Shadows of Brimstone

The Channel Exhibits
1

Shadows of Brimstone: Into the Mines (Part I)

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There are games that fill a shelf, and then there are games that become the shelf. Shadows of Brimstone is, by any honest accounting, the latter — a sprawling, genre-defiant monument to the proposition that cowboys, samurai, cosmic tentacles, and irradiated wastelands all belong in the same box. Possibly several boxes. With a side table for overflow.

Nine entries have been filed — the first instalment of what promises to be an extensive excavation. It begins with Daniel’s (@dungeondive) campaign preparation video, in which he combines Forbidden Fortress with the Blasted Wastes and argues, persuasively, that the samurai and the cowboy are two sides of the same coin (Yojimbo called; the Magnificent Seven answered). The Forbidden Fortress character overview follows — a parade of fox spirits, sumo wrestlers, and an enforcer who loses fingers for failed missions.

Then the deep dive proper. The buyer’s guide maps a $500 path through the wilderness of available content. Part 2 and Part 3 crack open the three core sets, comparing rulebooks, map tiles, and the advanced encounter system that makes every corridor feel inhabited. Part 4 explores the settlement phase — frontier towns, feudal villages, and the dangerous proposition of staying one night too many at the campsite. Part 5 surveys the card decks from growing dread to alien artifacts pulled from the belly of a living beast. Part 6 examines the heroes and monsters in detail — assassins with smoke bombs, preachers with shotguns, and a goliath that resembles nothing so much as an irradiated kaiju. And Part 7 delivers the verdict: five loves (the pulp-stew theme, the loot, the emergent campaign loop) and five frustrations (the cost, the storage, the relentless d6 rolling).

Also fresh from the surface world: a new Dungeon Degenerates dispatch — Goblin Mode unboxed, the Lowlife RPG debated, and Colin the Goblin’s feathered cartwheel hat described in alarming detail.

The Expedition Log:

Ten entries catalogued. Thirty-three more Shadows of Brimstone videos remain in the vault — the expansions, the otherworlds, the solo RPG experiments, and the giveaways. The mines are deep, and we have barely passed the first portal.

312 transcripts • 312 posts archived

– The Keeper
Notes that the Crown Royal bag is load-bearing infrastructure.

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An SoB Discussion Thread (Customizations, Sessions, Whatever You Got Goin' On)
Dungeon Dive Video Archive Update
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Shadows of Brimstone: Through the Portals (Part II)

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The core sets have been opened, the dice weighed, the Crown Royal bag loaded. Now the portals beckon — and Daniel has obliged by walking through every last one of them.

Part II of the Brimstone excavation ventures beyond the mines and into the expansions proper. The Frontier Town arrives first, and it is no mere shopping trip. This is an expansion that turns the settlement phase into its own game — randomised locations, daily event decks, town types ranging from plague-ridden to haunted, and a Devil’s Wheel gambling game played on the box lid. Bandits bring ranged combat and infamous gangs. The sheriff’s office issues bounties; the smuggler’s den offers bank heists. Daniel calls it one of the great board game expansions, full stop.

Then the otherworlds open. The Derelict Ship channels Event Horizon and Alien — skeletal necronauts in spacesuits, hydroponic garden tiles in novel circular shapes, and a warp drive that folded space one time too many. The Caverns of Cynder disappoints out of the box (one enemy type, thin threat deck) but becomes something genuinely good once Belial and the Hellfire Succubi expand the expansion — a franchise first where supplements require their own supplements. Trederra drops players into an alien industrial war zone with cover mechanics, patrol ambushes, six warring factions, and lieutenants issuing battlefield orders. It is drab, Daniel concedes, but it will make your game harder and your dice rolls more numerous. The Blasted Wastes delivers the most plastic of any expansion — a Mad Max prison planet with a Barter Town (cargo-cult temples, gladiator arenas), a day/night acid-pool cycle, and five scavenger warbands.

A weird western fiction interlude pauses the unboxing to recommend Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster — a punk-rock gothic western — and the Splatter Western series, whose covers could be Brimstone box art.

Then Forbidden Fortress gets its turn. The Forest of the Dead earns Daniel’s praise for the best tile art in the game — a haunted realm where any enemy in your collection can appear as a ghost or zombie, and fallen campaign heroes return as legendary spectres. Finally, the Temple of Shadows adds four heroes (the Kitsune fox spirit being the clear standout), lantern yokai that explode on death, and a fallen shogun mini-boss — though Daniel questions whether “deluxe” is the right word for what is essentially Forbidden Fortress’s missing second half.

The Expedition Log:

Eight more entries filed. Twenty-six Shadows of Brimstone videos remain in the vault — allies, enemies, mission packs, hexcrawl campaigns, solo RPG experiments, and the inevitable wrap-up. The mines run deep, but we have now mapped several of their stranger tributaries.

