New Release! Guard Cards for Pinching Tarts TTRPG Now Available


"Guard Cards gold text on a green vintage book cover two crossed swords and a shield

Guard Cards is a pay-what-you-want game aid compatible with Pinching Tarts, a Wonderland-themed PocketQuest 2024 game designed by Monica Valentinelli. The cards can either be printed out and used as half-sheets or folded in half to create cards.

Guard Cards
is a digital download available from DriveThruRPG.com. The game accessory is not playable on its own without a copy of Pinching Tarts. What it does include, are rules for all the foes you’ll encounter in the Red Queen’s Castle. It includes:

* guidance to introduce the Red Queen’s Guard
* alternate rules for Teatime! affecting guards
* cards for all foes expanding and clarifying core rules
* ranks for The Watch

The half-page guard cards include customized tracks for each guard’s hearts.

This printer-friendly title is a game accessory for Pinching Tarts, a caucus game of tart-stealing nonsense inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

Download Guard Cards from DriveThruRPG.com!



New Releases! Pinching Tarts RPG and Creature Sheets Accessory

Pinching Tarts Cover Art | Alice in Wonderland white rabbit | PocketQuest Monica Valentinelli

Pinching Tarts is a caucus game of tart-stealing nonsense inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) that offers players multiple options to win. You and your friends play Wonderland creatures who infiltrate the Red Queen’s castle to steal Her Majesty’s tarts while protecting what you hold most dear-your heart.

Pinching Tarts is a GM-less game that uses 10 six-sided dice in two colors (five of each). It includes:

  • standard rules, tips, and rule summaries
  • character rules, characters, and character creation
  • rules for Teatime, “Eat Me” cakes, and “Drink Me” potions
  • optional rules to stash and eat tarts
  • sample rooms in the Red Queen’s castle
  • rules for antagonists including the Knave of Hearts, the Cook, and the Red King and Queen
  • a recipe for fruit-a-licious mini-tarts
  • …and more!

Your mission? Pinch tarts. Drink tea. Escape… With your heads tarts!

Suitable for two or more players, childlike adults and children, this tartacular game from veteran game designer Monica Valentinelli is her PocketQuest debut. Whether you play a duck, a dodo, or a dormouse it matters not, for each creature has their own talents, specialty, and heart. Gathered together, you form “les pièces de résistance,” a ragtag band of thieves who have targeted none other than the head-chopping Red Queen.

“I had a lot of fun designing ‘Pinching Tarts’ for my first PocketQuest, so much so I devised a fun origin story for the game’s development and layout,” writes Monica. “I pretended I ‘found’ this vintage game in a secondhand book store, but several pages were torn, missing, and scribbled on in crayon. So, I reconstructed the original game and now present it you as a found artifact full of sticky notes, parchment, scrap paper, etc.”

This title includes a full color and printer-friendly greyscale version. The printer-friendly version of Pinching Tarts has a full color cover, but the interior has been modified to be less art-intensive.

For more about Monica’s process designing Pinching Tarts, you can read:

Pinching Tarts is available exclusively on DriveThruRPG.com.

Also Available on DriveThruRPG


Creature Sheets is a pay-what-you-want game aid compatible with Pinching Tarts, a Wonderland-themed PocketQuest game designed by Monica Valentinelli. The creature sheet is not form-fillable by design for two reasons: some of the fields are subject to change during gameplay, and there’s a rule in the game that gives players the ability to swap character sheets. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that you use pencil to fill out the sheets.

Creature Sheets is a digital download that includes:

  • creature sheet instructions
  • guidance for descriptive Wonderland-appropriate traits
  • sample creature sheet for a puppy
  • blank, printer-friendly creature sheets

The two-page creature sheets include tracks for hearts as well as optional tracks for tarts stolen, eaten, and foes defeated.



New Release The Dagon Collection Available for Pre-Order

The Dagon Collection | Cover Art

The Dagon Collection is a unique anthology edited by Nate Pedersen that debuts early this year from PS Publishing.

The Dagon Collection is a companion book to “The Starry Wisdom Library. Once again, the new anthology is presented as a fake auction catalogue, however this time it is 1929, shortly after the events in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” The feds have just raided the Esoteric Order of Dagon Lodge. Now they’ve contracted with Pent & Serenade, Occult Auctioneers, to sell the items secured in the raid.

In addition to books, this auction also features weaponry, art, jewelry, nautical items, textiles, and objects both strange and prosaic once owned by the Dagon cult. The design skills of Andrew Leman of H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society have brought the catalogue to life in all its 1920s period glory.

