This is a world of peril, of guarded riches, of the sort of wizard you might see airbrushed on the side of a van.

PITCRAWLER is a high-octane, high-chaos, high-fantasy RPG inspired by choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks. It's designed for two players, with one person taking the role of the eponymous 'pitcrawler' - an intrepid but workaday hero on a foolhardy quest for treasure and renown - and the other playing the book, blocking their way with challenges, choices, puzzles and fights. 

Want a taste of adventure? Download the free PITCRAWLER quickstart guide now!

Yes. PITCRAWLER's great!

OK, it's a fair question. PITCRAWLER is definitely for you if:

• you like tongue-in-cheek RPGs with a hint of ironic melodrama 
• you're into games with an emergent narrative and very little prep 
• you enjoy OSR-style random tables and 'rulings not rules'
• you're interested in RPGs but struggle to get a full group together
• you're a pair of nerds looking for a good time

PITCRAWLER'S probably for you if:

• you think it looks cool
• you want to play a mild-mannered orc who lived a simple life as a baker until their family home was threatened and now, to ensure their grandchildren have a place to live in peace, must venture into the abandoned tower of the dead wizard Entrapto in search of heavily guarded treasure...

Praise for PITCRAWLER

"Playing PITCRAWLER felt like I was watching at a kick-ass painting get airbrushed onto the side of a van in real time before my eyes, which is perhaps the highest praise I could give to any piece of art. It felt dangerous and thrilling and a little illegal, like the memories of reading cheap B&W pulp comics pulled from the garage of some distant, cool uncle."

-Jeff Stormer, Party of One

"You gotta check out PITCRAWLER. It’s lively, versatile, a clever spin on sword-dudes-and-beardy-wizards fantasy, and delivers on that holy grail of game design: it is an IDEAL game for beginners who are new to tabletop games!"

-Jeeyon Shim, designer of Field Guide to Memory and The Snow Queen

"Pitcrawler is a love letter to all the best parts of childhood adventuring, with every part of the text and game working together to bring you right back to that primordial time, sitting on a dusty library floor, thumbing through an impossible magical hilarious game. I can't think of another time a game's rulebook made me wheeze with laughter."

-Jay Dragon, designer of Wanderhome and Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast

"I haven't grinned this hard at a game since Edd and I beat that fucking vampire in Firetop Mountain when we were ten."

-Sean F. Smith, who met Iain McCaig once

We've already created PITCRAWLER 0.7th edition (available on our Patreon), and it's pretty darn good if we do say so ourselves! But we need your help to make it to the full 1st edition. Hitting our goal on Indiegogo means we can create a beautiful hardback edition of the expanded rules, including:

• Thumbs!
  Do you miss the days when leaving a thumb in a previous page might just save you from a bad decision/fiery death? Well, in PITCRAWLER this humble digit can once again save your hide, with an innovative save-point mechanic. As the adventurer, simply choose how many thumbs you'd like (from 0-5) at the start of the session and make sure you place them carefully: once you've accepted a dice roll or 10 minutes have passed, your thumb is used up!
• Legacy Mechanics!
  Did you run out of thumbs and die anyway? Not to worry! With PITCRAWLER’s legacy mechanics your next character will be able to carry on the work of their foolhardy predecessor, possibly inheriting skills, items, companions or even levels.
• Random tables!
  Are you sick of thinking about things? Of course you are! Thinking is boring! That’s why there are an almost absurd number of random tables to help you come up with everything from magic items to the title of your next scenario.
• Anatomy of a scenario!
  Coming up with an adventure on the fly can be a very daunting prospect. That’s why we provide a handy step-by-step process for constructing a scenario in mere minutes that will leave your player saying “uh-oh” and making that face. You know the face we mean.
• Tome of Foes!
  Of course, no game is complete without a huge list of things that really, really want to murder you. And PITCRAWLER is absolutely complete, with classic monsters, weird creatures of our own design, and a comprehensive guide to creating your own unholy monstrosities.
• Miscellany of Wizards!
  PITCRAWLER is a world without lore, with no “canon” to the setting. Still, sometimes it’s nice to have a toybox to choose from. In this spirit we’re creating a spectrum of iconic wizards: weird and sinister mages whose domains you can plop down wholesale into your game world. You can even pretend you made them up yourself (we won’t tell).

