Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

It’s here! 150+ Colorful Pages of Flesh Pit material to create and run a visceral adventure for you and your fellow squad of Park Rangers. Build out your own custom characters, select from an arsenal of questionable Anodyne-provided equipment, and encounter a robust bestiary of antediluvian macrofauna and geobiological hazards.
Get it here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/498633/mystery-flesh-pit-national-park-the-rpg?affiliate_id=4581853

This paper map from 1976 displays the surface facilities above the Mystery Flesh Pit prior to its absorption into the National Park System.

Tourism poster for Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, 1980

From an area tourism book of the era:

“While the rural areas of west Texas are known for their sparse populations, one tourist attraction seems to continually generate a steady stream of visitors around vacation seasons. The titular "Mystery Flesh Pit” has been a wellspring of fascination for geologists, biologists, sociologists, engineers and the general public alike. Guests are advised to book age-appropriate tours and activities well in advance of their visit, though the pheromonal discharges and the overall agitation level of the MFP can vary with short notice. Visitors should be advised to be prepared for changes in schedule & availability.“  

Aquifer Leech

Chaetoderma repens

These tube-like mollusks are similar to a shell-less clam or mussel. They can grow to a length of two meters and are equipped with two retractable, mucosal proboscises which branch into many thousands of microscopic tubes. These small tubes, which are able to penetrate even the densest tissues by finding microscopic fractures in its structure, sap liquid moisture from which the Leech feeds.

Aquifer Leech are typically found in well-oxygenated aquatic environments within the pit such as moisture crops and water bladders . They inhabit the soft, porous substrates of these aquatic environments, often forming large aggregations to feed on nutrient-rich organic matter suspended in the water. The Aquifer Leech also provide an important ecological service, as they help to aerate and clean the substrate of these aquatic bodies, by consuming organic material and expelling crystal clear water in the process. Aside from their ecological importance, the species have been utilized to treat water to an extremely high purity, requiring far less energy than a traditional desalination plant. Additionally, their mucosal proboscis is used in medical research as a way to perform research on the human vascular system and its response to various conditions.

Rare photo from early days of the pit.

This gives a good idea of how small the operations were back in the early 1970s, about 3 months after the pit was “discovered”. In this aerial photo, you can see the natural entry orifice (pre-excavation), a temporary electric lift tower, as well as a utility trunk connecting the surface power and ventilation plant to the basecamp down in the pit. There’s also a hydraulic dredging crane that was used to “bite” away at some of the flesh down in the pit to enlarge the working area and remove material.

It would be unrecognizable only a few months later as paved roads and a half dozen permanent buildings were constructed, transforming this modest camp into a fully industrial mining and excavation site.

“Why haven’t there been any new posts in a long time?”
“Is this project dead?”
“Trevor get off your ass you lazy hack”

This project isn’t dead! Two major factors have contributed to the relative silence of updates:

1) For the past year, I’ve been taking care of my infant son as the primary at-home caregiver. That won’t mean anything to people who have not been parents, and it wouldn’t have meant anything to me before having a kid, but it turns out that keeping a baby happy, healthy, and entertained is a major drain on your time and energy. Additionally, my office/studio/workspace is also the room he sleeps in (I live in a two-bedroom apartment) so I am limited with how much I can do at night.

2) As many of you know, in June, Fleshpit fans showed up in force to fund the TTRPG kickstarter. In response, I’ve been busy working through a multi-page list of illustrations for the TTRPG book, including wildlife, tools, vehicles, maps, and other ephemera:

“I missed the Kickstarter, can I still pre-order the TTRPG book?”

Yes! Here’s a link to the pre-order store: https://mysteryfleshpitrpg.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

“When is the coffee table art book coming out?”
“Are you finished with the book?”
“What still needs to be finished?”

