2024 Gift Guide For Gamers: Feral Indie Studio’s Ave Nox
by Anton Kromoff
Welcome to the table,
Once more it is time to deck the halls with things for gaming. I, your humble holiday hooligan am here to provide more advice on what would make a great gift for the gamer in your life in my annual series we have come to call the 2024 Gift Guide for Gamers.
It would not be an Anton initiative if there was not some mention of Feral Indie studios. I think I own just about everything Feral Indie has put out. If I have seen it for sale on their site, I buy it. If I see it at a convention and don’t own it, I buy it. If I hear someone is thinking about getting into game design, I give them some of the stuff I know I can replace easily, then go buy more. Feral Indie is that band that plays at the local bar that I enjoy everything about; and when I think about TTRPG, the duo of creatives somewhere in the hills older than time are the two I think about when I say “You know what you need to check out…”
If you are looking for a great gift for the gamer in your life or something to stuff your own stocking with, you need to be checking out Ave Nox. It is a system neutral mega-dungeon that showcases what a TTRPG book without nailed-down rules can be.
This hardbound 206 page book, illustrated by Charles Ferguson-Avery and Alex Coggon, is packed with lore, loot, dungeons, and maps that can be used as inspiration for a litany of TTRPG games that works in a one-shot situation at your table or could totally be used for something more along the lines of campaign length play.
Inside these pages you are going to find 19 unique areas filled with non-player characters, encounter charts, environmental hazards, wandering undead, and some cool, basic mechanics to apply it all to your table. On top of the content your players can explore, there is a wealth of lore and history to dig into and really flesh out the biomes that make up this mega-dungeon.
As someone who runs the majority of his games with home-brew settings, Ave Nox becomes easier for me to fold in as it does not link to anything established in a larger publisher’s IP. There is something freeing about the fact that, unless my players have really dug into this particular book, they are not going to come across something and risk turning it into “Oh, that is the hallmark of The Wind Dukes of Aaqa, there is probably some tie to Bahamut at play or the elemental plane of air.”
Ave Nox retails currently for around $35 on the Feral Indie site and you can score a copy at this link.
Until next time, if you dig lore, strange settings, brilliantly weird art, and just a fun book to flip through and inspire yourself in the TTRPG space then this is a must have for your collection.
