Ever since Hideo Mayazaki graced the world with the original Dark Souls, fans have wanted to capture its blend of mythic world-building, melancholy exploration, and heavy metal combat in a suitable tabletop RPG. The official Dark Souls TTRPG that released in 2022 had a rocky launch, a typo-laden first printing, and proved to be no more than a layer of Lothric gilt flaking off regular old DnD 5e – a Dark Souls themed sourcebook for DnD monsters and DnD classes. If that release left you feeling hollow, then cast your gaze at Doomspiral, an upcoming indie RPG that is seeking funds on Kickstarter right now.
Doomspiral doesn’t have the Dark Souls label attached, but the aesthetics, setting, and particularly the mechanics are all heavily inspired by FromSoftware’s oeuvre. The Kickstarter summary promises “a combat system that rewards player mastery, a sprawling and interconnected world that invites you to explore every cave and dungeon, and an enigmatic array of monsters and non-player characters that may help or hinder your Forsaken on their quest to kill the Gods of this dying world”.
The Kickstarter is live until 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm BST on October 16. It promises a roughly 240 page core rulebook available as a digital edition for $27 (£20) or full color hardback for $68 / £50. You can download a free 88 page Quickstart booklet for the game from the SoulMuppet website, which has the core of the rules system and a starter adventure.
The Quickstart guide promises three pillars of gameplay: wide scope travel across the world; exploration of ruins, castles, and dungeons; and tactical combat, which is the game’s “primary focus”. I’ve read through the rules but not tested them yet. The combat system looks like a great adaptation of Dark Souls, with a Stamina system right at the heart of it. This being a tabletop RPG, you’re working with Stamina Dice, not a green bar, but the vibes are the same.
Characters can take multiple actions and reactions in a round as long as they have Stamina to spend – but the amount of Stamina you regain each round is limited by how heavy your armor is. Having a high Strength score lets you deal extra damage if you choose to pour stamina into a single attack with a massive windup, with even bigger bonuses if you’re wielding an unfeasibly large weapon. Dexterity based attacks won’t ever hit as hard, but a high Dex character will reliably do a little extra damage with every attack, encouraging them to take multiple smaller attacks.
Melee attacks don’t have to roll to hit, which sounds counterintuitive, but actually increases the amount of decisions you need to make in combat. As long as the target of an attack has Stamina to spend (and the right gear), they have several defensive reactions available.
Light shields and light weapons are good at parrying, letting you react to an attack by rolling a single Stamina dice and avoiding all damage if your roll succeeds. Blocking with a shield lets you roll one or more Stamina dice, and reduce the damage you take from an attack by the result – the heavier the shield, the more dice you can roll.
You can always choose to dodge, rolling any number of available Stamina dice to try and avoid an attack. The target number you need to achieve on at least one of the dice rolls will be higher the heavier your armor is – so yes, this game has fat rolling. Though if you’re wearing really heavy armor, you can simply choose to tank the hit, and hope your armor deflects the worst of it.
Without testing it I can’t be certain, but this seems like very elegant design – a whole suite of combat options that arise just from your loadout. Then there’s the fact that your armor weight also determines your initiative, and thus how often you’ll get to take actions before the monsters; or the fact that the example monsters in the quickstart adventure have attacks that are more or less effective against specific forms of defense, so there’s no way to solve a single most effective loadout.
That honestly still feels like a pretty lightweight system, with a unified and pretty granular action economy that really cares about gear. You’ve got a full suite of stats which affect your competence outside combat, and are also used to stat gate certain equipment and abilities. And there are plenty of Abilities, from geomancy spells to martial powers, add the standard Ability-based character differentiation more familiar to DnD players.
Despite having a massive focus on combat, Doomspiral can be played without a map or miniatures thanks to the bespoke Position system. Almost all details about the physical positions of characters in combat are abstracted away into their Position score, which also includes factors like how good a character’s footing is, how prepared they are, and so on. And it’s used in a lot of clever ways.
By default, monsters target the character with the lowest Position – but you can put yourself in harm’s way by voluntarily dropping your Position score at any time to save a defenseless ally. Obstacles in a room have a Position score too, meaning you can hide behind a barricade if your Position score is higher than it. To represent AOE attacks, a monster might target both a character and the characters with Position scores one above and one below them – characters need to keep their Positions well spaced to avoid clustering up.
Perhaps my favorite part of all this is the monster activation system. Monsters roll a pool of Move Dice at the start of the turn, with each result unlocking a specific reaction or action they can take during the round. This lets the GM play with a large and unpredictable selection of abilities without lots of book keeping.
This system also manages large mobs of enemies easily: the mob uses the stats for a single monster, but gets one extra Move Die per mob member, and loses one Move Die every time the mob has lost enough hit points to kill one of its members.
I’m genuinely thinking of running this for my Friday game group if they’re game. If it’s great I’ll write a follow up article – whether or not it warrants that, I’ll share my thoughts first in the official Wargamer Discord community. You’re more than welcome to join!
If you’re a fan of grimdark gaming, I highly recommend you watch The Grim and The Dark, a documentary about an indie wargaming scene narrated by the man who played Napoleon Dynamite. Check out my review if that sounds good or deeply confusing.