The main Mystery Flesh Pit coffee table-style book is, like many other projects, paused while I’m working on the TTRPG book. Paid projects take priority! I will continue working on it as soon as I can; much of the art I’m working on for the TTRPG book will also be featured in the coffee table book. The biggest missing piece of the big artbook is the writing. I have much of it finished, but there is still a lot of editing that needs to be done.

“Is spectral haptics still continuing?”

Yes, but see the answers above. Paid projects take priority, and right now Spectral Haptics is third on the list behind the TTRPG and the coffee-table book. There is a possibility of me making time to create a small video for SH if for no other reason than to avoid burnout, but I’m not going to promise anything.

Some of the most sought-after artifacts surrounding the legacy of the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park are those items directly connected to the catastrophic 2007 tragedy. Such pieces of ephemera are rare to find in a salvageable condition, owing primarily to the amount of destruction wrought by the accident. Though the now-infamous CGR investigative report has long been made public, there remain many unanswered questions and inconsistencies, with some official reports offering wholly incongruous numbers with regards to total human casualties. In 2022 it is still unknown if the full scope of the accident will ever be entirely known to those outside of Senate committee chambers or Corporate board rooms. Despite this obfuscation, I believe that the truth can be deciphered from the tattered, bloodied, half-digested mementos and souvenirs of the thousands of visitors, workers, and families who suffered for hours (in a few cases days) as they were horrifically eaten alive in a terrible demonstration of wanton brutality on a scale previously unknown in recorded history. Can you imagine their terror? Can any of us really perceive the horror of those visitors as they realized that the end result of a lifetime of hopes, dreams, relationships, and destinies was to be consumed? These lifeless artifacts remain as more than just a testament; they are all that remain.

Get yours here. All Major Credit Cards Accepted. 

Park signage evolution.

Following its accidental discovery, the Mystery Flesh Pit and the unique phenomena surrounding it were targets of a headfirst and furiously paced campaign of commercial exploitation. Once architects, engineers, geobiologists and clerical members of the development team had done their work to make the park safe and viable, marketing teams faced the daunting task of selling the public on the intriguing and miraculous phenomena of the Mystery Flesh Pit while downplaying the visceral cosmic horror of the pit itself.

Families were a particularly difficult sell, as children often displayed an overwhelming fear and aversion to descending into the throat of the pit. One strategy early in the park’s history was the creation of friendly cartoon mascot Caver Coop. A brief animated film starring Caver Coop was shown at the park’s visitor center, where the character would attempt to assuage worries about being “eaten alive” or “swallowed”, reassuring children (and often parents) that the pit was perfectly safe and reinforced.

When the attraction was absorbed into the National Park System in the early 1980s, signage and other graphic materials were updated to the NPS Graphic Identity. The architecture of the park’s surface facilities was also expanded and renovated during this time to better fit with the “Natural Resort” image of the Mystery Flesh Pit brand, drawing inspiration from the local Santa Fe style integrated with unique bone formations discovered within the pit itself.

-Excerpt from New York Times Bestseller Unearthing the Unholy: Exploring the tragedy of the Mystery Flesh Pit, written by Dr. Rachel Frost, published 2011.

Wildlife Safety Brochure

Though the Mystery Flesh Pit National park remained a model of visitor safety until the disaster which led to its closure, the natural hazards of the pit necessitated guests being aware of the nature of the attraction they were descending into. This brochure, combined with a mandatory 3-minute orientation film shown in the lower visitor center, was intended to act as a minimum standard of readiness for inexperienced park guests. Park service staff, rangers, and anodyne mining personnel received much more in-depth training as part of their operations within the pit.

This is a tourist map of Gumption, TX from around the year 1998, meant to be a caricature of the city’s “historic” downtown area. Gumption TX, pop. 11,500 at its peak, is a small town located approx. 22 miles north of the surface orifice of the Mystery Flesh Pit. Throughout the discovery and development of the park, Gumption served as an important staging area for explorations of the pit before full facilities were set up, all the while eagerly selling any and every vice imaginable to the thousands of roughneck workers who flooded into the region to build the infrastructure within the pit. By the middle of the 1980s, families were the primary draw of the unique national park, so the city pivoted to keep up with the demands of tourism. Today, some 14 years after the closure of the park, the city of Gumption is an almost empty town, a fraction of its former size. The few hotels and restaurants left cater mainly to the routine droves of specialist workers and crews which labor to keep the slumbering superorganism contained, its empty streets haunted by the spectre of a golden era gone by.

