Vault of Monsters is a 5e-compatible adventure rooted in British folklore, full of creatures with personality, lore with attitude, and encounters that escalate without asking permission.
Vault of Monsters is a 5e-compatible bestiary inspired by British folklore, regional legends, cryptids, old village warnings, and the sort of local stories that begin with, “Don’t go near that field after dark,” which, as every sensible party knows, is basically an invitation.
Think Dungeons & Dragons meets British folklore: rain-slick lanes, moorland shapes, things with antlers where antlers absolutely should not be, canal-side rumours, haunted woods, strange lights, old stones, bad decisions, and monsters that feel damp around the edges... ewww.
Inside the Vault you’ll find original creatures made for actual play: memorable, easy to run, full of character, and ready to cause problems at the table without requiring you to prepare a 40-page dissertation on why the horrible little pond man is upset.
Some are cute. Some are grim. Some are cute until they open their mouth, or several mouths, and the whole table reconsiders its priorities.
If you want monsters with folklore in their bones, comedy in the cracks, and proper danger under the floorboards, come closer.
The Vault is opening.
Bring a lantern. Maybe gloves… at least some hand sanitiser
Vault of Monsters is a chunky paperback monster book for GMs who want creatures they can actually use.
Wild idea, we know.
Every monster has been designed to do a job at the table. It might bring dread, tension, comedy, chaos, curiosity, or that delicious moment where everyone realises the party has made the wrong call and it is now far too late to walk backwards out of the scene with any dignity left.
The book is written for 5e-compatible play and focuses on original monsters inspired by British folklore, local legends, and strange old stories from the darker, damper corners of these islands. You’ll find creatures that feel rooted in place: under bridges, out on the moors, in ruined chapels, beneath canals, inside old mines, behind village traditions nobody questions because the people who did are now mostly anecdotal.
Each entry gives you useful lore, clean mechanics, encounter support, table-facing flavour, and enough personality to make the monster feel like more than a bag of hit points wearing a funny hat.
Although, to be clear, funny hats remain a valid fantasy design.
This book is made to live beside your dice, your GM screen, and that notebook full of names you absolutely thought you’d remember. It’s practical, strange, readable, and built for the moment your session needs something with teeth.
We wanted to make a monster book that feels adventurous, funny in the right places, dangerous when it needs to be, and genuinely useful on game night.
That means monsters with stories behind them. Creatures that come from rumours, mistakes, old curses, forgotten places, village grudges, bad bargains, and the British habit of seeing something deeply alarming in a field and deciding the best response is to give it a nickname.
The Vault is full of creatures with distinct identities. Some are adorable enough to make your players lower their guard. Poor fools. Some look harmless until initiative is rolled. Some are awful from the start and at least have the decency to be honest about it.
Across the book, the aim is simple: give GMs encounters with flavour, fights with identity, and monsters that feel like they belong in a campaign world rather than being wheeled in for one quick scrap and forgotten by breakfast.
There’s humour in here, yes… and there are puns too. You’ll also find proper fantasy adventure running through it all: strange discoveries, perilous journeys, eerie ruins, unreliable locals, dreadful weather, and that special table silence that happens when the dice go cold at exactly the worst possible moment.
That silence is part of the hobby. We don’t control it. We merely provide the swamp creature.
Vault of Monsters is built to be useful from the first read-through.
Inside, you’ll find a hand-picked collection of original 5e-compatible monsters, each with lore, tactics, flavour, and mechanics that give it a clear reason to exist at the table. No filler beasts lurking in the margins pretending they have somewhere to be.
Where it suits the creature, entries may include variants, lair actions, legendary-style options, strange habits, local rumours, encounter hooks, and other details that help the monster feel bigger, stranger, nastier, or worryingly fond of eye contact.
Alongside the monsters, the book includes a run of plug-in encounters designed to slide into an ongoing campaign with minimal prep. Each one gives you a clear setup, a useful objective, room for twists, and enough structure to make your life easier without trapping you in a narrative cupboard.
