Pizza And Overdue Bills: Dead Beats Brings Demon Hunting To A Grimy 1990s

You are a demon hunter. The pay is bad. The perks are nonexistent. Your 9--5 is hazardous. But no one else is doing the work, so it's all on you.

Dead Beats is a tabletop roleplaying game by the author of fishing sim Rod Reel And Fist, vampire migration game The Dawnline, and gothic fantasy tactics crawler Over War. It paints a picture of a grungy 90s where heaven and hell are empires on the doorstep of our reality, and in a Cold War stalemate where neither can afford to act openly.

Dead Beats takes its inspiration from works like Devil May Cry, Evil Dead, Chainsaw Man, and Constantine: Hellblazer, focusing on how—outside of their very narrow windows of competence—the characters of those stories are screw-ups. They're unlucky. They're poor. They scrape by and do the right thing anyway.

In Dead Beats, 1-7 players take on the roles of down-on-their-luck weirdos and brawl it out with the forces of hell. The game uses a deck of cards instead of dice, and it uses those cards for crunchy, tangible combat where players take 5+ actions per turn.

See the campaign on Kickstarter

Interior art for this project is by HODAG (@HODAGRPG), and is all hand-illustrated. Cover and graphic design are by Jonas Wittmann (@Cognoscor). HODAG's original drawings are available to those who would like to purchase original black and white TTRPG art.

Dead Beats' campaign has already passed base funding, and is heading towards its first stretch goal as of the time of this writing.

The campaign ends on May 3rd. Delivery is planned for December the same year.

Support the campaign on Kickstarter