How A Dark Souls D&D 5e Campaign Could Work

How A Dark Souls D&D 5e Campaign Could Work

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All sorts of campaign settings can be invented for Dungeons & Dragons, but Dark Souls might offer a fairly compatible universe for 5e adaption.

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How A Dark Souls D&D 5e Campaign Could Work

Part of the brilliance and appeal of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons comes from player and Dungeon Master agency and the endless opportunities to improvise. There are plenty of official module books that will guide a D&D party through a campaign, but the leniency in game design lets DMs create their own settings – or even borrow ones from other sources. Particular video games, specifically Dark Souls, already have established universes that a D&D ruleset like 5e can be grafted onto.

Adopting an existing setting for a D&D campaign can help quicken the preparation process, but it’s still a lot of work, especially when the source material is steeped in obscure lore and signature game mechanics like Dark Souls. The fantasy settings of both D&D and Dark Souls make them fairly compatible, though, allowing DMs to lean one way or another to borrow items, spells, enemies, and dungeons. However, a Dark Souls D&D 5e campaign will have to make some significant changes to the 5e rules.

Back in 2018, Reddit user SnicklefritzSkad shared a look into their Dark Souls-inspired campaign. Instead of adapting one of the games in the Dark Souls trilogy directly, they chose to set up their own narrative, one which takes place “well over a million years into the future from Dark Souls 3.” This lets them create their own dungeons, encounters, and villains, but they’ve made several significant changes to the 5e ruleset, many of which would have to be adopted in some form in order for a prospective Dark Souls D&D campaign.

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A Dark Souls D&D 5e Campaign Can Actually Work Quite Work

Some important D&D homebrew rules that SnicklefritzSkad made have to do with how souls, death, and bonfires work. For instance, 5e gold and experience points have been combined into souls, which can be spent like currency or used to level up, just like in Dark Souls; custom rules have been made for the repeated deaths that have become synonymous with Dark Souls, and dying results in hollowing mechanics; long rests have been replaced with bonfires, which cause enemies to reappear like in the video games.

SnicklefritzSkad’s campaign is impressively thorough but may appear daunting to those who have only surface-level knowledge in either Dark Souls or D&D 5e. Luckily, the game mechanics and world of Dark Souls offer an opportunity for a streamlined tabletop experience, albeit one that will heavily emphasize combat encounters over role-playing. Following the lead of the games, every player character could be made a Hollow in lieu of choosing a D&D race, though many D&D 5e classes will still be viable. Items and spells could be pared down to only those available in Dark Souls, which might result in streamlined healing mechanics with the Estus Flask, and limit magic to abilities that already mesh with the setting.

The Dark Souls games are also designed in a way that their levels could be ripped and tweaked for the campaign encounters. Detailed maps can be found online for nearly all of Dark Souls’ areas, meaning one of the three games could be directly adapted to provide a combat-heavy D&D 5e adventure. NPCs are scarce in Dark Souls, so role-playing would definitely take a blow, but ambitious DMs could certainly create their own populated villages or camps to offset this. Of course, as a DM, it’s important to take the players’ expectations into consideration. The punishing nature of Dark Souls’ popular combat mechanics might not translate perfectly into a fun experience, and the tightly designed levels drastically reduce the amount of exploration allowed by a more traditional campaign. Even the best-laid plans can go change in Dungeons & Dragons, so a Dark Souls D&D 5e campaign will likely require some experimentation.

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