You’ll also find selected battlemaps where they add something to play. If there’s a map, it’s there because it helps.
The artwork is by Nick Ashton of Chicken Monster,bringing the creatures to life with character, movement, and the exact right amount of “I don’t like where this is going.”
The Vault has started attracting attention from across the tabletop community, which is reassuring for us and slightly concerning for the ancient containment systems beneath the Marches.
A few brave souls have even described certain creatures as “adorable”, which historically speaking is usually the point where things become difficult.
Welcome to Latchford
The Lockshore Marches are not the sort of place people write songs about.
It is a low, damp stretch of land where roads follow old lines for reasons no one questions anymore. Salt runs through the soil in places. Water sits where it should not. Fields produce just enough to keep going, provided nothing interferes, which it often does.
Settlements are practical. Timber, stone, patched roofs, doors that shut properly. People here do not ignore strange things. They note them, work around them, and keep track of who last saw what and where. There is a difference between superstition and experience, and most locals know exactly which they are dealing with.
Latchford sits at the centre of it all. A town built around locks, trade, and the steady movement of goods that may or may not arrive in the condition they left. News travels quickly here. So do rumours, and the two are not always easy to separate.
Beneath the Marches runs something older. The remains of a system that catalogued and contained things best left alone. Not just creatures, but objects, names, contracts, and other matters that did not improve with exposure.
Most of it stayed buried. Locked, sealed, and quietly forgotten. Now those seals are failing.
The Playtest!
Soon, Backers will get access to a short digital playtest sampler from the world of Vault of Monsters.
This gives you an early look at the tone of the book, the way we present creatures, and the kind of encounter design you can expect in the finished release. It also helps us sharpen the final book with feedback from the people who'll actually be using it.
You get a taste of what's coming, we get to make the book better, everyone wins. Lovely stuff.
Vault of Monsters is for GMs who like dropping unusual encounters into an ongoing campaign and watching the table immediately make it worse.
It’s for people who want folklore-flavoured fantasy with teeth. British legends, cryptids, old warnings, strange little horrors, eerie local customs, and monsters that feel like they could have been whispered about in a pub, recorded badly in a parish note, then made significantly more dangerous for 5e.
It’s for GMs whose players get attached to things they should not touch.
It’s for groups who enjoy tonal range. Some sessions need dread. Some need wonder. Some need a creature so oddly endearing that everyone forgets it has a truly dreadful special ability until it is, professionally speaking, too late.
It’s also for anyone whose prep time has gone sideways. The GM who had a plan, lost the plan, opened seven tabs, closed five of them, stared into the middle distance, and then remembered the session starts in twenty minutes.
We see you...The Vault gives you monsters with personality, encounters with shape, and enough folklore-flavoured weirdness to make your players feel like they have stepped into a story older than the road beneath their boots.
Whether you want a simple way into the Vault, a paperback for the shelf, a PDF for easy session prep, or a fuller Driftforge bundle with a few extra goodies tucked in, there's a tier here for you. We've kept the rewards clear and useful, so you can pick the level that suits how you actually play, read, collect, and run your games, then add a little more chaos if you fancy it.
Want to build your own Driftforge bundle? You can do exactly that through add-ons.
Available add-ons will include:
Moo A deeply silly little game with far loftier bovine ambitions than nature intended.
The Jeff Paradox A Roleplaying game with a gloriously daft concept at its heart. Featuring an Alien Hive Mind Called The Jeff!
The Blood Paradox A strange, punchy game with bite.
The Catalogue of Chaos Editions 1, 2, and 3 Our chaotic magic item books, full of dangerous nonsense, questionable brilliance, and items that have no interest in your plans.
You'll also be able to pick up campaign extras such as T-Shirts and other small bits that feel good to own.
Stretch Goals
We want stretch goals to make the campaign richer, so as the funding total climbs, we'll unlock extras that add extra value to the project.
That means digital bonus content, extra encounters, battlemap packs, printable tokens, upgraded presentation, or other additions that deepen the Vault and give backers a little more to play with!
