The Death Knight TTRPG

 

Hello all! This issue of Hearthside talks about the TTRPG I started noodling with in my spare time, talking about specific fantasy influences, as well as the mechanics that I’ve got - a dice pool and what I hope is a fun twist on Lifepaths. 

[This post was originally over on Substack. Now it's here.]

I want to openly share this development process, where I’m at and what inspires me.

I could wax poetically for an epoch about all the games I enjoy, but let me try to stay on target. Recently - and especially with 2023 ahead of us - we’re in a golden age for what I’ll call targeted experiences. Many ttrpgs attempt to cast a broad net to allow for a wide variety of fantasies or experiences (Dungeons & Dragons, but also Savage Worlds, Traveller, etc).

A focused and specific storytelling experience - while limiting the amount of options inherent in the game - can allow for more evocative, streamlined experiences within the creative confines that are set. MÖRK BORG hits a sweet spot (for me) of evocative and focused storytelling - the world is ending, what adventure do you go on? - while still maintaining a lot of options. So many options that it’s spawned CY_BORG and PIRATE BORG and probably even more to come.

But there are even more focused TTRPGs. Games like Wendi Yu's Here, There, Be Monsters s a game about being the monsters in a Monster-of-the-Week style scenario, battling weekly installments of supernatural cops rather than the other-way-’round. Games like GUBAT BANWA revel in the glory of combat, allowing players to use actions and violence not just as a way to interact with the game world, but use violence as role-play itself...violence as drama, tension and resolution.

A common refrain in writing circles is “the scariest thing is a blank page”. Having constraints can help drive creativity, drive game-play forward and help a table of players put their brains together towards driving a central story.

Many people in D&D circles bemoan “on rails” but roller-coasters are on rails, and don’t people really like those? Provided of course, you got on the roller-coaster knowing full-well what you were in for…

Wouldn’t It Be Cool If…

This is all to say, if you wanted to play something very focused and constrained for the sake of drama…wouldn’t it be cool to play as The Nazgûl from The Lord of the Rings?

The Nazgul Collection by Anato Finnstark

That’s the kind of experience I want to create. Inspired by the doom-laden art-punk of MÖRK BORG and The Black Company series of books by Glenn Cook, I’m imagining a ttrpg focused specifically on playing some of the most evocative (and specifically nameless/faceless) villains of the fantasy genre.

There are more examples to draw on beyond The Ring Wraiths. In The Black Company the eponymous mercenaries work with a series of undead wizards of immense power with the coolest sounding name ever: The Ten Who Were Taken. The Taken are almost archetypal “death knights” for me, even as their power comes more from wizardry than just martial power. They’re capable of both, and serve as both allies and antagonists in the series as allegiances shift.

Fanart of The Taken, as well as The Lady that commands them

 

Then there are The Night Cavalry from Elden Ring, a cohort of riders-in-black on horses who more closely evoke the imagery of the Ringwraiths. They are much more nameless than The Taken, appearing only during the night in certain places as optional bosses. FromSoftWare lore is purposefully vague, but my belief is that these riders were once heroes who stood in opposition to The Omen King Morgott, who stacked their bodies high in defense of his city and then turned them into nameless servants to ride out against Leyndell’s foes.

 

Concept art for The Nights' Cavalry from Elden Ring

There are, of course, other examples, but these are the three I want to specifically focus on and draw inspiration-from. A google search of “death knight” only pulls results relating to World of Warcraft, but the idea of riders-in-black chasing the heroes stretches far back into the fantasy tradition.

Thus, the working title of YOU ARE A DEATH (K)NIGHT or YADN for short. Another name will spring from the ether once it’s further along!

Vibes & Assumptions

Great TTRPGs understand their vibe and fulfill it through art, layout and atmosphere, and I think the vibe here could be straightforward. Evil villains doomed to die in service to a Dark Lord, now playable as player-character avatars through a strange twist of fate and now in sudden possession of free will!

What are some core assumptions about this game I’m trying to draft?

