A co-operative game for 1-6 players with amazingly detailed miniatures, depicting a sci-fi horror world inspired by Lovecraft's work.
Very excited and grateful to our backers, you made all these possible. It's a privilege for us to share our game with so many awesome people!
Last three days, more exciting stuff on the way!
Recently we passed $970,000, which added two new miniatures to the Rise of Dagon expansion. Wondering who those two new investigators were? Well, we’d like to introduce you to the boss.
Meredith Waite is the CEO of the Leng Corporation. Through her careful, strategic planning the company has gone from a virtual unknown to one of the most powerful organizations in the world, dominating in a wide variety of industries. While many corporations have dealt with the image problem of being depicted as “soulless” or evil, through Meredith’s careful guidance and meticulous message-sculpting Leng has never suffered from a major image problem - even while spreading and prospering around the globe. When asked what Leng’s secret is, Meredith always winks and says, “Magic.”
Meredith, as well as many of Leng’s shareholders, belong to a religious organization called The Church of the Golden Dawn. Very little is known about the movement from those on the outside, but when asked about it members always say it is a religion of mind and inner balance, where adherents can become at peace with their selves and learn of the enlightenment that is coming upon the whole world. Many have drawn parallels between it and Scientology, though neither group is overly pleased with the comparison. One thing that is known about the Golden Dawn, though, is that Meredith holds a place of high esteem in the church, as has her family for many years.
The Kadath deep sea mining facility was Meredith’s pet project. She personally oversaw great swaths of its construction, its placement, its equipment, and its crew. At Kadath’s opening those closest to her saw something they rarely did from her: she was jubilant, animated and almost giddy. This was in stark contrast to Meredith’s usual demeanor, which is cold, remote, calculating and almost cruel. (Unless a camera is on her, of course.)
Meredith is a single mother, having never married, and this has been used extensively to build an image of Leng as a poster-child progressive company – one where even a single mother can become CEO and change the world. The investigators were shocked when both she and her daughter stepped off of the submersible piloted by Franklyn Christie. What was stranger still, though, was the ceremonial cloak Ms. Waite was wearing, the strange tattoo that was now visible on her forehead, and the ritualistic daggers both women carried. Why had a powerful, influential woman like Meredith Waite come to Kadath? How could corporate officials have even allowed it? And why does she keep muttering about “enlightening the world”?
As the daughter of Meredith Waite, Regan has always lived in her mother’s shadow. And that fact has often taken its toll on Regan. As a child, Regan was often ill. She would regularly come down with high fevers, and on those feverish nights she would have the most lucid, terrifying nightmares. She would scream about the coming of their lord, and the spread of madness and terror across the earth. Hired help learned to avoid her, and even though she required their care none could stomach to be in her presence. After all, who would want to stay in a room with a possessed girl?
Regan grew up alone. She had no father and a cold, distant mother who barely paid her any mind. Whenever Meredith did deem to honor her child with love and affection, it always felt hollow. Like she was putting on as much of a show for her daughter as she did for the media. Regan had almost no friends, and those she did make would be forced to leave her when their parents learned about Regan’s “condition.” She took to cutting her arms to try to bleed out the misery. That just made things worse.
Everything changed, though, on Regan’s sixteenth birthday. That was the day that Regan was allowed to enter The Church of the Golden Dawn with her mother. It was the day she was initiated into the faith. It was the day she began to learn where she came from, and what her true purpose was. Regan never cut herself again after learning the truth. Her blood was precious. And some day she would offer it to her lord and god, who rested at the bottom of the ocean.
Meredith and Regan are available exclusively in the Rise of Dagon expansion. Do you want to know what part they have to play in the fall of Kadath, or in the coming worldwide apocalypse they wish to unleash upon the world? Then add Rise of Dagon to your pledge today! It’s $50 for just the one expansion, or you can get both it and The Oracle’s Betrayal for a $10 discount in our Expansions Bundle for $90. Why would you do that, though, when you could also get the Deluxe Expansions Bundle for $100, which also features not one but two Epic Monsters: Penitent and Forsaken?
To add any of these options to your pledge, click on “Manage Your Pledge” on the Kickstarter page, click “Change your pledge”, and then add the total for the bundle to your pledge before hitting “Continue”. We’ll figure out what your additional money was for when the pledge manager goes out after the campaign.
