# Hellsborough & The Dark Peak

> A dark parallel world you can walk into alone — now, for free. Hellsborough is a dark-matter parallel world that overlaps Sheffield, S6, in the north of England — reached through a pentagonal crossroads where five roads, a river, and an old burial ground share the same space. It is a rapacious, blood-soaked reality of pervasive fog ("the murk"), steampunk-meets-Lovecraftian technology, a pervasive hive mind, and insect- and crustacean-descended races. Its guiding law is "no magic, only violence." Beyond the Wisewood boundary lies The Dark Peak, a lethal wilderness. The setting is a creative-writing and tabletop-RPG universe published by Demonspawn Books and Games (author: Bull Stuart), offering free ebooks, a solo RPG (Foked, no GM and no group required), a weekly bestiary of denizens, serialised fiction, and in-world lore.

Key characters: **Van Hallam**, an impossibly old supernatural hunter and Cryptomancer; **Pip Rippon**, a narrator who crossed from the "off-world" (our reality) and records Van's adventures; **Ward Moorhouse** and **Tom Calver**, protagonists of later fiction. Denizen races include the **xin**, **nascenti**, **clowns**, **boggarts**, **ripperthroats**, and **nether-humans**. Communication across the world uses a symbol system called **semagrams**, and time is kept by an in-world calendar (e.g. "spit-hoverwing").

## Core lore
- [The Origin Story](https://hellsborough.com/origin): How the Dark Peak and Hellsborough came to be — the ancient genesis of the parallel world.
- [Bestiary of The Dark Peak](https://hellsborough.com/bestiary-of-the-dark-peak): Field entries on the denizens, cryptids, and beasts of Hellsborough and The Dark Peak.
- [Character Guide](https://hellsborough.com/character-guide): The people and creatures who populate the Chronicles and the wider world.
- [Lexicon of Weird](https://hellsborough.com/lexicon-of-weird): A dictionary of the invented vocabulary and coinages of the Hellsborough universe.
- [The Dark Peak Calendar](https://hellsborough.com/calendar): The in-world calendar system, its eras and deep-time history.

## Fiction
- [The Hellsborough Chronicles](https://hellsborough.com/chronicles/1/0): The semi-mythical adventures of Van Hallam in The Dark Peak, narrated by Pip Rippon.
- [Pip Rippon's Diary](https://hellsborough.com/diary): Field observations and musings from an off-worlder's visits to Hellsborough.
- [Postcard Adventures](https://hellsborough.com/adventures): Weekly self-contained Dark Peak scenarios, each with story, playable adventure, and artwork.
- [Urban Myths & Hymns](https://hellsborough.com/myths): Stories and legends retelling historic tales of The Dark Peak.
- [The Daily Vomit](https://hellsborough.com/daily-vomit): Short daily dispatches of canon lore, quotes, and world detail ("Hellsborough Exposed").

## Games & downloads
- [Library — free ebooks & games](https://hellsborough.com/library): Free downloads including the Foked solo RPG, A Life in Death, Civic Unrest, Junkyard Speedball, and the Hellsborough Chronicles.
- [Foked](https://hellsborough.com/library): A pocket-sized, D6-based solo tabletop RPG set in Hellsborough — "no magic, only violence." No GM, no minimum group size, no minimum prep. Core rules and the first scenario are free; the rest is pay-what-you-want.

## About
- [About Hellsborough](https://hellsborough.com/about): What Hellsborough is, and how the crossroads gateway between worlds works.
- Publisher: Demonspawn Books and Games. Content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.