This is the set-up for Doomsong, an eschatological, pre-apocalyptic roleplaying game of heretical temptation and divine punishment and survival horror. Published by Cæsar Ink., it is described as a ‘Roleplay Macabre’, which places it in the ‘grim dark’ genre. The players roleplay characters who have either committed heresy by accepting a gift from one of the Traitor Gods or have committed various crimes, and sort absolution by joining a guild, or joined a guild to serve. The guilds can be gravediggers’ guilds, philosophers’ guilds, signmakers’ guilds, ratcatchers’ guilds, woodcutters’ guilds, and Wyccefinders’ guilds. Understandably, gravediggers’ guilds have become common since the First Gate to Heall was closed. Members of the Wyccefinders’ Guilds are allowed to truck with the Dread or the Sublime in return for the Occult abilities they grant, but this does not mean they will be absolved. Over the course of the game, the Player Characters will work to achieve their aims, serve their guild, avoid being accused of heresy, and if they do give into the temptation of the Traitor Gods’ gifts, keeping them hidden.
Prior to character generation, the players decide upon the nature of their characters’ guild and what it does. The guild is the focus of the campaign and provides a ready source of NPCs in the form of guild officers (positions which the Player Characters can also fill) and equipment as well as a base of operations. In addition, the players, their characters, and their guild will have access to a calendar which can be used to track days, particularly the holy days and holidays, as well as the progress of any wounds that have to heal, activities that the Player Characters might want to do day-by-day, including cooking, crafting, foraging, keeping watch, engaging in a hobby, recruiting, working on a project, and more. It also includes Advancement, the spending of Experience Points followed by a Player Character training, the result of which is primarily random.
A Player Character in Doomsong is defined by his Origins and his Traits, and the path by which he came to be a member of the Guild. In combat, he also has Toughness and Footing. Toughness represents how difficult it is to harm the Player Character, whilst Footing is expended to defend against attacks. In addition, he will have Protection if he wears armour, which adds to his Toughness. If a Player Character is very lightly defined, the creation process does a lot of heavy lifting in adding depth to him. It uses a lifepath system which first gives him an Origin and then takes him through his youth to adulthood and perhaps beyond, pushing towards the decision to join the Guild. At the end he will likely be presented with a choice between giving himself up to the Pyre or joining the Guild. The former means being burnt as a heretic, whilst the latter gives him protection from the ecclesiastical authorities and a possible path to redemption.
There are six Origins—‘Wild Thing’, ‘Guttersnipe’, ‘Farming Family’, ‘Middle Class’, ‘Wealthy Elite’, and ‘Star-Crossed Babe’ and multiple options in the Lifepath. Each step in the Lifepath process gives a player a choice of traits to pick from, a table of events with entries that will give him another trait or an exit to another step. Some entries determine a particular aspect about the Player Character, most represent jobs of some kind, others might give the gift of a relic, whilst others will tempt a Player Character into acts of heresy that will lead either to the Pyre or the Guild. The process is relatively quick, but definitely easy—and it has to be. Player Characters are fragile. Life in Doomsong is short, brutal, and bloody. In other words, they die fast and they are fast replaced. What is interesting here is how it feels, which is like a cross between the complete career path for a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Player Character and Player Character creation for Traveller, but done at a gallop!
Name: Maub
Toughness 4 Footing 4 Protection 0
TRAITS
Wealdean, Tracker, Swift-footed, Avowed, Ruthless
ABILITIES
Canine Familiar
ORIGIN – Welcome, stranger. The Guild takes anyone seeking sanctuary within its walls. We have high-born and low, the scum of the earth and those who would turn their backs on the dull existence of daily life. Whatever has brought you here will not surprise us.
WEALD – Growing up beyond the border castles brought as much peculiar freedom as it did danger. Concepts like law and ownership were foreign to you.
THIEF TAKER – You were tasked with hunting criminals to the Petty Baronies and beyond.
JUSTICE – A stony voice commanded you use the blood of a foe to daub your hate on unworked stone.
DO YOUR DUTY – Those who join the Guild for selfless reasons are its greatest and most ill-spent asset.
JOIN THE GUILD – You stood at the threshold of the Guild, throwing the rest of your life away to the vagaries of fate. Whether you felt relief or fear when they accepted you, we do not know.