There’s only a couple days left and we still have some absolutely incredible things to show you! Keep spreading the word about Deep Madness, and let’s get every single stretch goal unlocked before the clock stops ticking!
We’ve spent a lot of time looking at monsters who have joined Deep Madness through stretch goals, but we haven’t talked much about the monsters in the core game. Since we’ve unlocked variants of a couple monsters recently and since we also took a look at a couple of the core investigators, we figured it was time to finally introduce you to some of the core monsters!
You wince, holding your side, the pain intense as you press the wad of cloth against the wound. You’re almost back to the others. Just a little farther. Just a few more feet and there will be help.
Something lands on the floor behind you with a thud. Whirling around, you gasp. The creature almost looks like it used to be the torso of a man. Its tail appears alarmingly like a spinal cord that has grown spines. You can see the spot where its head might have been ripped off, where the creature now has a strange tattered mouth. Its arms have mutated, branching off at the elbow. And its tongue. . .
You turn to try to run, and another beast scrambles out of the shadows before you. They both skitter towards you on their strange split arms, the long, vicious stingers on their tongues lashing out at you. The stingers puncture your legs and you feel an intense, agonizing fire racing up your body. Screaming in pain, you crumple to the floor, unable to move. And as you do, the beasts move in for the kill.
Agony is an embodiment of pain. Someone could almost imagine that at one point it might have been a man, but now it is so mangled and mutilated that it is wholly inhuman. Its dangling spinal cord has become a vicious tail. Its neck has become a horrific tongue. And its two arms have become four legs from the elbows down. It is very difficult for investigators to escape from Agony due to its high trap value. And when Agony attacks its cornered prey, it will very often leave investigators paralyzed from the intense, mind-shattering pain it inflicts. Perhaps you will survive an encounter with Agony. But will you overcome the torment that follows?
You frown as Arthur steps mechanically into the room. His movements are exaggerated, like a robot trying a little too hard to act like a human. His eyes are glassy, his expression confused and vacant.
“Arthur?” you say slowly. “Are you all right?”
Then Arthur begins to scream. He screams, and screams, and screams.
“Arthur! What is it?” you cry.
“It’s inside me!” Arthur shrieks. “It’s inside and it. . . hurts. . . so badly!”
“What’s inside you?” you ask, stepping closer to Arthur. And then you gasp. There is a flicker, like a mirage next to Arthur’s head. They’re like snakes made of brains and spinal cords, with frills on either side of their mouths made of bone and teeth. They peer at you and squeal, then move to reenter Arthur’s skull.
Arthur falls to his knees, wracked with pain. One of the snake horrors floats out of his head again, hissing.
“Don’t move, Arthur,” you say. Taking careful aim, you fire.
Miraculously you miss Arthur’s head and the thing’s brain explodes in a shower of grey matter, bone and blood. Its body jerks backward, dislodging from Arthur.
“Please hurry,” Arthur pants. “They’re killing me. They’re killing me!”
“Only two more to go,” you say, aiming your bolt gun at your friend’s head.
Hysteria can overcome anyone given the right circumstances, so it’s no wonder that the monster with that name acts likewise. When Hysteria attacks an investigator it possesses him, moving into his body to torment his mind. When this happens, Hysteria is removed from the board and placed on the investigator’s card where it will continue to ravage its victim until he can’t take any more.
Luckily, Hysteria can still be targeted by other investigators, as well as by the possessed investigator himself. Don’t think of it as shooting your friend in the head. Instead, think of it as freeing him from a life tortured by Hysteria.
There are more core monsters to come. Stay tuned, and keep spreading the word about Deep Madness! We’re nearing the final stretch, so let’s finish strong!
Recently we revealed the Expansions Bundle, complete with either a $10 discount or two free Epic Monsters. (If you missed that post, you can read it here - Expansions Bundle.) But people kept saying, “What about the other Epic Monsters?” We heard you. And so today we want to reveal the Epic Monster Bundle!
