SoulMuppet Publishing's Doomspiral Brings Dark Souls to Your Table

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Dark Souls is a game that has defined a generation of gamers in so many ways. It’s a game series that bring up memories of constant character deaths, mechanical mastery and a challenge curve like nothing in the gaming space before it. There’s a reason that Souls-like and Souls-lite are two subgenres of game design that remain at the front of our memory.

That’s why TTRPG creators immediately decided to try to convert the video game mechanics into TTRPG mechanics. Game makers like Rowan Rook and Decard, Kobold Press, and even Steamforged Games have attempted to capture the unique ‘spice’ that made Dark Souls the game design pillar it is today.

Now SoulMuppet Publishing, a UK-based TTRPG company best known for Paint the Town Red and Orbital Blues, is stepping into the ring. The company launched Doomspiral on Kickstarter, a game that claims to capture the essence of the game, on Tuesday.

“[Dark Souls-esque games] are something that lots of people love very deeply and very powerfully,” Nick Spence, Doomspiral’s main designer and author, told TTRPG Insider. “And we wanted to capture the alchemy and mechanics that made the games most magical to us and distill it down into tabletop form.”

Those core elements included the dark fantasy aesthetics and flavor, the skill-heavy combat and hardcore boss mechanics, and the profound lore that’s explored through the world’s layered storytelling instead of heavy exposition.

You play as a Forsaken, a “deathless human” whose “cruel fate is to face monumental adversity, either to be tempered into a hero or ground down into nothing.” They will have to travel this broken world, fight the gods, and perhaps play an integral role in shaping the future of this land in its last days.

The game seems like a beat-for-beat recreation of Dark Souls’ core mechanics and appears promising at a glance. Long-time fans of the genre will undoubtedly be pleased. And Cox confirmed that they hope to create expansion content that will allow storytellers to run games in settings like Elden Ring, depending on the game’s success.

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Capturing the Essence of Dark Souls in Gameplay

The lore and ‘flavor’ of the world have been represented before in other TTRPGs, but what about the mechanics? Dark Souls games are known for their steep learning curve. Players often have to go in, fight a boss, fail but learn about how they fight and adapt. It’s a learning process that can feel disheartening at first but becomes this grind that eventually reflects skill mastery and potential in a player’s actions. And the same can be

There will be 36 ‘backgrounds’ that a player can choose upon creating a Forsaken, which they can then build and develop their character through exploration, combat, and growth. Each character comes with preset stats that draw almost identically upon the same stat blocks that the original Dark Souls and its predecessors presented to players.

If you want to fight a boss in Dark Souls or Elden Ring, then you have to slowly learn about how he attacks and hopefully figure out how to predict his attacks so you can block, dodge, or do whatever you can to get out of the way so you don’t get wiped out and smashed into the floor.

 Doomspiral attempts to imitate this cycle of defeat and learning through a preset number of attacks. The “boss” will roll a d6 to determine their attack. For example, a one might be a sword swipe, a two might be a fireball, etcetera. Players will have to pay attention to those rolls to see if they can predict and hopefully avoid those attacks.

Players will have to roll a dice pool based on their stats, swing weapons at their bosses, and try to predict if and when they’ll be hit or if they can use magic or other abilities to excel. If the entire party fails to defeat the villain, then they will be restored at a Tether, a sort of “save point” in the game that allows them to refresh, reconsider their options and have another go. Death isn’t the end for the Forsaken, after all.

Doomspiral encourages a rinse-and-repeat mechanic, allowing players to keep trying to defeat the bad guys and figure out their best strategy (a contrasting approach when considering the lethal combat of games like Mork Borg or the lengthy combat of D&D or Pathfinder).

But for those who don’t want just to hit their head against a wall and pray for success, they can explore the world in hopes of finding the secret weapon needed to defeat that boss. The lore (which Cox, Spence and the SoulMuppet team have gone into excruciating detail over) will present players with clues for how to defeat certain villains in a way that a player’s guide to Elden Ring might. For example, they might find a text describing the boss and how they’re not resistant to fire, or details about how they fight. It’s a complicated world.

It’s also one that’s been created in immense detail with the hope that the Narrator will have as much fun discovering the world as the players. It’s a setting that’s been written in a lot of detail but claims not to make GMs do a lot of the work themselves.

“I’m really excited about all the content available to players,” Cox added. “One of my favorite things about Dark Souls is the lore. It’s building this idea of what a world is and filling all the nooks and crannies with lore. We've tried to make something which, like, at every point of text has that same like, reverence for the idea of setting and what the characters might be doing or interested in, or operating in all those little different spaces that will hopefully make something larger than the lore bloom out of the possibilities of players interacting with and reading about the setting.”

Doomspiral is currently available for crowdfunding on Kickstarter.

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