Tabletop Game / Drakkenheim

(aka: Dungeons Of Drakkenheim)

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Drakkenheim is a Dark Fantasy and Cosmic Horror-themed setting for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition published by Ghostfire Gaming, similar to yet separate from their other Dark Fantasy setting of Grim Hollow. It currently consists of three books: the adventure campaign that started the setting called Dungeons of Drakkenheim; a player-focused supplement called Sebastian Crowe's Guide to Drakkenheim; and a bestiary called Monsters of Drakkenheim.

The ruined city of Drakkenheim was the capital of the great empire of Westemär until it was annihilated by a falling meteor made of a darkly powerful magical crystal: Delerium. Fifteen years after the destruction of Drakkenheim, the city is an urban wasteland, enveloped by a toxic cloud of Delerium-rich dust known as the Haze and populated by horrific mutant monsters. With the annihilation of its royal family when the meteor hit, Westemär has fallen into a vicious civil war. Now Drakkenheim is a beacon for treasure hunters, would-be royalists seeking to find some way to restore the fallen royal family, mad cultists who believe that the meteor offers a divine message, thieves, ambitious wizards hoping to profit from the Delerium, zealots seeking to purify the corrupted city, and many more besides.

This game contains examples of:

• Alchemy Is Magic: The Apothecary, a new base class, uses a mixture of magic, chemistry, surgery, medicine and alchemy to enact wonderous feats, including exorcising evil spirits and reanimating the dead. Its specific subclasses are the Alienist (who uses Psychic Powers), the Chemist (a specialist in damage-dealing elemental spells), the Exorcist (specialized in repelling fiends, the undead, and other beings that prey on the mind and soul), the Mutagenist (who uses alchemical formulas to transform their bodies for superior power), the Pathogenist (who weaponizes disease against their enemies with the excuse that this will let them treat the sick better), and the Reanimator (who creates useful servants from the dead).
• Animalistic Abomination:
  • Eldritch Crawlers are on the low end of the power scale, being entities from the Space Between Worlds that resemble a twisted Giant Spider with eerily human-like attributes. Rather than spinning silk, they meld together partial realities, parallel dimensions, and alternate timelines
  • The Thing With The Writhing Tail is a god-like aberrant entity that roams the Space Between Worlds, the Dreamland, and the countless worlds they touch, resembling a distorted gigantic cat. It commonly bonds to humanoids as a warlock patron, but is largely motivated by its own fickle, feline sense of whimsy. The closest thing it has to a driving goal is its desire to eat the Rat God.
  • The Rat God is the dark patron deity of the Ratlings; a cosmic scavenger that devours worlds that succumb to corruption. It resembles an enormous, bloat-bellied humanoid rat with four arms, each of its hands having eight fingers, three heads, with a gigantic eye in the central head's forehead, and so many long, writhing tails that they twist themselves behind its body to form a mockery of six angelic wings. Countless ratling faces press through the thinning skin of its distended belly, squeaking and gnawing at their prison, it perpetually weaves the fingers of its uppermost pair of hands together to form the outline of a rat's head, and a halo of jagged metal shards circles its heads and casts a rain of blood over its scalp.
• Anti-Hero: Fitting its Dark Fantasy basis, players are expected if not encouraged to play morally complex and not necessarily virtuous characters. Players can even willingly risk themselves by playing with the power offered by Delerium, whether by using destructive and often unstable Delerium-fueled spells or taking subclasses that outright embrace Delerium's might — the Path of the Haze Rager barbarian draws on Delerium's ambient corruption for greater strength; the Delerium Soul sorcerer was literally awakened to their power by exposure to Delerium; Malfeasants are wizards who actively study how to use Delerium regularly, and druids of the Circle of Contamination believe they must spread The Corruption to help nature evolve. Even non-Delerium-focused subclasses can have sinister flavors, such as a paladin who specializes in cursing enemies, a doomsday-prophesizing bard, and an apothecary who reanimates the dead or weaponizes diseases.
• Beast Man:
  • Three of the mutant creatures now found in the ruins of Drakkenheim are Harpies, Garmyr and Ratlings, all of whom regard humans as utterly delicious.
  • Dragonborn, a race of Draconic Humanoids, are part of the "mageborn" collective, being descendants from ancient sorcerous dynasties who mated with dragons as part of their Super Breeding Program.
  • Sebastian Crowe's Guide reveals there is a population of assorted anthropomorphic animals in the nation of Terene, who are believed to have been touched by the Old Gods.
