DISPOSABLE BAGS OF MEAT - or, The Triumph of the Human Spirit - is an action-horror TTRPG where baseline, average humans become the heroes of their own hellish stories, surviving by grit and luck alone... until they don't.
Humans. An incredible breadth of diversity – of physical prowess, intellectual agility, and personal charm. And yet, when the blood starts to pump, or flow, or gush from a severed artery, it’s not skill or wit or even brute strength that keeps an individual human alive.
It’s luck.
It’s grit.
It’s the refusal to acknowledge that all is lost, and the pure animal instinct to live.
Disposable Bags of Meat – Meatbags to its friends – is a two-stat horror TTRPG that feels like an action horror movie (or game, if that’s more your speed).
Players create characters like the Average Joe heroes of the greatest of horror movies: college students, working class spacers, tourists, and other people who, if you were placing bets, wouldn’t stand a chance in hell of surviving a horror story. But these characters do, and in Meatbags they can.
These characters don’t have any terrific skills or edges, but what they do have is Goals, Grit, and most importantly Luck. Those are the things that allow them to face horror and come out fighting.
Meatbags runs on percentile dice. The GM sets a target number, the player reminds them of all the clever stuff they did to stack the odds – careful planning, the setting of traps, a tasty bit of teamwork – and rolls the dice. Sometimes they’ll have a relevant skill to reduce their roll. They’ll still fail pretty often: they’re trying to barricade a door while a rampaging werecreature hurls a body the size of a truck against the outside, or hide from a phantom tracking the irresistible glow of their life force. This stuff’s not easy.
That’s where Luck comes in. Every Meatbag has a pool of Luck they can spend to turn failure into success. Until they run out. A character’s life is fully in the player’s hands, and every decision on whether to buy off a failure or hold that Luck for the next desperate situation counts.
Fast, mostly. Each player divides up a pool of character points between Luck (which helps them succeed), Grit (which keeps them alive), and Skills (which are for cowards). They choose a Goal, and three sub-goals for it, which relate to the scenario they’re about to enter, giving them motivation beyond staying alive and story beats to try and hit during play.
It's geared for action horror; play fast, make mistakes, push your luck, and see how far you get.
At any point, a player can Sacrifice their meatbag to automatically succeed at a task. They’ll pick up an NPC for the rest of the game (one who can’t survive; pilot them to an interesting demise). The last meatbag standing can’t die. There’s always a Final Girl.
Soon! We're working on a quickstart, but we haven't laid it out yet. If we get the art and layout finished in time we'll release a glossy, polished version. Otherwise we'll release a bare-bones PDF with no art. Even if we only get the basic version finished during the campaign, backers will all get a really nice, properly styled, PDF version as one of their rewards.
THE CORE RULEBOOK: Minimum 100 A5 pages of full-colour gruesomeness, including:
Quick, easy character creation – for Meatbags, and the disposable Specialists players can pick up to keep playing if (when) their Meatbag dies
Rules (obviously it’s got the rules, but it’d be weird not to mention it, you know?)
Advice on safety tools and the expected social contract around horror games, and specifically this horror game
A collection of monster archetypes, with a buffet of rules and abilities you can swap out to keep players on their toes
Guidance on designing Meatbags scenarios.
THE QUICKSTART: A cosmic horror scenario, plus concise rules, so you can try out Meatbags for yourself. It can be run over a single 3-hour session, but ideally it takes two. The quickstart has art and cartography by the delightful Brian Yaksha. The PDF version of the quickstart’s free to everyone, but you can get a physical copy in the COLOSSUS reward tier.
CHARACTER SHEET PADS: Putting the “disposable” in Disposable Bags of Meat! You’ll get through characters pretty quickly, so we’re making it easy to just scrap one and scribble down another one with this notepad of character sheets. There are 100 pages, so they should keep you busy for a while.
DICE: A pair of percentile dice unique to Disposable Bags of Meat. These are premium, sharp-edged acrylic dice with gory red veins and swirly foil inclusions. If you play other percentile-based games, I don't have to tell you how hard it is to get a set of really nice percentile dice outside a multi-dice set.
