The Castle Automatic's great gears sat still for an age. Now, His Majesty the Worm has begun the machines again…
WHAT IS THE CASTLE AUTOMATIC?
The Castle Automatic is a 100+ room, 5-level Metroidvania-style dungeon designed for use with His Majesty the Worm, the 2x ENNIE-winning, tarot-based RPG. In the module, players will repair magi-mechanical engines that control the castle's sun, moon, weather, and seasons to overcome its deadly challenges.
Use it as an entire campaign! If you're new to His Majesty the Worm, you can get started with just this dungeon, the core book, and a single tarot deck! Or, slot it into your personal Underworld, expanding the core game with all new talents, monsters, dungeon lords, and magical treasures.
Importantly, The Castle Automatic is easy to run. Puzzles, traps, and combat sites are illustrated and included as handouts to be shown during play. The GM has a dungeon tracking sheet to monitor the castle's current state: mechanisms broken and repaired, time of day and year, and current factions in play. With maps for the GM, for the players, and included on every dungeon spread, it's easy to understand the sprawling space.
PREORDER THE CASTLE AUTOMATIC
All Funeral Funder Early Worms will get an EXCLUSIVE free large scale (A3) map of the Castle Automatic illustrated by Guy Pradel!
This map will not be available for purchase and is ONLY available by preordering.
A REASON TO EXPLORE
Four magical artifacts are locked inside the castle—each is powerful enough that the factions of the City would give anything an adventurer wanted to get their hands on one. Also, adventurers can meet mentors to learn all new talents!
A REASON TO BREATHE EASY
GMs have lots of conveniences—handouts, maps, and indices—to make running as easy as possible.
A REASON TO EXPERIMENT
The Castle Automatic's magical engines are broken. Adventuring guilds can repair them to change its seasons, the weather, and the day/night cycle to overcome different challenges and unlock new sections of the dungeon.
A REASON TO TALK
The dungeon is controlled by competing factions of golems, ancient giants who once ruled this place, and the otherworldly vampires who stole it from them.
A REASON TO FIGHT
The module contains fully illustrated combat zones with new creatures and dungeon lords, including a wyvern, a shapeshifting vampiric hierophant, and four mechanical kings.
A REASON TO BE SURPRISED
Illustrated puzzles and traps let enterprising players balance risk and reward as they explore five interconnected levels.
A REASON TO RETURN
With 100+ rooms, there's plenty of content to sustain an entire campaign of His Majesty the Worm.
WHAT IS HIS MAJESTY THE WORM?
His Majesty the Worm is a new-school game with old-school sensibilities: the classic megadungeon experience given fresh life through a focus on the mundanities and small moments of daily life inside the dungeon.
The game has robust procedures. Characters adventure in the Underworld, rest in role-playing driven camping scenes, and plot long-term schemes in the City at the center of the Wide World.
Often-ignored subsystems, like food, hunger, light, and inventory management,are central to play and actually fun. The relationships between companions, calledBonds, powers the rest and recovery mechanic of the game. Role-playing drives the game forward.
Tarot cards are used as a randomizing element. Combat encounters are handled with an action-packed subsystem that ensures that all players have interesting choices every minute of combat: no downtime!
WHY A PREORDER CAMPAIGN?
Most folks don't remember this, but once upon a time, Kickstarter was for burgeoning creators to collect enough cash to hire artists, editors, designers, and other folks to help them make their dreams a reality. Since then, the biggest companies in the industry have come to dominate crowdfunding platforms. They bring completed, polished works to the table and gamify people's FOMO. Now, crowdfunding platforms are really marketing and preorder platforms, not really a place for new artists to launch new projects. And, of course, these platforms are happy to take their chunk of the cash.
The Worm team has long been skeptical of the current trends in crowdfunding. To fund the core game, we used an Itchfunding model—putting ashcan drafts of chapters up on Itch.io as pay-what-you-will to collect enough coins to commission artists and editors. It took a long time, but it was the right move for the game. Now, to fund the production costs for the Worm's next big book, we want to do something similar.
A preorder campaign is like crowdfunding, but it cuts out the middleman and dispels the kayfabe of "will it fund?" We are confident this book is getting made!
But making a book takes a minute! Artists need to draw the art, cartographers need to draft the maps, it needs to be laid out by a graphic designer, the editor needs to make sure all the cross-references are correct. Then, printing, shipping, warehousing, packaging—all before the postal service can bring you the book. While we're working, we'd like to start gauging interest. It helps us cover these costs up front.
If this sounds like a cool project and you're excited to run a big dungeon campaign of His Majesty the Worm, we'd love for you to preorder the book! We'll be in contact with everyone who preorders the book through each step of our process to share the work as it's completed and celebrate milestones.
As thanks for supporting the book during the preorder campaign, we'll give you a free large scale (A3) isometric map of the Castle Automatic illustrated by Guy Pradel.
THE TEAM
Writing, Editing, and Layout
Artists
DELIVERY TIMEFRAME
This isn't a Kickstarter, but we're excited to keep you informed every step of the way! Current status: Writing is complete and the book is currently in copyediting! Layout should be complete by the end of the year. Print files will be prepared early next year. We expect that with prepress, printing, and shipping, this preorder will be fulfilled in May or June of 2026.
We will update Early Worms with regular updates via email. As soon as the digital files are ready, backers will get instant access.
