Apocalypse According to John... the RPG?
Apocalisse is shaping up to a be a Bible-based RPG masterpiece
Below is my interview with Mauro Longo of Acheron Games. He is part of the Italian team that created Brancalonia, Inferno and now Apocalisse, a 5e setting set in the Bible’s Book of Revelation! Also linked just under the image below is my video preview of the Apocalisse quickstart. You can watch the video or read the interview in either order. Enjoy!
Hey Mauro! Can you tell us what Apocalisse is and how you’re involved with it?
Hello everybody!
Apocalisse - John’s Guide to the Armageddon is a new RPG by Acheron Games and Two Little Mice, the Italian teams who together made Inferno - Dante’s Guide to Hell, and, separately, Brancalonia, Lex Arcana, Broken Compass and Household - all of them award-winning and very appreciated games.
We are working again together on the playable version of the Apocalypse, directly inspired by the biblical Book of Revelations written by St. John the Evangelist. As for the previous Inferno, we have no fear of bringing on our tables this kind of visionary and extreme themes, taken with all respect and consciousness from some pillars of our western culture. We also think that role-playing the End of the Days, the Last Battle between the Lord and the Adversary, could be an amazing experience for players all over the world, even if they come from different cultures.
We are deeply studying the Bible and including all those gargantuan and otherworldly beings: leviathans, behemoths, archangels, archdevils, the Four Horsemen and so on. They are all struggling against each other, divided in three factions, over what remains of the Earth - the Lands of Armageddon, while the last humans try to survive and avoid the extinction. It’s something epic, biblical, tragic and lyrical at the same time, with a lot of occasions to be heroic and make the difference in what’s happening.
As the Creative Director and Lead Game Designer in Acheron Games, I’m working every day on this project together with a team made by more than 20 people: designers, developers, writers, artists, creative and art directors, translators, editors, and so on…
I definitely feel like Revelations is the most metal book from the New Testament, so that’s pretty exciting. Can you briefly recap what happens in the Biblical Book of Revelations? And what kind of new discoveries and details have you found about the Revelations that you did not know prior to research for this game?
Absolutely it is weird, in an “apocalyptic way” of course.
In this brief text, whoever its true author, a series of increasingly lysergic and cosmic visions are offered concerning the End Times, and the final battles between angels and demons. It is here that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and other equally cosmic figures are mentioned for the first time, in a sort of continuous descent into holy madness, epic in the sensational visions.
In short, Hell and Heaven are emptied of demons, angels and souls, and the Resurrection of the Flesh takes place for all who have ever died since the beginning of the world. All these beings, (re?)incarnated, start (again?) to roam the Earth and fight each others, while the lands are struck by ever more enormous calamities. At the end, every servant of the Adversary and everything earthly will be swept away, and only the "Heavenly Jerusalem" (a kind of Heaven 2.0) will exist, forever. Outside this future place of eternal bliss there will be nothing.
The subject is obviously obscure, complex, symbolic, and delicate, but also full of incredible points of interest for an action-adventure RPG: angels, demons, gargantuan monsters and apocalyptic incarnations that trample the Earth, unnatural calamities that strike lands and seas, seals and other mystical artifacts to recapture, the struggle for survival of the last humans.
Furthermore, when we started working on it, we discovered something that we didn't remember, and that is extremely fitting for our intent: the whole Apocalypse does not take place in a few hours, "in seven days" or anything like that, but in " One thousand years". In the Book, the men are portrayed as survivors who take refuge in caves and grottoes, and somehow, manage to survive for generations in all this cosmic catastrophe.
This meant that our setting was not crystallized in a limited period of time, but that a real "civilization" of the Apocalypse could actually exist, complete with its shelters for the last of humanity, its hunting for resources, its struggle for survival.
All this material is incredibly suitable for an RPG!
Yeah, I think that last detail about the conflict lasting more than seven days is huge. That really opens things up quite a bit for an RPG. What are your thoughts on using parts of a holy text as a playground for a game? Do you think there is any potential for blowback or controversy in making this game in that regard?
We knew from the beginning this could be an issue, especially in the U.S., because in Italy and the rest of E.U. we are usually ok with these themes.
At the same time, the Book of Revelation and the whole Bible are mainly archeological and historical texts, with a huge amount of information on the people of the past, their beliefs, their myths, their legends, their lexicon and way of life. We decided to consider them in their capacity as legendary and fascinating texts from millennia ago, without any superstructure, like the Iliad, the Odyssey, King Arthur’s legendarium, the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Story of Wenamun.
