At long last, the second volume of Genial Jack, by Lost Pages Press, is available for purchase at DriveThruRPG.

Cover art by Bronwyn McIvor.

Genial Jack is a serialized setting of nautical weirdness and whimsy – cursed sailors, mutant shark-people, lost treasures, mysterious shipwrecks, mythic monstrosities, and, of course, Jack himself, a whale the size of a mountain. This 69-page (nice) volume details the endless darkness of Jack’s Entrails, the bizarrely brachiating intestines of the Godwhale: a living labyrinth filled with half-digested derelicts, fragments of swallowed islands, ambergris miners, strange parasites, and tatterdemalion outlaws on the run from Jackburg law. Within you’ll find:

  • A sprawling dungeon environment with 45 keyed locations suitable for a full mini-campaign within the Entrails, with multiple adventure hooks.
  • A gazetteer of Herniaheim, the rickety pirate town twixt the Small and Large Intestines.
  • Three detailed maps of the Entrails.
  • 16 new monsters and NPCs, including such horrors as the pestiferous thrushspawn with their swollen tongues, the toxically affectionate amoeboids, the true vampire squid, and the Dog-Nymph Skulla, the Swallowed Sea-Devil.
  • 8 new equipment items and 14 magic items, such as the corpse-locating Thanatometer, the obscenity-barking Rude Shield, and the Bristling Blade of the fallen hero Horkus the Hirsute.
  • Rules for the Gutgardeners, an order of druid-scientists able to commune with the “animalcules” in the microbiomes of living creatures.

Inspired by the likes of Gulliver’s Travels, the tales of Baron Munchausen, and New Weird urban fantasy, Genial Jack is written for 5th edition but easily adaptable to any fantasy tabletop game.

Reviews:

Questing Beast – “This is dungeon-crawling through the intestines – which sounds really gross, because it is.”

Halls of the Nephilim – “I’m pretty sure this release has cemented my resolve to run a nautical 5e game as soon as I can.”

Planet X – “I can’t recommend both Genial Jack books any higher. Jonathan Newell has created a fresh and exciting landscape for your #ttrpgs.”

I’m really pleased with how this volume turned out. There’s a mixture of whimsy and horror, the ludicrous and the grotesque – jaunty intesintal pirates, sea-urchin assassins, cannibals, gladiators, buried treasure, mutant parasites, ancient ruins slowly dissolving in Jack’s digestive juices, and much more.

Here’s a preview- the map for the pirate town of Herniaheim, where the Gutreavers hole up after their raids on the ambergris mines, drinking till they forget they live inside the bowels of a giant whale and gambling away their ill-gotten gains in seedy chance-houses and saloons like the Slippery Sea Slug and the Brown Pearl.

Many thanks again to my playtesters for this volume, both from the original Hex campaign crew and my old friends over at the Campaign Builders’ Guild Discord.