DOOMSONG RPG + Lord Have Mercy Upon Us (Hardcover Kickstarter Versions w/ Exclsuive Doomcoin!)

Doomsong is a Roleplay Macabre set in a world on the cusp of a Biblical apocalypse. The dead are being turned away at the gates of Heall, giving them no choice but to return to the world above. You must subdue them, regardless of how they feel about the arrangement. Inspired by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, medieval folkhorror, and European mythologies, these two beautiful hardback books are filled with artwork by the incomparable Moritz Krebs (@blackcrabart).

The first volume, Doomsong, includes a brand new fantasy horror system designed by Jack Cæsar. Featuring unique character creation, each player uses one six-sided die and one coin to generate a character’s entire history, forging the events that led them to the doors of the Gravediggers’ Guild. You can go from opening the book to having a character ready for macabre tales within minutes.

The second volume, Lord Have Mercy Upon Us, is a full campaign that takes your unfortunate gravediggers to the lost kingdom of Lethe. Since vanishing from Painyme, it has become sickly, mutated and malformed. The royal family is missing and two psychopathic entities roam freely, causing chaos. One of them, Father Plague, claims to be the Lamentide of Pestilence. To defeat him you must first survive... the plaguescape.

Doomsong: Lord Have Mercy Upon Us is a Roleplay Macabre, a story that puts tense horror at the heart of everything it does, giving GMs and party members alike an unforgettable experience. It is a system that prioritises player choice: will you brave the horrors of combat, parley obscene enemies into tenuous allies, or employ profane powers to twist the world about you? No choice is without risk, and you must weigh your strengths against the frailty of your mortal frame.

You can expect:

• 50+ unique creatures imagined with grim surprise in mind. Players may know that a vampire is weak to garlic and can be killed with an ash stake, but how do you defeat a harvestman? What will distract the Zanvurm?
• 60+ adventure locations designed to be easy-to-use and highly evocative. Each is strange and uncanny in its own way, giving you plenty of material with which to conjure up ominous scenes at the drop of a hat.
• Gameplay that matters. Gravediggers are always one bad decision away from death; quick-thinking and cunning pays dividends. An innovative combat+initiative design ensures the game remains free-flowing and engaging even in the heat of the moment.

Perhaps most importantly, GMs and players alike can expect a deep and rich story that gravediggers directly influence with their decisions. The choice to pursue an event to its conclusion or ferret out an NPC’s secrets could be the difference between defeating Father Plague or falling to his cruel torments.

In the beginning, the Immortal created everything. Almost immediately, They were murdered by the first of Their creations—the Amortines. Since being murdered and left to rot in a shallow grave, the Immortal’s sacred influence has drained from the world. The Divine Corpse works no miracles, answers no prayers and bestows no blessings.

However, wishes are granted every day in Painyme. Supernatural abilities lie within the grasp of all mortalkind. It’s merely an inconvenient fact that true power springs from the lap of heresy. To fulfill your deepest desires, you only have to turn your back on the Divine Corpse…

Across the whole of Painyme, many are finding heresy to be a price worth paying. Cults gather in secret, offering worship to the beings who have proven themselves capable of moving mountains or revealing the future. Individual mortals are granted extraordinary powers, seemingly at random. These people—known as wycces—go on to perform impossible, unspeakable feats, inevitably turning yet more of the devout away from the truth of the Divine Corpse.

The Church will stop at nothing to expunge the threat posed by the Traitor Gods. Their wyccefinders scour the land, burning out any hint of heretical intent. Meanwhile, within the capital city, the Beadsmen’s Guild ensures the populace shows proper devotion by way of tithes and gifts. Most destructive of all, the Templar wage a gruesome crusade against the gods themselves, seeking to rip blasphemy from the sky and tread it underfoot.

Your options were limited: be burnt at the stake for your heresies, go to prison for your crimes, or join the Gravediggers’ Guild. You chose the only one that allowed you to walk free. Now you and your companions roam Painyme, shovels in hand, interring its many dead. The deceased have other ideas about this, but you’re not paid to listen. Orders are orders.

In Doomsong, you play as gravediggers, members of the oldest guild in Painyme. Your organisation accepts anyone: highborn and low, from those skilled in swordsmanship to the very dregs of society.

Creating a gravedigger is simple. You start by discovering your character’s Origin—the social strata into which you were born—and then proceed by following the Life Paths that appear before you. Along the way, you make hard choices and suffer the whims of fate. 

All paths end with you joining the Gravediggers’ Guild. This means that a group of players are always motivated to travel together by shared goals. From the very start of the game, your characters are a team, no matter how different they may be.

With 90+ Life Paths, your character could be:

• A youth who was subjected to foul and heretical experimentations. They stole a profane relic before fleeing into the Weald, where they were injured and then forced back to civilisation so as to receive treatment for their wounds.
• A noble scion that gambled their family into ruin and joined the gravediggers as a way to have their debts absolved. Their literacy will certainly be useful to the Guild.
• A borderborn bandit who heard the whispers of Rot and became a wycce of that Traitor God. When they were discovered by a wyccefinder, their choice was simple: burn on the pyre or join the Gravediggers’ Guild.
• A simple apprentice who carried on their parents’ trade but who always yearned for adventure. The Guild promised them travel to distant lands and sights beyond imagining.
• An injured veteran of a dozen pointless wars, who knows only too well their skills qualify them for but one profession. Do they love what they do? Perhaps, but that comes with its own problems.
• A priest of the Divine Corpse who, in their later years, became a studied phlegethary. The Guild covets those who have mastered the secrets of alchemical flame; it is a powerful weapon against the unquiet dead.

And many others, all with unique traits, abilities and weaknesses!