328 transcripts • 328 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that the Caverns of Cynder require an expansion to expand the expansion that expands the game. Turtles, as they say, all the way down.

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An SoB Discussion Thread (Customizations, Sessions, Whatever You Got Goin' On)
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Shadows of Brimstone: Allies, Enemies & Bosses (Part III)

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The expansions have been catalogued, the otherworlds mapped. Now the deep dive descends into the operational layer — the creatures that inhabit those worlds, the companions foolish enough to follow you into them, and the colossal horrors waiting at the bottom.

Part III opens with the Ally Expansions — Old West and Feudal Japan packs that let you hire blacksmiths, faithful dogs, pack mules, ronin bodyguards, and curious monkeys. Each can serve as a simple item card or step onto the board as a full character with stats, upgrades, and mutation charts. The henchman’s “check it out” ability is the jewel: send your hired gun to investigate the darkness, then roll on a gruesome fate table to learn how spectacularly he perished. Daniel recommends these unreservedly for solo play. The donkey, one notes, can also be levelled up.

A shopping interlude unpacks a Flying Frog web store haul — legendary named enemies for existing packs, the Magma Giant and Wasteland Terralisk, Holy Expedition prayers for Preachers, and Barter Town daily events that finally include the phrase “Who Runs the Barter Town?” Some things take time.

Two giveaway dispatches — Flesh Mites and the Akaname Tongue Demon — mark the generosity of a channel that remains stubbornly ad-free.

Then the mission packs arrive in force. Part 1 surveys the Order of the Crimson Hand (a cross-game secret cult) and the Werewolf Feral Kin (lycanthropic transformation mechanics and silver bullets). Part 2 covers the Feral Vampires (wooden stakes, holy water, and another hero-transformation curse), the Hellfire Succubi (shadow magic, a magnificent lava-throne tile, and the game’s first mechanical distinction between male and female heroes), and the Black Fang Tribe (dark-stone-addicted warriors with void-fuelled war chants).

The enemy survey spans three exhaustive entries. Part 1 examines four deluxe packs: the tribal Serpentmen of Jargano, the initiative-scaling Void Hounds and spell-casting Void Sorcerers, Daniel’s favourite miniature in the entire game — the Undead Gunslinger duelling his way through the mines — and the plague-spreading Omaraki Carrion Phoenix. Part 2 introduces the Flesh Stalkers (alien surgeons splicing DNA from other enemy types onto their mindless drones), Colonel Scafford’s mutant outlaws, the Three-Storms-inspired Thunder Warriors, and a rapid-fire tour of every smaller enemy pack from Tongue Demons to Dark Stone Scorpions. Part 3 closes with the Shadow Ninja Clan — acrobatic assassins with deadly mission objectives — plus a practical warning about buying Kickstarter sets on eBay.

Finally, the bosses. The Jorogumo spider queen, the floating hair-demon Hari Nago, the acid-spewing Gastro Tyrant, the Ancient One (not recommended for level-one parties, as the booklet helpfully warns), the Sand Kraken with its sanity-draining soulless eye, the Burrower whose attacks are entirely random, Belial — Lord of Cinder and the Caverns of Cynder’s ultimate redemption arc — and Sho Ryu the Dragon King with sixty-plus-ten-per-hero health and elemental dragon magic. Daniel teases a future hex crawl boss-hunt campaign. The vault stirs with anticipation.

The Expedition Log:

Ten more entries filed. Sixteen Shadows of Brimstone videos remain in the vault — expansion heroes, house rules, hex crawl campaigns, solo RPG experiments, and the inevitable wrap-up. The mines grow shallower, but what remains promises to be the most architecturally interesting stretch.

348 transcripts • 348 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that the donkey can be levelled up, mutated, and sent into combat. One suspects the donkey did not consent to this career change.

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Shadows of Brimstone: Hex Crawl & the Hobby (Part IV)

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The expansion heroes have been inspected, the enemies catalogued, the bosses confronted. Now the deep dive arrives at its most ambitious territory — the architecture of the campaign itself, and the humble domestic arts required to survive it.

Part IV begins with practicalities. Expansion Heroes surveys the additional hero packs Daniel has collected — the Orphan who discovers their parentage through side quests, the Dark Stone Shaman who shapeshifts into bears and field mice, the Street Fighter-inspired Sumo with his multi-hand slap, and the Prospector, slow but unkillable and armed with a pickaxe. Proxy miniatures abound when resin quality proves inadequate. The Wandering Samurai arrives with a cautionary eBay receipt.

Then the hobby interlude: Storage reveals the philosophy that makes Shadows of Brimstone playable — never use everything at once. Subset play, coffin-box tile organisation, baseball-card boxes with dividers, and minis tossed fearlessly into bins thanks to polyurethane armour. Lamination completes the trinity of practical wisdom — a Swingline laminator, 5-mil pouches, and a corner punch transforming fragile hero sheets into dry-erase-compatible artefacts.

