News Roundup: Legends of Avantris Mix 80s With Space in Neon Odyssey

In This Edition

• The Crooked Moon Creators Announce Neon Sci-Fi-The …

  • Other News This Week

• Roll20 Publishes Expanded Roadmap for its VTT, Dem …

  • Q&A With Rob Boyle of Posthuman Studios About The Snarl

Other Stories from This Week

• Renegade Game Studios and White Wolf/World of Darkness announced that they will release Courts of the Damned, a book about political intrigue in Vampire the Masquerade, in August 2026.

• A series of new roles on the Dungeons and Dragons team indicate a growing interest in digital platforms, according to Geek Native.

• Cubicle 7 will release Temple of Spite, a new setting book for Warhammer Fantasy Fourth Edition focused on a colossal floating redoubt controlled by the dark elves of the fantasy setting, in Q3 2026.

• Faster, Purple Worm! Everybody Dies, a new D&D supplement from Beadle and Grimm based on the AP series of the same name, is available on D&D Beyond.

• Pelgrane Press is seeking playtesters for two new scenarios it has created for its horror-focused TTRPG

• D&D Beyond also has new digital dice for you to roll within its Maps VTT

• Titmouse and Critical Role have teamed up on a new animated TTRPG series called Draw Your Weapons, where artists play TTRPGs and draw the weapons and characters while they do so.

• Polygon interviewed the husband-and-wife team behind Sword World's English-language release.

• So did Wargamer, actually. Don’t worry, we’ve got an interview with them coming up as well.

• A D&D meetup in Minneapolis turned into an opportunity to organize mutual aid efforts against ICE.

Q&A With Rob Boyle of Posthuman Studios About The Snarl

Posthuman Games, best known for the sci-fi RPG Eclipse Phase, is getting into weird fantasy with its upcoming game The Snarl. Fight for survival among kilometer-high trees, play as sentient anthropomorphic animals and travel the canopy. The game intends to crowdfund later this year

We spoke with Rob Boyle, one of the designers from the company, about The Snarl and what inspired it.

You can check out the playtests for the game here.

What is The Snarl? What's the story of this game?

The Snarl is a weird fantasy game. It originated from a discussion on the drive home from Gen Con way back in 2014. Davidson Cole and I were both interested in taking a stab at a fantasy game, but we wanted to get strange with it and lean away from the usual fantasy tropes of elves, orks, feudalism, etc. China Miéville's style of weird fantasy was a big inspiration for us. The idea that stuck was setting it in an environment of massive, skyscraper-sized trees with distinctive biomes at different heights. I whipped up some notes later that week, and for the next few years we would have brainstorming ideas here and there, adding more depth to the setting, but it remained a backburner project. We did come up with some cool PC species ideas: telepathic bird-monkey symbiotes that act as a single person, sexually dimorphic beetlefolk, resurrected minds inhabiting sculpted tree bodies, and so on. Around the time the pandemic hit, I started putting more serious time into the project, developing a rules set for it, and we began running playtests. We came up with some innovative stuff in that time, like the jolt system we use for combat, where even misses have an impact and the longer a fight goes on, the more opportunity you build up to take an opponent down. Now, after a few years of rules iterations, it's finally all come together into a nearly finished game.

How does it contrast with Eclipse Phase? Is this a reflavor of your original game, or is it something new when it comes to mechanics or story?

It's an entirely new rules system from Eclipse Phase, but you will see some influence from that game in how we handle a few things. Also, like Eclipse Phase, we've put a lot of effort into world-building to create something fresh and unique. Our intent is that we can take this rules set from the Snarl and apply it other weird-fantasy settings down the line -- we already have a few in mind.

The rules themselves are skill based, using 2d10s for that nice pyramid distribution of results. I was aiming for something close to Dungeon World in terms of complexity level. (It's not a PbtA fiction-first game per se, though you could certainly play it that way, and we do make use of moves and playsheets.) It's geared towards an open adventuring style of play -- exploration, social interactions, combat, downtime -- with an action economy similar to Pathfinder 2.

In terms of story, we designed the setting to focus on two particular environmental threats -- a destructive Blight and an alien, transformative Creep -- that both threaten the Weald (the name of the setting). These twin threats are disrupting the harmony and balance of the world, both in ecological and social terms. Clans that once lived in abundance and operated with a gift economy now find themselves fracturing under the stress and in competition over resources. It's not a setting for treasure-looting murder vagabonds; in fact, gifting away the treasures you find is how you build your status.

I will say that we did of course sneak some transhumanist elements into our fantasy game. Death is not final, you can be resurrected in a tree body or have your corpse absorbed in a dream flower pool, where your mind joins and lives eternally in a gestalt Dreaming state that others can access. There are a few other things that an Eclipse Phase player might look at and recognize or see similarities.

What’s the project’s status?

The book is currently ~95% complete and we have early art rolling in, including some fantastic species illustrations from Crim Reaper (Luis J. Figueredo) and cover art by Hardy Fowler. Once the Kickstarter hits, we'll commission the remaining art we need, make final corrections from the playtest, and get everything off to press for a release later this year!

The current plan is to follow the core book up with a GM/monster release and a full scenario.