Fresh from a successful showcase at the recent UK Games Expo (UKGE) 2026, indie publisher MacGuffin & Co. has secured full funding for its latest tabletop project, The Bad Year. The campaign launched on 28 May 2026 to coincide with the opening weekend of the Birmingham convention, quickly blowing past its initial financial targets.
The book is an anthology of 53 system-neutral horror investigation adventures designed to be dropped into any existing roleplaying game or woven together into a massive, year-long campaign. At the convention, the team utilised a clever cross-over marketing strategy, offering a physical preview zine for £10 at their booth, which became free for attendees who backed the live Kickstarter campaign on the spot.
The project is the brainchild of Sasha Sienna and Jonathan Sims, the creative duo behind MacGuffin & Co. Co-creator Jonathan Sims is widely known in the horror community as the writer and voice behind the multi-award-winning fiction podcast The Magnus Archives, bringing an established pedigree in slow-burn, atmospheric terror to this new tabletop resource.
The Bad Year is set against the backdrop of Hallowcroft, Massachusetts, a fictional, gloomy New England city isolated by dense woods. The thematic core of the book is anchored in the late 1990s, blending monster-of-the-week television tropes from shows like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer with modern urban gothic supernatural horror. The overarching narrative begins with a rare stellar conjunction, known as the Grand Occultation, casting a shadow over the town and unearthing cults, ancient monsters, and restless dead at roughly one mystery per week.
Architecturally, the book is built for maximum utility at the gaming table. Each of the 52 standard adventures (concluding with a double-length finale for week 53) is laid out across a single double-page spread. The left side features a graphic-heavy “clue map” that lets game masters visually track how clues, obstacles, and action sequences connect at a glance. The right side provides a detailed breakdown of locations, NPCs, and specific events that can interrupt the investigation.
Speaking to Geek Native at the UK Games Expo, the team emphasised that while the book can be run as a standard Annus Horribilis campaign sequentially from week 1 to 53, it also includes three alternative structures. GMs can opt for a monthly 13-adventure astrological calendar focusing solely on the primary plot, follow specific standalone narrative arcs, or pull individual mysteries out to use as sudden episodic detours in their ongoing campaigns.
The physical book will be produced as an A4 hardback volume printed in high-contrast black and white on premium uncoated paper. According to the design team, this specific monochrome aesthetic is intended to evoke the gritty tactile sensation of reading old newspaper clippings, faded photocopies, and stained case files. The visual design is supported by cover art and occult symbols by artist Cael Lyons, map layouts by Dublin-based cartographer Jog Brogzin, and thematic digital audio accompaniments by sound designer Amber Devereux of Tin Can Audio, as shown in the production team overview in the file image_1ee309.jpg.
The core campaign is written to be system-neutral, offering explicit compatibility hooks for major investigation systems such as Call of Cthulhu, Monster of the Week, and The Magnus Archives RPG.
The crowdfunding campaign for The Bad Year will remain active until 25 June 2026. MacGuffin & Co. has stated that shipping costs will be assessed and handled separately during the post-campaign fulfilment phase to protect against logistical volatility, with current base shipping estimates sitting at £7 for UK backers and £17 for the European Union.
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