A mournful and poetic tale of wartime death and release

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows. 
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows. 
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win  
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,   
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain   
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.
- Dreamers, Siegfried Sassoon (1918)

Read Sprigs and Kindling Volume 6 here.

Editor-In-Chief
Amanda Mullins

Layout Artists
Alexander Thomas Guy Coursolle
Aaron Burkett
Ryan Yokle

Chief Copy Editor
Rebecca Hall

Deputy Editor
J. Carter

Editing/Layout
Bjorn Ove Asperem , Darren Brockes,
Kim Dalton, Dorian T. Hawkins,
Robert Merkel, Gabriel Robinson,
Clint Smith

Disclaimer
Sprigs and Kindling is not affiliated
with Gauntlet Publishing or Jason
Cordova but is published with
permission.

AI Statement
Sprigs and Kindling is
against the use of
generative AI in creative
works.

If you think we have accidentally
included AI-generated content please
contact us at sprigsandkindling
@gmail.com.

Image Credits
Cover Page Illustration: Rapidpunches
Cover Masthead: Mike Martens
Unless noted otherwise, images are
provided under a no attribution
licence from vecteezy.com, free licence
from unsplash.com, and public
domain (creative commons.org.)

For more (including 3 images), view the original article.

I work a research project coordinator within the research department of the KB, focusing on (inter)national collaborations and competitive funding applications at a national, European and global level.

For more (including 3 images), view the original article.

A pulp science fiction Incursion of strangeness and survival

The configuration of the skies had changed beyond all recognition; the Signs were no longer those that are known to terrestrial astronomers; far-off stars had leapt into blazing suns and had faded back to stars; and there had been a flying glimpse of stranger planets. And year by year the cold terror of the endless deeps, the vertiginous horror of untold infinitude, had crept like a slow paralysis upon the souls of the crew; and a nostalgia for the distant earth had swept them with unutterable sickness; till they could bear it no longer, and had made their hasty, ill-planned attempt to secure control of the vessel and turn it homeward.

- Clark Ashton Smith, Marooned in Andromeda, 1930

Read Sprigs & Kindling Volume 5 (2025) in full here.

Editor-In-Chief
Amanda Mullins

Chief Layout Artist
Alexander Thomas Guy Coursolle

Chief Copy Editor
Rebecca Hall

Deputy Editor
J. Carter

Layout Artist
Arthur Wells

Editing/Layout
Valentin Gerber, Jack Hargreaves, Chaotic Jamgochian, Mike Martens, Nicolas Ronvel, Jesse Ross, Brian Sago, Michael Van Vleet

Sprigs & Kindling is not affiliated withHedgemaze Press, Gauntlet Publishing, or Jesse Ross, but is published with permission.

Trophy™ is a trademark of Hedgemaze Press. The trademark and “Designed for Trophy” Logo are © Hedgemaze Press, and are used with permission.

AI Statement
Sprigs & Kindling is against the use of generative AI in creative works.

For more (including 4 images), view the original article.

Working for the Research Support Team at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) at Leiden University Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs

For more, view the original article.

Working with Professor Claire Connolly as part of the School of English and Digital Humanities

For more, view the original article.

The Silt Verses is a game folk horror and monstrous divinity.

In The Silt Verses RPG, you play Custodians, employees of the Bureau for the Investigation and Assimilation of Stray Deities. In a world with tens of thousands of gods, your job is to track down the forgotten and stray deities causing trouble in the community and... deal with them. Sometimes that means figuring out how a community can co-exist with the god, and sometimes that means eliminating the god's threat in a more extreme way. Regardless, you are a pawn within an uncaring system, and will eventually be the target of a conspiracy that will try to use your work for its own nefarious purposes.

Buy it here.
 
The Skyward Sprawl
The Custodians have been directed by their handlers to quietly resolve a situation in the sprawling fringes of the Greater Glottage conurbation. Suburbanites within a growing sphere of influence are sickening, contracting a hideous rot from clouds of gray spores spread on the wind. Their skin erupts in weeping rust and cracked concrete. They become obsessed by ascent, drawn to a towering building erupting like a twisted fingernail from the dead urban soil.

For more (including 4 images), view the original article.

The Code Coven computer club is proceeding normally when its facilitator, Circe Vaughan, cries out and falls to the ground—dead—a cordless keyboard clutched to her chest. The air is heavy with the smell of ozone and burnt plastic: the computer Circe had just been handling is a scorched ruin. This could be a simple case of bad wiring, or something more sinister could be at play.

