incredibly excited to announce my new project and share this preview! Kraldum, my solo fantasy mudlarking TTRPG, will be funding on Gamefound this autumn as part of RPG Party 2026. click through to read more and follow its development:
Go down to the shore below the city. Collect what you can. Survive what lurks there and beat the rising waters to make it home.
this game has been forming over the last 4 years in notebooks and spreadsheets and pub conversations, and the time has come to bring it into the world as a real book. lots more to come!
Kraldum design log: okay but what is mudlarking (and why am I making a TTRPG about it)?
Janine: What's the word for people who go to London and just dig through the fucking river? And they make books about the shit they find and 90% of it is pipes?
Jack: Oh…. um, mudlarks?
Janine: Yeah, mudlarking!
Art: Fucking gross-os if you ask me.
Janine: But it's fascinating —
– Friends at the Table, The Curse of Eastern Folly Pt. 1
You glimpse what might be a case and step carelessly. The mud lets loose a great belch of gas and tries its hardest to draw you in. You break free, but only at the cost of a shoe. You flounder hastily back to shore. Now for a long bath.
– Fallen London
This is the first post in a little series I’m working on about my solo fantasy mudlarking TTRPG in progress, Kraldum – the ideas, mechanics, challenges and miscellany of making it. For the first entry it seemed best to answer the question several people have asked me: what’s mudlarking? Ah, friends, that’s a great question with a slippery tangle of answers. Let’s get into this muddy business.
The London Museum has a good primer here.
Mudlarking can be broadly defined as searching river shores at low tide for items of value. The word ‘mudlark’ became popular in Victorian London to describe those who carried out this activity on the Thames foreshore as a means of survival. They looked for scrap metal, lumps of coal, rags – anything that could be sold on. 19th century writer Henry Mayhew described the mudlarks of his day as “compelled from utter destitution to seek for the means of appeasing their hunger in the mud of the river”. Many of those mudlarks were people marginalised by society in one or more ways: the impoverished, women, young children, the elderly, the criminalised.
One of the earliest mentions of the practice comes from a treatise by the man who later founded the Thames River Police – the most wide-reaching force policing London at the time, predating the Metropolitan Police by 29 years. There’s a great short post on this bit of history on the Thames Discovery Programme’s blog here.
These days, mudlarking is a very different practice built around the same core activity. Instead of survival, it’s an act born of archaeological interest. London’s modern mudlarks look for items that might tell us something about this city’s history, and their explorations are regulated by the Port of London Authority. Mudlarking requires a permit, which comes with a long waiting list and a fee, and many of today’s mudlarks are people with ample leisure time.
I started mudlarking in 2019, when the limits on permits weren’t as strict as they are now. Above are some pages from the little sketchbook I kept of my finds. It was an experience unlike any other I’ve had, seeing London from below, finding traces of other times and learning more of my city’s social history through my attempts to identify what I’d found. The Thames foreshore is also a strange and delicate ecosystem, and getting acquainted with it became a vector for learning new things about London’s biodiversity and climate. Then my permit expired, and I developed long covid, and I couldn’t get to the river as often (or legally look for anything if I did make it there).
There’s been a lot written about mudlarking within the last decade, and a lot of interest online (just look it up on instagram). I’m really definitely not the first person to be interested in the contradictions and tensions of asking/answering the question ‘what is mudlarking?’. I think I might be the first to approach it through the medium of a fantasy-adventure TTRPG though?
I am hoping to make a game that is fun for people to play. And also to explore some of these ideas critically. How well I manage to synthesise the two will have to be seen! But if you’d like to come with me as I think through the attempt, I’d love to have you along.
I have a bunch of topics lined up for future posts but questions & requests are very welcome too :)
