Dark Descent Kickstarter: A New Depth for 5E Fantasy

Few 5E projects dare to stray from high fantasy’s light. Dark Descent does. In our conversation with the team at Mammoth Factory Games, we uncovered the vision behind this subterranean campaign — one of scarcity, blood alchemy, and desperate survival. Blending mythic horror with ancient Near Eastern inspiration, it’s a chilling dive into a world where every spell, every risk, and every flicker of light has a cost.

From Concept to Campaign

What was the original vision behind Dark Descent, and how did you decide to bring together forbidden magic, subterranean races, and horror-driven adventures into one massive 5E project?

Dark Descent has been a long time coming. It's the first entry in a fantasy world that we've been working on at Mammoth for quite a while, one that we want to be highly distinct from classic 5e lore. The underground setting and the campaign we're publishing alongside it actually began as a home game that had been brewing in my mind for about a year before ever being run, and has since been pretty heavily nipped and tucked. All its original influences are still there, though - the entire project is heavily inspired by the Descent of Inanna, a Sumerian poem about delving into the underworld, and a lot of its visual and thematic inspiration leans heavily into the mythology of the ancient Near East.

As an introduction to a new world full of concepts fairly detached from recognizable 5e lore, it fit well as something that is localized enough to be useful for DMs and players that would rather transplant its content into their own setting over wading into an entire setting. We wanted Dark Descent to cover themes 5e doesn't naturally embrace - scarcity, desperation, isolation - while keeping the book versatile, and Deephold, the subterranean region where it's all set, made sense for that.

Blood Alchemy and Forbidden Power

The new Blood Alchemy system is one of the most striking mechanics. How did you design it to feel both gruesome and balanced, and what role do you see it playing in the long-term survival of adventurers?

Both blood alchemy and infernalism magic were designed to be visceral and seductive, to feel like something that constantly dares characters to see how far they can push their luck. Descriptively, they tend to involve mutative body horror, and mechanically a lot of this comes through via effects that play around with ability scores, Hit Points, and conditions in a way that bends the normal logic of 5e - for example, characters might want to actually have as many negative conditions on them as they can, to spread or pass them on to enemies.

There's also an element of fundamental risk to both systems; certain blood alchemy effects are very powerful, but they might have negative side effects, and if you use them too much or too often, those could become permanent. Infernalists can 'push' their spells, enhancing them at the risk of harming and permanently changing themselves, fulfilling that classic idea of the dark arts being more powerful but also dangerous and unpredictable to the caster. For adventurers, these systems are a thematic part of the descent. They offer powerful tools that will help them survive, but they come at a moral and sometimes physical price.

Building a World Beneath the Surface

Deephold is a realm of exiles, corruption, and horrors lurking in the dark. What were your inspirations for crafting this subterranean setting, and how do you keep it distinct from other “underdark” campaigns?

With Deephold, we wanted to let go of a lot of the assumptions 5e brings to underdark type settings, and our main inspirations fed pretty naturally into that. The classic underdark is thought of in terms of an ecosystem - going deeper is sort of like entering another planet. It's all about weird flora and fauna, glowing mushrooms and the like. Deephold is designed to be pretty maximally inhospitable. As mentioned earlier, the setting takes a lot of thematic cues from an ancient poem about descending into the underworld, and that feeling is something that governs how Deephold is presented. It's an underdark that is dusty, barren, and sparse.

Instead of glittering underground cities, any structures that exist are crumbling remnants of an older, forgotten time. Settlements are hardscrabble collections of tough survivors living in desperate conditions, constantly on the lookout for the resources they need. The monsters characters encounter are not, generally, simply creatures that live there, but unnatural beings that don't really belong in reality. Rather than an alien planet, Deephold is meant to feel like it extends down into the realm of the dead, or even deeper. And, of course, it's darker - literally. The prevalence of light magic in 5e sort of negates that element of typical underdark exploration, but Deephold is haunted by creatures that track down and devour careless spellcasters, so all the wizard players out there better get used to packing torches.

Dark Descent Kickstarter: Monsters, Magic, and Miniatures

With 70+ monsters, 50+ infernal spells, and 200 STL miniatures, this project is a huge undertaking. How did you approach blending narrative, mechanics, and visual design to create such a cohesive dark fantasy ecosystem?

We approach this sort of thing from a fantasy-first perspective - i.e., does the visual or thematic element we're working on fulfil a fantasy that people want to play around with, and do the mechanics actually feel like they're delivering that fantasy? We asked ourselves what the key fantasies of the project were - survival, dark magic, power at a price, subterranean exploration, mystery - and made sure that our concepts always fit into one or two of these spheres. For example, we knew we wanted fiends to be stalking the lower depths, but we decided there was nothing mysterious about the typical horned devil look, so we started trying to imagine what visual element would bind our version of these creatures together instead.

Eventually, we ended up with designs that, rather than horns and hooves, were structured around these weird mask-like faces, as though these creatures have to hide themselves or wear a new face when visiting the world of mortals. This filtered down into mechanical design - there are infernalism spells, for example, that require a mask as material components. Once you have your key fantasies set out, they kind of naturally ask you a series of questions that eventually informs even really minute bits of mechanical design.

Community and the Future of Mammoth Factory

You’ve already built a strong following through monthly themed releases. How has community feedback shaped Dark Descent, and what can backers expect from Mammoth Factory Games after this campaign?

Our community has played a pretty huge role in manifesting Dark Descent - a lot of members have had access to our alpha stage versions of the content, and have been able to heap feedback on us. Some have actually been in our playtests of the Exiles of Deephold campaign, which we've run multiple times now. Balance is one of the main things they've helped us with, but running entire adventures with our community has also answered some pretty fundamental questions about how sections of the book should flow, what mechanics just don't feel great in practice, or even which visual elements work and which don't.

As for what backers can expect - we're aiming to return to the setting of Dark Descent, though probably in a way that expands on the surface world, as well as to branch out into settings with an altogether different feeling. We've covered a lot of ground with our monthly releases, and we want to bring the fantasies people have fallen in love with to life in the kind of high quality format platforms like kickstarter and gamefound allow for. So, if you're a fan of Dark Descent, you're in for more - but if you got into our work through our earlier sets or our more fairytale-inspired collections, your time is on the horizon.

Our descent with Mammoth Factory Games revealed more than another 5E supplement — it uncovered a philosophy. Dark Descent isn’t about power for its own sake; it’s about what it costs to claim it. From blood alchemy to broken gods, the team at Mammoth has built a world where light and survival are equally precious — and both always fleeting.

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About Mammoth Factory Games

Mammoth Factory Games is a collective of storytellers, artists, and designers redefining 5E fantasy. Known for their monthly themed releases and cinematic approach to tabletop gaming, their work merges narrative depth with stunning visuals and innovative mechanics. With Dark Descent Kickstarter, the studio invites players into a realm where myth, horror, and survival collide — a bold reimagining of the worlds beneath our feet.

Back now Dark Descent on Kickstarter.