So, there could be controversy on Apocalisse? Probably. But ours was a conscious and precise authorial choice, and we have no particular second thoughts about it.
I’m really excited about this game for its setting and theme, but could you tell me if and how the game’s rules/mechanics support the setting, or at least what considerations you have made on that front?
We are mainly working on monsters, terrain and character options.
About the first, there will be a dedicated bestiary: one on two books will actually be “Monsters of the Armageddon”, with more than 100 creatures. They will have specific powers and capacities connected with their origin. A lot of them obviously come from the Abyss or the Heaven, but there is a third faction, ruled by the Horsemen: “the Ills of the World”. They don’t want the End of the Days but to rule on Earth and humanity, virtually forever.
Apart from the bestiary, just as with our previous game, Inferno, we’ve developed new “origins” instead of the normal backgrounds, a system of vices and virtues to connote the characters, and brand-new subclasses, specifically designed for this strange new world.
The campaign book will also have rules for the new “Apocalyptic Terrains”, because just traveling the world is now a lethal task. There will be dozens of new Relics to find and use (like the Manna, the Spear of Destiny and the Ark of the Covenant) and a new mechanic called Mark Dice, that you can find explained in the Quickstart.
From what I’ve seen, the artwork for Apocalisse is phenomenal. What was the aesthetic goal of the artwork for this game, and how long did it take to get the teams on the same page?
The art direction of the whole project, as for Inferno, is by Two Little Mice, an Italian creative studio also known for games like Broken Compass and Household. Their work is truly outstanding, not only for the artists they lead in the process, but also for their attention to details, their high concepts, their aspiration for originality, and, as you would notice, for the inner coherence in every aspect of their books.
Together we selected a team of artists we really love, mainly Italians but with an international members: Daniela Giubellini (Broken Compass, Household, Inferno) as the main and cover artist, Fabio Porfidia (Brancalonia, Warhammer Fantasy RPG, Lex Arcana, Inferno), Angelo Peluso (Pathfinder, Cypher System, Numenera, Invisible Sun), Francesco Biagini (Grant Morrison’s 18 Days, Elric: The Balance Lost), and so on. We also asked contributions to other wonderful artists, like Peter Mohrbacher (Angelarium).
As you already can see in the quickstart, every artpiece is not just an image, but a fundamental contribution for defining the mood and the flavour of the game. It took some time at the beginning to match the style of so many and peculiar artists, but we were already used to working together from previous projects, so it never was a problem, just a normal running-in phase.
Two Little Mice is definitely well-known at this point by English-language RPG aficionados. It’s interesting that your team is working with them, since you’re both high-caliber game studios in Italy that could have easily been rivals. That point aside, what is the Italian RPG scene like overall right now, and how has it changed over the years?
It’s true, we ARE rivals, but sometimes rivals team up for a greatest treasure! Inferno, made this way, has been the greatest Italian RPG project so far, and this could not have happened without our alliance.
Also, we are GOOD rivals, meaning that we know personally each other, we respect and like each other’s games, and we also think that competition on quality and ideas is an incentive to continuously improve.
The Italian scene: well, that’s a good question. I’m also a blogger, a youtuber, a theorist and an essayist on role-playing games (links at the bottom of this article), and I’ve been studying our scene for more than fifteen years now. In Italy, we started playing RPGs in the 80’s, with a lot of creativity, hack, fan material, events and competitions from the very beginning. Our “way to playing” evolved differently from the Western standard, and the games we created in the last decades were very elaborate, deep, particular, even if almost always a bit naïve. But, in any case, translating them to English and trying to find distribution for the United States or other large foreign markets were insurmountable difficulties. Nobody did it for thirty years.
Then, the great game changer was Kickstarter. With this international platform and the crowdfunding system, we were able to provide a professional translation for our titles, and introduce our games directly to the players, without intermediaries. We started in the 2015 with “Enascentia” (a Savage Worlds campaign setting in which I was also involved) and its 131 backers, and now the average project counts ten times that number of people. Apart from us, other important Italian game studios and publishers devoted themselves to creating and exporting new games, like Mana Project Studio (Historia, Journey to Ragnarok), Grim Moon Studio (Nightfell), Officina Meningi (Odissey, Last Sabbath, Blood Sword ), The World Anvil (Broken Tales, Valraven), and a few others. We also have a strong OSR scene, so we are always part of Zinequest or other similar initiatives.
