Something strange is going on in Last Pine, the fictional setting of Bump in the Dark, a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) created by local writer and game designer Jex Thomas.
Thomas grew up in Northern Wisconsin in the 1990s, and this setting inspired Last Pine, located in Iron County in the state of Ontonagon – an actual proposal for a 51st state that would have included parts of northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Last Pine is based on towns like Hurley, Wisconsin and Ironwood, Michigan, surrounded by forests and iron mines. The timeframe is specifically 1994, and the game’s vibes tap into supernatural mysteries of the era like “Twin Peaks,” “The X-Files” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Thomas recently demonstrated the game at popular gamer hangout bar and restaurant Faklandia Brewing in Saint Francis. The table spread included drinks, pencils, piles of dice and character sheets. Bump in the Dark players create a character based on archetypes like “The Shield,” a warrior, and “The Icon,” a “keen liaison and investigator,” among others. These characters form a “pact” to work together, led through the game by “The Keeper,” a gamemaster that roleplays the characters the pact encounters and describes clues they find.
Thomas, as The Keeper, led this hunt session in a campaign titled “Waxen Moon.” The pact of four players discovered clues like a headless mannequin with a broken amulet inside, a piece of pine bark, and a trail of wax leading to a hidden passage. The path eventually led to a theater costume and storage room where the pact had to fight a league of wax automatons under the control of mysterious robed figures, possibly the politically influential Grand family, who own the Grand-Soothill Mining Concern, and has “likely clandestine involvement with the occult.”
And while the game has many monsters you might encountern – vampires, werewolves, giant centipedes, golems – it’s the Grand family and their greed that is the most villainous of the game’s themes.
“The mid-1990s offers an interesting frame to look at themes about deindustrialization and how so-called progress leaves many behind,” Thomas explains. “Last Pine and the places it’s based on all experienced some level of prosperity thanks to decades of strong industry, but by the mid-90s they were starting to get hit pretty hard by the changing economic landscape.”
An early access version of Bump in the Dark was created in 2022, with a print on demand version of the game published the following year. Wanting to update some of the rules, Thomas decided to work on a revised edition of the game.
“The new edition contains streamlined rules, a whole bunch of new art, some new reference materials to make the game easier to play, some clarifications in the text, all wrapped up in a nice hardcover,” Thomas says.
Crowdsourcing funds for the new edition launches on June 4.
Other future plans for the world of Last Pine include possible fiction tie-ins and turning recordings of an ongoing Bump in the Dark campaign into a podcast, Thomas says.
You can find more info on Bump in the Dark and their crowdsourcing effort here.
