The National Park Service, tasked with protecting America’s most important ecological treasures, like the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, and several hundred linear feet of stainless steel-reinforced Mississippi River shoreline, has an even more unusual plot of land to maintain beginning in 2025. It’s a place that’s fairly dark, extremely moist, and entirely fictional, called Mystery Flesh Pit National Park. The viral art project, which blew up on Reddit during the COVID-19 pandemic-era lockdowns, is finally being turned into a tabletop role-playing game. Polygon sat down with the creators to learn more.
As it turns out, Flesh Pit is largely Texas’ fault.
“I am from West Texas,” admitted its creator, Trevor Roberts, in a recent interview with Polygon. “[Specifically a place where it’s] very rural, very sparse, [with residential areas] mixed with the oil industry and fracking activity.”
Coming from such a large, flat, mixed-use area where the community was very concerned about all things under the ground, the idea for Flesh Pit came somewhat… organically.
“I was getting my lunch together [in the break room at work, and] I was looking at this horrible little grapefruit thing beginning to rot,” Roberts said. Like any normal person, he whipped out his phone to capture the moment. “I was like, Man, what if you were that tiny and were standing on the edge of this thing and it was like a big crater? [What if the Grand Canyon] was all pulpy and nasty? So I took a little low-angle picture […], popped back to my desk, opened up Photoshop, and started messing around with it.”
Of course, Roberts is not just an artist. A trained aerospace engineer, he’s worked at both the Johnson Space Center in Texas and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That’s where he developed a taste for art and design, which he went back to school for before ending up in the break room of an architectural firm astride a calcified citrus fruit. So what happened inside his copy of Photoshop was, in all actuality, remarkable and unique. Once it hit Reddit, things really began to take off. Before long he’d developed lore and a backstory centered around the Permian Basin Super Organism (PBSO), a colossal creature whose gummy gubbins make for harrowing hikes literally into the bowels of the Earth.
“A lot of the fans of the Flesh Pit […] had been asking about [a game of some kind],” Roberts said. There had been some fan-made modules for Dungeons & Dragons and other systems, but he simply didn’t have the expertise to take them any further. That’s when he was approached by Christopher Robin Negelein.
“I feel really privileged,” Negelein told Polygon. That’s because Roberts basically handed over everything he had created so far, and then gave the game designer permission to pile even more content on top of it.
“Why Chris convinced me was he had a very realistic approach to it,” Roberts said. “‘It’s going to take this much, it’s going to take at least a year to do this. Let’s set up a Kickstarter, and here’s the budget, and here’s this.’ His thoroughness in detail really convinced me, like, OK, he knows what he’s doing. He’s delivered projects.”
The projects that Roberts is referring to? Only a few hundred thousand words for Monte Cook Games’ wildly popular Cypher System.
Negelein recalled how over decades of work as a journalist, marketer, and nurse he had been trying to break into fiction writing. He finally got his big break thanks to a mentor, author Adam-Troy Castro, who connected him with the team behind Esper Genesis, a science fiction setting designed to be compatible with Dungeons & Dragons’ popular 5th edition. That eventually turned into a long-term gig with Monte Cook Games.
“They did their own community content program,” Negelein said, “and at one point […] 50% of it was my output. […] That got me enough of a recognition with Monte Cook Games that when they decided they were going to do their own version of an open license, they got ahold of me two to three months early before the public release.” The Kickstarter campaign for the Flesh Pit RPG launched not long after, resulting in a successful crowdfunding campaign and the final retail product — which will be available for purchase beginning this month.
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG is a lavishly illustrated 190-page game book available through DriveThruRPG containing all the rules you need to play the full game. The joy begins with character creation, where players choose a “type” to serve as the core of their PC. They might choose to be a security agent hired by the Department of the Interior to intervene when something unusual happens underground. Players could also become an engineer, one of the many full-time employees and contractors who work at the park. There are park guides, of course, but also “marketeers” who work closely across the organization to “control the public’s perception” of the Flesh Pit. Finally, there’s the Men in Black, secret agents who work behind the scenes to ensure the public never finds out the sinister forces truly pulling the strings in the background.
In this way, Negelein explained, game masters merely have to create an otherworldly event that occurs at the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park. Then the players at the table can create characters to deal with that event from any perspective they prefer. They could be trying to prevent the event from happening, or simply trying to conceal the event from prying eyes. The event could be happening to them in real time, or they could be sent down below to deal with the gruesome aftermath. Whatever path they choose, the asymmetrical tools inherent to the Cypher System will be there to guide them on their journey.
Roberts, for his part, just seems elated to finally see his internet-based artistic side project becoming a game that people can experience in the real world.
“I think Chris has done a fantastic job of riding that very kind of thin line,” Roberts said. “It’s horror, and it’s scary, and dangerous, and thrilling. But also, there’s a lot of on-the-nose ridiculousness to it. This is an absurd, silly kind of setting, and so it’s fun to see people engage with those two kinds of sides of it.”
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG is available starting today on DriveThruRPG, with physical versions ranging from $38.95 to $58.95 and digital versions for $16.95.
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