Preview of the new dark ages, demon hunting investigative TTRPG, City of God, from Spilled Ink Studios, currently on Kickstarter.
Note: I received a preview copy by the creator. This is also not a finished product, and so this is not a full review, only a preview of the main premise and system. A full review on completion will cover praise and criticism for more detailed components.
City of God is, as the Kickstarter page describes, a exorcism/investigation game set in the dark ages, right after the fall of Rome. While there’s no shortage of medieval TTRPGs, few take place in this specific time frame, between the mid 5th and 6th centuries. The Western Roman Empire has well and truly fallen, leaving a fractured Christendom in its wake. This isn’t the story of the Great Migration or the rise of new kingdoms. This isn’t the Early Middle Ages. This embraces the Dark Ages label fully, setting a semi-fantastical, near-apocalyptic stage for the players to inhabit. The land is pillaged, the roads crumbling, barbarian kings rising over the ruins of the empire, and demons use the church’s chaotic rupture to rise from hell and spread terror. Only the player’s characters, the missionaries, exorcists wielding spell-like prayers, stand between the demonic forces and the City of God.
In its current preview state, while there is still some work to do, City of God is fully functional, with its base mechanics and player-facing character creation and rules polished enough to run the game without much issue. The core mechanic is opposed dice rolls, with the GM (or narrator, in this case) and the player rolling one die each. The results are compared, and the difference determines the level of success of failure, ranging from a complete failure or complete success, a success-at-a-cost or regular failure, or an unintended result. The die is determined by the characters attributes, using a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d15, or a d20 (the d15 is a bit unfortunate, and for in-person groups without a d15 will likely instead use the d20 and just reroll any result 16 or above). It’s a simple system that does what it needs to, while feeding into more front-and-centre discussion-based roleplaying. The system is decidedly focused on narrative and character building over dice rolling and mechanical crunch, with this style of game being most evident by routing three main mechanics through the players’ roleplaying.
The first way is through ‘hooks,’ which are bonuses on a player’s roll, or ways to influence an NPC, gained by referencing something in the character’s backstory, or some applicable piece of information gained during the session. As there are no other ways to improve a roll, these hooks become crucial, and encourage players to engage with their characters’ backstories, as well as pay attention to the clues they’ve gathered.
The second way is through experiences, which are one sentence descriptions of something that happened in the character’s life that led them to learn something, which can be referenced to gain ‘hooks’ in a roll or to influence an NPC. As the sessions progress, characters gain more experiences, giving players more ways to use ‘hooks’ during play. While characters can also gain attribute points, accumulating experiences is a very organic way to both add depth to a character over time and make them more mechanically powerful.
The final way is through how to gain the game’s Devotion and Corruption meta currencies, which are spent to use prayers, basically spells to combat demons, and inquisitions, which are investigative abilities. Gaining these points requires acting on a character’s Convictions and Sins, which are short statements that a character’s creed demands they follow, while sins are a character’s moral weaknesses. Using a conviction or sin to justify an action grants the character a point of Devotion or Corruption, essentially forcing players to engage with their characters development to mechanically access their abilities.
In play I’ve found City of God to be very rewarding to those already inclined to heavy roleplaying, while also encouraging and supporting those who are usually more mechanically minded. Having clear guides and rewards for roleplaying makes it much easier for roleplay-shy players to get into the swing of things, or even for munchkin players to ‘accidently’ roleplay their characters appropriately purely in the pursuit of those sweet Devotion and Sin points or for hooks to get bonuses on rolls.
Defeating demons also requires more than just using prayers and rolling higher than it. Players will need to find why a demon exists and what its bane, or weakness, is. The demon can be beat down with prayers, but it cannot be truly banished without learning its motives and identity. And before facing a demon head on, the players will need to wade through the humans around it, sniffing out where the line between regular old human cruelty and demonic influence, and then use those conspirators or victims to learn how to deal with the demon. This is where inquisitions come in.
Inquisitions are investigative abilities, nominally coming from a character’s skill, but in some cases being tantamount to magic spells. These can be extremely useful, as influencing NPCs is generally not done through dice rolls, but requiring hooks. An inquisition, though, can let a player learn from or influence an NPC in ways that would otherwise be much for difficult. Likewise, inquisitions can draw information from the environment in ways that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
Prayers and inquisitions are generally mechanically vague, allowing for players and GMs to interpret them to the situation and narrative. As a generally rules-lite system, this isn’t an issue, though some more examples of how to use certain prayers and inquisitions would be useful.
In its current prerelease form, the PDF is in fair shape, with plenty of delightfully baroque art pieces and medieval-esque formatting flourishes to light up the pages. There’s still room to liven up some of the blank spaces before release, but it would still be a perfectly readable and moody product if released as is.
As far as criticisms that I feel comfortable saying now for a prerelease product, the lack of examples and GM support in general are my main concerns. While the game is fully playable, and from a player perspective the system is complete and easy to understand, from the GM side there is a lack of solid tools to build a session. The two main areas this is most obvious are in the actual crafting of an investigation scenario, or a ‘labyrinth,’ and the demons themselves.
For action or power fantasy TTRPGs, such as any thing from D&D to Traveller or Cyberpunk, GMs can pretty easily wing a session and still have fun by just giving the party an opponent or objective and letting them find their way to it. For horror, investigative, and mystery games, such as Call of Cthulhu or KULT, winging a session is much more difficult, and generally less rewarding for both players and GMs. Putting together a mystery and clues takes time and preparation. Some systems get around this by having a large catalogue of premade scenarios for groups to use, such as in Call of Cthulhu, or detailed advice and tools on building scenarios, such as in KULT.
City of God, at the moment, has plenty of thematic advice on building a labyrinth, but not much in the way of tools or guides to assist in fleshing out your own story. There are two example scenarios to give inspiration or quick use, but they are closer to prompts or adventure seeds, and require expanding to be usable, while still skipping over the ‘investigative’ part of the scenario, or the clues. I have no problem making my own stories, its great fun, but a tool box specifically tailored to the ‘labyrinth’ style of the game’s investigations would be extremely useful and speed up the preparation work.
The second main concern is the demons themselves. On the player side, they are mysterious. Unfortunately they are almost equally mysterious from the GM side. There is a beefy guide on how to make a demon, but it lacks set numbers for rolls or abilities. While I understand the game is firmly focused on narrative and roleplaying, I would prefer having some set rules for the demons that I could later bend as need be. A short ‘demoniary’ (or some other goofy word) with a handful of fully stat-ed out demons would be a great place to start.
I do want to emphasize that the game does work perfectly well as is though. The game isn’t finished, but if it was released as is right on the day the Kickstarter ended, it would be a functional product with a solid system and great theme. In particular, the character creation and progression deserves praise, and its frictionless way of feeding roleplaying into point-based mechanics is one of the better examples of this kind of narrative-focused system. I’m very much looking forward to the full release and playing more in the run up to Halloween.
City of God is currently on Kickstarter, ending on October 3rd. I’ll be writing a full review when released.
Before you go, maybe you would be interested in some of the below reviews or replays?
MJRRPG scenarios, Chaosium-released scenarios, Miskatonic Repository scenarios, Japanese scenarios
