Jonathan Newell
LightNews LightNews
banner
edweirdian.bsky.social
Jonathan Newell
@edweirdian.bsky.social
320 followers 210 following 61 posts
Weird fiction, fantasy cartography, monsters, roleplaying games. Academic credits include A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937. Games credits include Genial Jack, work on Dolmenwood. He/him.


patreon.com/c/beardeddevil

https://bearded-devil.com/
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
edweirdian.bsky.social
Jonathan Newell @edweirdian.bsky.social · Sep 20
I have big news! I've launched a Patreon for the Hex setting, including monthly maps, fully-illustrated installments of the Hex Guidebook, a playtest version of The Hex Hack system, and an archive of older high-resolution maps. Subscribe here: www.patreon.com/c/beardeddevil
Bearded Devil | Patreon
Fantasy roleplaying games and maximalist maps.
www.patreon.com
edweirdian.bsky.social
Fluxcats are strays who fed on the magical trash and mutants of the Midden, Hex's eldritch trash-heap.
A strange two-headed hairless cat-thing, bristling with unusual appendages.
November 18, 2025 at 1:13 AM
edweirdian.bsky.social
Sigil spinners are dangerous Hexian predators who lust for mage-meat. Capably of draining wizardly knowledge from their prey, they instinctly weave spells into their webs, laying elaborate eldritch traps for future victims.
November 3, 2025 at 11:07 PM
edweirdian.bsky.social
Happy Halloween everybody!

I've got a new entry in the Hex Guidebook series detailing the necromantic district of Shambleside. Breathe in the reek of embalming fluid and old leather; sip sangwine from Bastien's Blood Bar; bet on the zombie fights in the Rotting Ring. The night beckons...
A patchwork man with swollen cranium, his skin tattooed with eldritch sigils. An elegant woman with curiously shaped nostrils weeps, her eyes concealed by a black hood, her black garments adorned with strange, stylized flowers. Strange bones spires, a coffin shop, an osseous dome. A worm-like creature with a woman's face, its body swathed in tattered robes, looms towards you with withered hands crossed.
October 31, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
skerples.bsky.social
I've also created an OD&D hexcrawl.
www.patreon.com/posts/od-d-h...
Not every hex is keyed, but major locations are included, treasure is pre-rolled, and some emergent factions and quests are ready to go.
October 24, 2025 at 4:18 AM
edweirdian.bsky.social
Like a water weird, but smaller, meaner, and heavily polluted by alchemical runoff. Introducing the puddleweird.
October 21, 2025 at 4:55 AM
edweirdian.bsky.social
Everyone's heard of owlbears. But what about leechbears?
October 6, 2025 at 10:32 PM
edweirdian.bsky.social
For today's Monstrous Monday: the ideologeist, a ghost with unfinished political business, haunting the body politic.
September 29, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
save.vs.totalpartykill.ca
A great review by Tim for Wargamer about The Grim and the Dark, a documentary about the #Inq28 scene, Blacheitsu, etc. Looking forward to watching it. It also sounds like a great introduction to the scene.
Napoleon Dynamite's Warhammer documentary is a glorious guide to grimdark gaming
In 'The Grim and The Dark', Napoleon Dynamite actor Jon Heder journeys into the grimdark indie scene beyond the border of regular Warhammer 40,000
www.wargamer.com
September 18, 2025 at 11:07 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
save.vs.totalpartykill.ca
Queue the Pacific Rim soundtrack: MAC ATTACK is out. (As a PDF, anyway.)
The faction spread in MAC Attack!
September 22, 2025 at 6:14 PM
edweirdian.bsky.social
I have a new free post up on my blog and the Bearded Devil Patreon, the first in a series of Monstrous Mondays. This entry describes the clever little necromantic assassin-bugs known as earwights. My plan is to eventually build up posts like this for a bestiary book.
A creepy-looking earwig eyes you through the screen. It has a skull-pattern on its wing casing.
September 22, 2025 at 6:15 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
gshowitt.bsky.social
My hundredth one-page roleplaying game is HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOAT GIRL.

You are a goat girl, most beautiful and dangerous creature, and it is always your birthday.

