The Night Clerk is a system agnostic scenario usable in any modern horror game. Based on one of Role Playing Public Radio's most popular actual play episodes, The Night Clerk has been updated, after years of fine tuning and is ready for your gaming table.

Characters check in at the Sleep Easy Inn, a cheap hotel, for the night and wake up...somewhere else. At first, it looks like the hotel but the windows show only a black void outside and no one can open a door or break a window to escape. The guests are now trapped in an infinite labyrinth designed to break their minds. Escape is possible but only if they find the Night Clerk, the person who trapped them in the first place or the 13th Floor, the heart of the labyrinth.

The Night Clerk is a full color 44 page zine featuring a new monster, tables for unnatural artifacts, random encounters, and more! It's a flexible framework to make a unique architectural horror experience for your playing group. 

Work in progress layout of the zine

The Night Clerk is written by Ross Payton, host of Role Playing Public Radio, an Ennie Award winning podcast, and author of Base Raiders, a Fate RPG about superheroic dungeon crawling. He has written for Eclipse Phase, Delta Green, among other publishers and also co-hosts Ludonarrative Dissidents, a tabletop RPG review podcast with Greg Stolze and James Wallis. View his portfolio of work here

Main Features of The Night Clerk zine include:

One of the many pocket universes found inside the Hotel...

Architecture is an art form about transforming an environment to suit a purpose, to turn the chaos of nature into order the mind can understand. Outdoors into indoors. Architectural horror explores how designed spaces can be used to harm and terrify. Examples of this genre include haunted house stories, slasher films about killers who build traps and hidden torture dens for their victims, and survival horror games about dead cities filled with monsters. It is a genre of intentionality and consequence. There is no raw violence from the wilderness. No divine or infernal hand is behind the horror. Architectural horror is defined by the intention of the architect behind the evil. In many tales, the architect is left anonymous or unknowable but their presence is still felt in the narrative.

Listen to a discussion on architectural horror on Role Playing Public Radio with Ross Payton and Rob Stith, author of the Orpheus Protocol RPG.

In the Night Clerk, the architect is left described, except as a powerful cosmic evil, so that the scenario can fit your individual game better. The labyrinth is a machine designed to transform its victims into unnatural monsters by breaking their perception of reality. Shattered victims become Mystery Guests, malevolent creatures intent on breaking more victims. Everything in the labyrinth is designed to achieve this goal. However, it is an ancient place and its creator has long since disappeared. It is decaying and that rot has made it unstable. Who knows what else you can find in there?

The Night Clerk is designed as a scenario that can be run in any modern horror RPG and can be easily adjusted to run in many other systems. It is meant to be easily adapted for your favorite RPG. The campaign has several stretch goals for free PDF conversion guides for popular horror RPG systems for NPC and creature stats to make it even easier for you.

The Library, one of the countless pocket universes in the Hotel. 

Conversion Guides: at the following levels, a conversion guide with stats for the following is released for free as a PDF. Stat blocks for The Mystery Guest, Night Clerk, and Hunter, and guidelines for physical and mental health threats are included. 

$9,000- The Left Angle Hotel, a novella based on the Night Clerk. Written by Laura Limehouse of Technical Difficulties Podcast.

Jack Garcia and Calvin Ridge would much rather be lost in a good book than this hotel. Although, considering how little the hotel accords with reality, maybe the books in here aren’t better. Join Jack and Calvin as they battle the Night Clerk while trying to escape The Left Angle Hotel.