Russ “Morrus” Morrissey

Just running around a maze being chased by ghosts.

While eating pills.

Yeah. We've got Mega Man, New World, ATM, Pac-Man, Sifu, Spelunky, The Outer Worlds, Unreal Tournament, and Warhammer 40,000. Wow. Wow. Okay. Two of those are tabletop role-playing games.

It's not out yet. Sorry.

December the 10th. Sorry, I missed that key bit of information. It was... Yeah, December the 10th. You've got a couple of months, three months, four months, some months, a number of months that is plural. I will put the pitchfork and torch down.

I have heard a rumour, and I don't know how true it is, that the D&D one features Tiamat. Nice. I don't know how true that is.

you're not getting a lot stronger the strongest female character yeah yeah right I think that might be the news mm-hmm

Tell us, if you will, what is a shadow dark?

because darkness and light is very much a theme of the game so um just for those i think most people listening would have tuned in already knowing who you are and what what this game is but would it be fair to say that your game is kind of an osr style game with some more modern trappings to it is that a fair description oh absolutely that's what i would call it too Okay, excellent. Lucky guess.

So you kickstarted this, what, last year, was it? Yeah. And did over a million dollars. That's incredible.

And we mentioned earlier in the show, it's one of the only two Kickstarters to have done that without including a ton of miniatures and plushies and T-shirts and pins and badges and stuff. So it's just for the game. So that's a singular club of only two. Only two people have managed to do that.

Well, I think it definitely speaks to how some of these Kickstarters, people are fans of maybe Avatar, or they're fans of maybe Brandon Sanderson, and they're collectors of all this stuff. This speaks to how people, I think, really wanted that game, that specific experience that you're offering. So I was kind of thinking, how would you describe that?

Say to a 5e player who maybe hasn't played many other games, how would you describe how that experience differs to your standard kind of 5e style game?

Mm-hmm. yeah um because i i kind of noticed that obviously it reminds me very much of earlier editions of dnd and that's obviously you know deliberate um what one thing that really striked me is the the visual style of the game and the layout choices that you've made sort of topics having their own page each each topic is like one or two pages with a big kind of bold header and um

Just flicking through the book, just from an ease of use in a player navigation point of view, I think that's a really, really strong choice. And it's thematically strong as well as being incredibly useful. So I was kind of thinking, how did you come to that style of layout and how it looks and the kind of iconography that you've kind of gone with?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, same with me. Yeah. So can you speak a bit about the element of light I noticed in the game? So one of the concepts of the game is like a minute in the game is a minute in real time and vice versa. So the game runs in real time unless you specifically say, okay, an hour is passing while you rest or a day is passing or a week is passing or whatever.

But otherwise, a torch will last an hour and that will be an hour of real time at the table.

So...

So you've got a minute to take your turn sort of thing.

Yeah, so it's not like it's six seconds. If it takes you five minutes to go around the table, then the round is five minutes.