Patrons get it a week early here: www.patreon.com/posts/138800...
GREAT NEWS. You are a GOAT GIRL and it is ALWAYS YOUR BIRTHDAY. You are having a joint birthday/war party with the other goat girls and no-one is going to stop you. drawing of a goat girl what I did. she is bursting out of a multi-tiered birthday cake (it is unclear whether it is the type of cake you are suppose to burst out of) and she is holding a small hammer VIOLENT DELIGHTS Goat girls cannot die, nor suffer serious harm. (It is their birthday.) Goat girls can be captured and/or confined, but this state of affairs rarely lasts for long. Any death or injury they inflict (a frequent occurrence) happens slightly off-screen, or out-of-focus in the background of a different scene. a small goat girl carrying a club what I drew
September 16, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
lostpages.co.uk
The best RPG has been made, we can all go home and rest now.
gshowitt.bsky.social Grant Howitt @gshowitt.bsky.social · Sep 16
My hundredth one-page roleplaying game is HAPPY BIRTHDAY GOAT GIRL.

You are a goat girl, most beautiful and dangerous creature, and it is always your birthday.

Patrons get it a week early here: www.patreon.com/posts/138800...
GREAT NEWS. You are a GOAT GIRL and it is ALWAYS YOUR BIRTHDAY. You are having a joint birthday/war party with the other goat girls and no-one is going to stop you. drawing of a goat girl what I did. she is bursting out of a multi-tiered birthday cake (it is unclear whether it is the type of cake you are suppose to burst out of) and she is holding a small hammer VIOLENT DELIGHTS Goat girls cannot die, nor suffer serious harm. (It is their birthday.) Goat girls can be captured and/or confined, but this state of affairs rarely lasts for long. Any death or injury they inflict (a frequent occurrence) happens slightly off-screen, or out-of-focus in the background of a different scene. a small goat girl carrying a club what I drew
September 21, 2025 at 5:01 AM
edweirdian.bsky.social
A deranged goose eyes the viewer with depraved malice in its eye.
September 20, 2025 at 7:58 PM
edweirdian.bsky.social
I have big news! I've launched a Patreon for the Hex setting, including monthly maps, fully-illustrated installments of the Hex Guidebook, a playtest version of The Hex Hack system, and an archive of older high-resolution maps. Subscribe here: www.patreon.com/c/beardeddevil
Bearded Devil | Patreon
Fantasy roleplaying games and maximalist maps.
www.patreon.com
September 20, 2025 at 7:04 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
bransonreese.bsky.social
We need to stop calling the four humors thing "pseudoscience." There's too much evidence for it in culture, it's real.
September 6, 2025 at 4:12 PM
edweirdian.bsky.social
Minitower, wake and bake, acid-washed, contact trace,
Patient zero, thirtysomething, beta-amyloid.
Yuppie flu, guanciale, steampunk punditocracy,
Pravastatin, lovastatin, off-label lipo.
danhon.com Dan Hon @danhon.com · Sep 1
MW's Words First Used In Print in your birth year is your personal We Didn't Start The Fire:

commoditize compact disc
core inflation de-stress
closed-captioned
first world problem
female genital mutiliation
laser disc laser printer
hip-hop space elevator
...

www.merriam-webster.com/time-travele...
Time Traveler by Merriam-Webster: Words from 1979
See which words were first recorded in 1979. Or search for other words by the year when they were first used.
www.merriam-webster.com
September 2, 2025 at 6:50 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
lostpages.co.uk
I made a couple of little videos for the Pergamino Barocco kickstarter. Have a look at the Red Prototype as it... unfolds?