Your pledge helps fund the final art, editing, layout, playtesting, print, and fulfilment. It helps us pay creators fairly and make the book the way it ought to be made, with enough care, enough time, and enough polish to feel worth owning.
Backing also gets you in early. You'll get the sampler, the updates, the behind-the-scenes progress, and the chance to be part of the book before it lands in the wider world.
We're Driftforge Games, a small British outfit making TTRPG books and games. You may know us from The Catalogue of Chaos, Moo, or from Roll Britannia, our comedy D&D podcast.
Across all of it, the goal tends to be the same. Make things that are fun to read, fun to run, and likely to cause at least one very avoidable mistake at the table.
Vault of Monsters comes from that same place. We love odd creatures, strong lore, practical design, and just so many bad puns... seriously it's like an illness.
Vault of Monsters contains no AI-generated artwork. All artwork in the project is 100% human-made by Nick Ashton of Chicken Monster. We have not used AI art in this campaign and do not plan to use it in the book or related materials. We believe in supporting real artists and properly commissioning human creative work.
We've already made and sold books, and we're working with Critical Kit as publisher. They've got real experience making and shipping award-winning tabletop games, and they're currently helping us deliver our previous projects too. That gives this campaign a solid production footing and a fulfilment partner who knows what they're doing.
The above timeline shows the current path through the Vault, from first draft to final delivery. Each stage marks a step forward, though not every step is perfectly predictable.
As with any project of this size, things can shift. Delays happen, details change, and occasionally something unexpected crawls out of the dark and needs dealing with.
We’ll keep you updated as we move through each phase, adjusting where needed.
The goal stays the same, even if the route takes a few turns along the way.
Shipping is not included in your pledge. We'll collect postage after the campaign through BackerKit surveys, which keeps the pledge levels cleaner and means people are charged fairly based on where they actually live.
Estimated shipping rates are:
UK, £8 EU, £15 USA and Canada, £18 Australia, £25 Rest of World, £25
All physical rewards will ship from the UK. Digital rewards will be delivered first, with physical items following once production is complete.
We'll pack things properly, keep you updated, and avoid leaving your monsters to wander the postal system unsupervised for longer than necessary.
If you like monster books with flavour, puns, personality, and proper tabletop value, we'd love to have you with us.
There are creatures in there already. Some are lovely. Some really, really aren't.
If you haven't already, come chat to us on our Discord Channel or follow us on our Instagram!
Tabletop Tavern
Welcome to Tabletop Tavern at Pocketopia 2026 A gathering place for tabletop roleplaying games, where a wide range of TTRPG projects come together under one banner. From original settings and adventures to new systems, tools, and supplements, Tabletop Tavern showcases games with different styles, mechanics, and ways to play.
Back 3+ Tabletop Tavern Campaigns, Unlock Free Digital or Physical Content! Back 3 or more Tabletop Tavern campaigns to receive FREE digital or physical content from each participating creator you support.
The more Tabletop Tavern creators you back, the more bonus content you unlock.
Some creators may also be offering extra cross-collabs, exclusive rewards, or additional campaign-specific bonuses, so be sure to explore the full banner and see what each project has to offer.
FREEBIE: El Duende is a game you play by yourself to meet an imaginary creature. Fairy and demon, dream and nightmare, the thrill that leads to art and death. El Duende is all this. What will you do when it comes to visit you in the dark of night?
FREEBIE: A Chaotic DND 5e One Shot. A quick job turns into a chain of events no one is fully in control of. Somewhere along the way, the party meets something that doesn’t follow the rules.
FREEBIE: a free Tabletop Tavern STL. All backers of any physical pledge of the Legendary Dice Bags season 3 will additionally get a free dice set with their pledge too!
FREEBIE: A bestiary packed with eerie, folklore-inspired creatures that haunt the slopes of Wytch Mountain. Perfect for dropping straight into play, these strange horrors bring new threats, omens, and dark possibilities to every coven’s tale.
FREEBIE: A sticker drawn lovingly by Rook for all physical backers, and a digital version of the sticker if you want to print it at home for the digital backers.