Jackson Letter #1
May 2nd 1973

Coke Heartthrob was first introduced on Valentines Day in 1985 as a limited promotion, but sold so well over the summer that Coca Cola added it to their primary beverage roster in 1986. The defining ingredient in Coke Heartthrob was, of course, amniotic ballast harvested from special glands deep within the Mystery Flesh Pit. The potent aphrodisiacal properties of amniotic ballast were diminished by heavily diluting the chemical before adding it to the beverage, but Coke Heartthrob still developed a notorious reputation for its unusual intoxicating effects. The taste of Coke Heartthrob was described as “Syrupy-Sweet” with hints of “Amaretto & Rosewater”, and the beverage had a light pheromonal scent similar to perfume. A combination of increasing extraction costs after the 2007 tragedy, as well as changing cultural attitudes, ultimately saw the decline of Coke Heartthrob sales until the Coca Cola company decided to discontinue the beverage in 2011. 

Gumption, TX

This chart, and many others like it, were produced by the Park Service as an educational tool for use in classrooms, museums and universities. Popular among natural history enthusiasts, the illustrations featured on these posters were the result of intensive expeditions and surveys into the Mystery Flesh Pit. While visitors are almost certain to encounter common fauna such as the myriad of Macrobacteria subspecies, many organisms such as the Venous Shamble and Abyssal Copepod tend to evade trails and high-traffic areas, making them difficult to spot. As a practical tool, these illustrations were useful in training Wildlife Management rangers in proper firearm techniques for safely dispatching a dangerous organism. For this reason, the designers of this and other charts attempted to represent the scale of the organisms in relation to each other as accurately as possible. 

Jackson Letter #2
August 24th 1973

Depending on who you talked to, James Jackson was either a con man, a genius, a degenerate gambler, a reincarnated shaman from ages past, or some combination of all four. “Jim”, as his friends and detractors called him, was a strange man. He was a self-educated thinker who was absolutely convinced that he was possessed of talents that approached the supernatural.
    He may have been right: in the history of American enterprise there was no one quite like Jim Jackson. His overall demeanor and presentation to all who interacted with him was that of a self-styled cowboy; he wore ostrich-leather boots, always had a Marlboro cigarette in his mouth, and owned a ten gallon hat in every color in the catalog, and spoke with a drawl so thick that he could easily be mistaken for a man out of time. This man, who came to embody every myth of the western oilman and whose exploits would someday captivate a nation, had not stepped foot in Texas until his twentieth birthday. He never made a dime from oil.

Jim was born in Boston on July 16th, 1945 at the exact instant that the first atomic bomb was detonated two thousand miles away in New Mexico. He was the youngest of four children to Walter and Evelyn Jackson; Evelyn was a classically-trained stage actress who came from old money tied up in real estate in the northeast. Walter was a prolific and brilliant chemist who directed a research group for Bell Telephone Laboratories. During the war, Walter’s team was instrumental in developing the membranes necessary for the gas-diffusion method of enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project. Walter moved his family from Boston to San Jose, California in 1949 to partner with one of his former colleagues in founding a new applied science company. This new venture, Allied Micromaterials Corporation, would become one of the pioneering institutions in the development of semiconductors and later transistors. Contacts Walter had maintained in the defense department led to Allied receiving a contract to manufacture guidance systems for a new range of ICBM missiles, and by the middle of the 1950s, Walter was a very wealthy man.

