Daniel (@dungeondive) sits down with the Tempest Tome Games team at Dungeon Siege West — a designer, the writer who built the world, and the lead playtester — for a long conversation about a game that took three Kickstarter attempts to fund.
The setting lands somewhere between cyberpunk and deco futurism. A mega-corporation runs a think tank that has found an artifact in the Kurdish mountains allowing travel into the land of the dead; it fences off the site, evicts the locals and imports occultists, archaeologists, soldiers and scientists to work out what can be sold, weaponised or used to topple a government. You play the second wave. The first mission was a total disaster with one survivor — the inventor of the cryptonaut suits, who came back unable to explain what she had met. Opposing you are death goddesses defending their own realm, and the writer is blunt that this makes the human players the invaders.
The lore arrives through play: roughly thirty-five Knowledge of Death cards, one per victory point, branching through an encounter book by character class and tying into a novella.
On the art — stark black and white, drawn from first and second wave black metal sleeves with a little Alien in it — the designer’s job was making several illustrators look like one hand while keeping walls, pits and floors readable across a table. Minis were cut on cost; the 2D was the point.
The team argue their striking art gets people to look, but a genuinely replayable game is what earns the shelf space. Has a game’s look ever sold you on something that turned out to be hollow?