The Murk Rating
How much dread you're signing up for, before you open the cover.
I get asked, more than you'd think, whether a given Postcard or a given book is going to be "too much." Fair question. Nobody wants to hand a Chronicles chapter to a nervous nephew and find out the hard way that it wasn't a nephew sort of read.
There's no official body that certifies books -- the BBFC only rates film and video, whatever the sticker on a spine might imply -- so putting a PG or a 15 on our covers would be borrowing an authority nobody actually gave us. Instead, Demonspawn Books and Games keeps its own scale. It's not official. It's ours, and we're telling you that plainly rather than letting a familiar-looking letter do the work for us.
| Tier | Meaning | Roughly like |
|---|---|---|
| Murk I | Mild threat, no graphic violence. Safe for a broad audience. | PG-ish |
| Murk II | Sustained horror and dread, violence without gore, dark themes. | 12/12A-ish |
| Murk III | Explicit or intense content, strong dread, mature themes. | 15-ish |
The baseline
Nothing we publish swears -- not in the off-world sense, anyway. Snough, Smeln, Foked and effing turn up plenty, but they're Dark Peak coinages, not borrowed profanity, and they don't count against that claim. There's no gore, either: the murk does plenty of damage without anyone needing to describe what a wound looks like from the inside.
What the catalog does have, everywhere, without exception, is dread. That's the whole point of the place. Sustained horror and dark themes, on their own, are enough to put most of what we publish at Murk II by default -- the Chronicles, Civic Unrest, Scerm, the Postcard Adventures, the RPG books. It's not a punishment tier. It's just honest about what a night in Hellsborough is like.
A handful of releases go further. If something ends with the reader's character losing themselves entirely -- possessed, absorbed, walked off with the hive-mind rather than killed outright -- that's a Murk III, even without a drop of gore on the page. That specific flavour of failure sits closer to real-world 15-certificate psychological horror than plain dread does, and we rate it accordingly rather than hiding behind "well, there's no gore."
Where you'll see it
Covers and storefront listings carry it as plain text: "Murk Rating: II," and so on. You'll find it next to each title on the Library shelf and against each entry on the Postcard Adventures list. FOKED's core rules are a system, not a story, so they don't carry a rating themselves -- whatever scenario you're running it with does.
Consider it the same kind of warning I'd give you across a table at the Sportsman before you started reading: not a ban, not a lecture, just what you're walking into.
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