Doom! The word that everyone seems to have gotten on their word of the year calendar. Everyone is “doomscrolling” or “doomposting” and even Marvel is revving up for Doomsday. But why is this the mood we find ourselves in? Are things breaking down around us, the cycles we depend on starting to fray as we scramble for control and meaning in a darkening world?
As TTRPGs develop and grow as an art form they’ve started to mirror the anxieties and questions that surround us in the real world. Take, for example, Doomspiral, the newly launched TTRPG from SoulMuppet Publishing, which puts players in the center of a decaying fantasy world. Their quest? Kill the gods, change their fate, and maybe fix or replace the broken cycle. Oh, and you’ll be resting at some familiar brightly lit locations that help you recharge.
Any of that sound familiar?
I had a chat with Zachary Cox, director of SoulMuppet who serves as co-creator of Doomspiral, about this very clear Miyazaki influence, the value of fatrolling, and publishing one of their biggest, crunchiest games yet.
Creator and Writer: Nick Spence
llustrations: Dwyn D’Alton Goode
Project Management and Additional Writing: Zachary Cox
Editing: Cody Faulk
Layout: Eryk Sawicki
Maps: Fernando Salvaterra
So it’s clearly an homage to Dark Souls, as it says on the book, but tell me a bit about where it might be coming from and what the genesis of it is.
Zachary Cox: SoulMuppet games are always about people in desperate situations struggling against the world, whether it’s the economy Orbital Blues, or like Eldritch Horror in Best Left Buried, or crime and the underbelly of Gangs of Titan City, or like steep, welling sadness in a lot of other games. Doom Spiral is about that same idea of a world stuck in a system that isn’t working, one that is slowly decaying and breaking down because of the mismanagement of the gods and their nature. You play a group of The Forsaken, our party of protagonists who are desperate, memory-addled, immortal people from around the world who begin as these desperate characters on a quest to kill the gods and resume a great rebirth of the world.
It’s about conservative societies and decay and rebirth and making a choice about societal change. The vibes in the background are all about decadence, decay, dying worlds and a lot of significant Buddhist ideas about regeneration. We wanted to do that and make a game that aesthetically emotionally was borrowing from the incredible work done by FromSoft and then give it a spin in a tabletop form because I feel like there’s been lots of attempts.
Similar to video games, when someone says “Soulslike”, at this point in time, it’s either, “what does that mean?” Or, “Oh God, what are we doing?” How do you spin on that when it’s been spun on by other people a few times?
ZC: I’m the co-creator of the game alongside my collaborator, Nick Spence, who worked with us previously on Gangs of Titan City. And we sat down and decided we wanted to do a Soulslike game together about a year and half ago, which is how long one these games takes. It’s not gonna be out for another year after crowdfunding because it’s a big-ass book. It needs a lot of playtesting and a lot of design to make these beautiful labyrinthine interconnected worlds, which these games are when they’re at their best, and getting them to appear in a form which is usable to a GM, approachable as a player, and still fun and interesting to interact with yeah. So when me and Nick were prototyping the game and work out what we wanted, it was like making a list of like the features of Soulslike games we really wanted to Adapt and work with. We needed to see how those fit within RPGs and specifically the idea of an RPG as book and as product.
Beyond the realm of perception,
Lies the weft of Fate, woven by gods.
Through faith, we glimpse its design.”
—The First Tenet of the Custodial Church
The first real step for us was thinking about the joys of playing Souls games. The really tight and interconnected world, the sense of mystery that unravels and reveals itself not through dialogue, but more through bits of environmental storytelling on items and the way that monsters exist, mechanically interesting tactical puzzle combat.
Elden Ring, Dark Souls, a lot of FromSoft games, are really rooted in the Japanese history with D&D and Tabletop. It’s very different from ours.
ZC: Dark Souls feels very OSR to me. In terms of the focus on player skill, the focus on stacking encounters you make against you. They always feel like sport as war, right? The combat was a really interesting point for us because we wanted to enshrine a load of stuff that was really important to Dark Souls. We needed to build variety, like the understanding of being able to approach combat in different ways, learning boss move sets. The idea that maybe this is expected to kill you the first time and that it might take you a few attempts, going back, finding stuff, re-equipping, planning it. Normally, the SoulMuppet games I associate with the past are not really that interested in combat.
