This is the gorgeously weird Super Blood Harvest (2020), by Dirk Leichty, a serious contender for most beautiful RPG book I’ve gotten this year. The book consists of three standalone-but-thematically linked scenarios – Escape the Blood Ship, Crashed on the Moon, Killbot Guardian Gods – and a set of very light rules, cheekily titled Dirk Rules!, for use in play.

There is a vein of videogaminess running through SBH. That “Super” in the title is the first hint. Each scenario had a kind of meta vibe of being part of an old school game franchise, with each sequel being familiar yet increasingly bizarre. Each scenario ends with a “game over” screen. Quiet nods to Castlevania, Metroid and other videogames abound.

And plenty of other references, too. They’re not the star of the show though – Dirk’s decidedly non-Euclidian art is and it does most of the heavy lifting, with the text being fairly terse (which is good, because terse, I increasingly find, also mean extremely usable). I don’t honestly have words that do his art justice, so just flip through the images here and revel.

All of the scenarios are accompanied by a set of six pregenerated characters, each set as increasingly bizarre as the adventure they are to star in. The first scenario involves being kidnapped by space vampires who needed to refill their ship’s blood reservoir before hibernating behind the moon. The second sees the ship crash on the moon, where new characters discover the vampire temple and the god they imprisoned there to worship (and some Venusians). The third, my favorite, moves the action to Mars after the fall of the vampire empire (hundreds of years later?) where humanity, insane machine entities, vampires and less easily described entities crash into conflict. SBH3 is the most ambitious and sprawling of the scenarios, reminiscent of the way Vault of the Drow sketches out a sandbox campaign setting. Though a pretty fast read, there are hours and hours of very strange play awaiting you here.