• Black Mage: Any character who uses Delerium-powered spells or who takes one of the Delerium-based spellcasting subclasses is dabbling with corruptive forces that could destroy them, but is not necessarily evil. Although, they may be painfully misguided at best considering one of Delerium’s long-term effects include "tearing a hole in reality" that will let in a bunch of invading Eldritch Abominations.
• Body Horror:
  • As Contamination builds in a living creature, they succumb to all manner of horrific and disturbing mutations, such as skin sloughing off, eyes rotting in their sockets, tongues dissolving out of the mouth...
  • Warlocks sworn to the Flesh Patron gain hideously malleable bodies as a result of their patron's magical affinities.
• Corrupt Church: The ''Dungeons of Drakenheim" campaign setting describes both the Church of the Sacred Fire and the Followers of the Falling Fire as capable of terrible deeds fueled by zealotry, though it also states that neither one is perfect and neither is objectively "right" or "correct".
  • The Church of the Sacred Flame has a very heroic background as La Résistance against the Arcane Empire and it worships legitimately benign concepts, but the faithful of the Church have exploited their popularity with the masses from their role in toppling the Arcane Empire to firmly consolidate themselves as a political power, including denigrating and aggressively suppressing the individual religions they now disparagingly lump together as the Old Faith and oppressing the mageborn. It's telling that when the Followers of the Falling Fire were founded, they began trying to capture their former seer and have her burned at the stake for heresy.
  • The Followers of the Falling Fire are considered to be crazy by outsiders for their Sacrament of the Falling Fire, which involves shoving a delirium crystal into their chest. Not everyone who undertakes this ritual emerges from it alive and/or sane. Unlike the Amythest Academy, who wants to find a way to safely use delirium for the good of people everywhere, The Followers of the Falling Fire just want it to exist and propagate for their leader's fatalistic vision of apocalyptic doom.
• The Corruption: Delerium is not safe to be around, and the setting uses a mechanic called "Contamination" to represent how much a being's body and soul are being poisoned by the stuff. A character who reaches Contamination Level 6 transforms into an insane monster and becomes unplayable, and most of the monsters in Drakkenheim are, of course, Delerium-created mutants.
• Creepy Good: Many of the unique subclasses of Drakkenheim are Antiheroic at best, including the fantasy equivalent of mad scientists, people who worship (or try to exploit) The Corruption, apocalyptic fear-preachers, and people touched by Eldritch Abominations. None of these subclasses have moral components, so despite how villainous their powerset may seem, a player character can still be genuinely heroic in temperament and benevolent in ambition.
• Dark Fantasy: Even before the coming of the Delerium, Drakkenheim was a world of moral ambiguity, where the mageborn were oppressed and the zealots of the Sacred Flame were prone to abusing their power in the name of self-righteousness. The Delerium unleashed rampant mutations and madness. And then there's the threat of an invasion by Eldritch Abominations as the Delerium literally eats a hole in reality...
• Dark Is Evil: The Sacred Flame regards all worshipers of the Exalted Darkness as utterly insane and evil, and in fairness some Shadow Cults are devoted to monstrous deities who seek to snuff out the literal and spirital light of creation.
• The End Is Nigh:
  • The Followers of the Falling Fire were founded by a Flamekeeper seer turned doomsday prophet who foresaw Drakkenheim's destruction.
  • Sebastian Crowe's Guide has a Bard subclass called the College of Doomspeakers, which allows players to play a doomsday prophet, with class features heavily focused on terrifying their foes.
• Fantastic Racism: Mageborn are subject to considerable distrust and fear by the general populace, which has been fanned and manipulated by the Flamekeepers. Life for mageborn is controlled firmly by a code of laws known as the Edicts of Lumen, which includes amongst other clauses the strict prohibition of mageborn being allowed to inherit noble titles, to avoid the potential rebirth of the Arcane Empire. The Edicts of Lumen also exist to reign in the persecution of mageborn by giving them equal protection under the law and the means to safely train in and practice the arcane arts.
• Fantasy Pantheon: There are three distinct religions in the world of Drakkenheim, which are touched upon briefly in Dungeons of Drakkenheim and expanded upon in Sebastian Crowe's Guide:
  • The Flamekeepers of the Sacred Flame are the currently dominant religion, a monotheistic faith that doesn't worship a god so much as the concepts of light, life, hope and good, represented by an eternal sacred flame. It was they who led the uprising against the Arcane Empire a thousand years before the present, and it kind of went to their head, as they subsequently began pushing to essentially become a theocracy. The Followers of the Falling Fire are a splinter cult of the Sacred Flame who worship a priestess-oracle and who believe that Delerium must be gathered and consecrated to enact a great miracle that will save the world.
