Lowlife is a toolkit for old-school RPGs about delving into tunnels, trenches, and mines.
The zine has:
- Systems and consequences for caving, climbing, and tunneling: all the ways you might interact with (and suffer horrible fates in) caverns and mines.
- Hazards, challenges, and encounters players can grapple with, down in the dark: flammable gases, toxic molds, and mysterious geological phenomena.
- A handful of monsters and beasties that might live in the shallow underground: critters like the dire hellbender, the precognitive mole, and the greater trollworm.
- Items to use in the tunnels: the standard tools and dynamite, yes, but also exciting chemicals (like gelignite) and strange devices (like singing holler-hammers).
- Tables for generating your own warrens and trenchworks from scratch, if you want to build a hellhole dungeon from the ground up (or down, as it were).
- Guidelines for modifying existing dungeons to be denser and tighter, if you already have a dungeon in mind but want to up the level of tension and danger.
- Bits of flavor, aesthetic, and worldbuilding scattered throughout.
Critically, Lowlife is not a setting guide or an adventure; there's no preset content here. Rather, it's a toolset for GMs and players, full of rules and content you can slot in at your table when and where you need them.
The whole thing is presented with a smoky, Appalachian, old-world feel, pining for a wild, murky yesteryear.
Includes Beneath Horlowe House, a pamphlet dungeon for use with Lowlife.
Written and designed by Sam Sorensen. Illustrated by Seweryn Jasiński. Edited by Jarrett Crader.
