The Thoughtlessness of Deathbringer's Sales Pitch

    Last time, I went through all the actual serious problems with Deathbringer's marketing campaign: the racism, the misogyny, the one weird kinda homophobic potshot Professor DM made in the opening minute of the video. That all stands. This post is going to be the dessert after we've had all our vegetables, looking at the actual pitch and the product, asking "What is this game? What is it designed to do?" and having a few laughs and lessons along the way.

    As I write this, Deathbringer is closing in on a million dollars in funding, with the average backer pledging $180 US. There are tiers available where you can give them one thousand dollars to help make this game a reality. That's enough to buy, say, a Playstation 5, and still have $350 left over to buy all the games it doesn't have. Multiple Dungeon influencers are contributing adventurers to this game, ranging from famous creators like Kelsey Dionne to outrage merchants who uh...are also here. 

    Deathbringer is, by the standards of indie roleplaying games, a juggernaut. It deserves to be taken seriously. 

    So let's take it seriously. What exactly are they trying to sell?

From the Backerkit page. Professor, if I can talk to you for a moment...everyone for whom "Designed by Professor DM" is a draw hopefully already knows you're making it. You've been advertising this game for at least eleven months.

Some Stuff I Liked

    While I don't really like the product they're putting out, or the way they're advertising it, this is not a drama blog. I try not to be a dick. So I'm including this section because there was some stuff reading and watching the videos that I actually liked, and I thought that was worth highlighting too:

• The justification for not including healing being that PDM finds it slows combat down. Fair enough! It's a design decision. Same thing for not including death saves because it makes that player's game experience more boring. In a sea of nonsense, it was nice to find the occasional flotsam of well-reasoned game design talk, even if it means the end product probably wouldn't be my cup of tea. 
• "Do you really need ten pages of description for Pissberg?" made me laugh. So did the Deathbringer character's interjection about how every hero had the right to attack their foes with a leg of lamb. Those were funny on purpose. 
• Deathbringer Dice being use-it-or-lose-it! That's how I prefer my metacurrencies to be in games, I'm so glad we're moving away from XP as Brownie Point. 
• In a similar vein, I liked how every encounter has a built-in "Shit gets worse" track. I like it in Sentinel Comics, I like it in Spectaculars, and I like it here. I think more games, especially games centered around combat, should encourage that kind of encounter design.

A Profound Lack of Confidence

    One of the rules of creating that I personally struggle with is that you have to promote yourself with confidence. You can't be like "Oh my fic is kinda cringe," because no one is going to be a bigger advocate for your work than you. You have to be, to borrow from one of my favorite tumblr posts, King Big Dick of Fanfic Mountain. It's hard. I'm bad at it. So is the marketing for Deathbringer.

    Now, Deathbringer is in a bit of an odd position in the market of fantasy role-playing games. It is a standalone product, but it originated as a series of modifications to Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition and Shadowdark, and is semi-compatible with both. That's a neat feature to have, and a nice bullet point in the text of your Backerkit. What one should not do, in my humble opinion, is continue to try to upsell that point in your launch video and compare your game to hamburger helper. What one should definitely not do is try to use the fact that your book fits on the same shelf as Shadowdark because they have the same dimensions as a selling point before you have told us anything concrete about your game (aside from, of course, that orcs are to be slaughtered, there are no furries, and the women put out). There's nothing wrong with being a supplement, or even advertising yourself as such (see Blades '68), but Blades '68 has its own aesthetic to go off of and Deathbringer's aesthetic is...not its strong suit. 

    On the subject of openings, after that delightful introduction I quoted a bunch from in the previous post, Professor DM answers the question that everyone has on their lips: does the world need another fantasy RPG when D&D already exists? (This coming from a video titled D&D is dead. THIS game kills it.) When arguing for his own game to have a place in the tabletop market, the professor says this:

“I think Dungeons and Dragons is the greatest fantasy roleplaying game of all time and not just because it was first, but because I think it’s the best.”

    This is followed by two low-resolution photos of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson accompanied by an applause stock sound effect. Yes, really. 

    Finally, as I mentioned above, the Professor's nom-de-plume is all over this thing. Not counting the "About Us" section, his name is mentioned sixteen times, each with an air of breathless awe. It's in the title of the backerkit, the blurb, the Ultimate Dungeon Terrain is Professor DM's Ultimate Dungeon Terrain, designed by Professor DM himself! That particular phrase "by Professor DM himself", appears no fewer than eight times. It reeks of theme park podcasts where you have to use the full legal name of the attraction to stop things from becoming genericized. It's a bad look is what I'm saying.

Ma'am I would gladly worship your ten inches of pure physical might,
but I'm unfortunately spoken for.

