Heirs of the Leviathan Released – and it rocks

I know because I playtested it.

The “leviathan” is question is of the Hobbesian variety. Include big sea monsters at your own risk.

Heirs of the Leviathan is an RPG by my good friend Henrik Dithmer (his blog is here, and more important, his Mastodon is here). It is, in a sense, based on John Harper’s classic World of Dungeons, but aims for an entirely different tone and type of narrative. Heirs is a game about people in power in a dark fantasy world, doing dark fantasy world stuff, and suffering dark fantasy world fates. It’s wuxia melodrama combined with Shakespearean tragedy roiling in the philosophic despair-musings of Le Guin through the lens of dark fantasia. It’s about characters who grow more and more connected with the sources that grant them political power while they grow weaker, more brittle, more susceptible to hubristic mistakes. In Heirs, a character’s advancement is inexorably tied to their demise. The game conveys the dual property of power – liberating yet inviting disaster and danger – subtly and then with a gut-punch.

The madman illustrated the thing himself too!

There’s quite a lot I could say about this game. How it use minimalist but evocative prompts to fuel collective worldbuilding. How its character creation is quick, efficient, and yet makes highly memorable PCs at every turn. How it encourages you to revel in the disaster and desperation without resorting to tasteless misery and exploitation. How the eventual downfall of your characters feel not arbitrary but earned, the natural outcome of a long string of increasingly poor and increasingly dramatic decision, as is the due of any good political tragedy.

Heirs of the Leviathan is a solid piece of RPG artisanry, and whatever I can say about it, the game itself can say better. It’s a mere $5 on drivethrurpg and itch.io. It’s compact, evocative, and a blast. And to me at least, its a culmination of a dear friend’s passions and labor finally and triumphantly released into the world. If that was all, that’d be pretty cool. Good thing there is a damned fine indie RPG backing it up too.