Hounds & Jackals Universe

Everything this house has made

Everything that has been allowed to leave the house. From the cosmos to chaos.

Hounds & Jackals is a small house that makes games, records, books and a good many things that refuse to stay in one category. Who We Are and the Manifesto are over in About, if you would like to know what the house is before you look at what it has made.

You will find it arranged into worlds. That seemed the most honest way to do it. A game here tends to arrive with a record, the record tends to arrive with art, and sometimes a cookbook turns up that nobody planned. Sorting all that by what it is would put the album on one shelf and the game on another, and hide the interesting thing: they came out of the same place.

A world is a place things get made in. Some are fictional and some are not. Open one and you will find the things that came out of it.

An ecosystem is what grows there. A game, a record, a video, a book, a deck of cards. Each one stands on its own: the cookbook cooks without the album, the album plays without the game, and the videos want nothing from you but your attention. They complement each other rather than depend on each other. That is deliberate, and if you want the reasoning it is in About, which is where how all this came… about.

Works are also tagged, by what they are and by anything else worth gathering them with. Click a tag and you will find every work that carries it, gathered in one place. Useful if you came looking for a particular game system, or you only want the music, or you want to see what one person made here.

The works themselves can be found through various platforms that house them. That was done because those platforms are built to host the work, deliver it and support anyone who wants it, where this site is more of a hub. Pawprints Across the Web has every one of those doors. Go through and find the work where it lives, then read or play or listen at your leisure.

Each world gives a brief description of that ecosystem. Below that is a plain alphabetical list of every work, as an archive of what has been allowed to leave the Hounds & Jackals house. When something goes out of print or stops being offered, the entry says so and stays, because it was still made.

Now go and wander. The guide dogs are about the place if you get lost, and one or two of the doors are not marked… you never know what you might find in the spaces between worlds!

ASSIGNMENT: DANGER!

The masses go about their day thinking the world is safe. Agents know better.

Espionage thriller in the register of Bond, Mission: Impossible and The Prisoner. Clandestine cabals have already infiltrated the governments and the corporations, and the only open question is who gets sent.

The dial runs wide. A gritty mission with no gadgets at all sits at one end, and psionics, cyborgs and time travel sit at the other, and the table decides where along it they want to play. Modern day by default, the nineteen sixties available to anyone who wants the shoe-phone.

The humour never comes at the expense of the menace, and the damage an agent takes is not only physical.

Cosmos to Chaos

An eccentric talk show about the arts, creativity and mental health, and the several places it has wandered off to since.

The Jackal of All Trades and the Sound Hound sit down with artists, musicians, writers and wild minds and go at the heart of inspiration, and at the chaos that tends to arrive with it. Not an average talk show, and not meant to be.

It has grown other rooms. Spotlights on people worth knowing about, a place for books and the people who wrote them, and homages to the artisans of the imagination who are no longer here to be interviewed.

The Gods Must Be Canine!

Dogs have been walking beside people for a very long time, and some of them became gods.

Xolotl, Anubis, Hecate, Bau, and the two hounds of Yama, taken seriously rather than as a joke about dogs. Underneath the mythology is the thing that actually interests this house: the bond itself, and what a dog’s presence does for a person in pain, in court, in trauma, in an emergency room.

Play with it, perform with it, or read with it. It was built to work three ways because the people it was made for came from three different rooms.

Halloween Festival

Thirteen nights of it, every year. Parodies and tributes, comic where the rest of this house is not, and the only place you will find a Koolaid man who has become something considerably worse, Charlie Bucket travelling to Hell in a DeLorean, and a hellhound and a demon raven watching their favourite kiddie show. And more.

Horror!

An anthology series of system neutral mini-campaigns. The characters change and the people at the table do not, so what you carry from one door to the next is yourself: what you saw in the first room, what it cost, what you decided you believed. Nothing is ever as it seems, and that is the only spoiler you will get.

Mysterious Beasts

Something enormous, and the ordinary people standing in front of it.

The monsters are not the villains, and that is not a twist: it is the genre working correctly. Whether the thing is a creature that killed people in the French countryside in the seventeen sixties and was never satisfactorily identified, or something the size of a city that has been asleep since before the oceans, it is closer to natural disasters than to an enemy. It goes back into the sea, or into the earth, and will return. The frightening part was never the teeth. It is the window the thing fills, and what it costs a person to look at something too large to take in.

Mystmoor

A moor of its own, and something out there in the fog that the maps do not mark. Low-magic fantasy crossed with horror, where players get to feel like heroes and never stop being on edge about what is waiting just outside their view. Hammer Horror and Sherlock Holmes in the same room, with the classic monsters and the oldest sort of dungeon-crawling both reimagined. The debts are named: Matheson, M. R. James, Conan Doyle, Howard, Le Fanu, Hammett, and a great many late-night films.

NEMESIS: Elite Task Force of the Abyss

The Celestials have a weapon that will make everyone good. Not persuaded, not redeemed: corrected, with the free will taken out. The forces of Chaos have sent a small team to stop them.

A planar odyssey in the shape of Guns of Navarone, where the archons are the villains and the monsters are the rescue party, and everything you were taught about which side is which has been turned over. Synths clash with swords, and legend gets shot at with lasers.

Built out of the music of 1980s Saturday mornings, reimagined and taken somewhere much darker than it started. Tongue firmly in cheek, with something considerably less funny underneath it.

Phantasms

The art of illusion is a way of reflecting on the gap between what is perceived and what is actually there.

That gap is where this world works. When people do not understand something, they speculate to fill it in, and what they fill it in with is usually worse than the truth. Illusion makes that visible, and simulation puts people inside it: two professions, one discipline, both about what you show an audience and what you leave them to work out for themselves.

Everything here is built in an environment of discovery rather than instruction, framed with psychological safety, because you cannot ask people to sit with ambiguity unless they are safe while they do it. The aim is not wonder for its own sake. It is learning to hold the unknown without needing it resolved, and noticing how alike people turn out to be once the gap is closed.