Grimdork

    To quote the Professor himself, he envisions the world of Deathbringer to "Make Mork Borg look like Candlyand." (EDITOR'S NOTE: This linked to a summary of the Deathbringer setting released to people who gollowed the Backerkit campaign. It has since been made private.) This is a tall order. Whatever my gripes with Mork Borg and its influence on the broader indie RPG scene, the game undoubtedly has a strong and distinct style in its art, writing, and even its web design, that give the world (which is mostly broad strokes left for the GM to fill, from my remembering) an incredible, oppressive tone. So let's see how Deathbringer does in its sales pitch.

    The Shattered Empire of Tormentia is intended to be an homage to many things: Dark Sun, Conan the Barbarian, Thundarr the Barbarian, Korgoth of Barbaria, and Heavy Metal Magazine, a very ultraviolent and over the top place. I mean the place has town named Cankermouth and Pissberg, and the announcement video makes two separate equally unfunny jokes about some of the add-ons being made of baby unicorn parts. We aren't exactly given a clear picture, but what we do get seems...confused about what exactly its doing.

Like okay granted it's a Warhammer Fantasy knockoff, but 
it's supposed to be your Warhammer Fantasy knockoff!
...
I wonder if that's why Daniel Fox is contributing?

    Things are left vague, I think, for the same reason as Mork Borg: to try and evoke emotions and let GMs fill in the blanks, but I think too much is left open at this point. During the setting overview, he brags that his games don't have "400 pages of elven politics" as though that's the only option, then drops “Was this once a fantasy realm, or is it our world a thousand years later? That’s a mystery.” Buddy, you made the damn thing, why is it a mystery to me the buyer? Barbarians of the Ruined Earth is not called "Barbarians of This Weird Place That Could Be Anywhere Really" damnit. 

    The art itself suffers from this as well; we don't even get to see the setting's chief macguffin. Wyrdstone Moonstone is magic material from the comet that broke the world and creates monsters. Magic items and drugs are made out of it, and I'm still not entirely sure what it looks like, beyond the world ending comet resembling Majora's Mask from Wish. What we see of Tormentia could, frankly, be any town from any given Elfgame. There are sewers, and big buildings, and at least some folks have access to big burly metal armor. Sure monsters exist, but on the whole the people in the art of Deathbringer seem to be doing alright despite some ill-conceived fashion choices. 

Behold, multistory buildings with shingled roofs!
Truly we live in the dying times.

    Also! Before I forget! The Doomsayer class rolls to cast, and if they critically fail, some sort of horrible thing happens, based on a random table. "Like what?" you ask? Well dear reader, we get two examples: crops wither and die, or every fetus in a one-mile radius shrivels and dies in the womb. 

    You know. 

    Like in FATAL. 

    Those are our two examples of spell failure, and they each get mentioned in two separate videos. This is a system with a town named Pissberg and spells like Tragic Missile, why are we bringing mass miscarriages into this game?

Who is this for?

    I took a marketing class in high school, and one of the most important things I learned from it is making sure you know your audience. Taking everything we've seen in totality, what is the intended audience of Deathbringer? I've narrowed it down to two primary groups (if you're reading this blog, you're most likely not either of them):

1. Divorced dads who have opinions about blue hair and pronouns and want to feel like teenagers again. 
2. Players who are fans of a certain breed of Dungeontuber and don't really know much about the hobby and its history.

    We've already covered the marketing to the first group in my first post, so let's look at the second. When the Professor discusses his love of D&D, the things he points to are rolling a d20, rolling advantage, and rolling a nat 20. Not resource tracking, exploration, desperate fighting, storytelling. The kind of lowest-common-denominator experiences you see plaguing r/DnDmemes. 

    When he discusses compatibility with older modules, your Keep on the Borderlands or Barrier Peaks or what have you, he calls them "OSR modules." That's not OSR! That's just OS! (As a funny side note, when discussing compatibility he lists OSR and Shadowdark separately. I don't think he means anything by it, but it's the same kind of slip up as whether or not Mr. Beast recognizes different countries and I found it amusing).

    The backerkit brags about how its monsters aren't "pulled from a neutral monster manual" in its trademark sneering tone, seemingly implying that having monsters integrated into your setting is some mark of superiority, when uh...we've seen the kinds of monsters they cook up. I don't think that's a compliment.

This was the first monster they revealed. The first one. You can't find it anymore because the Roll For Combat folks deleted it after a while. They seem to be developing a habit of doing that. 