Once a pawn, now a player. Imagine if you will: the Dark Lord Sauron has captured the ring from The Hobbits and is 24-48 hours from plunging the world into eternal night. Somehow, the Ringwraiths gain their free will at this critical 11th hour. Acting on instinct, they assassinate the physical embodiment of their master, like all the Senators of Rome each partaking in the assassination of Julius Caesar.

The world still is on the precipice of its end, but now that process is on pause, and the people who made it happen now have a say in the matter of the world’s fate.

What’s next?

Not a game of heroes. You are playing individuals who are scarred by being forced into service by a Dark Lord, and you’ve already got one foot in the grave. You are not heroes; but when the game starts you’re also not necessarily villains anymore.

You’ve killed your own Dark Lord and now you’ve got to decide what to do: align yourself with your (undead) life’s work, take the chance to rebel, or something else? Are you aligned with the few remaining heroes of the piece, or the villains who will leap to your defense?

That’s not to say the players can never be heroic or become the heroes of the piece. If you’re a hero and a bunch of riders-in-black show up and ask to help out restoring the living world, you’d likely be skeptical of their intentions. A TTRPG where the players are storied, villainous death knights and turn to help the heroes would be hard to pull off (but not impossible! That’s what I’d want to do as a player!)

 

I love this semiotic square; don't FULLY understand it, but I want to!

 

Not a vehicle for homophobia, racism or transphobia. This storytelling experience that I’m trying to engineer specifically draws on a lot of older tropes from the fantasy tradition. These are works that hold a great deal of meaning to Grognards and Fascist types. I hate to admit it, but it’s true. And so if I’m going to be drawing on these archetypes and ideas for my own game, I have to confront that and try to head it off at the pass.

And I can’t do that by inventing a way for the Ringwraiths to be progressive figures, but more likely by taking seriously that this is a game that will need disclaimers, guard rails, and to not fall into tropes of the purely mad-and-crazy. Hurt and scarred beyond recognition, absolutely, but this must be a game that doesn’t fall into stereotype over mental illness nor a game that encourages the kind of racial hegemony that Fascists tend to see in works like LotR.

(Which I know is antithetical to the actual works, but the current prime minister of Italy is both a member of the same Fascist party as Mussolini and a LotR Stan. This is not a fringe concern it’s very real).

The drive of the drama (the “juice” if you will) is confronting the horrors you’ve been made to do, deciding what adventure drives your future, and who you’ll become. Not in enforcing or encouraging real world prejudice, not as hymns to purity, anti-modernity and the worst of Christianity; but by emphasizing the post-modern anti-hero and nuance over black and white.

Mechanics In Progress

The mechanics will likely change over the course of this project. Nothing is final.

D6 dice pool, successes on 5s and 6s. Three stats of MALICE, DREAD and GLOOM to represent physical, social and magical prowess respectively. Toying with the idea of everything in the game running the gambit of 1-6, and a PC going through some kind of apotheosis if they get a 6 in each stat. 666, and something wonderful happens. Something monstrous, more likely!

The real juice of what I’ve been wrestling with is the process of character creation. To further capture the fantasy of a mind-controlled evil minion, I want to create a Lifepath system to help characters discover their character as much as make it, to divine through dice what campaigns of evil they went out and accomplished before they got the reigns on their free will.

These are games like Traveller - a scifi RPG by Mongoose Publishing - that have you roll on successive tables to generate a full backstory. This goes beyond just character backstory into turning the process into a kind of mini-game. You pick a career for your fresh 18 year-old character and see if you succeed or fail, what twists and turns happen in your life, and then thread those events together with those of the other players to create an extensive backstory.

A process that many TTRPG players do, but in this Lifepath system it’s baked-in.

This is exactly what I want for YADN (in a more streamlined form)!

Evil On Campaign

You were Chosen and converted into this undead servant, your free will was taken. How did that happen? Was it willing for some dire reason, or were you duped? Had you been dead for a century before being brought back to serve in a world you don’t even recognize? Once your starting stats are rolled, you go On Campaign. There are 3 different types of campaign, evil quests and deeds for The Dark Lord that roughly correspond to the three stats.

