Stillfleet Studio, the tabletop roleplaying games company behind The Grit System and the RPGs Stillfleet and the in-development The Something Kingdom, also has the dark and dangerous Danse Macabre on the way.
Danse Macabre is designed by Christopher Pickett, and it promises to be bleak in a fun way! The TTRPG has a pay-what-you-want quick start available already, and is coming to Kickstarter.
In the game, player characters are challenged to survive in a 14th-century Earth that’s been abandoned by death. In this interview with Chris, some of the inspiration for the game comes from a time when undead horrors really were rather freaky.
To start, for our readers who are just hearing the name for the first time, could you give us the elevator pitch for Danse Macabre: Medieval Horror Roleplaying? What’s the central experience you want players to have?
Absolutely! Danse Macabre: Medieval Horror Roleplaying is a historical fantasy TTRPG in the vein of ‘medieval horror’ literature and media. In the game, set in 1390 CE, death has stopped working the way it has before due to a cosmic event which we call the Great Abandonment of Death (or just ‘the Abandonment,’ for short) which occurred 30 years prior in 1360. Now, when a person dies, they are revived within a few hours, each time with a new and grotesque mutation, called maleficia. Each time someone is revived, they lose a piece of their humanity, eventually leading them to become a demoniac—mindless, violent undead mutants who stalk the wilderness of the Abandoned World.
Only quintessence, a mystical energy held within relics crafted from before the time of the Abandonment, allows a person to die naturally. Quintessent relics lay dormant, but light up with a soft, warm light whenever someone sings near them, and a dying person touched by this light is able to pass away naturally, without reviving. Our player characters—called Pilgrims, in-game—are criminals (allegedly – we leave it up to the player as to whether or not their character committed the crime of which they are accused!) who have been conscripted by an organization called the Canticum Aeternum and made to explore the wilds and ruins outside the safety and walls of Constantinople to find and retrieve relics, amassing quintessence for the upper crust of society.
In terms of the experience we’re aiming for, there are so many possibilities! The game is well suited for classic, OSR-like wilderness and dungeon crawls, if tables are looking for a good old hack-and-slash experience. But we’ve also front-loaded the game with highly political factions for players to interact with, allowing for any number of noir plots including espionage, sabotage, and plenty of politicking. But ultimately, the core novum of the game begs the question of what it means to be human, even in a world (and a body!) that has been turned upside down and inside out.
You’re the writer, artist, and designer for this project, which is a monumental effort. How does your background as an illustrator and a tattoo artist influence the way you approach world-building and game design?
Haha, it is quite the undertaking so thanks for saying so! Fortunately, I have an incredible community in Stillfleet Studio that helps me keep motivated and on track. I think that my career as an illustrator and tattooer has led me to approach world building by first figuring out what the characters—both player characters and NPCs—that inhabit the world look like. One of the first things I like to do is to sketch out a character that I think is interesting or weird, then work backwards from that point to imagine what it would be like to embody that character, getting into their head, convictions, and motivations. TTRPGs, after all, are not only moments of collective story telling, but also exercises in embodiment so it’s always felt like a natural starting point for me.
The setting is very specific: 1390 CE, with a focus on Constantinople. What was it about this particular moment in history that sparked the idea for the game and its unique take on undeath?
I’ve long been enamoured with the late medieval period, especially after reading Barbara Tuchman’s seminal A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. The cascading events of the plague, mass peasant revolts, and the transition from feudal economies into early forms of mercantile capitalism already gives you so much interesting material to work with, even without undead mutant hordes!
The take on undeath came about from looking at art and literature of the post-plague period, where you begin to see these truly creepy personifications of death and bodies rising from the grave. Even the name of the book, which is admittedly a little anachronistic, is a direct reference to the genres of visual art, literature, and music that came about as a response to the plague. A lot of the works I was looking through were produced by millenarian Christian communities who expressed a lot of anxiety over corruption of the body and the end of the world, which is one of the kernels of where maleficia and demoniacs come from.
We landed on Constantinople as the specific setting of the core book (though, we’ve imagined that the Abandonment has affected the whole world!) to try and break away from the stock western fantasy setting that you see reproduced in a lot of games, which usually ends up being some mash-up of England, France, and (what would eventually become) Germany. The city’s historical diversity, as the trading port between Europe and Western Asia, and connected to much of Northern Africa by way of the Mediterranean Sea, made it the perfect choice for showing another side of the medieval world that doesn’t receive as much attention in the US and in fantasy gaming, in general.
The game’s inspirations include fantastic titles like Berserk, Castlevania, and the novel Between Two Fires. What elements from these stories did you most want to capture in the gameplay of Danse Macabre?
I could go on and on! All of these titles—and others such as the metroidvania game Blasphemous, Karen Maitland’s A Company of Liars and Mitchell Lüthi’s Pilgrim—do such a fantastic job of establishing a deep, creeping sense of claustrophobic dread, as well as a sense that there are inscrutable, cosmic forces that influence and twist our sense of the ‘normal.’ In the end, though, all of these stories are ultimately about regular people (more or less) with very human failings who nevertheless struggle to live on and, ultimately, find redemption, in spite of the collapse of their world and their own sanity.
