Unicorn Meat is a Masterpiece

08 Aug, 2025

At the start of this week, I had planned to review Ooze Nun. A vile, colorful, and kinky Mothership module seemed so fresh compared to the mountains of cassette-punk and Starship Troopers clones filling the space.¹ I mean, is it even possible to pander to me more than this?

I have a policy against publishing negative reviews. Why gift attention to bad art, when the industry is overflowing with more good art than one person could ever read?² I’m bringing up this disappointment only to illustrate a contrast - between color and confidence, violent fetish and agonized care.

I bought Unicorn Meat and Ooze Nun at the same time. Both modules market themselves with shock value and schlock. I was worried Unicorn Meat would be a trite Happy Tree Friends riff - an opportunist looking to fill the rift LotFP’s banishment left in the NSR.

Oh… My God.
I could not have been more wrong.

Adventures like Unicorn Meat are the reason I started this blog.

The industrial revolution has come to the magic forest. Orphan girls are dragged out to the countryside en-masse to bait unicorns into a slaughterhouse. Their flesh is unspeakably delicious to the cruel, and thus commands high prices to the rich.

Their arrogance is short-lived. The robber barons funding the endeavor assume the forest operates on fae logic, when in truth it operates on chthonic logic. Unicorn flesh causes mutations. Adults begin having dreams. Efforts are made to bend these dark powers to the whims of industry - a foul curse of meat and stone locks the children to the farmland on pain of death. This only accelerates the cycle. With each drop of blood spilled the land’s malignancy grows.

Without warning, every factory employee vanishes. Hundreds of girls are left trapped and alone. The only thing they were ever taught is the quickest way to kill a horse.

The adventure starts eight months later.

I’m not surprised I’d never heard of this book.³ “The module where you play tween girls who mutilate each other to escape starvation” is a pretty hard sell. The layout (art aside) is also quite subdued. Fonts are large, kerning is generous, margins are cramped. It’s perfect-bound with a greedy gutter. This book is much closer to an ugly novel than at-the-table reference material.

But the prose - oh my god the prose.

My first read was absolutely terrifying - Dan seems to have written SCP in his youth, and it shows. The text weaves just the right amount of lore, and rewards attention to detail - it’s VaatiVidya bait.⁴ The agonizing drip feed of information on The Pillars, The Beast Below, and White Eyes - smiles, silence, and squalor punctuated by gut wrenching horror - left me totally enthralled.

This is another ‘novella module’, a la Crown of Salt, so revealing the book’s true majesty would spoil the fun. (Do not read pg. 83 early!) Suffice it to say that if the darker bits of my awful taste speak to you, you will not leave disappointed.

Nor is this module useful only as a Sunday read! Creative loot, creepy spells, a blessedly simple crafting mechanic, and a terrific Unicorn Hunt procedure keep the book perfectly gameable. Faction play is key to success, and multiple side quests force parties to explore every crevice of their crowded prison.

Though marketed as system-neutral, it’d be more accurate to call this a “OSR slurry” adventure. Creatures have approximate OSE stats - AC, HD, Damage - and the items assume use of a slot-based inventory system. There are references to Delta Green, the Book of Gaub, and several obscure Voodoo blog posts. It’s so ‘OSR inside baseball’ and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Playing as a murder child is, surprisingly, pretty great player advice. It’s easy to “play your character like a stolen car”⁵ when your character treats themselves with the care of a stolen car. If every NPC is canonically an emotionally feral moron, petty murderhobo behavior only deepens everyone’s immersion.⁶

Moreover, asshole children are much easier to empathize with than asshole adults. It’s hard to default to violence when the only targets available for that violence are abused orphaned children. C’mon, just look at them! They live every day in a misery swamp and still find reasons to smile. The good ending is locked behind a caring friend being shown the right poetry.⁷

Unicorn Meat is just good ideas all the way down. This book deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Deep Carbon Observatory, Winter’s Daughter, and Reach of the Roach God. It is, without a doubt, my new favorite adventure.

It is beautiful and violent and horrid and kind.

$12 on itch, $25 physical on Exalted Funeral. Buy it now, before Mastercard wipes it off the face of the internet.⁸

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