Hidetaka Miyazaki is a noted fan of Dungeons and Dragons, and it’s hard not to see the influence of the classic game in the Dark Souls series. It only makes sense that the tabletop RPG world would start learning from FromSoftware and incorporating their ideas at the table, completing the cycle of inspiration. Doomspiral, the latest RPG from Soul Muppet Publishing written by Nick Spence and Zachary Cox, is heavily inspired by the soulslike genre, advertised by them as a love letter to Elden Ring and Dark Souls.
Different people come to soulslikes for different things, whether it’s the tense and challenging combat or the mysterious worldbuilding, and this game does a great job of trying to cater to all those audiences.
Players are the Forsaken, journeying through a dying world trying to reforge the Loom of Fate, either to help rebuild the broken land or put it out of its misery. After waking up on the beaches of Saltcrag, your party heads out on a quest to defeat the gods themselves before approaching the Great Foundation. It took me a while of reading the book to figure out exactly what sets Doomspiral’s brand of dark fantasy apart, but the basic premise strikes a good balance between giving you a plot hook while also leaving room for the players to discover the world through play.
Character creation is relatively simple, especially for a game that ends up being this crunchy. There’s a table of 36 starting backgrounds, and a roll of 2D6 will determine the first and second digits of the number to pick off the list. Each of these backgrounds has a brief descriptor, giving you an evocative hint of the game’s lore, along with starting values for all seven of your stats. You’ll also get starter equipment and abilities to help define what your character can do, along with a choice of a memento that can add a little flavor to who your Forsaken was.
You might begin the game as a Prophet of Tar-Valam, wielding a Herald’s Spear and a Sacred Psalm of protection, or maybe a Swamp Hunter, whose Skinning Knife and Chain-Link Net make him an ideal trapper for all things that lurk in Miremount. It perfectly simulates picking your starting class in Elden Ring, but also allows you to improve the character as you see fit, leveling up with Thread collected from enemies and customizing your playstyle as you collect more weapons and abilities.
Stamina and Position Create Tense, Tactical Combat
If you are attracted to soulslikes because you are a build sicko who likes to tinker around and find different ways to play, the combat in Doomspiral might be for you. There’s a lot more going on in this game than other TTRPGs I usually play, but the rich system really simulates the risk-reward nature of their video game inspirations. Two of the biggest concepts that support this in the game are stamina and position, which both have big effects on what you can do on your turn.
You will have a pool of stamina dice when you enter combat, and those will all start as Ready. Based on what you are doing during your turn, you will roll a certain number of those D6s to determine the success of your action, then move them into the exhausted pool. At the end of each turn, you’ll regain a certain number of stamina dice based on your armor’s weight class. These dice are also used when rolling reactions to attacks, like dodging, parrying, or blocking, so making sure you’re not left high and dry without any dice in your Ready pool is key to making it out of a fight. It’s a really clever system to mimic that feeling of the back and forth dance of going all out and backing off to catch your breath.
You don’t fight on a grid in Doomspiral, as you would with many other tactical combat games, but you instead have the abstract concept of Position. This represents how well you control the space and how advantageous your position is compared to the enemy. It’s both a resource to be spent and an indicator of being in the same space as another character. Certain position values, which can go up to 12, can have obstacles that affect your character, and repositioning within battle is crucial to winning. Certain actions cost position, representing your character using their situational advantage to gain the upper hand. It’s another clever wrinkle that doesn’t require you to measure out range squares or look at lines of sight on a battlefield, boiling complex ideas of the fighting space into a single number.
The Different Types of Ancient Powers
There’s a huge list of consumable items that can aid you in battle, each with its own utility. These also have great little item descriptions that again make you feel like you’re opening up the menu in Dark Souls and reading about something new you just acquired. Many times, these items are about inflicting one of the many statuses on you or the enemy, which change the flow of combat.
There are five different types of abilities laid out in the Ancient Powers section of the book, all for the players to learn throughout their journey. Arts of War, which cost position, are martial actions about using your weapons and shields to gain advantage in battle. Geomancies, which can be cast a certain number of times and have an intelligence requirement, fall into many different magic categories, from attacks to defensive actions. Forbidden Names of Flame are powerful attack spells, but have negative conditions that will happen to you if your roll doesn’t meet certain conditions. Sacred Psalms are holy spells that are powered by your Faith stat for a wide variety of effects. Finally, Decoction Recipes are alchemical potions that are prepared when you rest at a Tether, the game’s version of bonfires.
It’s honestly a lot of options at your fingertips, which can feel a bit overwhelming if you’re not used to this type of complexity in your tabletop RPGs. Since abilities are locked to stats and not classes, anything you find or learn while exploring could possibly be incorporated into your build. The amount of options can feel like both a blessing and a curse at times, so make sure this is something your group is interested in before diving in. Either way, it does a great job of translating the mechanical depth of the video game into tabletop form, without relying on the more ‘classic’ framework of Dungeons & Dragons-style combat.
Why Death Isn’t a Punishment in Doomspiral
Death isn’t the end in Doomspiral. Just like in a Dark Souls game, if a player character dies, they will find themselves respawned at the last Tether they rested at. Resting at a Tether will also heal you and reset the enemies, allowing for things to remain challenging throughout as you progress. The respawning is nice, allowing the game to feel difficult without being punishing, but again this is something you want to make sure your players are into.
If they are looking for a soulslike tabletop game, then I’m guessing they are, but most traditional TTRPGs work best when the players feel the threat of death looming without ever actually running up against it.
To challenge your players, there’s a wide array of enemies included in the book, which range from dangerous knights to strange creatures. GMs have some of the heavy lifting taken off of their shoulders by the way they run these enemies, as each of them has a move table included. At the start of each round, the GM rolls a pool of move dice, and the results will dictate what the particular enemy can do that round. This gives them a mix of actions, reactions, and stances that change from round to round, taking away a lot of the burden of trying to optimally pick what attack the creature should do at any time.
There are some really great Dark Souls-style weird guys in here, like the horrific Ghoul Star or the Unflame Lamplighter, making Doomsprial’s combat feel more flavorful than your standard goblins and orcs.
Doomspiral is available to purchase digitally from Soul Muppet Publishing.
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