A mystery for Brindlewood Bay by Jason Cordova, published in the Nephews in Peril kickstarter edition expansion.

Brindlewood Bay is a tabletop roleplaying game that combines Murder, She Wrote with H.P. Lovecraft. In it, you play a group of elderly women, members of the local Murder Mavens Mystery Book Club, who help the authorities solve murder cases in a picturesque New England Town. Over the course of their investigations, they become aware of a dark occult conspiracy that connects the cases, and will eventually have to face that conspiracy in order to save their community. The game is low-prep and easy to play no matter your experience with tabletop roleplaying games.

The mystery and Nephews in Peril are available on DrivethruRPG, along with the core game.

For more (including 3 images), view the original article.

The Miswell Hill rookery is being tormented by a strange, poisonous miasma. Hargrave House investigates to determine if the source is supernatural in nature, or something entirely more horrifying: a mundane device to kill the poor. The rookery in this beautifully-researched Threat is like an entire setting all its own. It was written by Chloe Germain and James Smith.

A threat for The Between by Jason Cordova, published by the Gauntlet

The Between is a tabletop roleplaying game about a group of mysterious monster hunters in Victorian-era London. They are residents of a place called Hargrave House, and their job is to investigate and neutralize monstrous threats terrorizing the city—threats that Scotland Yard won’t or can’t handle themselves. As the story progresses, they become aware of the plans of a Moriarty-style criminal mastermind they will eventually have to face in order to save Queen and country.

The Between is directly inspired by the gothic horror TV show Penny Dreadful, but also takes a lot of inspiration from British horror classics, graphic novels like From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and pulp-era stories. Mechanically, it’s Powered by the Apocalypse but also uses the mystery system from Brindlewood Bay.

For more (including 3 images), view the original article.

Ambaret has always been a hubbub of wheedling merchants, bellowing costermongers, whispering plotters, roaring drunkards, and droning priests, but this is different. An incendiary pamphlet printed in an alluring silvery ink entitled Cutting Words has the city in an uproar. The source is a mystery, and yet this strange publication has rapidly become notorious for revolutionary ideas and scurrilous gossip. Some argue that its influence has become so great that there must be subtle magic imbued within its words, an arcane hex placed upon the city on a vast scale.

An incursion for Trophy Gold by Jesse Ross, published in February 2022 in Codex Hex

A tabletop roleplaying game of dark forests, doomed treasure-hunters, and a world woven on a loom of rumor, history, and myth.

For more (including 3 images), view the original article.

A Game of Godly Investigators and Ancient Horrors, written by Philipp Doebler and James L. Smith

It is the year 1153 and shadows lurk beyond the comings and goings in the lands of His Majesty Louis VII, King of the Franks. In Yet This is Hallowed Ground, potent legacies of the pre-Christian past endure as spires rise, commerce expands, trade flourishes and hymns echo across Christendom from the British Isles to Constantinople. You are a group of pious investigators, the finest minds that the Universal Church has to offer. You have been sent to investigate a strange happening as legates of His Most Reverend Excellency, the Bishop of Vyônes. 

The game takes place in your choice of an abbey or nunnery in the blighted region of Averoigne, the creation of weird fiction author and Emperor of Dreams Clark Ashton Smith. Daily life in this house of God seems normal on the placid surface, and you are welcomed as an honoured guest. Everyone seems pleasant, if anxious. As the faithful prepare to sleep after Compline by the warm glow of candles, the illusion ends. Shadows lengthen and monstrous things ooze from the ground. Christ sits like a frost upon the earth, yet the old earth waits below, moist and hungry. You must adumbrate the mystery and purge the horrors before they consume you. 

Yet This is Hallowed Ground is a Rooted in Trophy game by Philipp Doebler and James L. Smith written for the Dark Forest Jam combining elements of Trophy Dark and Gold by Jesse Ross and the Rooted in Trophy game Shadow Precinct by Eric Brunsell, as well as concepts from Brindlewood Bay by Jason Cordova and Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley.  The rules of Trophy Gold are required to play this game.

• New Backgrounds, Skills, Drives and Rituals
• Eighteen Monstrous Entities
• Procedural Generation of a Monastery
• Random Tables for NPCs, Revelations and Investigator Goals

For more (including 5 images), view the original article.