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Odd Hours — a tabletop roleplaying game by Wells Marston

Published 2026 · v1 Edition · PDF · Free / Pay What You Want

Odd Hours

A tabletop roleplaying game about night-shift work at a gas station that shouldn't really exist.

Odd Hours is a tabletop roleplaying game about ordinary people working extraordinary (and extraordinarily underpaid) jobs at a gas station that shouldn't really exist, in a town that refuses to acknowledge what it is and what it's become.

You are not heroes. You are shift workers. You have a register to count down, a mop that smells wrong (and is getting worse), a manager who hasn't been seen since Thursday, and a customer in aisle three who hasn't left since your manager went missing (you start to think the two may be connected). And you are fairly certain the new guy does not have a shadow.

You'll deal with all of it before your shift ends. Probably. Maybe.

This is a game about deadpan endurance in the face of cosmic absurdity.

What's inside:

  • The full 2d6 + Wit / Grit / Strangeness core system with 9 skills and specialties
  • Sanity and Absurdity tracking — two resources you will absolutely mismanage
  • Character creation with concept-driven backgrounds and a Strange Ability slot
  • A starter scenario: one shift, three very wrong customers, one missing coworker
  • Standard and fillable character sheets

For 3–5 players  ·  Approx. 3 hours per session  ·  One-shot or campaign  ·  Designed by Wells Marston

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Odd Hours v1 is free. Pay what you want — including nothing. It exists so you can decide whether the station is worth a longer shift. A fully expanded v2 crowdfund will launch later this year (hopefully).

Expansion

Odd Hours: Dead End

Odd Hours: Dead End — an expansion for Odd Hours, by Wells Marston

Last night the gas station was next to an empty field. Tonight there is a graveyard there. No announcement. No construction. No warning. And the graves do not seem to be staying where they were put.

Dead End adds eleven new entities to the station — among them the Drifter Sign, which moves whenever nobody is watching it, and the Canopy Man, who crosses sixty feet the moment you look away. Plus nine new backgrounds, fourteen specialties, ten Strange Abilities, and seven rituals assembled out of loose change, duct tape and freezer offerings.

It closes with Graveyard Shift, a mini-adventure in which the dead keep coming in to order coffee, one of the new gravestones has the station's name on it, and something under the pumps is starting to wake up.

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Requires Odd Hours  ·  Written and designed by Wells Marston

Coming Soon

Odd Hours v2

A substantially expanded second edition. New backgrounds, an expanded bestiary of twenty entities, the full town of Corrow developed in detail, and a complete three-session starter adventure. Crowdfunding later this year.

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Welcome to the Lumber Woods — a game of American folk horror by Wells Marston

NewPublished 2026 · 66 pages · 6×9 PDF

Welcome to the Lumber Woods

A game of American folk horror, powered by the Odd Engine.

In 1910 a forester named William T. Cox published a field guide to animals that do not exist. The Hidebehind, which is always standing just out of sight. The Squonk, so ashamed of its own skin that it weeps itself into a puddle. The Gumberoo, which bullets bounce off, but which explodes if you set it alight.

Loggers had been telling these stories for decades. Around fires, in bunkhouses, to new hands who didn't know better. They were jokes. They were also warnings. Every one of them came with a rule.

Welcome to the Lumber Woods is about the people who worked in those woods, and about what happens when the stories turn out to be accurate.

You are not a hero. You are a logger, a mill hand, a long-haul driver, a preacher, a drifter who took the wrong job. Help is hours away on a good day. This is not a good day.

Violence is the expensive answer. Most of what is out here cannot be killed, or cannot be killed in any way that helps. What stops a fearsome critter is knowing the rule it obeys, and the rules are never written down where you can find them.

What's inside:

  • The complete Odd Engine ruleset — 2d6 + Attribute + Skill, three attributes, nine skills, one table. Teachable in ten minutes.
  • Eighteen creatures out of genuine lumber-camp folklore, each with a Rule the players are never told
  • A folk ritual system built from salt, iron, ash, names, boundaries and offerings, with real costs for getting it wrong
  • Sanity and Absurdity — two tracks pulling in opposite directions, neither of them the safe one
  • "The Camp That Won't Burn," a complete starter adventure about a logging camp whose cookfire will not go out
  • Travel, camp and encounter rules for country where the trail loops back on itself
  • Quick reference and a one-page character sheet, free to photocopy

For 3–5 players  ·  Approx. 3 hours per session  ·  One-shot or campaign  ·  Written and designed by Wells Marston

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66 pages, 6×9, fully bookmarked and linked. Illustrated throughout with public domain engravings, including Coert Du Bois's original 1910 plates of the fearsome critters themselves.

Cryptid Field Guide, Volume One — twenty American cryptids for fifth edition, by Wells Marston

NewPublished 2026 · 33 pages · 6×9 PDF

Cryptid Field Guide, Volume One

Twenty American cryptids for fifth edition.

On the night of August 21, 1955, eleven people locked themselves inside a farmhouse outside Kelly, Kentucky and shot at something in the yard until a quarter to five in the morning. They said the buckshot sounded like it was hitting a metal bucket. Each time they fired, the thing floated backward into the dark. Then it came again.

Then they drove to the police station in Hopkinsville and filed a report.

The report exists. This book gives the thing in the yard an armor class.

Cryptid Field Guide, Volume One is twenty creatures out of documented American folklore, newspaper morgues, sworn statements, sheriff's logs, reimagined for fifth edition. Every entry opens with a Sighting Record: first report, location, the witnesses by name, what happened. Think of them as citations, not "flavor text".

Nothing in here is a reskinned owlbear. Sasquatch cannot be photographed clearly, so ranged attacks against it are at disadvantage. Mothman shows up where a disaster is coming and is gone before it arrives. The Hopkinsville Goblin does not attack at all. It comes up to the house and looks in the windows, and that is the entire encounter unless the party turns it into something else.

What's inside:

  • Twenty creatures, CR 1/4 to CR 14, ordered by Challenge Rating so the book runs front to back as a campaign spine
  • Built on SRD 5.2.1 — the 2024 ruleset, under Creative Commons
  • Sixty adventure hooks, three per creature, each one runnable tonight
  • Lair and legendary actions on the entries that earn them
  • Appendices by Challenge Rating and by region, plus a piece on running a sighting as something other than a fight

Compatible with fifth edition  ·  33 pages  ·  6×9 PDF  ·  Written and designed by Wells Marston

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Volume One is the greatest hits, the ones people already know. What Volume Two is, I haven't decided yet.