There is a city where nobody goes,
a city of sepulchers, a city by the sea.
It is ruled by a Sleeping King, bound deep inside the earth.
He dreams of a great dark kingdom,
he dreams the dead to life,
he dreams his people into monsters
and the day into endless night.
You have awoken on a beach of black sand.
The sun sits too red and too heavy on the western horizon, and the waters are cold and dark.
You are in the city where nobody goes,
you are in the Dream of the Sleeping King.
This place will not abide you, but how will you get out?
LABYRINTHIUM: SAN SERAFIN
The First Stratum
(an old-school dark fantasy role-playing game setting featuring masked devils, mummified saints, jaguar witches, sybaritic assassin-surgeons, a looming apocalypse, Borgesian horror, and procedures for generating the seven levels of the worst city on earth.)
San Serafín is a procedural urban point-crawl set in a Latin American necropolis, and includes
- several Original Dungeons and Dragons-friendly classes, such as animist-priest Mediums and crudely powerful Pyromancers
- a setting-specific equipment list that assumes newly created characters start out marooned on a desert island
- rules for salvaging and scavenging with little hope of finding civilization
- a large cast of eccentric NPCs and unsettling monsters
- other stuff
Here’s a sample spread:
