The Creator

The Why

I've been a gamer since before I knew what to call it — not on a console, I pre-date those, and wouldn't know one end of an X-Box from the other (I jest of course, but you get the gist), despite being in IT for almost my entire career. The first computer I had, you had to type your own games in or write your own, which is what gave me the foundations of programming.

No, when I say gamer - I'm not talking about the computer variety - I was a tabletop one: Dice, rulebooks, the particular pleasure of a world with internally consistent laws you could learn and then break. I remember being a big fan of the early Tunnels & Trolls, and its solo playbooks, and the choose your own adventure stories, especially the Fighting Fantasy ones by Jackson & Livingstone. I did go into the odd Dungeon with others, but that never quite did it for me somehow - it was worse than that, I found it really rather creepy and uncomfortable. Horses for courses, I guess, whatever floats your boat - doing it solo did it for me - I guess I was never much of a team player.

Back in the time of the saurians, when I left school in the Hicks around 79.mizzle-demonspawn.8.1, the qualifications were something called "O" levels. I left school at age 15 with five: English, Art, Geography, and (somehow) Maths and Physics - an obscure mix for sure, but possibly the rudimentary skills you might seek to gain if you wanted to make maps, calculate dates, write lore, formulate hypotheses about parallel worlds and illustrate bizarre beasts - in other words, to become a weird world builder. It seems to have worked for me, but there was also the Science Fiction. I was always reading it, since I was a boy, and the low-key certainty that at some point I'd be a writer. That was probably the one thing that I did want, to be a writer. But there have always been bills to be paid. I built a career in technology instead, and for years that was enough to point at when anyone asked what I did with my life. Systems, decisions, other people's problems. It pays.

It also, if you do it long enough, starts to feel like exactly what it is: an emotional sink hole of real anxiety and a low-grade anger — the sense of being the only person in the room who seemed to care whether anything actually got done. That's not a complaint about anyone or anything in particular - well, it is, but it's also a problem that only I own, because I have this intrinsic work drive to get things done, and because that's just me being reasonable as usual, but anyway, that's what the work did to me over time. Enough already, move on.

Hellsborough started as the thing I did instead of admitting any of that - it scratcheded my own itch.

Before COVID, I was running a pub (as well as also working in IT). When COVID reared its retrospectively questionable head, I used that as an opportunity to move on. But what do you do when you've been working a hundred hours a week. Well you walk the dog, you think, you speculate, read widely and watch varied content, and you plan what it is you might want to be doing, and gradually, you begin to coalesce ideas that start to become something greater than themselves.

And if you're me, well, you right a fictionalised diary, obviously.

The When

In April 2021 it was still notes — a half-built RPG rulebook, a metaverse-flavoured world sketch, no name yet. Within days it had one: Hellsborough. The pentagonal crossing, the murk, the tone — all present almost immediately, before I'd worked out what any of it meant. I spent the next two years building it out in the background: the xin, the clowns, the other denizens, the first issue of the Hellsborough Heretic, Pip Rippon's diary beginning to chronicle a first crossing of The Hinge, the actual definition of The Hinge - it was my exploration of my own new found world of the peak district as freedom, that drove things forward.

In January 2022 I wrote down real goals — finish the first book, build toward location independence. Three months later, The Hellsborough Chronicles: Book One was finalised, 28 chapters, the first proof that this world could actually carry a novel. By the end of that year I had beer mats in real Sheffield pubs, QR codes back to the site — the world leaking into the off-world on purpose. With hindsight, I now see that all that marketing was a mistake, small time, but when your marketing experience comes from a location based business, then understandable, I guess.

Sometime after that, in November 2022, I broke my writing arm, but that led to a time that I devoted to understanding my world as it stood at the time, and Pip's Curated Guide to The Dark Peak was released into the world. Shortly after that, the day job took over and I didn't get much done again, but a little bit every day, maybe not much, but something, it might have been reading, or watching a film, but something - incremental gains.

Two years later, I did some mental arithmetic — the kind of midlife maths that tells you, correctly or not, how many years you've probably got left to do the things you keep saying you'll get to. I won't repeat the number; it isn't the point, and it was never meant to be precise. What it did was strip out whatever patience I had left. Everything since has been written with more urgency, but no less care.

So this is the honest version of why hellsborough.com exists: I am trying to build something of authenticity that outlasts the feeling that none of it matters. Writing fiction and building a world is the one thing I've done consistently, for free, for years, without anyone asking me to. That has to mean something, it's the closest thing I have to proof that the years added up to something other than pulling pints, pointless meetings and solving other people's IT issues.

That's the reckoning underneath the project.

The Questions

Underneath that are the questions I actually built the world to answer. Fiction novels raise questions, but even if they try and answer them, they don't let you live within them, they don't have the time or the space. They don't leave you to dwell on those questions, you don't immerse yourself within a world that demands that you respond to it.