Mechanically, Doomsong is relatively simple. To have his character succeed at a Standard Check, a player rolls a single six-sided die and attempts to roll five or more. A Player Character’s traits, equipment, conditions, and allies can add modifiers, ranging from ‘-1’ and Hindering to ‘+3’ and Defining and Perfect, though the latter is rare. If the task is Focused, then the player rolls two six-sided dice and keeps the highest, but if Hasty, the player rolls two six-sided dice and keeps the lowest. If the result is under the target number, the Player Character has failed with cost; if equal to the Target Number, it is success with a cost; and if over the Target Number, it is a straightforward success.
In addition, a player can choose to flip the Doomcoin (an ordinary coin will do, but the roleplaying game does have its own coin as an accessory). If the result of the flip of the Doomcoin is a Skull, the result of the Standard Check is one step worse, but one step better if result of the flip of the Doomcoin is a Crest. Either way, this is the only means by which a Player Character can achieve a critical success or a critical failure. Further, once flipped, the player keeps the Doomcoin in front of him. His character is now doomed and the Game Master can force the player to flip it on any test, but can only do this once. It then passes back to the Game Master and be picked up by another player. Whatever the result, failure is permanent and the task cannot be reattempted; the cost of failure is permanent; critical results are spectacular; and a Player Character with a particular skill or trait does not fail because of a lack of knowledge or expertise, but because of the uncertainty of the situation.
Combat is slightly more complex. Each Player Character has two actions in a round represented by two six-sided dice, or Action Dice, whilst NPCs have one action and thus one six-sided die. At the start of the round, each player sets his character’s Action Dice according to the actions that he wants him to take. He will set an Action Die at one if he wants his character to ‘Aid’ another or ‘Draw’ gear; at three if he wants his character to carry out a ‘Light Strike’ or hasty attack with a non-heavy weapon or ‘Recover’ and regain Footing; or to five if he wants his character to perform a ‘Heavy Strike’, a focused attack with a non-light weapon or ‘Set Up’ a ‘Standard Action’ or ‘Standard Strike’ whose trigger the player can also establish. There are two Actions per die face and a player is free to choose from them as he wishes, even performing the same action twice, though the same weapon cannot be used for more than a single attack in a round. The Game Master counts up from lowest numbered to the highest, from one to six, completing all of the actions for one face of the die before moving onto the next. Ideally, this is set up with each player placing his two dice on the two choices he has made in the Action Block on his character sheet.
The actual attack roll in Doomsong is not treated as a Standard Check, but a Special Check. The difficulty number varies, being based on the defender’s Toughness, which can be modified by his player or the Game Master spending Footing to have his character or NPC dodge or block the attack. As with Standard Checks, the results be under, equal to, or over the difficulty number. If under, the attacker is off-balance and will lose Footing; if equal, the attacker delivers a graze and will also lose Footing, whilst the defender will lose Toughness; and if over, the attacker will inflict more damage, reducing the defender’s Tougher even more, as well as inflicting other effects, depending upon the weapon type used in the attack. For example, a bludgeoning attack might leave the defender staggered, battered, or with a smashed face, whilst a slashing attack might leave the defender grazed, scarred, or with a sliced face. Flips of the Doomcoin can also increase the result of an attack roll and potentially inflict even greater damage.
In terms of background, Doomsong provides details of the ecclesiastical calendar of Painmye, along with overviews of its geography and social hierarchy, and also the hierarchy of the Church of the Divine Corpse. The most attention is paid to its pantheon of The Immortal and The Immortal’s misbegotten progeny, detailing each of his children and his children’s children and so on, including their prayers and the cults devoted to each of them. Twelve of the Traitor Gods—Chance, Feast, Frenzy, Honour, Hope, Justice, Oblivion, Panic, Perception, Rot, Toil, and Vorcacity—grant occult gifts to their followers and so give the opportunity for the tempted to become a Wycce, an agent of one of the Traitor Gods. Familiars—canine, laceworker, or rat—are the most recognisable of the occult abilities granted by the Traitor Gods. For example, the Sublime called Feast gives his patronage to those that give generously to others, especially of their scraps of food, his familiars being vultures, boars and gowenflies, and his vow being to feed the hungry. In return for feeding the starving, his Wycces learn abilities such as ‘Attuned Forager’, enabling them to sense food stores, ‘Nature’s Bounty’ which cures food of any rot, or ‘Amphora of desire’, by which they can enchant a jug or bottle of alcohol that is so enticing, anyone who drinks it is likely to fall unconscious should he try to stop. All of the abilities have three and many actually have positive effects despite how the Church of the Divine Corpse might regard them.
