic Beasts, he reverse-engineers each creature from its image, drawing names, histories, and nightmare logic out of the artwork’s abyss.
Stretch Goal Artists:
Causticis an illustrator, writer, and game designer whose work revels in the weird vitality of fantasy creatures and monsters. His art is driven by a love of character, silhouette, and visual storytelling, giving even his strangest beings a sense of presence and possibility. Rather than treating monsters as generic threats, Caustic approaches them as distinct inhabitants of fully imagined worlds—odd, intense, often grotesque, but never without personality. The result is creature design that feels playful, imaginative, and full of tabletop possibility: art that invites you not just to look, but to wonder what kind of world could produce such beings in the first place.
Saprophial is a Canada-based illustrator whose ink and graphite work conjures a world of exquisite dread. Working frequently in music and TTRPG contexts, she creates images defined by thoughtful line, obsessive detail, and a gift for making the monstrous feel intimate, expressive, and strangely elegant. Her pieces often seem to emerge from the shadowlands between dark fantasy, gothic illustration, and biological study, where beauty is inseparable from unease. There is patience in her work, but never coldness; each drawing feels carefully summoned, as though its creature has been waiting a very long time to be seen clearly.
The book reproduces each piece of artwork in a full-bleed A5 format—with name, lore, and stats for each creature on the facing page. You can back us to get:
A PDF
Or a hardcover book + PDF
Or a hardcover book + PDF, and a black light poster
Or a signed & numbered book encased in a handmade reliquary complete with a portfolio of fine art giclée prints—limited to no more than a cursed edition of 13 copies from the Flaming Hand Vault
220+ pages, A5 sized (6" x 8.5") hardcover book!
Yellow leatherette cover with debossed black foil stamp!
Entirely originalmonsters, complete with lore and stats compatible with Mörk Borg!
Full page, color illustrations on every spread!
Beastly Index in the back!
Printed on heavy premium gloss paper!
The PDF comes with a hyperlinked Table of Contents!
Original artwork is also available at higher pledge levels, including concept sketches and full-color paintings!
FUNDINGSTRETCHGOALS GET YOU: more monsters, more art, and more material upgrades! More details below...
The Reliquary Edition is handmade in Minnesota by the Campbell-Logan Bindery, which has been operated as a family-owned business for over 60 years. Each box is meticulously crafted to order, bound in Japanese cloth imported directly from Tokyo, and stamped with black metallic foil. The box contains eight giclée prints—representing eight of our nine illustrators—suitable for framing, or keeping as a complete folio set. The editions of Mörktastic Beasts included in this set will be individually numbered and signed, limited to an edition no greater than 13 copies. No further Reliquary Editions will be produced after the campaign is over, so this run promises to be extremely rare.
ENDED - NOW AVAILABLE AS AN ADD-ON Back at any physical pledge level in the first 48 hours:
Get a free, limited edition Flaming Hand 4" x 5" patch featuring the Haski (fire troll), illustrated by Joe Keinberger for Mörktastic Beasts! Also available as a $6 add-on.
Plunder the corpses of those who came before, and add any of these items to your pledge!
Asterism — The Art of Arik Roper
Asterism (interior spread)
Asterism: The Art of Arik Roper - $35
Asterism is a visual journal of instinct and improvisation—a month’s worth of daily drawings from visionary artist Arik Roper, created in the fall of 2024. Unprompted and unfiltered, these works channel the raw flow of inspiration, revealing fragments of lost worlds, shadowed myths, and half-remembered dreams.
Like pages torn from unwritten books or glimpses into forgotten realms, each piece stands on its own while echoing deeper, recurring themes. Rendered in Black Star ink, brush pens, and fine line markers on toned paper, Roper’s signature style emerges in intricate detail—an invitation to explore the landscapes of the subconscious. This limited edition of 200 is printed in full color on archival paper, bound with a 2-color silkscreened cover (black and opalescent white ink) on 100# Lessebo paper.
Mörktastic Beasts / Flaming Hand Patch - $6
Black Light Poster - $40
Ekphrastic Beasts (5e) - $45
MÖRK BORG rulebook - $40
In addition to the items above you can add one-of-a-kind original pieces of art from some of the illustrators involved in the book!
All works are drawn by hand, unique, and available to add-on to your pledge. All works of art ship separately, direct from each artist. Browse the gallery on Google Drive here.
The complete catalog is available in the Add-Ons section—but act fast! There is of course only one original available of each illustration.
Deep Sea Wight, Illustrated by Joe Keinberger
Thonquis, Illustrated by Jeremy Hush
Changeling, Illustrated by Ellie Gill
Scerceid, Illustrated by Nathan Reidt
We've got loads of great stretch goals for this campaign, including expanded content and physical upgrades! Keep an eye on this space as we unleash even more horrors upon the world.
$10K: Arena Zine - UNLOCKED: We will publish a monster hunting arena game written by Max Moon featuring the creatures from Mörktastic Beasts! A free PDF of the zine will be included at all pledge levels; a physical copy of the zine will be included with all physical pledges. It will also be made available as a $6 add-on.
$12K: Art by Caustic - UNLOCKED: We are adding eight pages of monstrous encounters illustrated by Caustic to the digital and physical editions of the book! The bestiary keeps growing...
$14K: Art by Saprophial - UNLOCKED: We are adding eight pages inspired by the nightmarish creations from the abyssal subconscious of Saprophial.
$18K: Art by Johan Nohr - UNLOCKED: We will add six pages of psychedelic chaos based on the iconic artwork of Johan Nohr—the illustrator and designer behind the visual identity of MÖRK BORG.
$22K: Even MORE Art by Caustic - UNLOCKED: We are adding another eight pages of grotesque content, illustrated by Caustic, to the digital and physical editions of the book.
$25K: Physical Upgrades - UNLOCKED: We love the silk ribbon marker bound into the core MÖRK BORG rulebook so, since Mörktastic Beasts is now TWICE AS LONG as the rulebook (!!!) we figured we should add one as well. We're also including color-coordinated headbands and footbands.
$30K: Art by Justine Jones: We have been a fan of Justine's work for a long time, which lives in the space between detailed, obsessive line work and unhinged psychedelic color. She's illustrated for Magic: The Gathering and Kobold Press, among others—and if we hit $30K she'll be illustrating for Morktastic Beasts!
If funded, we’ll move directly into the final phase of bringing Morktastic Beasts to life: converting these creatures into the MÖRK BORG system and designing the finished book for print and digital release. The artwork is already complete, apart from any stretch goals, and all of the lore has already been written. That means the core creative work is done, leaving only system adaptation and layout ahead—making this a low-risk project with a fast turnaround.
This project is being built by people who know how to make books. Having more than a combined 25 years of experience designing and publishing books, we at Flaming Hand exist to create beautiful, evocative objects at the intersection of art, story, and play. With strong creative direction, real publishing experience, and established production relationships, we’re approaching Mörktastic Beasts with both ambition and rigor.
In other words: the nightmares already exist. We just need to finish summoning them to the table!
