Fatherfog - Starter guide

What is Fatherfog?

Your grandmother told you never to follow a light in the woods. You laughed. Then the Fog came, and it turned out every warning she ever gave you was a set of instructions. The wolf in the story is real. So is the house made of bread. So is the thing that lives under the bridge and wants your name.

Fatherfog is a fairytale horror roleplaying game about ordinary people surviving in a world where the old tales have come true in their original, unsoftened forms. You are not a knight or a chosen child. You are a worker, a beggar, a stranger passing through, and your village is running out of hope. You walk into the Fog to bring some back.

The game was designed by Alan Gerding, co-founder of Tuesday Knight Games and one of the people behind Mothership, and it is the studio's first new roleplaying game since that one. It appeared in spring 2026 as a Zero Edition: a complete, playable zine that will grow into a full first edition later, the same path Mothership took. Netherbook sells that Zero Edition and its introductory adventure, Into the Fog.

How does the system work?

If you have played Mothership, you already know most of it. Fatherfog runs on a d100: roll under your stat or save to succeed, with advantage, disadvantage and criticals where you expect them. Skills sit in trees you climb over time, and characters are quick to make and easy to lose. Combat is short and brutal, over in a handful of rounds, and the book is honest that running is often the right answer.

The new idea is the Bit. The Bit is the ones digit of your d100 roll, and the game keeps reaching for it. Fail a Mind save and you may lose Hope equal to the Bit. A roll is never just pass or fail; the last digit tells you how much it cost.

Hope is the engine. Every character starts with a hundred points of it, and the Fog takes them: witnessing a death, failing a save, seeing something the stories warned you about. The less Hope you have, the more likely you are to fail a Hope save and fall into Despair. The Guide, Fatherfog's game master, then hands you one of dozens of Despair states in private, and you play it out without telling the others what it is. Panic spreads at the table the way it spreads in the tale.

Two more touches give the game its shape. The Guide never rolls dice; all the uncertainty sits with the players. And a character with a high enough skill can trade it for an unnatural ability, something magical and fairy-tale shaped, at a cost to their Hope. Resting, travel and death all have their own small rules, which matters in a game where the road home is half the story.

What do you need to start?

The Zero Edition is one zine of just over sixty pages: character creation, the four roles, equipment, the rules, a Guide section with sample enemies and legacy artifacts, and the full list of Despair states. It is genuinely complete. Add percentile dice, pencils and a table, and you can play tonight.

You will want a Guide and a small group of players. For a first session, Into the Fog is the doorway: children are vanishing from the village and a thread of magical yarn leads into the Fog. It runs in one evening, teaches the Bit system as you go, and its Guide notes tell you where to let the silence sit. Read it as a Guide, do not read it as a player.

Who is this game for?

For horror tables that want fear with a fairy-tale shape: cottages, wolves, bargains, breadcrumbs. For Mothership groups who want to leave the ship without leaving the rules behind. For Guides who like handing a player a secret and watching what they do with it. And for anyone who grew up on the Brothers Grimm and always suspected the cleaned-up versions were lying.

It is not for players who want their characters to become heroes. Fatherfog is lethal and it means to be; the village needs Hope more than it needs you. It is not a big-book game, and a Zero Edition has rough edges by design: the world map on the inside cover is not explained anywhere yet, and some rules will change before the first edition. And it is not for tables that want their horror clean. The old tales were not.

How does it compare to other systems?

Next to Dungeons & Dragons, the difference is who you are. D&D hands you a hero and a spell list; Fatherfog hands you a lantern and a grandmother's warning, and your best skill might be knowing when to run. There is no levelling toward greatness here, only survival and the slow return of Hope.

Mothership is the obvious relative: the same designer's studio, the same d100 bones, Hope where Mothership has Stress and Despair where it has Panic. If Mothership is the corridor and the airlock, Fatherfog is the path and the tree line. Groups who own one will be up and running in the other within minutes.

Bluebeard's Bride shares the fairy tale but not the shape. Bluebeard's Bride puts the whole table inside one woman's head for one long night; Fatherfog gives everyone their own body to lose and a road to walk. And Mörk Borg shares the doom without the folklore: if you like its bleak tone but want your dread wrapped in cloth rather than metal, this is the book.

Where do you start?

Read the zine once as the Guide; it is short enough for an afternoon. Run Into the Fog with pre-made characters or with the quick creation rules, and keep the first session to one clear task: find the children, come home. Tell the players the rules of the Fog as your grandmother would have, half warning and half riddle.

Hand out Despair in private, every time, and never explain it. The table will fill the gap with dread, which is the point. And when someone rolls a 04 on a save and asks what the Bit does, let the book answer: it costs four points of Hope, and everyone at the table just heard the door creak.

Recommended products at Netherbook

Fatherfog 0e is the complete game, and Into the Fog is the adventure to open it with. If the Fog leaves you wanting the same engine in a different dark, the Mothership Core Set is the sibling; if it is the fairy tale that got under your skin, Bluebeard's Bride goes deeper into the house, and Mörk Borg takes the despair further still. Everything for the game itself sits in our Fatherfog collection; you will find all of the above in Horror, and the old stories behind them in Mythic & Folklore.