    Professor Dungeon Master has been running Dungeons and Dragons since at least 1991. He is friends (or at least collaborators) with people like Ben Milton, Luke Stratton, and Kelsey Dionne. He knows how old D&D was played, and he knows the standard OSR stuff. Yet "The DM rolls their attack and damage dice in the open" gets spotlighted as a special rule in the video when it's been SOP for many DMs since before I was born. 

    Deathbringer Dice supposedly offer "unlimited options, and unlimited tactics" when what he describes is getting a mechanical bonus on a check the GM said you could make that was improvised in the moment, which has been a thing since forever. The "Ultimate Dungeon Terrain" is ultimately just repackaging the concept of range bands! You didn't build that! 

    This all irks me because Professor DM cloaks himself in the titles of academia, making these big promises about what his rules can accomplish for your game, while describing all the things that he knows other people have already done. And it clearly worked. It's worked to the tune of almost a million dollars. 

My Old Man and the Sea

    When I think about Deathbringer, I think about one of its ad-ons: sets of dice that cost $30 each, made to look weathered like the classic Red Box set's dice. They're branded "Total Party Kill Dice Sets," and I'll just quote their description from the Backerkit page:

These dice weren't made. They survived. Each set looks like it was pulled from a basement game in 1983 and never stopped rolling — scuffed, faded, worn smooth by decades of desperate saving throws and doomed characters. These aren't pristine collector's pieces. They're veterans. Every scratch is a TPK. Every worn edge is a character who didn't make it. Each set of battle-worn dice is guaranteed to deliver a natural 20 right when you need it most. (Natural 20 not actually guaranteed. Void where prohibited by the dice gods.) 

Piss yellow is a good color for a dice set.

    My dad had those Red Box dice from when he was a teenager. He still does, and we still use them. He's about a decade older than Professor DM if I had to guess, but they were probably playing D&D at the same time. I asked him his favorite story from those days, and if you'll permit I'd like to share it with you. 

    Pat, the senior most member of the party, decided he wanted to do pirate shit, and everyone agreed that sounded cool. Flush with cash, he bought a boat and supplies, even though my Uncle Jack, the DM, had the NPCs be expensive and irritating every step of the way. Their ship set off, and before they had avasted their first me hearties, a storm struck them. Pat said "You'd better not sink my ship, Jack."

    They awoke on their ship in the middle of a desert. Not to be deterred, Pat's wizard (either Pat the Great or Pat of Orange, my dad doesn't remember) cast an enlarging spell on my father's dwarf henchman, put some chains on him, and the dwarf hauled the ship across the desert. 

    That story, to me, is the best summary of Dungeons and Dragons prior to the time I was born. It's silly, juvenile, and maybe a little dickish, but it's all in good fun. Was this also a time that was super hostile to women in the hobby? Yeah, of course. We live in a world that is unfortunately super fucking hostile to women. But when I think of that first time playing D&D, I think of that camraderie and sillyness and creative problem-solving, because those are the parts my dad remembers, and the parts that he instilled in me.

    The Total Party Kill Dice Sets are kind of a neat synecdoche for the Deathbringer Roleplaying Game. It attempts to sell a vision of the past for thirty dollars a pop, trading on the aesthetics of an era that never was to promote its vision of what Dungeons and Dragons should be. And that, more than anything else, is what gets me. A guy who once wrote interesting murder mystery adventures in the nineties (including one set in a Benedictine monastery! That's so my shit!) is now going "my Lady Macbeth is vampish and sexy and she attempts to seduce one of the player characters" and attempting to present that as a Return to Tradition that you too can partake in to prove your penis isn't small. I think that's a real shame.

From MacDeath (2021). The honeypot monster thankfully seems to be on the decline, though I'd be willing to bet there's at least one or two in Deathbringer's bestiary.

    Before I go, I’d like to thank all my beta readers for their help:

• Nael of Billhook Bearblog
• LootLootLore
• Markus of Personable
• Seraphina
• Velocitree

    This one felt a lot more personal and like it needed more work, and I appreciated all of your feedback. Thanks also to my mom and dad, for letting me indulge my fantastical thoughts and helping me stay grounded even when my head was in the clouds, and my girlfriend for tolerating my hobby of showing her weird trash I find on the internet. I'd also like to thank all of you reading this. For whatever reason, this article series has struck a chord with a lot of people (over 2,000 of you as of time of this reading!!!). So thanks for reading, commenting, and letting me share my thoughts with you. This is hopefully the end of the Deathbringer Saga, at least for me. I have no aspirations of being a drama blog, and frankly all the attention has made me spend way too much time on social media. Aside from maybe posting The Case of the Disappearing Redhead for preservation purposes, I’ll be back to talking about movies and games I like soon enough. Maybe my British Murder Show Cinematic Universe theory. We'll see!