Lets say we wanted to create a campaign setting that captures the feel of the Dark Souls series

Lets say we wanted to create a campaign setting that captures the feel of the Dark Souls series.

How would you go about it?

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You base it on Berserk.

I'd go for a world similar to Demon's Souls:

>"An ruined ancient kingdom enshrouded by mists. Occasionally a brave soul will enter the kingdom through the mists in search of glory, treasure, or, perhaps, the power to lift his own curse... Few who venture to this accursed land ever make it out alive."

You can then create various zones and fill them with monsters, traps and a handful of NPCs.

The main problem is that the Souls games focus heavily on gameplay and I'm not sure that they would lend themselves well to tabletop roleplaying. You'll have to find a way to engage the players and compell them to explore the world and fight demons.

>You'll have to find a way to engage the players and compell them to explore the world and fight demons.
Architecture. Oh wait, you can't do that either.

You replace the skill-based nature of the game with ludicrous dice checks

Draw inspiration from Vagrant Story

Souls is about skill more than luck, you would use a diceless system

I think the way to emulate the Dark Souls "feel" of storytelling on the table would be to severely prune down what the GM actually says and use a lot of handouts. The GM just describes environments, actions and NPC's. Handouts are your lore, item descriptions etc. We have precedent for that in games, especially things like Call of Cthulhu.

Lol

Well here's an idea.

You make a world in which humans live among the ruins of the Age of Gods, a fabled age a thousand years ago where the gods were physical and walked among men, but then there was some kind of ancient cataclysm and the gods disappeared. Much of the old world was laid to waste and today there are only a handful of civilized kingdoms left. The rest of the world is a hostile wilderness infested with monsters, demons and the undead.

Obviously this setting should not have elves or dwarves, but I might include some Divine Bloodlines instead. People who are descended from the now-disappeared gods.

I think you could work elves, dwarves etc in there - remember the Dwarf skeleton in DaS1?

Like, I think Elves work well as the "descendants of the gods" or something that can be encountered living in the ruins of the Age of Gods - think like the Silver Knights, Darkmoon bros etc, the folk around Anor Londo. Still trying to live in their faded glory.

By not doing it because it's almost impossible to translate to tabletop

Also kill this fucking dark souls meme already

Yeah, that makes sense.

For me the closest thing in tabletop gaming to Souls games would be the Tomb of Horrors because it's a brutal adventure that will most likely result in a TPK and involves very little roleplaying.

>souls games
>skill
Top kek

I'd prefer not to, just because elves and dwarves are so over-played.

I think that people with odd skin colors or other non-stereotypical traits would work better for the descendants of the gods a la the irithyllians.

>Thinks something is overplayed
>Trying to jam dark souls into table tip
Oh the irony

From the handouts, you get information on the world that was - ages of the gods, the linking of the flame, that shit.

From the GM, you get how things ARE. This place is a pile, that ancient hero is an insane zombie etc.

It's funny that you mention Call of Cthulhu because BRP would be perfect for a Dark Souls RPG in my opinion. BRP has a wonderfully deep melee combat system, your HP is a fixed value which doesn't changed (which I much prefer for a tabletop RPG) and most fantasy creatures in BRP will utterly outclass the PCs physically.

You can even utilize the SAN system as a variant Humnaity system. When your Undead dies, they resurrect but lose part of their SAN. If SAN reaches zero they become a Hollow and are removed from play.

dropbox.com/s/gzylzqw7bzop7cp/Dark Souls v.#.#.#, by Kittenhugs.pdf?dl=0

I need to get back to that VS longplay I started watching. It's a shame I never got to play it myself.

Wraith: the Oblivion, except you're a zombie instead of a spooky ghost.

Thats it. Shadow = Hollowing, old gods = old gods. Not many changes are needed.

>Also kill this fucking dark souls meme already
Why bother? It'll just respawn at the last bonfire.

I rather like the ideas that

Posted.

Here's some ideas of my own that I'd like to add. This setting would feature it's own Curse of Undeath, that's similar but works differently. Undead in this setting are a bit more like the zombies in the Walking Dead. As more and more lands are affected by the curse, anyone who dies there will return within a day or two as an undead. Most undead return as mindlessly aggressive creatures called Wights. A few, however, retain enough of their humanity to stay sane, for a time at least.

These undead are more like zombies or the Harrowed from Deadlands. They are extremely resilient to damage and can only be killed by destroying the brain. They can only heal injuries by eating raw flesh (human or otherwise).

Another idea is to have one of the surviving human kingdoms be a theocracy ruled by The Church of the New God or something like that. They claim that a new god has arisen from the ashes of the dead gods and this new god commands total obedience. He's sequestered in his cathedral and only high-ranking members of the clergy are allowed to see him. The Church have sent out their Templars to hunt down as many God Blooded people as they can, and bring them back to the cathedral and an unknown fate.

Naturally, this New God is actually one of the old gods, twisted and corrupted by the cataclysm that destroyed the others. He has to devour the souls of the God Blooded to maintain his warped divinity.

under fucking rated post

I love VS

I'd go in a different direction.
The thing I enjoy most about From Software games is environmental storytelling. Using this concept as a springboard, you can make any setting fairly souls-like.

Here's a noblebright idea I had a little while ago:
A city on a hill filled with streamers and colored ribbons, flags, scraps of cloth. The entire town is a (tasteful) riot of color atop grey stone and brown dirt. The walls near the front gate have been broken, each one an indefensible bore in the city's defenses. Hastily-built scaffolds, crawling with soldiers carrying blocks of stone, surround them. As the terrain ascends, the architecture becomes more vertical -- towers, multi-story buildings, facades, monuments, whatever. At the very summit a once-silver tower has been blackened -- whether from fire or sorcery, you don't know. However, the rest of the town is clean; no fires, no bodies, no damage.

You fill in the gaps.

>You fill in the gaps.
Why? Looks like the soldiers are already filling them in.