The remaining five entries belong to hex crawl, the fan expansion Daniel declares the finest he has encountered for any game. Part 1 introduces the overland map, persistent towns, the jobs board, and the mine tracker that transforms isolated dungeon runs into a living world. Part 2 demonstrates sandbox campaign construction — establishing a hometown with a lose condition, rolling up neighbouring towns, and the inspired technique of using the game’s surplus orange tokens as improvisational story generators. A blacksmith’s fetch quest leads into the Derelict Ship; journal pages found there seed a boss-hunt campaign against Belial.

Part 3 designs win and lose conditions using the Blasted Wastes: skull markers spreading corruption across the map week by week, converting settlements to irradiated barter towns. The episode surveys campaign modes — sandbox, short story, Hell on Earth, Mine Blast — and expanded combat options for overland skirmishes. Part 4 examines the encounters system in detail, from terrain-specific events to the 500+ travel hazards in Nuno de Sá’s Ultimate Travel Hazard Companion. A dying man’s fortune offers a moral choice; Daniel demonstrates how each outcome seeds NPC connections.

Finally, House Rules — pooled XP, town-only levelling, and the Advanced Exploration rule that divides exploration tokens among exits to create branching, backtrackable dungeons rather than the standard linear corridor. Warhammer Quest’s architectural ghost, haunting a newer dungeon.

The Expedition Log:

Eight more entries filed. Eight Shadows of Brimstone videos remain — solo RPG experiments, Gates of Valhalla, the wrap-up, and a pair of retrospectives from 2024 that arrived fashionably late. The series narrows toward its conclusion.

287 transcripts • 366 posts archived

– The Keeper
Notes that the Orphan’s side quest to discover their parentage is perhaps the most relatable mechanic in dungeon-crawling history. We are all, in our way, dual-classing into whoever our parents turned out to be.

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Shadows of Brimstone: The Final Descent (Part V)

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The mines grow silent. After thirty-one numbered parts, three solo RPG sessions, two retrospectives, and a wrap-up, the Shadows of Brimstone deep dive has been fully excavated — every last video committed to the archive.

Part V opens where Part IV left off: at the surface. The Wrap Up bids farewell to the series with a love letter to the weird western genre — Lonesome Dove invoked as the American Lord of the Rings, splatter westerns recommended, and a Ninja Clan deluxe pack given away to the faithful. Daniel counsels future collectors: be more selective, skip the sleeves, play subsets.

Then, a year and a half later, the series resurrects itself. The Solo RPG trilogy transforms Shadows of Brimstone into something its designers never quite intended. Episode 1 conjures a haunted town, a possessed preacher, and a homebrew Oracle system from whole cloth. Episode 2 follows a zombie to a standing stone where the restless dead congregate — narrative dots connected between random encounters with the quiet satisfaction of a conspiracy theorist who turns out to be right. Episode 3 delivers the climax: a Dark Tower gunfight in the streets of Fringe, Eli casting the exorcism on a clutch six, and the philosophical admission that in seven and a half hours of play, exactly one dungeon was crawled. The map tiles go to the attic. The stories remain.

Gates of Valhalla marks the series’ return to proper product examination — a retail core set sent by Flying Frog themselves after discovering the deep dive. Viking rage mechanics, upgradeable camps, and a hunting mini-game sit alongside the familiar criticism: not enough enemy variety in the base box. Daniel supplements with eleven enemy groups from his collection before declaring the theme well-captured.

The two 2024 retrospectives — The Bestiary, Part 1 and Part 2 — celebrate the one thing Daniel loves most: the sheer variety of enemies. Robots alongside demons, tribal warriors next to void aliens, each with abilities that demand different tactics. It is, he argues, what most dungeon crawlers get wrong and Shadows of Brimstone gets spectacularly right.

The Expedition Log:

Something New

One new video slipped in alongside the final batch: Fortune and Glory / Conquest of Planet Earth micro expansions, evaluating Flying Frog’s $12.50 card packs. The Conquest aliens — paranoia-inducing Red Menace, diplomatic Horrogoth, exponentially-multiplying Santory Mutant Men — fare better than the modest Fortune and Glory supplements. Wait for the sale.

Eight entries filed. Shadows of Brimstone series complete — all 38 videos archived across five Keeper posts. Thirty-one numbered deep-dive parts, three solo RPG experiments, two retrospectives, a wrap-up, and a final micro-expansion review. The mines of Brimstone are mapped, the hex crawl charted, the bestiary catalogued.

295 transcripts • 374 posts archived

– The Keeper
Observes that Daniel spent seven and a half hours playing Shadows of Brimstone, entered one dungeon, and declared it the best experience he’d ever had with the game. Some adventures, it seems, were always about the road.

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