www.kickstarter.com/projects/los...
Pergamino Barocco - the Red Prototype
YouTube video by Lost Pages Books
www.youtube.com
August 15, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
lostpages.co.uk
"Wings of Talent, Stone of Necessity" is one of the strange spells in our next strange spellbook, Pergamino Barocco.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/los...
A spell: Wings of Talent, Stone of Necessity. Those who have chosen a life of scholarship, with few ex­cep­tions, lack martial talent, when are not outright puny. For them — for us, dear initiate — the usefulness of a certain "other" cannot be understated. Hire them from the streets, summon them from thin air, or grant the office to an other­wise undistinguished in-law. Call them champion, bodyguard, grog, in some climes kagemusha (when dressed and masked as your double); perhaps porter or valet, but one of uncommon loyalty, able to interpose a comforting bulk between your esoteric talents and the forces birthed of dull matter which threaten them. It is for such loved ones that Zacquetoon, choirmistress and quartermaster of the Serpentine Scholia, formed a potent allegory out of the purest Yellow words of Transmutation. Some will call vulgar the artist's reliance on gross sympathetic principles, but then, consider what the effect can do, and what kind of person it enhances. You must prepare materials, namely: a stone of unitary com­position (that is, not a conglomerate) to be held in your hand sinister, and a pair of birds' wings from a flitting species such as swift or martlet to be bound by a spangled cord to your wrist dexter. Your muscular comrade must be visible, within thirty feet, bipedal, and facing the same direction. That is to say, your eyes must be upon their back. You and them must perform the same arm movements requred by this incantation, while you croon synchronic cadences in the tongue of spells. At the end of this lesson, for ten full minutes by the sand-clock the enchanted champion will strike twice as rapidly with their right hand, and twice as forcefully (that is, doing double damage) with their left, so long as you keep a tight grip on the stone, and keep the wings at your wrist. There is a period woodcut depicting a buff wizard with stone and wings.
August 8, 2025 at 12:21 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
merrittk.com
socialist vampires. that's it, that's the pitch. that's what my book is about merrittk.itch.io/vampirocene
Vampirocene by merritt k
A climate horror novella
merrittk.itch.io
August 23, 2025 at 11:18 PM
edweirdian.bsky.social
Bill's game Restore the Warp has a very cool loose setting with a lot of great quirks, like a plethora of terraformed planets dating back so far no one is quite sure which of them is Earth and a planet that got cut in half. Lots of procedural mechanics for generating worlds and scenarios on the fly.
billtherad.bsky.social Bill (he/him) @billtherad.bsky.social · Jul 16
The earliest drafts were a lot wider open, influenced by open campaign settings like Starfinder's Pact Worlds or @edweirdian.bsky.social's Hex.

But I was also trying to do zero-prep and collaborative world building. It was slow and messy, as we spent a lot of time discussing what existed.
Map of Starfinder's Pact Worlds Map of Bearded Devil's Hex
July 16, 2025 at 9:02 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
billtherad.bsky.social
The ashcan for my science fantasy ttrpg is public! Fight an interstellar invasion and heal the god of the stars in Restore the Warp: Ashcan Edition!

billtherad.itch.io/restore-the-...
Restore the Warp: Ashcan Edition by billtherad
cosmic drama, personal struggles
billtherad.itch.io
July 14, 2025 at 2:46 PM
edweirdian.bsky.social
Omne Vivum Ex Ovo. A dungeon I'm working on for students at my college. A few of its levels pictured here.
A gigantic egg-like structure suspended above an abyss in a cavernous underground chamber, four bridges leading to it, a strange base-camp of tents to one side, a fungal infestation to the other. Doorways pierce its biomechanoid shell, part of which has been corrupted by some seething organic growth writhing with tendrils and fanged mouths. It's all very Lovecraftian but in a sort of whimsical way, like if Shel Silverstein was illustrating The Shadow Out of Time.
June 14, 2025 at 12:05 AM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
riseupcomus.bsky.social
My friend made a completely diegetic book on blood magic.

230 pages of magic, theory, and lore
3 world maps detailing the setting
33 blood sorcery rituals + magical circle diagrams
135 illustrations & 24 diagrams
3 unique runic alphabets
3 historical timelines + a detailed family tree

IT'S FREE
strangeredeyes.bsky.social Michael L. Strange @strangeredeyes.bsky.social · Feb 15
After an absurd amount of work, I’ve digitized the Jagged Missal—a massive LARP ritual tome on blood magic—and I’m beyond excited to share it! 📖🩸

www.reddit.com/r/LARP/comme...

#larp #roleplaying #magic #spells #props
February 15, 2025 at 12:58 PM
Reposted by Jonathan Newell
benlaurence.bsky.social
Love me an underwater dungeon!
idlecartulary.itch.io Idle Cartulary @idlecartulary.itch.io · Feb 12
Sharky is in its final 48 hours of funding, and I’m so excited to get this crazy, underwater dungeon delve with secret-laiden seaside village into your hands! www.kickstarter.com/projects/die...
Sharky
A fantasy roleplaying adventure module
www.kickstarter.com
February 12, 2025 at 10:54 PM
edweirdian.bsky.social
Gormenghast for me, I think. Like, it's also a favourite but it's got so much in it. The Gothic, yes - dust and cobwebs and horror and murder and ruins. But also it's fantastic, otherworldly, it creates a different world. And then there's the language itself, ridiculously maximalist and ornate.
dhmontgomery.com David H. Montgomery @dhmontgomery.com · Dec 27
What are people's most ARCHETYPICAL novels? Not your FAVORITES per se, but the ones that best exemplify your tastes in novels, distilled into a single work?

Mine is probably Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell."
December 27, 2024 at 11:14 PM