Something strange happens every time we bring La Notte Eterna to a convention table.
People approach the booth with that careful half-step every tabletop player knows. They look at the banners. They glance at the books. They wait just long enough to decide whether this dark thing in front of them is for them.
Then someone says something that knocks the air out of me.
“I still have the first edition. I keep it like a relic.”
Every time I hear that, time breaks a little.
It stretches. It folds. Suddenly I’m not standing in a crowded hall with coffee in my bloodstream and convention noise beating against the walls. I’m back at the beginning, when La Notte Eterna was not a product line, not a Kickstarter campaign, not a D&D 5e campaign setting, not a booth at SPIEL Essen.
It was a riff, an obsession, and a dark fantasy tabletop RPG world that refused to leave me alone.
Before the Booths, There Was a Small Print Run
La Notte Eterna began the way many good things begin: by accident, through stubbornness, and without anything that looked like a sensible plan.
There was music in it from the start. Literally. A Sepultura instrumental track put a spark in the room, and that spark became a feeling I could not shake. That particular dark fantasy feeling, the one that does not pat you on the shoulder. The one that looks you in the eye and asks what you are willing to carry.
Slowly, the world took shape. A cosmology. A geography. Factions. Names. Ruins. Cities. An aesthetic. A mood that was not just “dark” because the sun was gone, but dark because the setting had something to say.
The first publication arrived in 2010, using the T20 system. It was small. Painfully small, by today’s standards. One hundred and fifty copies of the core book. One hundred copies of the underground supplement, Tomo delle Terre Nascoste.
That was it.
A handmade print run. A fragile little army of books. The kind of project that exists because someone believes in it hard enough to make the numbers look less stupid than they are.
Those Copies Found Homes
Every one of those books went somewhere.
That sounds obvious, but it stops being obvious when people come back years later and tell you what happened after the book left your hands.
Some of those copies ended up with Dungeon Masters who ran full campaigns in Neir. Some ended up with players who still remember characters, betrayals, impossible fights, desperate bargains, and nights when the table went quiet because the world had finally landed right.
At Play Bologna 2026, people came to the stand and told us they still had those books.
Not sealed. Not pristine, dead on a collector’s shelf. These books had been used, read, and bore the marks of campaigns: dice, coffee, arguments, laughter.
That matters to me more than I can say cleanly.
Because a roleplaying game book is not really alive when it is printed, but when someone drags it to a table and makes trouble with it.
Then the World Got Bigger
A lot changed over the years, and I do not only mean the color of my hair.
The 2023 Kickstarter campaign changed the scale of La Notte Eterna in a way I honestly could not have imagined at the start. Hundreds of copies moved into the world. The circle grew wider. The community stopped being a small group of people who knew the project from the old days and became something more organic, more unpredictable, and much more alive.
The new edition, adapted for D&D 5e (2014), gave the setting a broader language.
That matters. Not because 5e magically solves anything, but because it lets more tables step into the same darkness. It gives Dungeon Masters and players a familiar frame, then asks them to walk into a world where the usual heroic comfort does not always survive contact with the night.
La Notte Eterna did not become wider by becoming safer. It grew because more people could finally reach the door.
Play, Essen, and the Strange Proof of a Living World
Distribution through shops and conventions did the rest.
Italian fairs helped build the path: Play Bologna, Lucca Comics & Games, Romics, Comicon, Etna Comics, Gigacon, and more. Each one added faces, names, conversations, questions, and those familiar people who make every new edition feel like a return home.
Then came SPIEL Essen 2025.
Seeing La Notte Eterna on a table in Germany hit differently. Players sat down without the history. They did not know the old print run. They did not know the long road, the strange detours, the late nights, the work that felt, to borrow a phrase, mad and desperate.
They just opened the door and entered Neir for the first time.
That was enough.
There is a kind of proof you only get at the table. Not from reviews or numbers from a campaign page and a warehouse report. You see it when a player leans forward. When a DM lowers their voice. When someone looks at a character sheet and realizes this world is not here to reassure them.
That is when you know the thing is still breathing.
What Makes La Notte Eterna Stay
I have seen people try to describe La Notte Eterna from the outside.
Dark fantasy. Eternal night. D&D 5e compatible. Grim setting. Italian tabletop RPG. All true enough, I suppose. Useful labels, especially when someone is trying to understand what kind of book they are holding.
But labels are thin things.
The setting has a voice. It has a cosmology. It has a history that keeps growing because Dungeon Masters and players keep dragging it into new rooms and making it answer new questions.
The tone matters. That feeling of a world that does not want to comfort you, but still wants to tell you something true. The sense that beauty can survive inside ruin without becoming clean. The sense that horror works better when it has memory.
People can copy ingredients. They cannot copy the years inside a thing.
The People at the Table
This year at Play Bologna, the reception was extraordinary.
Some people waited to come to the booth just to tell us they had played dozens of sessions in the setting. Others had followed the project for years and finally wanted to hold the book in their hands, flip through it, and decide whether the thing they had seen online was real.
Then there were the demo tables.
A special thanks goes to Davide Gibin and Paolo Mazza, who ran sessions with an energy and care that pulled dozens of players into the world. Convention demos are hard work. You have little time, too much noise, too many distractions, and a table full of people who may not know each other.
When it works, it feels like a small spell.
Thanks also to my brother Steven, art director of La Notte Eterna, who keeps following the project with that rare mix of critical eye and affection. He is one of the people who helps me adjust the aim when I risk losing the thread. He remembers where we were when this started, and he keeps asking where we are trying to go next.
Having someone like that close to the project is not a small thing.
The Road Is Still Open
The story does not stop at Play, or Essen, or any single convention hall.
If you want to follow La Notte Eterna more closely, the best places are our Discord and Patreon. That is where we share new material, previews, campaign tools, unreleased content, and updates as the project keeps moving.
It is also where you can support the work, argue about the world in the correct and healthy way, meet other travelers, and help shape what comes next.
Because that is the part I keep coming back to.
I made a world, yes. But a world does not stay alive because one person made it. It stays alive because people keep entering it.
To everyone who kept an old copy. To everyone who sat at a demo table. To everyone who found us at Play, Essen, Lucca, Romics, Comicon, Etna Comics, Gigacon, or somewhere stranger. To everyone who still wants to know what waits under the stars.
See you soon.
And may the moon smile on all of you.
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