De-luxed Edition

As well as the standard hardback edition, we'll be creating a limited edition "de-luxed" version of the book for the true pocket-paperback connoisseur! This is the kind of book you'd find in the teen section of a local library, or in the back of a second-hand bookshop. We guarantee low production value on this one, with cheap paper, flimsy binding and minimal formatting. We hope you'll throw this book into the bottom of your backpack, stuff it into your coat pocket and use it as a coaster for endless cups of coffee. As its aesthetics make it virtually unusable as a reference document, everyone who buys the 'de-luxed' version will also receive a standard hardback copy of PITCRAWLER.

Adventure Zines

PITCRAWLER contains guidelines to help you craft your own adventures, as well as a miscellany of wizards, tome of foes and random title generator for plenty of inspiration. But, if you'd rather leave all that to us, we've also created four pre-written adventures, published as a zine bundle.

• Search for a missing realm in Hunt for the Enchanted Isles
• Attempt to escape the sinister Port Fogge in Midnight Festival of the Sea
• Try to steal the precious Omniseed in Betrayal at the Hidden Mountain
• Navigate a wizard break-up in Wrath of the Bitter Palace

Character Sheet Notepad and Campaign Journal

Perils abound in the world of PITCRAWLER and, sadly, not all adventurers are built to last. But fear not! With our notepad of tear-off character sheets, a new, fresh-faced contender is always at hand. Because character creation in PITCRAWLER is so quick and easy, the character sheet pad means you can have another pitcrawler ready to go in the same amount of time you'd normally be wrestling with your printer settings. 

With PITCRAWLER's continuity mechanic, the adventurer chooses one element from each session that they'd like to see return in future adventures, and the legacy system means that each new adventurer follows on from the one before. Our campaign journal lets you track your pitcrawlers, their adventures and the emerging details of your world, so you can concentrate on the terrifying moss-bear shuffling towards you!

We'll be releasing PITCRAWLER under an open license, meaning anyone can create additional content for PITCRAWLER and then either release it for free or sell it, without us taking a cut. There's so much creativity and weirdness and the indie TTRPG space and we can't wait to see what comes out of it!

There's no canon in PITCRAWLER. Instead, we give you a set of principles (plus a lot of random tables, pre-written adventures and repositories of wizards and beasts) to help each GM and adventurer build up the details of their own world together as they play.

Just a couple of rugged adventurers, hunched over a bowl of hearty broth, tearing into a crusty roll and spinning a yarn about magic and danger. By which we mean we’re Jonathan Sims & Sasha Sienna, a pair of writers and games designers who have been publishing games as MacGuffin & Co. for three years now. We’ve previously put out Odd Jobs, a collection of system-neutral micro-settings, space-crime desperation simulator Zero Void, and many other smaller games through our Patreon, as well as currently working on production of queer tarot riverboat game Upriver, Downriver. Outside of MacGuffin, you may know Jonny as the writer and narrator of the award-winning horror podcast The Magnus Archives, and Sasha as one of the writers for the official Doctor Who: Redacted audio drama and co-designer of Himbo Treasure Hunt with Grant Howitt.

Rewards will be fulfilled through Backerkit. Because we can't know in advance exactly how much shipping will be, shipping costs will be charged through Backerkit when the rewards are ready to be sent out. Although we can't guarantee the costs, here are our estimates.

The bulk of PITCRAWLER is already written though, depending on which stretch goals we hit, we may need to create more content, as well as allow time for additional art and music from our artists and composer. Our estimated delivery date of April 2023 allows for plenty of time if we hit all our stretch goals. As we both print in and ship from the UK, there should be few delays in getting the game sent out from our shipping partners, Parcelhub, though there's always a possibility of delays with international shipping. As we've encountered delays in the printing of complex physical books before, we're keeping the design of PITCRAWLER as simple to produce as possible without compromising on quality.

If you can't back the campaign but still want to help, we're very grateful to everyone who helps spread the word, either by telling your friends/acquaintances/enemies, sharing the Indiegogo page or using #PITCRAWLER