Inspired by ancient Near East civilisations and early 2000s dark fantasy art, Dark Descent is the latest ambitious Kickstarter from Mammoth Factory Games. The project offers a 5E mega-campaign where characters must delve ever deeper into a monster-filled abyss to cure themselves of an eldritch sickness.
We have an interview with Daniel Smith, Mammoth’s Head Writer, but let’s first take a quick look at the Kickstarter, which runs to October 27th.
On offer are two books and over 400 pages of dark TTRPG content. Mammoth promises;
- A dark survival campaign setting
- 8 subclasses
- 8 subterranean races
- 40+ Underdark battlemaps
- 50+ Infeneral spells
- 70+ Monsters
- 50+ Profane magic items
- 6+ Dark fantasy adventures
- 200+ STLs
- A new blood alchemy system
Backers receive rewards from pledges as low as $1 because a dragon STL is on offer, and there are numerous takers. Why? Mammoth is known for its STLs.
At $50, backers get both the Dark Descent sourcebooks and the Exiles of Deephold 5e Campaign and Bestiary.
Then, doubling up, at $110, the books become hardback (and backers get the PDF too), which means shipping needs to be calculated later. There’s also a deluxe digital tier at $110, which avoids shipping (unless you add physical extras) and offers all the digital content, including one VTT conversion or the 200 STL mega pack.
After that, there are tiers at $159, adding dice and cards as well as a DM Screen, $259 adding battlemaps, more dice, handouts, STLS and minis and $299, which gets your name in the book.
The top tier is $499, which gets all the core content from previous Kickstarters but not (don’t be greedy) all the possible previous stretch goals.
Blood & Magic: Daniel Smith introduces Dark Descent, a forbidden tome for 5E dark fantasy
The art for Dark Descent has a very distinct, dark, and atmospheric style. What were some of the key inspirations behind the look and feel of this project?
A lot of the architecture and monster design draws from a few real-world influences, primarily civilizations of the ancient Near East. The Descent of Inanna, a Sumerian poem, is actually one of the main inspirations for a lot of the campaign, and there are quite a few monsters – like the soul-eaters, for example – directly inspired by passages from it. There’s also a lot of influence from the kind of harsh, rough-looking dark fantasy art that characterized a lot of projects in the 1999-2002ish period – I think this style is sort of epitomized by how MtG mostly looked at the time. Finally, for a lot of material, we kinda just leaned into the perception a lot of our patreons had when the first versions of Dark Descent’s adventures had come out, and went metal with it. The books are full of demons and black magic and blood rituals, so we thought, hey, why can’t our DM screen just look like a Venom cover?
You’re introducing “Infernalism and Blood Magic” as new mechanics. How do you approach designing new magic systems for 5e that feel fresh and balanced?
Generally, the first thing we really dig into when thinking about this is what fantasy does this actually serve? Like, what are the things related to this idea or theme that players will actually want to play, and DMs will actually want to weave into their games? The idea from there is to identify what about that fantasy 5e doesn’t do, or doesn’t do how we’d like it to, and try to work that into a consistent system. That’s the most important thing to get right – balancing and testing is a lot of trial and error that comes later, but before any of that the focus is on ensuring that the new mechanics feel like the fantasy being offered. When designing infernalism as a magic school for example, we wanted to emphasize the idea of trading life for power and risking your soul to access incredible power, so the spells tend to do weird things with Hit Points, and often have an inherent risk to them. We decided to really emphasize that last part by having every infernalism spell have a separate ‘Push’ mechanic – a way for the caster to amp up the spell in some way by sacrificing Hit Points and risking nasty effects that can sometimes become permanent.
Dark Descent is a great name. What can you tell us about the story and themes of the campaign without giving away too many spoilers?
Quite a bit, actually. The real spoilery stuff is in the finicky details. Overall, the campaign is about desperate survival. The characters are all exiles or criminals, whether falsely accused or not, that have been sent down to live out the rest of their lives in Deephold, a sprawling underground cavern complex that extends deep into the earth, and is full of scattered relics from an ancient fallen empire. The upper levels of the place have been turned into a sort of hands-off penal colony by its rulers up above, who want the wealth and notoriety that comes with retrieving all these valuable artifacts from the depths, but don’t want to do it themselves. The real call to action comes into play when, early on, the characters are infected by something called Voidstone Sickness – a kind of eldritch radiation poisoning that is a fairly common way to die in Deephold. There’s no way to cure it save, maybe, a rumoured remedy way down below, so if the characters ever want to go back up, they’ve first gotta go all the way down. Things spiral from there, and there’s a lot of weird politics among the criminal under-society of Deephold, but at its core the campaign is about having to delve down to survive, both physically and spiritually, with the characters often having the choice to embrace some pretty nasty powers and allies to increase their chances at living to the end.
The project includes both a 400+ page tome and over 200 STL files for miniatures. Do you see this combination of detailed physical books and high-quality 3D printable files as the future for tabletop RPGs?
Maybe part of the future for tabletop kickstarters. There’s already been a few projects like this, some of them our own. The power to offer an entire library of miniatures, fully tailored to an adventure module, without actually having to box them all up, is one that will only get more useful as 3D printing materials advance. We’re at the point where quite a few wargames are already using some of the more durable types as the primary materials for their games – I imagine there’ll be more as the technology progresses.
For readers who are new to Mammoth Factory, what makes Dark Descent the perfect entry point to your work?
Well, for one, it’s our highest quality product yet – we’ve put everything we’ve learned from our previous kickstarters to practice here, and we think it shows in terms of overall coolness. But aside from that, this is definitely a great jumping on point if you’re looking for something you haven’t seen in 5e before. Dark Descent is our first major project set in a world that stands almost entirely apart from standard 5e. The books are really focused on offering a setting and experience that does away with a lot of the standard lore and tone assumptions for 5e, and leans hard into being dark fantasy. There’ll definitely be more to come building upon the same universe, so if you like the tone of the books, this is pretty much the optimal point to hop aboard.
With a monthly release schedule and now a major Kickstarter, how does your team manage the creative workflow and consistently produce such a high volume of content?
With great difficulty! Seriously though, a lot of it is a matter of diligence and caring that comes from being really invested in what we’re creating here, and the rest is knowing how to trim fat and prioritize carefully. A lot of ideas have to be killed to make the monthly output possible – though, considering that there is a constant need for new ones, they often return in unexpected or slightly updated forms. In a way the timeline we work with is a real help in making sure that there’s no oatmeal in our releases.
What does a good tabletop RPG look like to you? What are the key ingredients for a memorable gaming experience?
For me it kinda comes back to what was said earlier about serving a key fantasy. The most important thing is that a game knows what fantasy it wants to serve, and makes sure its mechanics are designed entirely around delivering that fantasy. This doesn’t necessarily mean a game’s concept has to be hyper-focused. A lot of games have a relatively broad scope in terms of the stories they want you to tell with them, but their class or character mechanics are laser focused, and demonstrate an understanding of what players actually want to feel like when they’re engaging with those fantasies. Conversely, I can’t count how many games I’ve tried over the years that are more concerned with delivering standardized RPG options than the ones that would really fit the fantasy they’re going for. I’m also a bit of a crunchlord, so if there’s a ton of character building options and paths, that’s almost always a plus for me.
Thanks, Daniel!
Quick Links
- Kickstarter: Dark Descent
- DriveThruRPG: Mammoth Factory.