  • The Old Faith is the original religion of the world of Drakkenheim, and is actually more a catch-all term that the Sacred Flame's devotees use to refer to any worshiper of any of the dozen deities who predate the Sacred Flame's church — they didn't and still don't necessarily see themselves as a singular pantheon. These twelve gods and godddesses are: Arwyn the Moon Hunter; Danu, Mother Earth; Dian Cheht the Healer; Gaibhne the Smith; Kromac the Ravager; Lugh the Sun; Morrigan the Witch; Nodens of the Tempest; Nuada the Silver Handed; Ogham the Sage; Phantasia the Dreamer; and Shegorach the Trickster.
  • Shadow Cults worship what they call "The Exalted Darkness", the cosmic counterbalance to the Sacred Flame, and are a scattered array of sects and shadow faiths devoted to strange cthonic deities from the Shadowlands and the Abyss, ranging the gamut from malign to benevolent. The Sacred Flame despises them without exemption, forcing them underground.
• Green Rocks: Delerium is a purple crystal that can be used to augment spellcasting and create powerful magical items... but it's also a powerful corruptive force that induces madness and mutation if not handled carefully. It's also the creation of an Eldritch Abomination and used to weaken reality, allowing it to invade worlds.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The most populous races after humans are their hybrid offspring, most of whom were created during the founding of the Arcane Empire two thousand years before the present, when ambitious sorcerers mated with magical beings such as fiends and dragons to have offspring who would have greater arcane abilities.
• Kill It with Fire: The Silver Order, a militant branch of the Flamekeepers, have decided that ultimately the best thing for the ruins of Drakkenheim is to burn the entire corrupted city to the ground. Their goal is to find both the bones of an ancient gold dragon devotee of the church and the magical relics that can revive him, so he can scorch the city clean. If the party helps them achieve this goal, it destroys the Haze and ends the threat of invasion from the Beyond by sealing the Rift... but Westemär will shatter into a dozen disorganized provinces unless a new unifying king or queen is appointed first.
• Light Is Not Good: Despite the Sacred Flame embodying the concepts of honor, hope and good, its adherents are still mortal, and in particular have a tendency towards self-righteousness and bloodthirsty zealotry. The Followers of the Falling Fire in particular have an apocalyptic creed, and it's spelled out in the epilogues guide that their victory in the clash for dominance over Drakkenheim's ruins will ultimately let the Haze spread to envelop the world.
• Mage Species: The ability to use arcane magic is a recessive genetic trait, one that can also be unlocked by mutation (such as by making a warlock's pact or being exposed to powerful arcane magic, such as Delerium) as well as inherited. The Arcane Empire two thousand years ago was created by the sorcerer descendants of the original warlocks after their patrons mysteriously vanished, who engaged in selective breeding both with each other and with magical beings to create stronger offspring. As a result, arcane magic users and most of the Half-Human Hybrid races are known as "mageborn".
• Mechanical Abomination: One of the Eldritch Abominations fleshed out in Monsters of Drakkenheim is an entity called "The Algorithm"; an enormous mass of wires, tubes, metal, and electricity that constantly shifts and transforms as it drifts through the Space Between Worlds, and which carries out plans for reshaping the multiverse to be more "orderly". None know what those plans entail, but it shifts endlessly through realities in pursuit of it, and its legacy can be seen throughout the Space Between Worlds, where entire planets have been repurposed into mechanical hubs, quantum spheres, time paradoxes, and machine factories.
• Plague Doctor: The artwork for the Pathogenist subclass of the Apothecary is clearly based on the iconic Plague Doctor outfit.
• Plague Master: Apothecaries get access to a number of old and new spells that revolve around infecting others with diseases, but those who take the Pathogenist subclass specialize in weaponizing disease, with an expanded arsenal of plague-based spells and subclass features that make their spell-crafted diseases much more potent.
• Rat Men: The Ratlings are one of the distinct monstrous humanoid factions that have claimed the ruins of Drakkenhem, and are former rats given humanoid stature, physiology and intelligence by Delerium contamination. They're a thinly veiled expy of the Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy, notably in their obsession with collecting (and eating) Delerium and their reverence of a Rat God.