In addition includes an extensive bestiary of NPCs and monsters. All have their own Action Blocks. Some of the NPCs are simple recruits to the Player Characters’ guild, but others include militia, assassins, duellists, templars, and more. There are stats for normal animals as well as familiars, and also the favoured children of the various Traitor Gods. For example, Laceworkers are favoured by Chance, preternaturally lucky (which means that when the Player Characters are confronted by them, the Game Master can force players to flip the Doomcoin, even their characters are not Doomed, and flip it a second time if it does not favour the Laceworkers) spiders that lay their eggs in partially consumed corpses that can later rise as a Husk of Chance. The Opri are associated with the Sublime Frenzy, birthed by her hatred of the Church of the Divine Corpse after the Ecclesiarch ordered the murder of sister, the Sublime Joy. The Opri hunt the pious and hunger for the bones of the holy, often desecrating churches and villages in the process, whilst their bite turns men into Opri-Falsere, servants that grow to look like the feline Opri with the passing of each full moon whilst dedicating their lives to them in secret. Given that the First Gate of Heall has been closed, it is no surprise that the Unquiet Dead are also detailed. The journey of both body and soul are described in detail, whilst there are descriptions of numerous types of the undead, all pleasingly different to that found in most other roleplaying games. Rounding out Doomsong is a selection of flora and fungi.
Physically, Doomsong is a stunning looking book. Black and white, but with grim and grimy artwork reminiscent of both Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, First Edition and the Fighting Fantasy series. This should be no surprise that its artist also drew the illustrations for Themborne Games’ Escape the Dark Castle: The Game of Atmospheric Adventure and Escape the Dark Sector: The Game of Deep Space. The layout has an early modern look to it in terms of style and feel, whilst the book has pleasing physicality in that its jacket actually doubles as a Game Master reference, whilst the inside back cover actually has a pocket for the Doomcoin! Another interesting design choice is the use of colour, used in conjunction with the Traitor Gods as if they are offering something bright and enticing in comparison to the sackcloth and ashes that is the everyday existence of Painyme.
There can be no doubt that Doomsong is a fantastic looking book, one that reeks of desperation and fear in the face of an encroaching biblical Armageddon. Yet this is both a help and hindrance. A help because it imparts so much of the roleplaying game’s atmosphere and apocalyptic alarm, but a hindrance because it makes Doomsong look like a more complex and more daunting roleplaying game than it really is. It also hides some issues with Doomsong. One is that there is no advice for the Game Master on how to run the roleplaying game, whilst the other is that there is no discussion of what a Doomsong scenario or campaign looks like. There is the sperate campaign, Lord Have Mercy Upon Us, in which the Player Characters are members of a gravediggers’ guild helping to bury the multitudinous Unquiet Dead, and Doomsong leans that way in terms of a set-up, but that requires further purchase followed by long term play and commitment rather than enabling the Game Master and her group to play just from the core rulebook. Yet despite its mechanical simplicity, Doomsong is not suitable for inexperienced Game Masters given its lack of advice as to how the game runs, what a scenario looks like, and what a campaign looks like. Even an experienced Game Master will be challenged to set something up from scratch and whatever that is, it may not be what the designers intended to best showcase their design.
There is a piquant sense of epoch-ending trepidation and existential anxiety to Doomsong. It casts the Player Characters as heretics seeking absolution, but tempted time and time gain with occult gifts that in some cases might actually do some good, more than the simple, extremely fragile mortals that they are, are actually capable of, knowing that to give in to that temptation so is heresy once again. This is the core dilemma at the heart of the roleplaying, one that reeks of dread and despair that might yet be forestalled, but ultimately in Doomsong, leaves it to another book to really show the Game Master how that will play out in the short term, let alone the long term.
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