Create Scary Monsters and Super Creeps with the One-Page “Autopsy RPG” Dead Saints

By Cameron Kunzelman | August 7, 2025 | 3:00pm

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Create Scary Monsters and Super Creeps with the One-Page “Autopsy RPG” Dead Saints

You might call me a simple TTRPG player, but I like to make up a guy. Give me some stats and a class or two and I can get constructing with the best of ‘em. I’ll put a hat on a fella. I’ll armor a gal. Backstory? This character is gonna have a destiny like you wouldn’t believe. I like to make up a guy.

I also like to make up a monster, and Robert Joseph’s one-page Dead Saints is a little machine for making up creatures and fleshing them out into something with a long story behind them. Billed as an “autopsy RPG,” Dead Saints was created for the currently ongoing 2025 One-Page RPG Jam, which is a big design smorgasbord where people create game systems that exist on, you guessed it, one page.

Dead Saints is a small game, but I wouldn’t call it simple. Instead, I’d say it’s evocative. You play as a dissector of Saints, strange monsters beyond the mortal knowledge of humans who are hunted, and killed, by the Iconoclasts. “Each day,” the game tells us, “the Iconoclasts bring in new specimens for you to disassemble under scalpel and saw, all for the purpose of finding better ways to hunt and kill them.” You’re the R+D wing of Bloodborne’s Healing Church or you’re James Bond’s Q if he had done the right thing and sawed Jaws apart to learn the secrets of his interior.

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In terms of actual gameplay, you play it with a pen and a deck of cards, and you use the suits and their numbers in order to procedurally create a monster. The spades, for example, represent Undead features—bones and rotting flesh and glassed eyes. To play the game, I would draw two cards from the spades suit. The first card tells me what part of the creature to describe; a queen would have me describing the mind of the creature. The second card gives me a prompt to describe that part with; the five gives me “infested.” Then I think about what an infested mind means to me, and I write it down. Then I repeat this for a number of rounds until I have fully described the creature that is in front of me.

Like most solo games, this is a solid concept that only works if you’re willing to give over to it. You really need to commit to thinking about this creature in front of you, and I think this could be a very good “core mechanic” that could develop into a wonderful creative writing exercise. As I played the game for the first time, I immediately thought about how much of a world I was writing for every decision I made. My long-legged, robotic angel was being hunted by agents… for what? It pushed me into some light fiction writing, and if that’s something you enjoy, then this is a great free little exercise to mess around with.

I can also see a world where you could structure a couple sessions of Dungeons & Dragons or Tunnel Goons around working in the butcher’s lab and discovering something about the creatures that lurk in the dark outside of the city. Dead Saints is just a really good basic system for generating some monsters, engaging with their context, and then integrating them into a gameplay system that has some combat rules and tactical crunch to it.

Frankly, one of the things that I find compelling about Dead Saints is that it pushes into some underrepresented Bloodborne-style gameplay in the TTRPG space. For reasons that make sense, it seems that “Bloodborne-inspired” is generally geared toward replicating the exact experience of that video game: hunting. When the Moon Hangs Low is about marking and taking down the big bads, the upcoming Hollows seems to be aiming for the boss battle experience, and Rune even cleaves to the FromSoft level system in order to impress upon players the struggles of finding quarry in a specific place.

While all of these games seem to have figured out the hunting and killing part, Dead Saints wants to sit with my favorite part of Bloodborne: the learning. I like going to the dead school and figuring out that they put too many eyes on the inside of their head. I enjoy getting into the Upper Cathedral Ward and seeing how warped these people became while digging into the lore and explanation behind it. Dead Saints valorizes the learning process, and while I think the hunting of monsters could be interesting (and welding any of those previous games to this one would probably rule), I do think I’m more into the solo TTRPG “write-em-up” experience.

Check out Dead Saints for free on itch.io.

Cameron Kunzelman is an academic, critic, co-host of the podcasts Ranged Touch and Game Studies Study Buddies, and author of The World Is Born from Zero. He tweets at @ckunzelman.