As a boy, Jim was bright but had no patience for school. On several occasions he was found cutting class to wander along a creek that ran through the family’s estate. The land had been an apricot orchard before being purchased by his father, and a young Jim spent every spare minute he could find playing cowboy in the pastoral grove of trees. His patient mother indulged his fantasies and sent him to dude ranches and paid for horse riding lessons in the hopes it might instill a sense of discipline. By Jim’s sixteenth birthday he was showing signs of restlessness in the rapidly-urbanizing Californian environment, and entered into frequent arguments with his exasperated father. When he told Walter that he had no interest in attending college, and instead mentioned the then-escalating conflict in Vietnam, his father shouted him down. Angry but determined, a seventeen year old Jim walked to an army recruitment station the very next morning. It was of no use, however; through Walter’s many ties to the U.S. defense industry, it was essentially guaranteed that Jim would never see combat. For the young man who yearned to see the world and longed for an adventure to break the monotony of his sheltered upbringing, this was the final straw.

On a spring day in 1962, James Jackson packed a small bag and left home. From San Jose he took a train to Carson City, Nevada with the intent of finding work at one of the horse ranches from his childhood. When he arrived, a new subdivision had taken its place, with any traces of the ranches long gone. For two months he washed dishes in a casino buffet in Reno to pay for accrued gambling debts. From Nevada he hitchhiked to Idaho where he cut onions for 80¢ a day until the winter season forced him to move on. For three years he stumbled from job to job, lumberjacking in Washington state, fitting irrigation pipe in Arizona, welding in Alaska, mining Molybdenum in Colorado, and eventually working as a roughneck in an oilfield outside of Odessa, Texas. These three years had hardened young Jim and for the first time he felt at home among the wildcatters and oilmen in the dust and sun of west Texas. The challenge of the work invigorated him. The harsh conditions of the desert inspired him. The boom-bust cycle of the petroleum industry, however, did little to help secure the human needs of food and shelter. The men who made the real money on the drilling sites, Jim had noticed, were the geologists; those who only found the oil and didn’t stick around to do the hard work of pulling it out of the ground. Jim was charismatic, and it wasn’t long before he found work as an assistant for a local surveying office and began to learn the fine art of finding things underground. (edited)

He was almost ready to settle down when he received a call from home: His father had suffered an intracranial aneurysm and had died before emergency medical treatment could be administered. For the first time in years, he went home. In the days after Walters funeral, Jim was forced to confront his future. Jim was twenty, with little occupational prospects, but now had a twenty-five thousand dollar inheritance; enough in 1965 to get into nearly any business he wanted. He knew he still didn’t have the patience for college, and he had already figuratively “gone west.” Out of either a feeling of guilt, or a desire to not cause any further trouble to his family in California, he returned to Texas with the goal of finally striking out on his own.

By 1973, James Jackson was a man who, at least on the surface, betrayed no insecurities about his expertise. He exuded confidence and, after a few lucky breaks locating petroleum where none was thought to have existed, was billed as a “guru of the underground”. A small office was leased in Midland, a clerk and eventually a geologist, a few engineers and surveyors were hired. For a short time it was a mundane but generally honest living. What he lacked in experience as the chief of the small firm he more than made up for in the energy and zeal he brought to every job he undertook. He detested office work and would personally show up to every site, rain or shine, with the enthusiasm and showmanship of a circus ringmaster.

The job for Dale Whitmer was no exception.

This profile survey is one of many examples produced early in the development of the Mystery Flesh Pit. The “New Jackson Survey”, conducted by surveyor James “Slippin’ Jim” Jackson, combined many prior smaller surveys with new biospeleological data obtained by Jackson’s team. Notably, Jackson’s surveying expedition marked the discovery of such features as the “Fondue Village”, the “Chyme Bladder” and the “Pleasure Domes”. Missing from this early survey are deeper portions of pit anatomy such as the “Gift Gardens” and “Copepod Barrows”, as these sections would remain inaccessible until the introduction of the Grumman IAV in 1978. This survey was printed in several national publications and was a primary piece of marketing information until an updated computer-aided survey was conducted in 1980.