Happy Saturday, all!

Today we thought we'd share a backer preview of content—and plan on sharing a few more before the campaign is through...

Ekphrasis is one of the oldest forms of writing—it's the craft of describing visual art in language so vivid it becomes an experience of its own. Homer did it with the Shield of Achilles. Keats did it standing in front of a Grecian urn. It's writing that not only references an image—it enters it, inhabits it, and comes back with something new.

This is the engine behind Mörktastic Beasts. We took the ekphrastic method and pointed it at the tabletop. Each of our illustrators creates original artwork with no brief, no creature name, no lore—just whatever crawled out of their subconscious. Then I reverse-engineer everything from the image: the creature's name, its history, its abilities, its place in the world. 

For this today's preview, Jeremy Hush painted a ghostly figure in a bronze mask sitting in what looks like a tomb and handed it off to me—without name or additional comment. I sat with it for a while, then went for a walk in the nearby woods. Over the next hour or so I let my mind wander, and when I got back to my desk I wrote out a secret order of necromancers who pledge their lives and their deaths to a serpent lord, undergo a 29-day living entombment, and rise as spirit-possessed masks bound to bring about the end of time... 

Then Max takes it from there, using his extensive experience playing and designing games for MÖRK BORG to translate these wyrd visions into game mechanics, making sure the lore doesn't just read well—it plays well.

This is one spread in a book that's now over 220 pages, and every creature in Mörktastic Beasts was made this way.

~Janaka

Backer-only content: the full spread is below. Take a look at the Disciple of the Morningstar in all its necromantic glory!