Year 2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the passing of Dante Alighieri and, after the Kickstarter success of Brancalonia - the first "Spaghetti fantasy" role-playing game (releasing to retail in May) - Italian publisher Acheron Games launched a new crowdfunding campaign for "Inferno - Dante's Guide to Hell", the first original Dantesque Campaign Setting for the 5th edition of the most played RPG in the world. The Kickstarter project reached its funding goal in 9 minutes, and it will run until April, 9th. The game is expected to ship to backers in December 2021. Ares Games plans to distribute the English edition of Inferno to retail, after the KS fulfillment, as we are doing with Brancalonia.
Inferno adapts Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy" - an epic narrative poem widely considered to be the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the masterpieces of world literature - into a tabletop role-playing game. Players are all Lost Ones, living beings forced to enter Hell for some reason and must complete their journey to the Last Door, the only exit, before losing their Hope. They are alive and could remain alive throughout the journey, as Dante was in his, but Hell itself, with its demons, damned souls and dangers, will try to capture and enslave them forever. Thus, the main challenge of the Lost One is not to face and defeat the damned and the monsters, but to maintain their path and their Hope during the journey.
Inferno is composed of two volumes: "Dante's Guide to Hell" (the “Player's Handbook”) includes character creation, rules and an in-depth description of Hell itself; "Virgilio's Untold Tales" is at the same time the “Game Master's Guide” and the “Monster Manual”, with adventures, dangers, special equipment, a complete campaign to play, and the bestiary, along with a more detailed description of the Inferno as a sandbox, allowing the players to play in Dante's circles of Hell indefinitely.
The previous project of Acheron Games, Brancalonia RPG is a "Spaghetti fantasy" setting for the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It's due to release to retail in May 2021, following the KS backers' fulfilment. In Brancalonia, the player characters are Knaves, members of a Free Company of mercenaries, rogues and similar rascals, engaged in questionable jobs across the various domains of what is left of an ancient kingdom now in ruins set in a “back-to-front” version of Medieval Italy, an unheroic, picaresque and roguish world with references from contemporary Italian fiction and over a hundred works of Italian fantasy tradition, pop culture, and collective imagery.
For more information about Inferno - Dante's Guide to Hell and to pledge, visit the Kickstarter project. For more information about Brancalonia RPG, visit the Roleplaying Games section.
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