A couple weeks ago, someone on Veeky Forums asked to see a Dark Souls homebrew I mentioned I was working on. It wasn't ready then, but its more or less ready now.
This is that homebrew.
Its obviously incomplete. It needs more weapons, more enemies, and rules for things like covenants. But there is enough here to run a couple low level sessions with, and so far its worked out pretty well. So think of this like a proof of concept.
We often see people saying they want to run something like Dark Souls around here, but there really isn't any good system for it. I hope this will be that system for anyone that cares about that sort of thing. You obviously can't do a 1:1 experience for how the video game works around a table, so Fires Far Away doesn't try to. Instead it takes the ideas that I felt the mechanics of the video game tried to capitalize on, and found either similar concepts or replacements that use the strengths of a PnP game in their place.
I hope the user from before finds this thread, or someone else here finds this useful.
Otherwise, dark souls thread. Those are always cool.
Seems pretty cool user. I don't know about calling DR "Absorption" when you could call it Damage Reduction, especially since exactly what it does and is described as. I'm not sure about running actual combat in it, but it seems worth a shot. I really like what you've done with the storytelling and putting the worldbuilding/creative onus on the players. That's cool. Same with the mapping out and more easily clearing stuff after you beat it. Nice.
Reading more about the enemy combat, instead of "enemies roll a number of AI dice equal to their interrupts" just have it so they have Xd6 to determine their actions that turn in the formula. On the Asylum demon, 1d6 AI dice but rolling 2d6 is a bit confusing. All in all though, please keep working on it, it seems fun.
Ryan Brooks
Thanks! I know the current system is likely nothing perfect, but I hope there is enough good here that people want to see more of it. And its Dark Souls, its not like it needs to be perfectly balanced fights anyway. Whats the worst that can happen, you accidently TPK your players?
Glad you like the bonfire stuff.
> just have it so they have Xd6 to determine their actions that turn in the formula.
I'm not sure I understand. Can you give an example?
Ethan Wood
So how would covenants work in a game like this? Are they just organizations, so its like belonging to a guild? Maybe give you special objectives which if you pull them off you get covenant specific rewards for?
Seems like the sort of thing where it might be best to describe what the covenants are lorewise, their goals, and what kinds of stuff they might have to hand out as rewards but to not lock them into anything specific and leave it up to GMs to fill them in to their own campaign as they see fit.
Ayden Scott
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Dylan Thompson
I always wanted to run a Dark Souls themed game, from what I read it seems pretty fun; it only uses D6 right? Anyway, I'd be glad to read more of it and to see progress made on it, do you have a blog or a platform other than tg to check for progress?
