Brood & Bloom is a bestiary of sixty-one creatures whose lives run through other bodies, living, dead or built. Like The Waking Garden, it is published here in full and free to read, and it is built into the console.
The thing that makes it different to run is that a lot of it happens after the fight ends.
Three broods that want different things
The creatures are in three broods. They are unrelated, and the distinction is practical rather than taxonomic. It is about where the party meets them.
| Brood | Chapter | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Inquiline | 2 | Infects one person. What a party carries away |
| Sporophore | 3 | Infects ground and buildings. What a party walks into |
| Necrophore | 4 | Wants nothing from the living. What a party leaves behind, in its dead |
Each runs on a counter the console can hold for you. The Inquiline tracks Depth, which never recedes on its own, because the graft has to come out. The Sporophore tracks Spore Load, which washes off with rest and distance, because what has to be left is the colony rather than the passenger. The Necrophore has neither. What it asks of a party is what they do with their dead.
Read chapter 1 first
This is the one instruction the library gives, and it is worth repeating here. Several of these creatures do most of their work between sessions, and their stat blocks lean on the rules around them: the classifications, the counters, what happens at the last stage of a disease, and which spells help. It is a shorter list than you would expect, and one of them makes a particular case worse.
That framing chapter is also where the order lives. The Lazaret has been writing this down for longer than anyone remembers, and its three ranks are statted so you can put one at the table: a Registrar at CR 1, a Prosector at CR 4, and a Lector at CR 5. Rank follows the career, so the officer running a house is the strongest of the three rather than the weakest.
From nothing to an apex
Every brood runs a full ladder. The Inquiline opens on a CR 0 latchling and ends on the Exemplar at CR 17; the Sporophore runs from a driftling to the Nave; the Necrophore from a cinder nit to the Lychfield. An appendix lays all three life cycles out together (what grows into what, what settles where, and what lays in what) so you can see where a line is going before you commit a campaign to it.
Using it at the table
Open Settings in the console and tick Brood & Bloom. Its creatures join Add creature with everything else.
The counters are worth setting up as you go. Select the
character, click Apply effect, set Duration to Counter, and type Depth or
Spore Load into Reminder. It starts at 0 and sits on their row as a badge with the
number in it, with +1, −1 and Reset beside it in the controls.
OpenFray never moves a counter on its own. You do, and you decide what it means when it gets high. That is exactly how this library wants to be run, and it is why the counters are counters rather than something the app resolves for you.
What you may do with it
Same terms as the rest of OpenFray’s own writing. The stat blocks and game mechanics are under CC BY 4.0, so share and adapt them, commercially included, with credit and a note of any changes. The lore, the chapter text and each creature’s description are © 2026 Nicola Mustone, all rights reserved.
Start with the overview, or read the broods for the rules the stat blocks assume.