Dark Souls, Berserk and Castlevania inspired the classes in this horror RPG
At Dread of Night.
A new tabletop roleplaying game features character classes inspired by the likes of Dark Souls, Berserk and Castlevania.
The Dread of Night is an upcoming tabletop RPG about the land of Gradina, a fictional world that is being tormented by various beasts and horrors. As a party of monster hunters, the player characters will be tasked with exploring the world and destroying the creatures threatening its people.
Based on the Powered by the Apocalypse gameplay system – which is also used for tabletop RPGs such as the Root RPG and the upcoming Avatar Roleplaying Game – Dread of Night has players working together to solve mysteries, find clues and eventually seek out the location of the local monsters. The arrival of creatures to Gradina is recent enough that people still do not entirely understand their behaviours and how to deal with them, meaning that the players will need to discover the weaknesses and strengths of each creature before facing it.
Every new threat that the party faces will have a time-limit in which they’ll need to destroy it. The longer the players take to fulfill their challenge, the more collateral damage will take place and the stronger the monster will become. If the group does not manage to neutralise the threat before the time limit is up, they’ll be directly responsible for the consequences.
When creating their characters, the players will need to consider their party composition and whether they’re covering enough of their bases in order to survive the challenges ahead. Each class – or playbook – in Dread of Night is inspired by a different thing. For example, The Accursed Ember takes inspiration from the Dark Souls series of video games, whilst The Condemned is a playbook that takes cues from the manga series Berserk – by Kentaro Miura – with The Exorcist sharing similarities with certain characters from the Castlevania video game franchise. Other notable inspirations include the video game series The Witcher, The Lord of the Rings novels by JRR Tolkien and Kimetsu No Yaiba, a Manga otherwise known as Demon Slayer.
Several gameplay mechanics featured in the horror TRPG are unique outside of Powered by the Apocalypse, such as Evasion – which reduces attack rolls by a certain amount – including luck as an attribute that players can invest in, haunt points that the game master can use against the players and skill mastery that allows players to increase their modifiers beyond a certain level.
Dread of Night was co-created by Taylor James Guccione and Joseph Fredrick Richardson, with editorial contributions from Oliver Vargas and Jade Catthey.
The Kickstarter campaign for The Dread of Night is live until November 13th, with a pledge of $45 (£41) getting backers a physical copy of the book in February. Alternatively, a pledge of $20 (£18) will get backers a digital copy of the RPG in December.