• Real After All: It's noted in Monsters of Drakkenheim that many people who have clashed with the Ratlings believe their Rat God is a collective delusion. It's very much not, and is instead one of the Eldritch Abominations fleshed out in that book.
• Rightful King Returns: Invoked; the faction known as the Hooded Lanterns wants to restore peace to Westemär by cleansing Drakkenheim of its corruption and by ending the civil war, which for many centers around either discovering a long-lost rightful heir to the throne or creating a legitimate replacement that the warring noble houses will accept. A possible outcome of Dungeons of Drakkenheim is the players helping the Queen's Men faction achieve victory. Although the Games Master is given discretion to change who the mysterious "Queen of Thieves" actually is, the "canon" answer is that she's actually Lady Katarina von Kessel, who would have been the Crown Princess of Westemär as the eldest daughter of House Kessel... if it wasn't for her being a mageborn. Her ultimate goal is to recapture the enchanted Crown of Westemär and use two of its three wishes to first resurrect her sister (cast into the Abyss before the meteor fell) and then to erase all knowledge of her being a mageborn from the nation's memories so she can claim the title she was denied by the Edicts of Lumen. Whether or not she'll be a good ruler if she succeeds is left ambiguous, but she is noted to be a very shrewd politician with no intention of being a pawn for either the nobility or the Amethyst Academy.
• The Sacred Darkness:
  • The faiths known collectively as Shadow Cults believe that reality is based on the interplay of two equally important cosmic forces; the Sacred Flame, and its counterpart, the Exalted Darkness. Adherents can be evil nihilists and fiend-worshipers, but can also believe in shadow as an important balance to light.
  • Druids of the Circle of Contamination believe that the mutagenic effects of Delerium are simply part of nature on a more cosmic scale, and so embrace spreading The Corruption as a way to "jumpstart" evolution. Its notable that their power set includes being able to wield contaminated spells with relative safety, and to remove Contamination from others.
• Saintly Church: The ''Dungeons of Drakenheim" campaign setting describes both the Church of the Sacred Fire and the Followers of the Falling Fire as heroic in their goals and outlook, though it states that neither one is perfect and neither is objectively "right" or "correct".
  • The Knights of the Silver Order, which is the military arm of the Church of the Sacred Flame lists Personality Traits, Ideals and Bonds that demonstrate their commitment to righteous lifestyles. These include "We conduct ourselves with honor and respect", "We will never abandon the righteous to torment and death" and "We are oath-bond to protect those who cannot protect themselves from supernatural evil, cosmic terrors and malevolent sorcerers". The campaign setting also states that the order sees their historical oppression of arcane spell-casters in general as a "deep stain on the order's honor".
  • The Followers of the Falling Fire believe that the brightest light can shine from the deepest darkness, and thus anyone can find redemption, and that all are worthy of assistance in doing so. They cast off worldly possessions to live lives of modest reverence in Drakenheim.
• Shout-Out:
  • The concept of the setting, a Dark Fantasy city-state that was annihilated by a meteor of Green Rocks, is very similar to Mordheim.
  • A merchant in the neighboring shantytown of Emberwood Village, Aldor the Immense, is described as an enormously obese, well-dressed, ever-jovial merchant — he's clearly an homage to the Duke from Resident Evil Village.
  • Delerium is sometimes referred to as being "octarine" in color — this is the color associated with magic in the Discworld novels.
  • This isn't the first RPG to have a class that specializes in alchemy-based elemental damage.
• Sorcerous Overlord: Two thousand years before the present, the realm of Westemar was ruled by an array of sorcerer, warlock and wizard dynasties collectively known as the Arcane Empire. After a thousand years of their rule, they became so corrupt and tyrannical that the faith of the Sacred Flame was born and gained legitimacy by marshalling the people to overthrow their mageborn rulers. The ongoing persecution and repression of mageborn is justified as being necessary to prevent a second Arcane Empire from returning.
• Underground Monkey: Whilst the horrors of Drakkenheim come in many forms, there are several enemies who come in so many sub-varieties that they get entire chapters to themselves in Monsters of Drakkenheim, namely the Delerium Dregs and the Trolls.
• Unequal Rites: Wielders of divine or druidic magic are exalted and respected, whilst those who practice arcane magic are shunned, feared and looked down upon. This is especially the case for arcane magic users who don't belong to the Amythest Academy; academy mages are seen as trained professionals who are bound by rules and provide useful services, which can mitigate the fear factor but also makes non-academy mages look even worse. Those who merely "dabble" in magic, like rangers, are given neither overt fear nor overt respect.