What an incredible game.
This is like a rules-light, R-rated (violence, gore), 5E for horror adventuring.
One of the best play-throughs of the game was where the game's creator ran the Penny Arcade crew through the game as a demo, and the entire video is worth a watch from beginning to end, but be forewarned, this does get pretty graphic.
What I love about this playthrough is it shows the creator's intent for the tone and play style of the game. Often, groups fall into this D&D norm "adventurer mentality," sort of like, "If a dungeon exists, we must go in and clear it!" sort of ARPG feeling many games fall into. You see this in the OSR too, and this is that sort of "mega-dungeon mentality" where you have a few million ten-foot squares to explore, keyed encounters to clear, traps and puzzles to solve, and treasure is littered around the place waiting for you to pick up.
This game is different from that.
The combat mechanics are tight and built to run fast, unlike 5E, so there is the tactical challenge and numeric balance. The classes have incredible customization and depth as you level. The game has a classless zero-level funnel-type experience, like Dungeon Crawl Classics. The game has professions, and you start as dark fantasy characters, like Zweihander.
Also, in the video, pay attention to some excellent game mastering - how every combat has a twist, and things that happen during the fight change everything and up the stakes. The use of dynamic environments and conditions. Enemies throwing characters around. Area attacks versus close-in party members. Multiple attack use. Special attacks. Triggered actions while wounded.
You only need to add some 4E concepts (triggered environmental hazards, map hazards, and forced movement) to have a master class on creating engaging encounters. You aren't sitting in a "bag of hit points" 5E slog, playing turn denial games, and burning down with this style of refereeing.
The rules are a d20 variant, but they run fast and are not the complex and vague mess that 5E has turned into. 5E is the game you start with, and Pathfinder 2 is the game you end up in after you tire of dealing with unclear rules and looking up answers online. A rules-light d20 framework solves those problems, too, especially with a few universal mechanics like boons/banes and the turn order system. The advantage/disadvantage system in 5E feels like a hammer to problems you need other tools for, and this system feels elegant, is stepped nicely, and works well.
Another game this reminds me of? The classic Arkham Horror board game. You have a choice of which apocalypse is happening. You are fighting to stop the end of the world and frantically running around the world, completing missions to try to stop the inevitable. Every end-of-the-world choice is flavorful, brings new challenges and boss monsters, and plays differently. You can play this game subtly and in the shadows, build slowly to a catastrophe like in Arkham, or go full-out Roland Emmerich at the start and turn the dial past 11 with every level the characters gain.
You leave the city, and it is destroyed behind you.
That is cool, epic stuff. Since the campaigns are supposed to be one-shots, you will start a new world next time, and different things will happen. Again, this is something that really doesn't happen in D&D; how dare you destroy Waterdeep, Ravenloft Castle, or the City of Greyhawk? You can't do that! Your campaign sucks now! You can't have the defeated Tomb of Horrors fall into Hell and create a bottomless 3-mile hole in the planet! You can't defeat Tiamat and have her explode, permanently tearing a hole into a nether realm and destroying a kingdom 300 miles wide! You are ruining the map! You can't turn Elminster and the good guys of the Realms into a secret society of spider demons and kill them! Those were my favorite characters from the books!
That happens here often. Like Arkham Horror, everything is paid for, and this world ends. Feel free to tear up your source material and start fresh next time. Arkham had events that closed off boards or shut locations, and the map changed during play. But every time you played, things went back to normal and were destroyed again - maybe.
And it is fantastic and the stuff that makes legends.
This is like D&D 5E meets Arkham Horror, minus the Cthulhu plus demons. There is a Warhammer FRP comparison in here, but I would pick Arkham over Warhammer because the player power scales more on 5E's epic-hero curve than it does the more realism-based Warhammer. With the right mix of artifacts and abilities, Arkham player power scales high too.
Nothing has plot armor. No place on the map, no NPC, no dungeon, no part of the setting, no monster, no villain, no good guy, no city, nothing on the map, no "favorite thing in the novel," no piece of product identity, no magic item, no spell in the rules, no kingdom, no way the world works, no assumption about cosmology, no cute thing, no ancestry, no god or demon, no PC - nothing.
You only know how good that feels when you try it.
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| AI Art by @nightcafestudio |
And no PC is safe. Get your self-insert character out of your head; that is dangerous for your mental health (as we were told repeatedly in the 1990s by every game company). The industry pushes these "identity gaming" concepts to increase attachment for profits, but nobody seems to care about their players' health and well-being. Profits are being put ahead of the mental health of players.
If you watch the video, combats are fast, and they have a back-and-forth flow to them. Fights can also be deadly, which should be in a horror game. Advancement is one level per adventure, with a maximum of ten levels, so the game is suited to a shorter campaign and more campaigns played. A supplement has rules for levels ten and higher, so it could be played long-term, but again, the one-and-done campaign structure feels suitable for a horror game.
Again, watch the video and note how fast the combats play. This highly streamlined system feels like an OSR game where the combats play fast, but there is that 5E-style tactical depth and choice. Even a 4-on-4 battle was completed relatively quickly, and a two-hour video handled four battles (two of them boss battles), which is blazing fast at the mid-level of play (level 6) they were adventuring at.
Significant-sized battles will always be something 5E is terrible at, and to be fair, many games could be better at. Cypher System does these relatively quickly, but asking players to wait 30 minutes for a turn is a non-starter and, honestly, something I am concerned about for all the 5E clones, even Tales of the Valiant.
Also, this game flips the D&D assumptions on their head. The "big bad" is the demons, and you could recast monsters as demon servants - or recast them as monsters realizing what is happening, and they throw in with the good guys to avoid the end of the world. In D&D, 99.9% of liches are evil. In this game, you could make a lich hate the Demon Lord, fear the end of the world, and give the characters' missions and assistance. This game casts a standard fantasy world in a "The Walking Dead" sort of apocalypse, and the story starts there. Good guys could be bad, bad guys could be good, and you take it from there.
The game does many things I look to other games for, but this has them all in one place. The zero-level funnels and deadly world of DCC? Check. The grim and gritty horror and professional progression of Zweihander? Check. The rules-light framework of Cypher System? Check. The freedom to multiclass and build interesting characters of 5E? Check. The deadliness, horror, fear, and insanity rules of Call of Cthulhu? Check.
The game's progression curve is also designed to teach the game. Seriously, why isn't 5E more like this?
Until Tales of the Valiant emerges, I will play this for d20 and 5E-like gaming.
Then again, this may be what I am looking for.
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