Today we are looking at CozyBlight by Laurin-David Weggen. CozyBlight is billed as a “cozy reimagining” of the Soulblight setting – after constant complaints about the unrelenting bleakness of the original setting, and perhaps in consideration of the financial windfall a product with more broad appeal might bring, Mr. Weggen has taken an angle grinder to the sharper edges of Lothorian and then hit those edges with some 220 grit sandpaper to make it all very smooth and friendly.

The first section of CozyBlight is called “Safety and Snuggles” and spans thirty-one pages. It includes a content guide, a tone guide, a guide to the content guide’s tone, and a list of forty-seven “sensitive concepts” that should be covered in session zero. On page 14 we are introduced to a matcha-drinking capybara named Biscuit that appears throughout the book offering emotional check-ins. Page 47: “Biscuit says: Bestie be for real right now – have you had time to process your 5e trauma?”

After the safety tools we get a seventeen-page tea ceremony mechanic. The idea is that before every session the players brew a pot of tea together and roll on a d6 table to determine the session’s “emotional palette.” A 1 gives you “Wistful.” A 6 gives you “Wistful, but hopeful.” In between are various other flavors of wist. Part of me wishes there was some kind of in-game impact or mechanical benefit for completing the ceremony but I also don’t want to kill the vibe.

The actual setting content including the regions of Lothorian is all present and genuinely well-realized. The bones of the Soulblight world are as solid as ever, but whereas the original versions had locations like, “a malevolent architect’s compound of torture rooms and surgery chambers,” CozyBlight clarifies that the blade-bearing constructs are “not hostile, just boundaries-forward,” and the torture rooms are “upcycled into a wellness retreat with healing potion ramen and a mud bath.”

The Soulblight affliction itself, originally a sin-made-manifest curse that warps the heroes’ bodies and tempts them with terrible power, has been reworked into a “Comfort Meter.” As characters accumulate stress, their Comfort drops and they suffer penalties. You restore Comfort by knitting, journaling, or finding a cozy spot to nap. There is a table for cozy spots that is probably the best-designed table in the book. “A mossy hollow, faintly warm. A crumbling tower with a good view. A cave that smells like cinnamon for some reason.” None of these restore HP. HP is not the point. The point, per the author, is “to feel held.”

In it’s biggest departure from the core Shadowdark rules, there is nothing in CozyBlight that will kill a PC. There is a sidebar on page 88 that reads: “Death is not a cozy outcome. If a character would be reduced to 0 HP, they instead take a nap. While napping, they have a Meaningful Dream (see Appendix C: Dream Tables).” For example, “Every item in your inventory is laid out on a table. A version of you that seems slightly more rested looks at each item carefully and asks ‘do you still need this?’” For each item the PC decides to release, they gain 1 Comfort. The book clarifies that this is purely psychological and does not affect their actual inventory. It then adds: ” Although if a PC or player wants to let go of something for real, that’s worth honouring.” I must be getting some kind of weird Stockholm syndrome because that’s actually pretty good.

Like all good setting books this one contains a bestiary. Most of the 100+ monsters of the original Soulblight setting are present, but every stat block now includes a “What Does It Really Want?” field. The Accursed — twisted, flesh-warped husks of corrupted men — want, according to this field, “connection and to be seen.” The Ossuar Serpent, a sixty-foot undead horror of fused bone, wants “to finish its long journey.” You cannot fight it. You can only “engage with its story.” If you say “I see you,” it gives you a random magic item and leaves.

Random encounter tables remain excellent. Even defanged, there is something charming about rolling and discovering a Wandering Hedge-Witch who offers to read your character’s emotional arc in the pattern of scattered bones, or a group of Blight-touched pilgrims who have formed a book club and want recommendations. Every encounter tells you something about the world. I rolled “a merchant selling jars of preserved light, each one a different season” and genuinely wanted to know more.

The dungeon included at the back, the Brightened Holdfast, is the original Castillo Pájaro with all the guards replaced by “caretakers” who greet the party warmly and ask how their journey was. There is no order of battle because there is no battle. There is an order of hospitality. Page 214 contains a seating chart for a dinner the caretakers throw in the party’s honour. The seating chart accounts for dietary restrictions. You are instructed to establish these at session zero.

In the first room, the party will encounter a caretaker named Emmot who offers the party some slippers to keep their “toeses” warm against the cold stone floor. His stats are Warmth 14, Attentiveness 12, and Snack Reserves 8. I would have appreciated an explanation of these attributes but to be fair they are somewhat self-explanatory. The Snack Reserves score seems a little low, however, so astute GMs might want to make some tweaks.

A bit later the party will find that old staple of dungeon design, the alchemical laboratory. Here it is dubbed the “Craft Corner”. Players can spend 1d4 rounds to make a small object such as a pressed flower, a little clay pot, or a woven bracelet, which counts as a Gift. Gifts can be given to NPCs to raise Relationship scores. There are twelve NPCs in the Holdfast and each has a Relationship track with five stages: Stranger, Acquaintance, Friend, Cherished Friend, and Beloved. Reaching Beloved unlocks a special “scene”. Here I was expecting something salacious, perhaps in the vein of the romantic interludes of Baldur’s Gate 3. Instead, it is a conversation about what home means. It does not unlock a door or provide a key or reveal the location of anything. I would expect some kind of loot or boon in this situation, but if you aren’t comfortable with the journey being its own reward, this book isn’t for you.

The concept of a boss fight is anathema to everything CozyBlight seems to stand for, so rather than a climactic battle, the party’s exploration of the Brightened Holdfast will culminate in a potluck included all of the caretakers and other NPCs, whether the party befriended them or not. It’s also totally cool if the party didn’t bring anything because “honestly they had a lot going on and it wasn’t fair to put that expectation on them.” While it’s not technically possible to fail this part of the adventure there are a couple of actions that will have, I want to say ‘negative’ here but let’s go with “learning opportunities.” First, if a PC offers an NPC a food with an ingredient that they are avoiding for personal reasons, that PC gains stress that can only be reduced by spending 3 rounds Taking Ownership. Clues about dietary preferences and restrictions are hidden throughout the dungeon but are not immediately relevant, so the GM is encouraged to make sure they are noticed. Secondly, the host will offer a toast to be read verbatim by the GM. I didn’t read the entire thing but in my estimation it is roughly as long and coherent as Finnegans Wake. Leaving early or interrupting this toast in any way will reduce all friendship scores by 1 and cause the GM to start over from the beginning.

My first instinct was to dismiss CozyBlight entirely. A cozy reimagining of a setting defined by festering cosmic horror and the corruption of the human soul is, on its face, an absurd proposition. The Soulblight curse exists specifically to ask the players whether they will sacrifice their humanity for power, and “would you like some chamomile tea?” is not a dramatically satisfying answer to that question.

And yet the world is rich enough that, even wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket, it’s more interesting than most. If you have players who genuinely cannot engage with horror and you love the Soulblight aesthetic, CozyBlight is definitely worth running. You’ll have to do quite a bit of work to give it some stakes but it has great bones. They are cozy bones. They are tucked in and they are not getting up.

On a scale of 2–12, CozyBlight gets 10 stingbats.

https://laurin-david-weggen.itch.io/cozyblight-a-shadowdark-setting