The player makes these choices, but the character themselves have little choice. Was your character made to rule over a rebellious barony and crush dissent? Or, were they on the front lines, wading through enemies with overlarge weapons? Maybe they were locked in dusty labyrinths researching spells that would bring The Dark Lord closer to a final victory. A player need only go On Campaign once before their character can choose to begin play. This might reflect a death knight who is “newer” to the crew, a late addition or a replacement for someone else destroyed by desperate heroes.

Or (and this will take tweaking to get right) they keep going On Campaign! A player might want to have a more extensive and storied backstory, or could simply want to push their luck and see what cool stuff they get. Players can get extra Relics, equipment or powers from successful campaigns. They could also fail! Pushing your luck and failing should have consequences like scars and an inability to adapt to stress encountered in the actual game. Characters that fail severely or with frequency will also have the chance to DIE!

 

 

That’s right, DIE! Now, that sounds terrible. For a servant of the night puppeteer-ed by a dark master, death is far from the end for a character. Inspired by Keith Baker’s Phoenix Dawn Command, a character in YADN can die multiple times (6 in total, obv) coming back every time with an increase in power, and having greater access to powers/abilities only available to those who’ve died at least once.

And this can happen On Campaign, in character creation! Like anything, it’s a risk/reward calculation. You make a risky choice and suffer for it. You get a more powerful or pronounced scar, you get the YADN equivalent of a level-up before the game’s even started and you’ve got early access to powers from Beyond Death’s Kingdom. And perhaps most importantly; you’re one step closer to true death.

This creates the possibility of a group of players running the gambit of “lower-level” characters on the same team as “higher-level” (though I don’t think this will be a game with straight-up numerical levels). There’s imbalance there, but isn’t that cool?

Powerful, well-established characters can lead the charge but need to be more careful since they’re far closer to a permanent death. The less-powerful, less-entrenched characters might not be able to get up to the terrifying escapades of their party mates but importantly are able to make last stands and sacrificing bouts of heroism a lot more confidently; because they’ve got more chances to die and come back, and it means they are catching up much faster!

 

My Long Road to True Death

This lifepath system I’m describing is in its early stages, and it’s going to take a lot of fine tuning to get right. It’s got to be evocative, allow some measure of control but be punishing enough that characters can die. Lives are just another resource for YADN characters, and even if players were to shortcut to the end of power in the Lifepath, it just means they’re one death away from having to start over and make a new player character. And that could be fun too!

And while I am clear and open about my influences, I’ll need time to develop this unique setting all my own. I’m more than okay pitching YADN as “wouldn’t it be cool if you got to play The Ringwraiths from LotR?” but at the end of the day this isn’t just a fanfiction exercise. It’s got to have its own boundaries and its own twists on the old forms for players to recognize but keep their interest. This isn’t a game focused on dungeon crawling but “confronting your evil deeds past”, so there have to be kingdoms and empires burned to the ground that YADN players a) can have connections to and b) contextualize relationships

I’m hoping to curate experiences like a player deciding “Okay, we’ve got to ask The Dream Kingdom for aid in finding lost spells to achieve our goals. Problem is, my PC is the great-great-grandfather of the current monarch, and I don’t know if my allies & I will receive a warm welcome”. That’s the juice, right there.

It’s all about that focused experience I was discussing earlier. For those familiar with TTRPGs discussion might be retreading a lot of familiar ground, but I’ve very much enjoyed running through my early processes as I work on what will likely be a long project. Even as I sort out my personal life, work on other projects (like Project Unseen & The Steel Guild), this is going to be the work that I return to time and time again. If you’d like to get more updates on YADN’s progress (upcoming lifepath teasers, digressions on playbooks vs classes, etc) follow this publication.

Starting this series of game-design / speculating / teasing articles is both an attempt to get people excited, as well as to pay homage to some of my favorite online creators. I welcome feedback from other creators because I know how much I have to learn. After all, we all stand on the shoulders of giants!

In my case, perhaps, rotting, horrifying giants.