95102_RAA_Hasselberger2024_R1_PROOF

The Rev’s Pulpit Monsters are cool. For kids of a certain age, I’m not sure anything was cooler. I’m a monster kid from way back, growing up on a steady diet of midwest creature features, monster comics, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Saturday morning cartoons and Star Wars. Coming from a small town in the south, the landscape for finding that kind of material wasn’t often fertile. In fact, it was

downright hard to find. I haunted the racks of convenience stores looking for issues of Saga of Swamp Thing, out of the way used book stores hoping to get a copy of Weird War Tales and begged my mom to buy me the latest issue of Mad Monsters if one popped up at the local Piggly Wiggly. I watched grainy reruns of Baron Von Crypt’s Shock Theater and hoped to catch a glimpse of Elvira when she drifted through a Coors Light commercial. I listened to Al Lewis (that’s Gran’pa Munster, for the casuals) as he talked about whatever old school monster movie he was getting ready to show, all the while laughing as he puttered around his weird basement laboratory. I’d get super stoked when USA Up All Night would host double and triple features or when I could tune in cable on my tiny bedroom TV just in time to see late night fare like The Hidden or The Hitchhiker series. Man, I loved that stuff. Still do. I guess I just never really stopped thinking monsters were awesome. So that’s what you’re getting here. Not just from me, but a whole cadre of monster-loving, horror-fiend friends who feel like long lost brothers. These fellas GET IT. These are guys I would have traded Garbage Pail Kids with or invited over because TBS had a Godzilla marathon going down on a Sunday afternoon. These are the weirdos who saved up their pennies for Don Post masks and rubber vomit from the Johnson Smith catalog. The art kids scribbling vampires and werewolves into the margins of their Trapper Keeper who grew up to be the kind of guys who endlessly debate the ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing. … but how does this fit into the tabletop roleplaying space? Well, this is one part monster magazine and two parts RPG resource. There’s plenty of stuff in here for you to use in your weird fantasy, horror and modern games. This is an idea machine, allowing you to spin off and extrapolate your own adventurers. Hooks, rumors, NPCs, items, locations, adventures, magic… it's all here! Best of all its gloriously illustrated and easy on the eyes, full of the old school nostalgia that you can both actively use and enjoy reading at the same time. Together I feel like we’ve made something cool and fun that will resonate with other past-their-prime monster kids like us. Maybe other folks too. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed making it! - XXOO, Levi

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