That feels like a very interesting shift as well, seeing this. It’s not like you made light games, you weren’t making super cozy light stuff but you also weren’t making very combat heavy stuff, so it’s interesting that you’re exploring that.
ZC: Me and Nick’s original big collaboration was Best Left Buried. That game is much more tactical and wants you to play in certain ways. It’s about decision making and risk management, trying to kill big monsters. So that was actually a really interesting starting point for us. Could we just make this a Best Left Buried hack using the same engines as Orbital Blues and Paint The Town Red. No, this needed to be its own custom ruleset.
What we started doing is managing this idea of the big combat mechanic with stamina dice. Your characters start with a certain number of dice depending on their stats. Then, depending on the armor, they’re wearing, they’re going to regenerate dice as you go. If you’re in heavier armor you’re not going to regenerate as much, lighter and medium armors are going to give you more ability to move around, do more actions, and you gotta fat roll sometimes.
Sometimes you gotta fat roll.
ZC: That needs to be the pull quote of the article, please. Sometimes you gotta fat roll. And when you’re doing that, you’re using those dice to attack, to move around the environment and interact with this thing called position, which is who is in the best position to be tanking the boss right now, or who is further back and safer. And also, what you’re going to spend on attacking, or what you’re going to save for reacting with blocks, parries, dodges, all of which we’re trying to drag forward. Ultimately, the tests we did relied on simulating and running between the two of us lots of combats.
Monsters are working in a pretty similar way to players in that you’ve got this number of move dice and you’re rolling on a random table. So you know that , say, when it rolls a six that means that when it’s the monster’s turn it’s gonna do that smash attack. You know it’s gonna have a parry and a dodge and this ability, which means that when you come back to the fight you can bring the correct tool. Because you’ve watched its move table. I’ve seen the kind of stuff it does and I’m equipped and learning that, like unlocking the monster as puzzle and working out what tools you’re going to bring with you into that fight to take it down.
We’re obviously like trying to hit the emotional notes of what like it means to be a Souls game, but we can’t make that game without dodge rolling. It’s really exciting to make something which is hopefully going to hit a slightly different market for some people in terms of the kind of gamers that are going be interested in these slightly crunchier games while retaining our emotional core.
There’s some amazing characters in here? Can you dig more into some of the NPC’s that populate the book?
ZC: One of the things that’s really important to copy from Dark Souls is how beloved and interesting all of these weird little guys who laugh at you, sell you stuff in shops, or turn up in your quest area and teach you emotes. Some of those characters are so iconic and we’ve been trying to work out what we needed to make our own Patches. And her name is Sketchy Gren. She sells you stuff out of a shack in the old city. And like, obviously there’s all kinds of different characters. Industrious Eddie is the other one. He was fun.
When I read his quote, I was like, here’s one the more British lines I’ve ever seen in a RPG book.
ZC: You run into him and he’s like in the corner of a castle. And he says a little quote, he sells you a shoe, and then you never see him again. But he becomes your best friend and he’s lurking in your mind forever. And that is the power of these games is that they unlock such fervent imagination and community. Part of the thing that’s been so amazing for us is that we’ve been lucky enough to find the artist we’re working with on this project. that’s been really, I mean, you guys always do a really good job with art, obviously, on all your stuff. But this is mind blowing. The atmosphere of it, the character designs are just fantastic. We’ve found Dwyn (D’alton Goode) at UK Games Expo on a stand where they were selling prints and Dark Souls fan art. Me and Nick had written the concept, worked out what we were doing and we were like, do you want to do an entire RPG book? I’ve never seen a person sign a contract faster.
And then they’ve done their sketch two days later and we did the thing. Their stuff has got such a curiosity and Dwyn’s a massive fan of this format as well. It’s so good working with an artist who I basically don’t need to brief, right? I say here’s the manuscript that you were already reading and falling over the bits you really liked. Just do a sketch of Sketchy Eddie. And I have to say, he’s sitting on a blanket in a room and he’s got these things. Because Dwyn knows what that is because they fundamentally understand in the way that Nick and I do the adoration that Dark Souls fans have of these kinds of games and genres.
The art is so atmospheric. There’s one, “Remnants of the Dead”, that really stuck out to me. There’s so much in there.
