Imagine a tabletop RPG that’s built on the creative commons D&D 5e rules; designed and written by a veteran Dungeons & Dragons designer with a 20 year industry pedigree; and set in a dimension-cracked world where titanic magical beasts have terrorized humanity into hiding and otherworldly spirits are everywhere, twisting reality and corrupting heroes. Sounds cool, right? We thought so too, when we saw the new Beast RPG was exactly that. So we spoke to lead designer Chris S. Sims and art director Aron Midhall to find out exactly what it’s about.
Sims has lent his mind and pen to a stack of D&D projects over the years, credited as a story writer and/or editor on Wizards of the Coast’s books for 3rd edition, 4th edition, and both the 2014 and 2024 versions of 5th edition. A chance meeting at a con brought him into working on the Beast RPG with the charming Swedes at Studio Midhall, and it couldn’t be clearer during our chat that he’s fallen in love with its murky, perilous world.
He’s also evidently fallen for lead artist Aron Midhall, to be honest. “It’s a bromance,” Midhall admits, “but the bro is silent – it’s a romance”.
Throughout Sims’ involvement, they say they’ve riffed directly off each other, with Midhall painting Sims’ story creations, and Sims inventing new people, places, and even rules concepts directly inspired by Midhall’s paintings. “The work between us is the most fun thing I’ve ever experienced,” Midhall says. We love to see it.
So, what have this happy pair created together? Let’s venture into the Beast universe.
The Beast Universe is dark and full of terrors
Proudly emblazoned, high up the Beast RPG Kickstarter campaign page, is a glowing testimonial from none other than Ed Greenwood, celebrated creator of DnD’s Forgotten Realms setting and renowned monster milk documentarian. “Beast RPG is a success,” says Greenwood; “I found the setting, the prose, and the art combined to impart a wonderfully creepy atmosphere”. High praise for any TTRPG – and if creepiness is what you’re after, you’ll find a lot of it in Beast.
It’s a “very harsh, mysterious fantastical world, where the constant threat of titanic, almost godlike beasts impacts every waking moment of human life,” Midhall says. “We have a limited, but still vast setting of magic, dream worlds, and constant mists hiding everything – drawing from everything from Scandinavian folklore to Princess Mononoke.”
There’s more than a hint of The Witcher in there, as Beast’s setting is, at heart, the result of terrifying magical fallout from several parallel realities colliding. “Long ago, humans did something that they shouldn’t have, and broke the world,” Sims explains. “Three different worlds drifted together, and each of these worlds has a spirit world, where the magic comes from,” he adds. And “this unseen world of the spirits… has a heavy influence on things”.
“Heavy” might even be an understatement. The spirits are apparently numberless, “entirely amoral”, ethereal beings who are constantly watching the mortal world, desperate to intervene in it and work their own destructive whims. They’re central both to the game’s theme and its mechanics, because, as Midhall says: “Power and magic derives from spirits, and the promises and pacts – willing or unwilling – you make to [them].”
And they’re not distant, mythical somethings, either; they’re a clear and present force more or less everywhere in the world. “In the art, you see a lot of these faces,” says Sims. “That’s the spirits looking into the physical world; they make an impression on the physical world when they look in.” Midhall, chief painter of those faces, nods along with a fiendish grin. As a player in Beast’s world, he says, you’re “always being watched and always being listened to by forces you barely understand”.
The titular Beasts are the dark apogee of these spirits’ absolute power to corrupt absolutely. Generally speaking, they started out as ordinary, mortal animals, but have imbibed so much supernatural corruption from the spirit worlds that they’ve swollen into physically vast, extremely dangerous monsters. Far and away the most powerful and influential forces in the world, each is also a unique, named individual with its own attendant myth and mystique. “The Beasts themselves are like legendary creatures, known to almost everybody in this world,” Midhall explains. “So [they] come with a lot of their own personality.”
Beast hunting
As keen D&D players will already have clocked, Beasts are also the game’s way of delivering properly heavyweight boss fights, something that’s often a sticking point in TTRPG design. Interestingly, you won’t always have to battle and kill them; sometimes they can be magically contained or even, potentially, reasoned with. But Sims has put work into making each one a distinctive, satisfying, deadly barney for players, if it comes down to blade work.
“Fighting a Beast is a phased combat,” he tells us. “It’s not like a CR20 legendary creature; it’s the equivalent of three CR14 creatures.” Sims and Midhall bring up Dark Souls as an inspiration here, and the Beast fights share more with videogame boss fights than your average D&D endgame battle. “The way the phases work for each Beast is going to be engineered… to reflect what that Beast is,” says Sims. “The action economy for each Beast isn’t even going to function the same way.”
“Maybe this Beast gets more ferocious as they diminish in hit points, for lack of a better way to put it, so their action economy is stacked toward the end of the fight,” he says. “Maybe this Beast gets weaker in the middle and then bounces back, or this Beast is more ferocious in the beginning, but has some kind of real whammy at the end.” Each of them is “one of the biggest things this world has to offer,” adds Midhall, “and it needs to feel big, epic, and legendary”.