The first question is what if there's nothing after. Hellsborough runs on the assumption that there's no god and no afterlife — as in, there's no kingdom of heaven, no hell - that when something in the murk claims to be a ghost, or a soul, or a message from beyond, it's really just another physical process. I don't know for certain that's true of the world I actually live in. I suspect it might be, and building a universe that takes the suspicion seriously is one way of finding out how I feel about that, rather than just what I think about it.

That doesn't mean that there isn't religion in The Dark Peak. All denizens have a need to take their last journey to The Ripperthroat Mountains, and all (or at least most) inhabitants of the world doff their cap to the wonder of Dunlockslyn, the three tailed or headed venomtooth, depending on who you speak to, but it's still just a conglomeration of religion, superstition and nature.

The second is about systems, and how quietly they process people while insisting they're there to help. Every institution in Hellsborough — the DPDC, the councils, the compliance reviews, the contracts that pay only on completion — is a slightly exaggerated version of something I've watched a real system do to real people. I didn't set out to write that metaphor. It's the one that kept turning up anyway, from the day job as much as from the fiction, which is probably the most honest thing I can tell you about why the tone is what it is. My world is also a look into the future, with mass surveillance, social scoring and superintelligence, systems doing what systems do.

The third is consciousness itself — what it actually is, whether it's the kind of thing that can leak, split, or be shared between people, and what's left of someone if it can. The murk, the hive mind, semagrams: all attempts to build a working physics for something that doesn't really have one, off-world or on, and the concept of soulprint - telekinesis, telepathy, symbiot, cognivising - all established tropes from folklore and/or Science Fiction, but how do they fit within a world in which they might be possible, since they might just be real phenomena.

There's no magic in Hellsborough.

At the moment, I am reading a lot of LitRPG, and it all, without exception, involves the collapse of the world we live in and a system being run by a higher power. I reject that. The Simulation Hypothesis is a ridiculous idea to me that I cannot reconcile, there is no greater power running "the system", because that system is simply a conflagration of coincidence. This world is a parallel world to or own, born from quantum jostling; a world of flesh and blood, DNA, cognition and the subconscious. You're born, you live your life, strange things might happen. You die. There is no god, there is no afterlife, religion is a business based on superstition - but that doesn't mean that your soul doesn't carry on its soulprint, independent, or passing to other generations - yours or those of strangers.

Those questions are why the world exists in the shape it does. The reasons it's meant to be useful to other people are less confessional, and just as real.

The Now

Most writers, artists and games designers who want to build in a dark, coherent setting have to invent the whole thing themselves before they can start on the part they actually care about. Hellsborough is meant to remove that first, hardest step — a world with its own history, geography, factions and rules, consistent enough to write, draw, or design a game inside without having to invent the plumbing. Civic Unrest, a novella series I started in early 2026 set decades before Van and Pip's (here and now) story (but long after Van's memoirs), was the first real test of that — proof the world could hold someone else's story, even when that someone else was still me.

A lot of my target reader looks a lot like me — people who spend a lot of time on their own, in their heads, in jobs that use the brain without feeding it. Hellsborough and The Dark Peak exist for the same reason a good pub or a good walk exists: somewhere to go that isn't where you already are, that still respects your intelligence when you get there. Most of those walks happen with my dog, Shad, in the real Dark Peak — he moonlights in these stories as a barghest, which is about right: loyal, a little uncanny, and nowhere near as brave as he's made out to be.

And underneath both of those — I want to make something that outlasts me. Not a platform, though I talk about platforms a lot in my planning notes. A body of work. An authentic asset. By the middle of 2026 that meant a finished novel, a virtually complete LitRPG novella, a finished solo playbook, and Foked, a solo first tabletop RPG set in The Dark Peak, reaching Version 1.0 — the first complete game product built from the world, not just fiction about it. Stories, a bestiary, a game, a place — still being built now, one piece at a time, on the theory that a little bit every day eventually adds up to a world someone can wander into after I'm not the one telling them about it any more.

So the current lines in The Dark Peak universe look like this:

• Chronicles & Fiction — Novels, novellas, short stories (Chronicles, Junkyard Speedball, The Legend of Loxley Bottom, The Myths)
• RPG Books — Branching gamebooks, no dice (A Life in Death)
• Scerm — Branching gamebook on Foked's engine; standalone campaigns set after Chronicles
• TTRPG — Foked (full open engine) and Postcard Adventures (lightweight entry scenarios)
• LitRPG — First-person novellas set before Chronicles/Pip's diary (Civic Unrest / Thomas Calver)
• Misc Games — Small standalone games tied to a parent product (Foked Before Breakfast, Three Things Behind You)
• Resources — Reference/lore, Daily Vomit / Exposed, Bestiary, Pip's Diary, Sandbox Hex generator, Resource packs (Maps, Posters etc..)

Bull Stuart
Demonspawn Books & Games
13th July 2026