Indie RPG design studio Storyteller’s Forge is coming to the UK Games Expo and bringing 5e settings Festival of the Forgotten: Revelations of the Dark Carnival and The Black Ballad.
There are a few reasons why Storyteller’s Forge might make waves and why there might be Hilton bar chat during the expo. Storyteller’s Forge is a band that has collaborated with DiAmorte before. Yes, the metal band! The studio also sells The Red Opera, which Apotheosis Studios previously published, until a rather nasty drama.
Kindly, co-founder and author Rick Heinz agreed to an interview and tackled our questions. But, gosh, I lowballed the one about international travel!
Can you introduce Storyteller’s Forge to us, not just in terms of who you are but also the stories you create and the systems you use?
ST Forge is an indie game studio focused on creating immersive and metal worlds! Our primary creative drive is mixing music, full compelling narratives, and novels together into badass worlds. Our initial start was in D&D 5E, with the Black Ballad & The Dark Carnival, but we also play in Shadowdark, Dread, and unique systems. We also have full-length novels like the Seventh Age (Sarcastic Urban Fantasy about the end of the world) and The Chronicles of the Crossing novel series tied to the worlds we create.
Music however, is near and dear to our heart, and we’ve worked with the heavy metal band DiAmorte, Riot Games, the Budapest Symphonic Orchestra, and V is for Villains thus far to score all our campaigns and create soundtracks for our world. So this way, when you are storytelling or reading, you’ve also got killer music to listen to.
You’ve a busy convention and events schedule through May and June, including a trip to the UK Games Expo in Birmingham. It’s great to have you, and I wondered why you had made the decision to invest in international travel.
Well…it doesn’t hurt that our chief editor, Courteney, happens to LIVE in Birmingham. (Or specifically, just outside of it). So we’ve been to the UK loads. Plus, nerds live in every country of the world.
You’ll be showing off The Black Ballad at booth 3A-658. Please tell readers a bit about it.
The perfect campaign to run after you TPK your party! It’s actually our flagship property. We are going to make your players question the impact of resurrection magic in fantasy settings. For 100 Gold Pieces, why would a tyrant king ever need to change his behavior if he can just keep having his followers resurrect him? Remember, the villains in D&D also have access to Raise Dead.
It’s a full 10-chapter campaign, and setting guide, designed to plug into any homebrew campaign, with multiple choice endings, new classes (not subclasses), and even showcases how we include social stat blocks alongside the traditional 5E monster statblocks. But what makes the book truly special, is we got to work with DiAmorte, Symphony X, and Mike Pittman from Riot Games to compose a full custom album for the project that’s included in the book. We also had voice actors like Carlos Ferro (Dom from Gears of War) narrate all of the in-character letters for extra immersion.
As of June 7th, we just released 4 full-length novels set within the Sunless Crossing, exploring other tales within the universe!
Your webpage about The Black Ballad makes it seem both terrifying and mysteriously alluring! I also noticed, though, that you mention the design team’s connection to The Red Opera. That’s a game with an interesting history. Did it influence The Black Ballad or even the founding of Storyteller’s Forge at all?
Absolutely. It’s how we got started. We are the original authors of The Red Opera before we brought it to publication through Apotheosis Studios. After many trials, tribulations, and of course—a very very public explosion of TTRPG news, all of us creators that worked at the previous studio and banded together.
We wanted to prove that we were the creators behind the scenes that were caught up in the stories, and I pulled everyone together to form ST Forge studios. The Black Ballad, is the spiritual successor of the Red Opera and shows just how far we’ve come.
At the time, the rights to the Red Opera were still owned by Apotheosis, but as of October of 2024, all rights have been returned to us, and we filled the last remaining kickstarter elements of that Tarot Deck to put some good will out in the world. Now that we have the Red Opera back, everyone who loved the city of warlocks will be happy to know a reforging is in the works – and the metal shall live on.
What’s next from Storyteller’s Forge?
Currently we are working on The Dark Carnival: The Festival of the Forgotten which is in crowdfunding right now. Behind the scenes, Black Ballad: Shadowdark is coming soon, along with The Red Opera: Reforged for 2026.
We also have some new short-story horror games coming with Seventh Age: Dread, alongside the next novel in the series. Of course, we’d be a fool not to mention the creation of a brand new game engine Call to Power that we’ve partnered with Hedron to create Cthuhlu Dreamnt releasing early in 2026.
We are still writing campaigns and storylines for other game studios, as that is our studio’s strongest suite. Personally, I can’t wait to dive into Eldritch Automata as an official studio campaign book and write stories of mecha vs eldritch horror angels in order to break players minds and let them destroy cities.
Thank you, Rick!
A special thanks to Vortex Verlag for sponsoring Geek Native’s coverage of UK Games Expo. You can meet them at stand 3A-758 and find out about the exciting new Serenissima Obscura crowdfunding campaign.