What’s more, the character creation system is designed to allow for a wide range of player interpretations. You may have worked as a Watchman for many years, but did you like trying to keep the peace? Perhaps you felt more affinity for the criminals than your comrades-in-arms… We just don’t know, and only you can tell us.

Resolving dangerous situations in Doomsong is fast and simple. Players tell the GM what they are doing and which traits, gear, and conditions they have that will influence the outcome. By rolling a few dice, the player will succeed or fail their task, and perhaps incur a cost… but that isn’t where the story ends. 

After any check, players may choose to flip the Doomcoin. If they flip a crest, they have turned failure into success, or success into a critical success. However, flipping a skull could send them spiraling into critical failure. 

The temptation of the Doomcoin sits with players through the entire game, a dark choice for those who dare to risk it all.

Combat is, in a word, impactful. At the start of a combat round, players choose their actions, simultaneously deciding when they would like to act in the initiative order as well as the act they would like to perform. Will you respond quickly, risking failure but allowing you to strike before your foe? Or will you take your time, leaving yourself open to the audacious manoeuvring of your enemy?

Every attack brings with it the chance of injury—yours or your opponent’s—and each skirmish could be your last. Pick your battles wisely, and remember: retreat is a powerful tool.

Of course, what combat would be complete without gruesome monsters to pit your feeble human strength against? In Doomsong, NPCs are given their own special set of actions, ensuring the bear-like Bautenlobbe will act completely differently from the spider-like Laceworkers.

All in all, combat is something to be feared, prepared for, and survived. It is not a sport to be won on a level playing field. Your enemies will not play fair... so why should you?

In Doomsong: Lord Have Mercy Upon Us, we’ve used the same two-page spread layout we used in the award-winning Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and Dark Crystal Adventure Games.

This layout makes it easy to run encounters with minimal time preparing beforehand. It puts the information you need quickly right at your fingertips, ensuring the game flows smoothly even when your players throw a spanner into your meticulous plans. 

Anything we can’t fit onto a page, such as creature statblocks or plot connections to other parts of the plaguescape, are fully page referenced. This allows you to find what you need with minimal effort, allowing you to keep your mind on the story you’re running. This may seem like an odd selling point, but experienced GMs will understand how important a well-laid-out book can be.

Half a lifetime ago, the borderkingdom of Lethe vanished overnight, stolen by a blasphemous entity of untold power: Father Plague, Lamentide of Pestilence. It has long been foretold that the coming of Pestilence marks the beginning of the End Times. So it has come to pass.

Lethe may have disappeared from the world, but it still exists as the nightmarish plaguescape: sickly and cursed, twisted into a monstrous playground for Father Plague. Pox-ridden hares are birthed from rotted eggs, the somnolent Forest of Modren cowers beneath the shadow of a colossal snake, and leeches are one of the few weapons that slow the creep of Father Plague’s sickness.

Your gravediggers find themselves at a crossroads, on your way to an assignment on the nation’s outskirts. You step forward confidently and, without even realising it was there, step over a threshold. You have entered the plaguescape. It is up to you to wrest back freedom for you and your fellow gravediggers—for you are not the only members of your organisation trapped in this world—and re-enter the land of the living.

Your journey will not be easy. Those who begin it are not the same who will finish. Powerful beings in this world oppose you and all you stand for. Your companions will face danger and horrors untold; you will be changed by the experience.

You are gravediggers, and you dig where others fear to tread. Welcome to Lethe. Welcome to... the plaguescape.

Lord Have Mercy Upon Us is full of story hooks, including 3 main storylines that span an entire map and countless smaller encounters, interesting characters, dangerous creatures and mysterious locations. This makes it a campaign book that is easy for GMs to pick up and easier for players to get invested in. We’ve designed it so your gaming preferences drive the manner in which stories unfold.

• A plague doctor meets you on the road, as though waiting for you specifically. He tells you of the futility of your guild's work, thinly veiled threats dripping from every sentence. Then he offers a way out of the plaguescape, if only you bring him a silver hammer that was lost long ago. 
• You come across an inebriated man, held captive in a set of stocks. He rants and raves, but has in his possession a book you have been seeking for some time. Do you simply take what you need, or delve deeper into the circumstances of his predicament?
• You enter a convent full of silent, blindfolded women. Atop their altar sits a strange symbol made of twigs and cloth. Every fibre of your being screams that heresy is a afoot, but your compatriot is wounded. Unless you find help, they are liable to perish.
• You discover a large gathering huddled around a bear pit. The audience jeer and call for you to join them, but the creature in the pit simply stares at you with solemn eyes.

Your players can pursue any of these stories and many others. If they find themselves in the mood for something else, we’ve made it easy to switch to other threads. This means that no one will ever feel ‘forced’ to pursue a particular story; at every juncture, you are given the tools to quickly and smoothly change gears.

The plaguescape is a land that has been ripped from reality and moulded by infernal hands. Who’s to say it only connects to the realm of Painyme? 

Lord Have Mercy Upon Us contains advice and rules for using its contents in other systems and worlds. It is extremely narratively flexible: you can run the full campaign using another system’s rules and background setting; or, alternatively, you can use our ‘Everworld’ rules to drag various members of the party into the plaguescape at the GM’s convenience.

Father Plague’s penchant for selecting individuals to torment makes Lord Have Mercy Upon Us the perfect bundle of connected one-shot adventures, which players can pursue either piecemeal or as a whole. 

We plan to introduce PDF conversion support for the following systems:

• Dungeons and Dragons 5E by Wizards of the Coast
• Forbidden Lands by Fria Ligan/Free League

Want to see your favourite ruleset on that list? Let us know and when the campaign ends, we’ll run polls to see what people are most eager to see!