Totem – Tales from the Dark brings mega game mechanics to horror roleplaying

Live from the floor of the UK Games Expo 2026 in Birmingham, Geek Native caught up with the independent Italian publisher Officina Meningi. The studio has brought its award-winning Totem – The Spirits’ RPG to the UK through a new logistics partnership, but the standout revelation is its upcoming supplement. Totem – Tales from the Dark will take the map-making ghost story game and stretch it across multiple tables, introducing a “mega game” style campaign to the narrative horror genre.

Totem – The Spirits’ RPG, spearheaded by designer Valentino Sergi, has already established a strong pedigree. While it was nominated for a Judge’s Award for Best RPG at this year’s Expo, it previously dominated the European NDU Awards, taking home Game of the Year alongside Best Setting, Best Mechanics, and Best Art. The system tasks a Game Master with playing the role of a Spirit, while players act as Seekers mapping out a haunted location and resolving chilling challenges through a simple coin-flip mechanic.

Up until now, British fans have largely had to settle for digital PDF versions of the rules-light system. That changes this weekend. Officina Meningi has struck a distribution deal with GMS Table Top Games, making physical copies of Totem readily available for sale in the UK. As seen in the accompanying photo, stacks of the distinctive, glowing rulebooks, complete with signed copies and bundled “Ghost Packs”, are currently sitting on their UKGE booth.

The most intriguing news shared at the booth concerns the game’s first supplement, Totem – Tales from the Dark, which is currently available for pre-order.

Valentino Sergi, award-winning designer at Officina Meningi, explained to Geek Native on the UK Games Expo floor that the supplement features a campaign designed to be played concurrently by different groups of players across different tables, bringing a collaborative scale rarely seen in intimate horror roleplaying games.

Taking a multi-table “mega game” approach, a format traditionally reserved for sprawling board games or massive organised play events, and applying it to a haunted house narrative mapping game is a bold and highly unusual mechanical choice.

Alongside the Totem news, the studio recently wrapped a successful BackerKit campaign for a mature, erotic spin-off to their cooperative journaling game, Last Sabbath. Given Kickstarter’s notoriously strict and sometimes unpredictable enforcement of mature content policies, the move to BackerKit seemed like a calculated dodge. However, the studio clarified that dodging the crowdfunding giant’s content crackdown was simply a fortunate coincidence; they opted for BackerKit primarily because they felt it was the superior platform for their community’s needs.

Attendees at the UK Games Expo can find Officina Meningi and check out Totem – The Spirits’ RPG at Stand 4-574.