I’ve worked to really capture both of these elements in DM, reflected in the Abandonment (which, I should say, we don’t explain, even on a meta-narrative level—the mystery is a part of the fun!) and in the narrative design of the player characters. And, of course, Kentaro Miura and Christopher Beuhlman’s visceral, terrifying treatments of monsters and demons in Berserk and Between two Fires have had massive influence on the design and narrative descriptions of demoniacs!
Characters who die come back with ‘maleficia’ — mutations of flesh and spirit. Can you talk a bit about how this system works? Is it a constant source of dread, or can these mutations become a dark sort of advantage for the Pilgrims?
Yes, they are meant to be both! Procedurally, it’s very simple: when a player character dies, they are revived in 1d4 hours (in-game, of course). The player then rolls on a d100 table to establish which new maleficium (singular of maleficia) they gain. I’ve designed in affordances so that if you roll up a mutation you already have, instead of having to re-roll, the maleficium gains ‘levels,’ becoming stronger or, in some cases, more burdensome. Giving the in-game character time to revive allows for GMs—called Chroniclers—and the player opportunities to narrate how the character’s body morphs and changes as they move through false death.
By dying over and over, players can gain several strange and powerful abilities from their mutations, but it’s certainly meant to be a double-edged sword. Each time a Pilgrim dies and gains maleficia they inch closer to losing their humanity and becoming a demoniac, dependent on how the Pilgrim is ‘statted’ during character creation. On a meta level, this is the equivalent to a character dying in other TTRPGs. But on a narrative level, it’s meant to represent the erosion of one’s own humanity and a descent into madness.
Danse Macabre uses the Grit System, which also powers the sci-fi game Stillfleet. What is it about this system that makes it a great fit for both gritty space opera and grim medieval horror?
I love the Grit System for how flexible, intuitive, and player-forward it is. At its core, the system is simple and rules-lite, but it doesn’t break or get bogged down when you layer extra mechanical or narrative options on top of it. Really, adapting it for medieval horror was smooth and easy for me, just because of its inherent mutability and ease of scaffolding.
Both the Grit mechanic itself—a resource pool that can be ‘burned’ to boost dice rolls and activate powers—and the use of dice types as ability scores really encourage players to take agency in crafting epic, cinematic moments at the table without the overly large swings of a more traditional d20 game. The system can be as crunchy or as rules-lite as you please, making it perfect for any table.
The Kickstarter page makes a point of mentioning the game has ‘100% human-made art’. In the current industry climate, was this an important statement for you to make as the project’s artist?
We take a lot of pride in the work we produce, and in making a point of not using any generative AI in our books. Our studio is broadly leftist and made up of folks who have all made careers in both visual art and writing; careers which—as we’ve seen over and over again in the last few years—are being eliminated by the continuing use of AI in these fields. Rather than turning to platforms like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion (which, let’s be honest, churn out terrible, route one crap), we choose to put art-workers first, and hope that the sentiment and labor that goes into the work we do is appreciated by our audience.
You’re running a living campaign on Discord for the quickstart, Prima Mors. What’s the most surprising thing a playtest group has done so far, and did it influence the final design of the game?
Honestly, something that I was anticipating while going into playtesting was that players would actively choose to die over and over again to gain more powers, as a twisted kind of min-maxing. But, much to my delight, this hasn’t been the case in games that we’ve been running! Our playtesters have chosen to be cautious and smart about how they approach combat and other dangerous situations, really embodying the fear that their characters would feel when faced with the threat of terribly transforming and ultimately losing their humanity.
I’ve also been really pleased with how easily players have been able to establish themselves and their characters within the world of the game. A big anxiety we had early on was that real world history can come off as either overwhelming or boring to players, so we worked hard to make sure that things were familiar but weird enough, with a compelling narrative backdrop for players to grab on to. It’s been really fun to see our play testers get more interested in real medieval history, doing research on their own and coming back to the table, ready to jump back in.
The Kickstarter is set to fund the core rulebook, a ‘Guide to the Abandoned World’, and a zine of relics. Can you give us a tease of what lies beyond Constantinople in the wider world of Danse Macabre?
Absolutely! In addition to the core book and RELIQUARY zine that you already mentioned, we’re also producing two setting source books—The Guide to the Abandoned World and Unsunken: Beneath Paris, both of which will be available to backers on Kickstarter.
In Guide, we’re working with some really fantastic guest writers to offer up vignettes of other settings for the game, all based in real history, and how different people from around the world would interpret the Abandonment. As a teaser, we’ll have chapters on Mamluk Egypt, England, Venice, Thailand, and more! Unsunken is a longer, more in depth supplement that is being written by Stillfleet Studio’s own Wythe Marschall that explores 1390’s Paris and the subterranean, Roman-era mines beneath the city (the perfect place for a good ol’ crawl).
And finally, the big question! Looking past the launch of Danse Macabre, what’s next on the horizon for you and for Stillfleet Studio? Are there any other secret projects you can give our readers a hint about?
Ooh, yes—we’ve always got several irons in the fire. Without spoiling too much… We’re currently working on getting a program off the ground to offer up a series of smaller games and supplements, supporting our preexisting titles like Stillfleet and Blister Critters (and later on, Danse Macabre!), as zines that will be kicking off in the fall of this year. And fans of scifi, in general, and of our flagship game Stillfleet, in particular, should keep their eyes peeled in 2026—Stillfleet 2.0 is coming!
Thanks, Chris!
Quick Links
- Kickstarter: Danse Macabre
- DriveThruRPG: Danse Macabre Prima Mors
