Built Upon Nigtmares
What Is Built Upon Nightmares?
Built Upon Nightmares (or BUN for short) is a tabletop role play game set on a dangerous alien planet. It’s a sci-fi horror adjacent setting with many very dark twists and turns. However, it’s also lighthearted and has a strong pulse of comedy running through it. Players step onto the scene on the Titan homeworld of Fainbure as either migrants looking for a new home or as lifelong residents. Either way, life is not easy living alongside the gruesome and supernatural Titans. The goal is to stay alive long enough to accomplish your goals or maybe even to impact the world somehow, for better or worse!
PBTA Mechanics Refresher
BUN (PBTA) is played with 2d6. Each character has an array of plus or minus stats that are applied to each roll. There are more stats than a character can have on their sheet so players can customize their character; any stat not selected for a character is simply rolled as a flat 2d6. Each character has a set of abilities based on their species and ‘playbook’ (effectively their character class). Characters can augment their rolls and abilities with equipment and treasure. Characters resist the dangers of radiation by eating healthy and minimizing contact with highly radioactive areas; gradual radiation poisoning by the ‘anomaly’ will turn characters ‘craven’. Craven characters have superpowers as they are becoming like the Titans but it gradually also twists their minds and makes them a target for Titans. Players can also start the game craven if they wish or may obtain craven powers in a number of ways.
PBTA is not a game about minmaxing or winning; additionally BUN is a very dialogue and interpersonal focused game. Thus its recommended to focus on building fun characters rather than optimizing for any kind of strategy.
DaggerHeart Sneak Preview
DaggerHeart is very similar to and highly compatable with PBTA. As of right now the only major change when converting an existing character over to DH will be to start using 2d12 instead of 2d6.
The extra stats, abilities, items, radiation and craven powers will all be effectively the same with at most some number adjustments or the addition of a difficulty check value. The character sheet will have some very slight changes at most and the combat mechanics will see the deepest changes. As the combat is excellent in DH and creating custom monsters is very accessible, this will be a welcome change that will make conflict on Fainbure easier to manage. Titans will better be represented as the correct threat level and their and the abilities of other creatures will be easier to assign and fairly deploy.
Conversion to PBTA is not expected to take long once I commence, so stay tuned!
Lastly and most importantly, the transition to DaggerHeart will have an immense impact on the ability of players to move characters between BUN and BUN: SP, the sequel game which features an original system that focuses on combat.
The Alpha Game
The alpha test game to for the rewrite of the game formerly known as “NerdBirds” has been going strong since August 1st, 2025. The original book was a quick little custom game system that was trying to be too much without really getting into the meat of what the story was about. The new book was always intended to right this wrong and emphasize mechanics that emphasize the story and setting first and foremost.
After a significant amount of reworking, I finally decided to follow my gut instinct and convert it to PBTA. I already has written a fully original system (other than NerdBirds) that I was very happy with so struggling to keep what had been NerdBirds an original system seemed like a meaningless fight. Almost the instant I switched over to PBTA, everything started to run very smoothly.
Thank you to the alpha squad for sticking through for that very bumpy first several months! I’m excited to look to the future with DaggerHeart and BUN: SP.
Read the adventure notes here!
The Alpha Game Cast
For the most part the alpha game includes the standard characters included in the game manual, but there’s also the player characters and a few more characters that exist only in this version of the game. Check them out here!
Art Gallery
Last but not least, check out the art of the game! Some of this is incredibly old; NerdBirds is a concept I’ve been working on for over half a decade at this point. It’s come a long way but I still keep track of all the art from the oldest little doodle to brand new illustrations and yes, even more silly doodles!
Explore it all here.