The only thing I can add to differentiate us and make Acheron stand out among all others is that our concepts are always tightly rooted in Italian myths, legends, history, and themes: Lex Arcana, Brancalonia, Malavita and Inferno are focused on that. We work on “Italian style games”: this is our mission.
I’m glad I asked that question. I didn’t realize there was such depth in Italian RPGs, and it’s interesting to see how Acheron has a distinct approach there. From what you can tell watching American/British actual play videos, do you see any differences in how they play RPGs compared to how Italian players play? Or any other kinds of cultural differences for that matter?
Yes I’ve observed a great difference from the beginning of the hobby up until the last few years, a difference that has been increasingly attenuating more recently. I noticed it looking at how people were playing at events and cons, and speaking with American guest at these kind of gatherings.
Italian players have always been much more dedicated to completely random and unregulated role-playing. Many of the Italian players did not arrive at RPGs in the 80s from wargames or the "old school," but directly with adventure-style modules (“paladins and princesses”), or via Dragonlance novels and gamebooks. Our sessions at the table were often very long scenes of improv theater, in which every now and then someone rolled some dice, and the GM often applied all the best-known "illusionism" tricks to carry the story forward in one way or another. Until the late 1990s, only a few really knew the rules of the games, and even fewer were those interested in applying them in detail.
Only since the late 1990s, access to the internet and international forums began to change this, and it allowed us to be part of a more global gaming scene where we were confronted on these issues.
Today, we are “normalized” in many aspects. We watch U.S. game shows, vloggers, reviewers and actual plays, and our creators are deeply inspired by them when finding their style. So, the differences are now much smaller than they used to be.
In a way it’s kind of sad to see a regional cultural distinction get erased by the homogenizing effect of the internet. But such is the way of things. Is Apocalisse in a play-testable format yet? Have you played in or run any sessions?
We have already released a quickstart to show how Apocalisse will be: a collapsed world ruled by the Four Horsemen, the constant struggle for survival, otherworldly enemies, the difficulty of travel on the apocalyptic terrain, the kind of quests and themes the characters are going to face, and so on. In our quickstart set you can also find an introductory adventure, a map of the Plain of Armageddon, and 4 pregens, to try the new subclasses and the Mark Dice setting rule.
Having read through the quickstart, there are a lot of things I’m excited about. A lot of the descriptions in the original Book of Revelation are not particularly elaborate, so you have to fill in the gaps somehow. Where will the team draw inspiration from for the various monsters and beasts that will be described in the book?
The primary source is - of course - the Book of Revelation.
A secondary one is the whole Bible, and the traditions, lore and legends of the Abrahamic religions. The Leviathan, the Behemoth, Metatron, devils and angels, but also Apocalyptical Relics such as the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Lance and the Forbidden Fruit, which all come from this huge collection of material.
About this second source, we had almost infinite content available, so we made a selection of them, according to our personal preferences and the rule of cool :D It’s a sort of cherrypicking, we admit it, but we can also call it “authorial choices.”
Other sources or comparison and inspiration are Inferno, our previous campaign setting (with links between the two games), and, of course, the official D&D lore. D&D already has demons, devils, angels and monsters like ours, so we had to carefully choose what to include in Apocalisse from the official bestiaries, options and items, and what to rewrite, add or recreate from scratch. An example is Asmodeus, Overlord of the Nine Hells in D&D official lore, which is obviously different from "our" biblical Asmodeo.
Finally, other references for the game are the post-apocalyptic tropes and fictional works we love. We want to give to Apocalisse the flavour of japanese comics like Berserk, Bastard!, Fist of the North Star, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, but also of Mad Max, Dark Souls, and other similar franchise.
Alright, that was going to be the last question, but I have one more question for you. Considering the actualy End of Days could come at any time these days, does Italy have preppers like we do in the U.S.?
Ehehehe. This culture is not part of our traditions or habits. But we also have strange people doing strange things, like any other country.
Actually, in the period in which the game is set, there WERE traditions like that one: millenarian sects, penitents, hermits, and survivalists. If players like this kind of approach, they can try some origins, backgrounds or archetypes that embody this attitude: sentinels patrolling the borders, clerics of the Ruin, monks of the seven stars and so on. The Apocalypse is not picky. :D
Where you can find Mauro:
“My only English blog, long time abandoned, is this one.”
Mauro on Youtube (in Italiano)
Mauro’s books on the subject (in Italiano) Giochi di ruolo and Scrivi la tua avventura!
Back Apocalisse on Kickstarter: https://bit.ly/ApocalisseKickstarter