So, the odds are stacked against us – but there’s still hope. In this benighted place, we play as Hunters – a tiny minority of humankind who’ve stepped up to fight back against the Beasts’ malign influence, and have made pacts with spirits to gain the power needed to do so. “Normal human beings are at a very low range in power,” Sims explains – so, to have any chance at all of achieving any stunning heroics, Hunters have to sup from the spirit worlds’ poison chalice. And that’s what our player characters’ stories will be all about.
All power comes at a price
All the Beast RPG’s original mechanics revolve around the constant, warping presence of the supernatural in the game’s three-part universe. How you choose to interact with the spirits can open up all kinds of powers, but it can also spell your doom. Key here is the game’s Corruption system.
In this world, says Sims, “nothing is free, everything is a transaction… even if you don’t know it.” The spirits, ever willing to twist reality, might grant you your heart’s desire – but always, he warns, “there is a price to pay later”. If you stray from a pact you’ve made with a spirit, or otherwise anger it, your character gains points of corruption. Narratively, says Sims, this corruption is “spirits sticking to you” because you did a thing, or visited a place, that drew too much of their attention.
Rules wise, corruption takes your chosen character traits (specific characteristics you choose for your Hunter instead of D&D alignments) and jacks them up bit by bit, in increasingly dangerous ways. A ‘brave’ Hunter gets reckless; a ‘thoughtful’ Hunter gets paralyzing anxiety, and so on.
This is a vehicle to tell stories of Hunters “slowly losing their humanity as they uncover more of the world’s secret truths,” says Midhall. Let those corruption points stack up too high, and they become a permanent affliction that manifests physically on your body as shadowy extra limbs or bizarre growths. The more you have, the more regular humans will fear and distrust you. Eventually, you can lose control of your Hunter altogether.
The Beast RPG also builds on vanilla 5e with a whole new class, the Binder, as well as multiple original subclasses for all the regular DnD classes – “at the end, it’ll probably be three [subclasses] for each class,” Sims tells us. All are custom built for Beast’s weird world, but can also be used in other D&D 5e based games.
“The Binder is inspired by the fact that Aron’s wonderful art has mechanical arms on some of the hunters,” says Sims. “It specializes in very methodical magic used through objects, so if somebody has a prosthesis, it’s a magical thing that a binder made.” True to the ‘hunter’ theme, Binders can also set traps – functioning similarly to DnD spells like Glyph of Warding. And the inspiration from prosthetic limbs does double duty. On the one hand, it’s representation for players with prostheses (“You can easily start with a prosthesis if you want to,” says Sims) but on the other, he adds, “there’s also the horror of losing a limb to your highly, highly risky job.”
While the Hunter’s life is certainly risky, Beast does give players another original tool to navigate its dangers: Grudge tokens. An expanded version of D&D’s Inspiration system, these are physical coins the GM (known as Chronicler) hands out to players as rewards for good roleplaying. These can be spent for an in-game boon, the main one being the power to re-do a single, vital dice roll, just like Inspiration. But there’s another, more interesting use too: “Grudges can also act as a compel,” Sims explains happily.
You can offer another player one of your tokens, in exchange for taking an action you dictate that matches one of their character’s personality traits; for example, forcing a ‘greedy’ character to grab an obviously trapped treasure. Crucially, it’s not a confrontational thing. Players mutually agree what happens: they don’t have to do it, but if they want that tasty coin, maybe they take the deal and you play out the resulting drama together. “It’s such a good way of reducing playing ‘optimally’,” says Midhall. “Instead [you] just create drama and conflict and fun stories.”
A kickstarter with teeth to it
The beast RPG is crowdfunding on Kickstarter right now, and there’s exactly the panoply of nerdy loot on offer that you’d expect: plush books packed with Midhall’s haunting illustrations, custom dice, metal grudge tokens, and scary minis, oh my!
But Studio Midhall’s campaign is going a bit further to bring fans into the game’s development. There’s a free, 100+ page playable preview PDF to try the game before you back it, for starters. Studio Midhall is running open play testing as well: starting in 2026, it’ll be sharing public playtest material via its Discord and newsletter, with testers’ names going into the acknowledgements of the final books.
Instead of a massive string of crowdfunding stretch goals to unlock extra gubbins, the Beast RPG campaign is letting backers vote on new stuff for the game during the coming months of final development, from a new Beast, to an extra subclass, new magic items, and more.
And, starting right now, it’s also releasing a free actual play podcast, featuring Sims as Chronicler (GM), letting you dive into Beast’s world without needing to rope a group together just yet. So, if this delve into the Beast RPG has you itching to venture further in, there’s a lot of ways to do it!
Honestly, we’ve got one of the best right here: lead designer Chris S. Sims and lead artist Aron Midhall are joining us in the free Wargamer Discord community for a live video AMA, answering our community’s questions about all things Beast RPG. If you’d like to be there, join our Discord now!