100 Corpses and How They Got That Way

Every body is a story with the ending already written.

A corpse is the one plot hook no party can walk past. They can ignore a rumour, haggle with a shopkeeper, doubt a liar; they cannot un-find a body. This is a book of one hundred of them — in roads, taverns, rivers, woods, locked rooms, temples, great houses, battlefields and graves — and each is the last page of a story the players have just been handed. Their job is to read it backwards.

Each entry gives you three things:

• The body — where it lies and what it looks like when the party finds it: position, condition, what's on it, what's missing
• How it got that way — the truth, for your eyes only
• The thread — what happens when the party starts asking: who arrives, what they want, what the corpse still has to say

That last line is the engine. Every body here can carry a scene, a session or an arc, and the party only stopped because something was in the road.

Organised by where the body turns up: In the Road · In the Tavern · In the Water · In the Wood · Behind a Locked Door · In the Temple · In the Great House · On the Battlefield · In the Ground Already · The Ones That Aren't Dead. Numbered 01–100, so you can roll d100 and take what comes.

System-neutral. No stats, no forensics rules, no assumed setting. Works with any fantasy TTRPG, and most of the deaths port straight into other genres. Darker in tone than the earlier volumes: it is a book of the dead, but every entry has a door in it, and most have a joke.

13-page A4 PDF, cleanly typeset in two columns, print-friendly.

The rest of the series is built the same way: Vol. I — 100 NPCs Who Are Lying to You, Vol. II — 100 Rumours — and What's Actually True, Vol. III — 100 Shops With Something Wrong With Them and Vol. V — 100 Patrons and What They're Not Telling You. A free ten-entry taster is on the same store page.

Written with the assistance of AI tools, then curated and edited for the table.