Heeding the siren call of Doomsong

I am rather fond of dark fantasy. From early exposure to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to a more recent obsession with Dark Souls and the like, cast me in the role of a scrappy underdog in a vast, uncaring world of unfathomable horrors, and I’ll be happy. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the dungeon punk OSR stylings of MORK BORG and its assorted expansions and spin-offs would be right up my alley, but on the whole they leave me cold. There’s something inherently disposable about the whole thing that I find off putting – throwaway rules for throwaway characters. It all feeds into an intrinsic nihilism that totally misses what I enjoy about the genre and RPGs as a whole. It’s not that the scrappy underdog isn’t important, it’s that they very much are. Regular folks can struggle against the darkness and, in doing so, they become heroes. On the mechanical side of things, I find it lacking in substance. I want meat on those bones, whether it’s there to drive stories, develop characters, provide tactically interesting combat, or some combination of all three.

Caesar Ink’s Doomsong clearly isn’t throwaway. Set in a broadly medieval fantasy world undergoing the opening stages of the apocalypse, it tells the story of the Guilds – organisations that are granted leave to recruit pretty much anyone they like, condemned criminals and heretics included, as long as they perform their duties. Contained within two hefty hardbacks – one for the game itself, the other being Lord Have Mercy Upon Us, the first of several planned campaigns – these handsome, dust-jacketed tomes appear to be entirely monochrome at first glance, but flicking through either one will reveal splashes of colour which you’ll quickly realise correspond to the various forms of heretical magic in Doomsong’s world of Painyme. The books are full of little touches like this – clever combinations of form and function that speak of genuinely thoughtful design. The dust jackets, for example, serve as play aids with the campaign book featuring a random encounter table on the right-hand side, although there are no numbers listed. Instead, the table is designed to line up with the edge of the book, with each location page containing the other half of the table, giving each place a bespoke encounter table without any space wasted on redundant repetition.

Of course clever design alone isn’t enough to make a good game, however after just one session, I can say that Doomsong more than justifies the care and attention put into its presentation, being an absolute pleasure to play from the word go. I’ll even go on record as stating that Doomsong is the most fun I’ve ever had during character creation for an RPG, and I was the GM!