THE PHANTOM: Everything digital. You’ll get the PDF of the core book, including all digital stretch goals, and form-fillable digital character sheets.
THE BEAST: Everything from the Phantom tier, plus a voucher for an at-cost print-on-demand copy of the core rulebook (fulfilled through Drivethru RPG).
You will have to pay about £5-7 (depending on final page count) to Drivethru for the book.
THE MIMIC: Everything from the Phantom tier, plus a hardback copy of the rulebook.
THE COLOSSUS: Everything from the Phantom tier, plus:
Hardback copy of the rulebook
Softcover copy of the quickstart
The character sheet pad
The dice
You can get character sheet pads, physical copies of the quickstart, extra copies of the core book, and dice sets as add-ons to any pledge.
We are Ex Stasis Games, and we make strange games for strange people. We’ve made solo journalling games (you may know us for Final Girl, our Wretched & Alone slasher horror), system-neutral scenarios, and a big ol’ dark fantasy setting. Chant has freelanced for games like World of Darkness, various Warhammer TTRPGs, Spire and DIE: The Roleplaying Game and many, many more.
Lore’s edited games for Renegade Game Studios, Cubicle 7, and the ENNIE-winning Uncaged series on DM’s Guild. They’re also a working artist.
We could not have made the quickstart without the artistic and cartographic talents of Brian Yaksha, and Brian is very graciously contributing monsters to the core book’s set of antagonists, too.
You probably already worked this out from the rewards, but there are three ways you can receive your book, carefully calculated to get you Disposable Bags of Meat in the most affordable fashion.
1. PDF files: immediate (upon release), available everywhere (fulfilled through Drivethru RPG).
2. Traditionally printed books: the absolute best quality product. The only way to get the character sheet pack and the hardback version of the core rules. Shipped from the UK. We cannot ship to the EU due to GPSR regulations. We won't ship to conflict zones (all other issues aside, it's incredibly hard to get post into them).
3. Print-on-demand softbacks: affordable and available everywhere (that Drivethru RPG will ship to). We have less control over materials used, so the book might not look quite as pretty. There will also be additional fees to pay to Drivethru RPG.
We'll collect shipping fees when we're ready to ship out the books. The prices below are our estimates, based on the Mimic pledge weighing less than 750g and the Colossus weighing about a kilo. If we add loads more pages, the weight-based price might change; on the other hand, if we're hitting that many stretch goals, I may be able to bring in a fulfilment partner in the US.
Anyway, the main thing is - shipping's wildly variable, this is a good current estimate.
Short answer: late summer/early autumn (depending on what season you think September is).
The book is written, playtested, and revised. We'll try to slide in some more playtesting because the economics of Grit and Luck will benefit from being tested with more players and playstyles. Most of the time will go on art and the actual production process.
Mid-April: Campaign ends. We draw a line under playtesting. Lore makes art.
May: Lore edits the manuscript. Chant makes final post-edit/playtest changes to the quickstart and sends it, and the character sheet pads, off to print.
June: Lore makes more art and Chant lays out the book. We get the quickstart and character sheet pads back from the printers.
Early July: We release the PDF. We’ll give it a couple of weeks to spot the typos that inevitably creep in despite all the editing and proofreading, then send the files to print.
Mid August: The books arrive from the printers. As long as there are no colossal problems with them, we start shipping out orders.
Early September: We finish fulfilment, and kick back for a couple of weeks, basking in the satisfaction of a job well done.
We're cross collaborating with Eerie Games, who are making Survivor Sorority: a tarot-based TTRPG about Final Girls taking a stand. Support both projects and you'll get Carnival Obscura a two-part scenario (PDF only). The first part's for Meatbags, and you'll play a bunch of regular carnival-goers stumbling into the worst night of their lives. In the second part, you'll play Survivor Sorority with a bunch of hardened survivors returning to shut down this nightmare attraction once and for all.
As well as us and Eerie Games, there's a cornucopia of great horror TTRPGs as part of Pocketopia. We particularly recommend...
