CMON is converting its fantasy board game franchise Massive Darkness into TTRPG content. As part of the soon-to-launch Massive Darkness: Dungeons of Shadowreach GameFound campaign, CMON will also publish two new 5E-compatible books based on the franchise - a Massive Darkness Bestiary and a Massive Darkness Adventurer's Guide.
Massive Darkness is a dungeon crawl board game in which each player controls a character class with unique mechanics and components. The board consists of "light" tiles and "dark" tiles, with characters typically having additional abilities in darkness....hence the name of the game. This will be the third Massive Darkness board game published by CMON, with Dungeons of Shadowreach exploring what appears to be an underdark inspired setting with mushroom creatures, dark elves, deep gnomes, and bugbears as enemies.
The Massive Darkness Bestiary will contain over 50 iconic Massive Darkness creatures and monsters with stat blocks, narrative backgrounds, in-game tactics ,and new species to create your characters. Meanwhile, the Adventurer’s Guide contains "a sandbox campaign setting module including new backgrounds, magic items, traveling rules, a gazetteer filled with locations, hazards, NPCs and hooks, and “Raiders of the Lost Dawn,” an engaging, modular campaign adventure for both new and expert players who want to delve into the depths of Shadowreach."
A Quickstart Guide was also recently published on DriveThruRPG that contains a short adventure, four pre-generated characters based on various Massive Darkness classes, and a preview of several new species that will appear in the new book.
The Massive Darkness RPG books are designed by Max Castellani and Andrea Macchi, with Francesco Nepitello serving as creative director The trio also designed the Assassin's Creed RPG for CMON, while Nepitello is best known for co-designing The One Ring.
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