If any were here, surely they too have perished
In ages long gone,
Or have lost themselves to time and madness
And thus be good as dead.”
ZC: So these are the six bosses that you fight. There is… From left to right, I’m going to try to get this right. First is Moirannesse, the Queen of the Gods, then on the left hand side that is going to be Gwyndain the Storm Lord. Okay, there’s Ahm the gentle shepherd of the dead, then Linnea the Queen of Winter. There is Carwyn the god of desire and his twin Ceridwen the god of Obsession. The dead fire god has been killed so his statue isn’t here and then there is Emyrriad who is the city and ruin god.
I didn’t have to say like what each of them looked like, I just asked for statues the six gods and Dwyn drew out all their clothing and equipment and worked out how they looked. But each one of these is a different character in the setting.
When it comes to making the setting up, what did you kind of draw? The names sounded a little Welsh, but there’s a lot of interesting things coming in.
It’s been really interesting linguistically. We started by making the mundane world before we did the full Weftanhaal setting. Nick wrote out 36 locations within the real world and those are the places that the character backstories are from. So for example, the Stalvagger Knight is from Unconquered Stalvagger, which is our kind of big knightly city. And we built it up from there.
When it got to the actual setting itself, we realized that we wanted to do this generation of the gods who are the people currently holding the power within “heaven” and its temple city of Tar Valarn. Each god represents a different cycle that is causing the the order that was established in the beginning of the setting to decay. So there is a god of seasons who has been killed so the summer has died and now winter only exists. There is a god of wind and change who is grasping at all things and now the world is consistently overcast.
The fire god’s dead and then there’s a god of dead cities, right?
ZC: The god of cities is like this character who’s like representing the economic sense of like prosperity and ruin that is one of the themes of the setting. There is this glorious golden city at the middle of the world, Tar Valarm, which where the corruption of rot is starting to set in and fill the world with gray corruption. Then the cycle of life and death with this Ah, figure who is meant to shepherd the dead into the afterlife.
In any FromSoft game you often only get like three lines of description. Even with backstories and items, three lines. Your brain starts filling in the details.
ZC: So a lot of the stuff is like, it’s in Welsh, like Gwyndain is one of the big gods, Ceridwen is one of the other ones. We start to pull into Scottish Gaelic with Moirannesse and then also we jump into some bits of Scandinavian languages as well. Stalvaggar, which is the knight city we talked about earlier, is specifically Finnish. So we’re pulling on all these different threads in terms of like how different locations are doing it. One of the things we wanted to settle on is the setting is firmly Northern European where Dark Souls often feels a bit more like Italian Gothic, right?
“Unbound by Fate, a Forsaken’s history drags behind them, flapping
uselessly in the winds of chance. Benediction, however, has granted
them respite.; Tethers are loci of power that Forsaken can bind
themselves to, saving them from death.”
We’ve thought about the traditions of different types of buildings that have built on top of each other and different civilizations and different styles of fighting and weapons. We’re looking at our equivalents of the Stone Dragon guys or the Crucible Knights from Elden Ring. So you’re more likely to see a stave church in Doomspiral than you are a Gothic cathedral.
What’s the overall book going to feel like when it publishes?
ZC: Structurally we’re kind of feeling most like Elden Ring game in there’s lots of overland areas with like five or six legacy dungeons. We wanted to be able to do like some hex calls and some dungeon crawling and it’s still fully willing to interconnect with itself. So the quick start this out now is literally like a pretty substantial adventure for like one or two sessions, but we’re kind of heading towards a like 50, 60 thousand word manuscript. That is a massive campaign setting that will be like, apart from maybe Inevitable, the biggest pure adventure that SoulMuppet’s ever made.
So that’s going to be a separate book?
ZC: It’s to be one hardcover we’re aiming for. It’s going be 240 to 270 pages in a big fucking hardcover that’s going to look like a songbook.
You can back Doomspiral now on Kickstarter, with the digital version set at £20/$28 with the hardcover running you £50/$69, with additional accessories available like maps, dice, and character sheets. Its set to run through Thursday, October 16.
Images via SoulMuppet Publishing
Have strong thoughts about this piece you need to share? Or maybe there’s something else on your mind you’re wanting to talk about with fellow Fandomentals? Head on over to our Community server to join in the conversation!