The Thoughtlessness of Deathbringer's Marketing

     As I write this, Deathbringer, the self-proclaimed most anticipated RPG of 2026, is entering day two of its Backerkit campaign and has raised three-quarters of a million dollars. It is by any count a success story, and I wish I could just celebrate it and go on to my day: it is clearly a project its main creator, Professor DM, is proud of, and I wish the world had more stories of indie creators taking their ideas and making large amounts of money off of them. 

    I can't though.

    And that's because of the advertising, which has attempted to latch onto a particular aesthetic and in the process made the whole thing look rather...reactionary. 

    Now before I start, I want to make clear I don't know the hearts and minds of Professor DM or the folks at Roll For Combat. I am not accusing them of being bad people. However, their marketing absolutely sucks.

Disclaimer: Deathbringer is a game harkening to the days of Frazetta art and 80s Heavy Metal posters. As such it features blood and a gratuitous amount of boobs.

From "D&D is dead. THIS game kills it." I'll have a lot more to say later about the way this game positions itself in the market, but for now let's just appreciate that this thumbnail features Professor DM making two separate YouTube faces. 

Misogyny

    I don't remember the first time I was made aware of Deathbringer aside from one specific detail: the piece of art showcasing the Battle Nun class, posted below. What's your favorite part of the image? Let me know on Bluesky or in the comments!

To sell the grim darkness of the land of Tormentia, every woman
in the setting seemingly struggles with eating disorders.
 Thank goodness she still has eyeliner though.

    This kind of thing is prevalent throughout the marketing, to the point that I couldn't find a single woman who wasn't some form of Platonic ideal of a bombshell. Not even like...an ugly crone, or a fat lady who's evil because she's fat! It'd be one thing if every character was some form of cheesecake (Patchwork Paladin is in a Daggerheart campaign like this and it sounds hilarious) but it only ever goes one way, and the posing and composition aren't even that horny. It's not ladies being flirty and posing for the most part, it's just dehydrated women in impractical costumes with a bad case of Rob Liefeld disease.

    Take a look, for instance, at the differences in design between the man and lady examples of the Deathbringer class, a warrior roided-up on alchemy and ready to kill. 

Tall, imposing, and skipped head day. Very clearly meant to resemble a Space Marine.

Our Lady Deathbringer, on the other hand, gets no such treatment.
 She's just a dehydrated lady, only discernable from anyone
 else due to sharing a big spiky helmet with her counterpart.

    I'm sorry I keep just posting the art, but it really is the best way to reinforce that every woman in this game is in some sort of cheesecake outfit. It would be one thing if it was an isolated design, like Pathfinder's Amiri or Seoni, making it a choice of the character to dress like that (and also I am so horny for Amiri ohmygod). But it's every woman in every piece of art, at which point it feels more like the artists nudging me and going "Hey, look at the tits on that broad."

I showed this one to Mama Magnolia,
 and she sighed and went "For fuck's sake."

    Now obviously this is their product and they're allowed to have whatever art they want.  According to a livestream to celebrate the Kickstarter launch, the artists had a blast working on this project, and I hope they did, even if it was one-handed. But it also means that I have to point out they are deliberately invoking the art of an era that was pretty hostile towards women in the hobby. What really gets me is that they clearly know this, and are trading on it. To quote the first video I linked:

"Remember when D&D had balls? When dungeons were dangerous and you were lucky to make it to third level without being disemboweled? When orcs were pig-faced monsters meant to be killed? When characters looked more like Conan the Barbarian and less like Puss in Boots? More like Heidi Klum, and less like the Handmaid's Tale? Deathbringer remembers..."

    We're going to be looking at this quote a lot, but I just want to focus on two things for now:

1. The casual jab at furries (and all the thinly-veiled homophobia that comes with it) is hilarious because seemingly no Dungeontuber actually understands what furries are or what they want. Like seriously dude? Puss in Boots is your touchstone here? 
2. Attempting to say the outfits in The Handmaid's Tale are part of some greater repressed sexuality in the hobby and not, say, symbols of violent misogyny forcing women to cover up that some women are currently experiencing in the real world is fucking gross, and everyone involved in writing and okay-ing that line should be ashamed of themselves. Eighties aesthetic or not, it's 2026. Do better.

    

    With all that in mind, let's turn now to Part 2 of the Serious Social Issues section, and talk a bit about

Racism

    One of the things you'll notice in the "about us" section of the Backerkit is that as best I can tell not a single person of color is contributing to this game? Even though it includes luminaries like Ben Milton, Justin Alexander, and Daniel D. Fox (among others) there isn't like...a black person. Not a one. Maybe if there had been someone could have stopped the creation of the Fungus Licking Cannibal Cultist:

As a minor note, despite being fungus licking cannibal cultists,
 they're described as chewing the fungus. I feel like this game
could have used another editing pass.

    If I had to guess, this is a case of someone maybe being inspired by, say, Resident Evil Five and not really thinking about what exactly they were making. However, this is coupled with the game's treatment of Orcs. Now I've talked about Orcs a bit on this blog, but it's also worth noting that there is a lot of discourse surrounding them and other "monster races" and I don't claim to have a perfect solution.

    However, the idea of killing people and taking their stuff because they were green didn't originate in a vacuum, because Gary Gygax was a racist who considered the murdering of Orc noncombatants to be a Lawful Good Action, explicitly invoking a man who said "Nits make lice" to justify the mass murder of indigenous Americans. All that to say this kind of stuff should, in general, be handled with care. So let's see what the Professor says in that video:

"They are not blue skinned elves, or humans, they are monsters, 

pigs who mutated into bipeds and eat human flesh,

 so you don't have to feel bad about killing them."

This design goes super hard actually. I love it.

    This is followed by the professor donning a dwarf crochet helmet and beard and yelling in a Scottish accent about how Orcs want to eat your face. 

Once again, I have a few notes:

1. Blue skinned elves??? Wh-what is that from??? Is he thinking of James Cameron's avatar??? Orcs are green!
2. The actual design of the orcs, and the idea of them being mutated pigs, fucking rocks. Seriously, I love these guys.
3. When I went to the Museum of Us about five years ago, there was a great exhibit on the history of cannibalism and how it has often been used as a rhetorical weapon by Europeans against various indigenous populations, all the way up to like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. 
4. It feels a little telling about the state of Dungeontube that we keep seeing designers try to twist their way into creating populations of sapient beings that players can kill without remorse. 

Conclusion

     The word I keep coming back to is thoughtless. Professor DM and the Roll For Combat want to invoke 80s fantasy, and heavy metal, and old roleplaying games, but they haven't really thought of the other meanings of the symbols they invoke. It was an alienating time in the hobby (and frankly, America in general), one built on a bunch of white nerds from the Midwest trying to keep everyone else out. They want to be edgy and promote themselves having stuff "Mainstream companies are afraid to do anymore" without considering that there's a reason no one does this stuff outside of Zenoscope and the occasional OSR shock jock: because it's tasteless. 

    It clearly works: it made $20,000 in the time it took me to write this post. But it's also gross, the same kind of low-rent stuff you see in stuff like the whimsical rape riot of the original Deathstalker, or, frankly, the shitty misogynist dreck seen in the original Conan stories (or the original movie). That, I feel, might ultimately be its legacy: some houserules for Fifth Edition largely remembered for a bizarre, kinda racist, and definitely sexist marketing campaign. And that's kinda sad and disappointing.

Also, this is just Red Sonja. Can you...can you do that?

    In Part Two, I look at some of the actual substance and design in Deathbringer's marketing and ask "Have you ever played a game before?"