Rebecca Baumann of the University of Indiana provided the cataloging of the objects. Liv Rainey-Smith and Eduardo Valdes-Hevia contributed illustrations. Leading voices in horror and Lovecraftian fiction again contributed stories, including F. Paul Wilson, Jesse Bullington, John Langan, Gemma Files, Livia Llewellyn, Michael Cisco, Nick Mamatas, Ramsey Campbell, Selena Chambers, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Monica Valentinelli and, in a bittersweet note, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (to whom the book is dedicated), in what may be his final unpublished story.

Pre-orders for The Dagon Collection are now available. Visit PS Publishing to learn more!



New! Gaming Release! Legions of Carcosa Available Now!

Legions of Carcosa Cover Art features four monsters

Have your The Yellow King Roleplaying Game players grown complacent battling gargoyles, vampires, and riot dogs? Do you have a reality horror mystery crying out for a fresh and bizarre villain to drive it?

Legions of Carcosa: The Yellow King Bestiary solves your problems by helping you create some for your Belle Époque art students, Continental War soldiers, alternate reality ex-insurgents, and ordinary people trapped in unraveling normalcy.

From alien parasites to warped human conspirators, from hungry buildings to incarnations of drought, from gods torn from the pages of myth to war machines that hunt in wolf-like packs, Legions of Carcosa: The Yellow King Bestiary presents 86 new Foes to mystify, haunt and menace your investigators.

Throw icewater into your player’s veins with 100 brand new Shock and Injury cards. The book also includes all the preexisting cards you need to run these adversaries and beasties without reaching for any other volume.

Foe descriptions key themselves to one of the game’s four twisty sequences. Each entry also includes hooks inspiring you to repurpose the Foe in the other three settings.

With this book in your feverish hands, the investigators can:

* Tremble in aesthetic unease when confronted by the Living Portrait!
* Flee the blazing weapons fire of the Angel of Mons!
* Shudder at the razor teeth of the hinge-jawed Flip-tops!
* Open their apps to fall into the validating, concerned clutches of the Chirpers!
* And much much more…

Whatever hole opens up in your reality today, an antagonist from The Yellow King Bestiary is ready to slither out of it, through your mind and into your heart.

Legions of Carcosa: The Yellow King Bestiary was developed by Robin D Laws and includes the works of John Harness, Daniel Kwan, Kira Magrann, FlamesRising.com contributor Monica Valentinelli, and Sara Saltiel.



New Gaming Release! Mistborn RPG Nobles The Golden Mandate

Mistborn RPG | Nobles the Golden Mandate | Cover art of a noble on a balcony with his back to us.

Of Gilded Words and Poisonous Tongues!

In the Lord Ruler’s Final Empire, blood is destiny. A skaa birth condemns you to a hard life of labor and service. A Terris birth marks you forever as an outsider, an uncomfortable reminder of a bygone era. To be born noble is to live at the peak of political and social power, blessed with the potential for Allomancy — but it also means a life of vicious politicking, ruthless competition, and the perpetual risk of betrayal and ruin. As a noble Hero, you face the same question as all who defy this grim order: do you have the courage to shrug off blood and destiny, to stand against the brutality of this world, and fight for a better future… for everyone?

Nobles: The Golden Mandate is the final supplement for the Mistborn Adventure Game. Developed in cooperation with Brandon Sanderson and Dragonsteel Entertainment, this book dives deep into the history and intrigues of Mistborn’s most notable families, from the ten Great Houses who dominate the halls of power to the up-and-coming Lesser Houses that forever nip at their heels. This essential guide melds information from the novels with background developed for the Mistborn: House War board game to form a rich environment for storytelling in the cutthroat world of the Final Empire’s nobility.

For players of the Mistborn Adventure Game, this supplement offers extensive guidance for playing a rebellious noble Hero, adding nobles to a skaa thieving Crew, and exploring what it means to defy the Lord Ruler. Also included are new rules for creating Noble Heroes: Traits, Stunts, and a new Power, Family, which lets you bring the full power of your name to bear in cunning and creative ways. For nobles with a more daring streak, there’s also new background information and character options for playing an elite, Allomancer-hunting Hazekiller!

For Narrators, an exciting multi-session adventure titled “Thieves in the Ninth House” takes your Crew to the Eastern Dominance, where they’re hired to liberate an honor hostage from the clutches of House Urbain. This seemingly simple job soon proves to be anything but, for in the world of Mistborn there’s always another secret…

Nobles: The Golden Mandate is not a complete game. You need a copy of the Mistborn Adventure Game, some dice, and imagination to play.

Who the Book’s For
Fans of the Mistborn novels and the Mistborn: House War board game; players and Narrators of the Mistborn Adventure Game; or gamers who love RPGs of politics and intrigue like Amber, Houses of the Blooded, or Vampire.

Important Notice
Mistborn Adventure Game Digital Editions will no longer be available after December 31st, 2023. Get them now or they’re gone forever.

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Looking for Monica’s books and games that are still in print? Visit Monica Valentinelli on Amazon’s Author Central or a bookstore near you.

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