AttentionHorse
Explorer
I've recently bought Doomsong and it's campaign book Lord Have Mercy Upon Us and I'm absolutely in love with it. It's the grotesque dark fantasy of Mork Borg but expanded to an actual, full and complete sandbox TTRPG. If you love: ridiculously grim worlds with nearly no hope left, doomed and awful characters, disturbing monsters and events, bloody combat, fully open and sandboxy world with dozens of locations - then you'll love Doomsong.
It's honestly a bit sad that such a game with so much love poured into it went by under the radar of most folks, so I'll try to present it to you just as I'm doing with another underappreciated game Wilderfeast. Just as I did with Wilderfeast, I won't get into the nitty gritty of lore and systems, but I'll go chapter by chapter and point out cool things about the game.
Lore and setting in a nutshell is this:
Doomsong is set in Painyme, a world on the cusp of a Biblical apocalypse. The dead are being turned back at the gates of Heall. Heretical gods raise cults against the Church of the Divine Corpse. Vengeful, marrow-hungry monsters hunt priests beneath the Ossein Moon. Weary guilds struggle to keep it all working. Within this book, you'll find everything you need to run your own Roleplay Macabre. Enter the crumbling world of Painyme and drag your friends through Heall.
So yeah, you're playing some terrible people that run a Gravedigger Guild that takes care of folk that just won't stay dead. They're kinda like exterminators, except they die all the time and have to deal with way more terrible things than rats. Fun, right? Doomsong is focused on a gameplay loop of: explore the world of Painyme, travel a bit, survive through random encounters, reach locations with problems and interact with them, survive, go back to your guild, advance, do downtime activities, upgrade your Guild, repeat.
It's crucial to play this game as a pure sandbox, this is where the game really shines, and that's because the world of Doomsong is filled with events and locations that influence one another and change depending on the day of the year or even lunar phase. Calendar of Painyme is filled with various holidays, cursed events, world events, faction and character decisions. Each week has a patron god that changes things even futher. I've never seen a game in which calendar tracking is so important - and fun.
If you think "hey, this game should work great as a Westmarches game" - you'll be happy to hear that Westmarches is officially supported in the rulebooks of Doomsong. Creators have recently released a pdf with additional rules and advice for running Doomsong as Westmarches. I think I might actually finally run Westmarches thanks to Doomsong, it really looks like a ton of fun.
Creating a character in Doomsong is pretty fast and interesting, since it uses a life path system. You roll where you've been born, and then you go through your whole life through various jobs, events, you make choices that shape your traits and conditions, you lose limbs (yes, really) and you can die. Yes, you can die during character creation, just like in good old Traveller. There's only one thing about your character that is certain - you will probably look and feel like naughty word.
System of Doomsong is pretty simple, although it gets crunchy during combat. Your character doesn't have any attributes or stats that have numerical values. You only have your gear (a spade and a lamp + anything that you got from your lifepath), some traits, conditions and abilities. Traits are things that describe your character that might be positive or negative depending on situation - Compassionate, Coward, Duelist, Missing Eye, Silent, Hardy etc.. Conditions are temporary, so things like Sick, Exhausted, Bleeding, Depressed. Abilities are more active and unlock new gameplay possibilities, bonuses (they're very similar to Talents from Forbidden Lands), examples: Merciful Strike, Ambush, Poisoner, Stalwart.
Normal check looks like this: you roll a single d6, add to it any trait that is helpful (+1) or perfect (+2), substract unhelpful ones (-1) and compare to the difficulty level which usually is 5. You then look at the result and compare it to the Effect table:
Simple, makes sense. You may wonder - what's with the criticals? Well, here's where the Doomcoin comes in. Doomcoin is a big metal coin, that the player chooses to flip after a roll. If the result is a crest, then the effect goes down on the table one step. If the result is a skull, then it goes up one step. This is also the only way to get criticals.
For example: the result of your climbing check is under the difficulty, so you will fail it. You decide to flip the coin in hopes of upgrading it to a Success with Cost. You flip it - bang, it's a skull. So what was a simple failure is now a critical failure and you fall and break a leg.
I really like the doomcoin aspect, I always loved TTRPGs that have some element of "pushing it, risking it". It creates awesome moments at the table.
There's a ton of space in the rulebook about magic (called Heresy here), but I haven't managed to get to it yet. I'll be posting here from time to time after when I'll make some progress in reading the books. I'm very excited to run this!
