I’m a rabid Dark Souls fan, and I’ve been itching for a set of tabletop RPG rules that can capture that distinctive blend of relentless combat, perilous exploration, and ambiguous mythology ever since I played the original over a decade ago – and 2022’s official DnD Dark Souls game really didn’t scratch that itch. Enter upcoming indie TTRPG Doomspiral, an original game with a set of quickstart rules so compelling I immediately backed the Kickstarter, and wrote to the creative team at SoulMuppet publishing to ask for an interview. They were happy to oblige – and speaking to lead writer and designer Nick Spence and project lead and supporting writer Zach Cox, I discovered a similar combination of Soulslike fever, and dissatisfaction with the existing options on the market.
“Nick had been brewing the setting for what would become Doomspiral for years”, Cox says. Cox and Spence are longtime collaborators “who have worked together on tons of different games and genres over the years”, and they’re both “huge FromSoft fans”. “When Elden Ring came out we literally played the entire main campaign in co-op together (every boss and every legacy dungeon”, Cox explains.
It’s easy to see how a shared passion and long history of collaboration could turn into a new game – but Cox tells me that the “inciting incident that spawned Doomspiral” was “spite based”. “Around the time [that Elden Ring released] there was a big licensed release of a similar videogame turned TTRPG that didn’t land as well as we wanted”.
Cox is far too professional to name and shame the game in question, but I’m not above having a guess – the official Dark Souls RPG came out within months of Elden Ring, and it was a major disappointment.
The Dark Souls RPG released with rules writing errors that should have been caught in editing, a major source of community upset around launch. For my tastes, the more fundamental problem is that it’s based on Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, crunching down Dark Souls’ open-ended character customization to fit the format for DnD classes, with a spread of DnD monster statblocks for the creatures. I like DnD 5e well enough, but the parts of it that are like Dark Souls – exploration and grounded combat – are a small part of the overall design, and become even smaller as the party levels up.
Spence says that when he first started seriously considering how to make a soulslike TTRPG, “there had already been a good few TTRPGs that I considered to be doing the Soulsy tone very well (like Rune, Runecairn, and Wraithlands to name a few!)”, but “no-one had quite nailed down a good game-feel for it”. He “wanted Doomspiral to nail the back-and-forth, risk-reward, resource-management aspects of the games, so those mechanical aspects had to come first”.
I’ve written a separate article based on my time with the Doomspiral quickstart rules, and I’m really impressed by how SoulMuppet has handled it – the soulslike combat system was a big factor in me backing the Kickstarter. Every character has to manage stamina – as dice, not a green bar – and their stats, weapons and armor influence how they have to approach attacking, defending, or even just catching their breath. That’s crunchy – but then rather than track where characters are standing in combat using a map, how well prepared they are is abstracted into a numerical Position score that can change during combat.
Spence says “Position and handling Stamina were definitely the key components to adapting the Souls formula”, and “formed the backbone of Doomspiral’s system that everything else builds off”. “When you’re playing a Souls game, a lot of times being locked on to an enemy almost focuses the game into just being you and them, where the only real elements that matter is the dance of position and stamina”, he explains.
Trying to replicate that with a traditional, grid-based combat system means “you wind up with lots of fiddly little moves, or something that ends up feeling static”, Spence says. Conversely, “abstracting it too much loses that sense of constant motion and back-and-forth”. So the Position score “was a kind of middle-ground on that spectrum”.
But Position is also another resource to manage. “Keeping Position high usually keeps you safer” – since enemies usually target the character with the lowest Position – “but that safety is always relative to your friends”. And “Position is also a resource that you want to spend on abilities, or need to spend on dodging attacks, and then if you want your Position back, that’s something that you need to spend Stamina Dice on, but that’s also somewhat random”. It’s an interwoven system that offers strategic depth, but can be tracked entirely in the theatre of the mind.
A combat-centric RPG is only as entertaining as its combat encounters are, which makes it vital for Doomspiral to be accompanied by cracking campaign supplements, or very good DM advice. “One of the big things we wanted to nail for this project was having a complete package, where exploring the campaign was as fun and intriguing for the GM as it is for the players to go through it”, Spence promises, “So everything you need to run a full campaign of Doomspiral [will be in the core book] to dig into from the get go”.
“Part of the joy of Soulslike games are the encounters, from mobs of enemies, to giant bosses to weird little guys waiting to push you off a cliff”, he adds. “We’ve packed Doomspiral with a great selection of all three, and more”. You can download the quickstart for free right now, but he promises that what you’ll find in there is really just a baseline compared to what’s coming in the core book – “some of the encounters waiting in the campaign get scary and bonkers and weird and wild”.
For all that it’s inspired by Soulslikes, Cox says Doomspiral is “definitely not as hard as any Soulslike computer games – there’s no bosses in the game that we intend to take 20-something attempts and we don’t envisage ever making you need to grind for levels”.
But they promise that “Doomspiral’s character creation and setting is filled to the brim with a frankly bewildering array of weapons, armour, embellishments, consumable items and abilities”. Enemies should be tough, but will “have an understandable play pattern with gear and behaviours that you can use to mitigate its strength and exploit its weaknesses”.
Lastly, there should be plenty of Soulslike weirdness on offer. “If we didn’t manage to include all our favorite Souslike aspects, we wouldn’t be doing it justice”, Cox says. That means “labyrinthine dungeon maps and confusing NPC questlines were an autoinclude”. The Shrine Keeper equivalent is the ‘Eidolon’, and “there’s at least three Patches analogues: Motley the Crow, Industrious Eddie and Sketchy Gren, all with their own quirks and curiosities”. I wonder which one is prone to kicking you into pits?
Since this game doesn’t have access to From Software’s shaky netcode, it doesn’t have any systems for invading other player’s games – though Cox says “I have plans!”. But there is a system inspired by Covenants, in which you can pledge yourself “to powerful beings, and by making statements about what’s best for the world you can end up with some incredibly interesting endings to a campaign”.
The Kickstarter campaign for Doomspiral runs until October 16. If you’ve got your own recommendations for great TTRPGs that play like Dark Souls, let us know in the Wargamer Discord community. And you’ll probably enjoy this article, which makes the case for Mörk Borg as a fantastic tabletop system for playing games inspired by Elden Ring.