The Epic Monster Bundle contains Dimension Rift, Devourer of Worlds, Insidious and Spawn of the Sleeper. These four have a combined retail value of $75.00. They also have a combined Kickstarter price of $66.00. But with the new Epic Monster Bundle you will get all four of these terrors for only $59.00! Each Epic Monster will come individually packaged, and will also come with the cards and materials necessary to play them in all of our supported translations.
If you missed the update that detailed Spawn of the Sleeper and Insidious, you can check it out here - Spawn of the Sleeper and Insidious.
And now, here’s a look at Dimension Rift and Devourer of Worlds!
The air rips open before you, popping apart like a bloated corpse, and you stare into a place that cannot possibly exist. The ground is cracked and desolate, obtuse pillars of black stone jutting out of it at grotesque angles. There are markings on the stones: deep scratches that look almost like crude characters or markings. The sky is a bright but sterile, lifeless white. Everything is so. . . dead. So wrong.
You need to get out of here. Turning, you try to hurry back down the familiar corridor you came through. But as you do the dead white world eats away at the real one, eroding metal and sealing off your only escape. Desperately, you lunge forward. Your hand slaps into something flat, tall and angled. It shimmers slightly, like a shard of glass. Whatever it is doesn’t matter, though. Because in any case, it has trapped you here.
The ground rumbles beneath you, and a fissure breaks the earth right between your feet. Crying out, you jump to one side and spin around as the fissure widens, widens, and something starts to pull itself up out of the new chasm. A seething mass of tentacles boils over the edges of the opening, a terrible hum like electric bees accompanying it as it flickers spastically and speeds up and slows down.
Your ears ring with a high-pitched whine. The beast climbs onto its feet, its top half a fevered ball of movement. Raising your weapon, you open fire. The thing shatters into shards like a mirror, and then pulls itself right back together. Its whole body pauses eerily, vibrating softly as if it’s pressurizing to explode. And then it moves in a blur toward you and impales you on five different tentacles. As you look down at the wounds, blood pulsing around the thick segmented appendages sticking through your chest and stomach, you realize that reassembling trick would be pretty handy right about now. You’re going to die on a cold, alien world, and no one will even know where you went.
Dimension Rift is not just a monster: it is an unstable shard of broken space and time. It is a gateway to another dimension of blasted emptiness and death, where life was never meant to exist. No wonder, then, that it has birthed the creature that investigators see stalking them when their reality tears.
When Dimension Rift randomly appears on a tile with an investigator, that investigator is trapped in that other dimension. The investigator’s line of sight is limited to that tile only, and other investigators’ lines of site are blocked by the tile as well. It’s like the trapped investigator has ceased to exist. Which, in all honesty, will very likely be the case in short order.
The massive pinwheel of squirming horror descends down the shaft, its mouth gaping and its gargantuan tongue lolling. Snapping your head from side to side, you realize you are trapped. There’s nowhere to run. Its multitude of eyes stare blankly at everything and nothing as it spirals toward you. Gritting your teeth, you wait to be discovered.
But then the obscene thing stops. Puzzled, you look up. The horror begins to spin. Lazily at first, but then faster and faster. Looking to your right, you watch as a jug sails up into the air, straight into the thing’s mouth. Oh, no. You know what it’s doing now.
The vortex grows stronger and stronger. You grab onto a railing, but it’s no use. As the world warps and twists around you, you are sucked into this beast’s churning maw --
You find yourself sailing through infinite blackness. You are alone, yet you know that It is all around you. You see stars explode to life, then shrivel and die as the life force is sucked from them. You see planets erupt with sentient beings, only to have every one of those beings wither in endless pain and agony as their planet dissolves beneath their feet. Everything is swirling toward a point: the center of existence. You realize that somehow that center is this entity. This terrible, mindless thing waits, and it dreams. It is part of the sphere, and the sphere is part of it. It is the creator of chaos. It is the perpetuator of madness. It is the blind daemon sultan at the end of everything, dreaming and eating in its frothing pandemonium. It is the Devourer of Worlds. It is the cancerous insanity scratching just below the skin of reality. It was there at the beginning, and it will be there at the end. Closing your eyes, you scream, raking your fingernails across your face.
Everything is a lie. Order and time and matter are all meaningless fictions. Someday the Devourer will wake. And then everything will end.
You open your eyes, and find yourself in a completely different section of Kadath. You struggle to your feet, but shortly collapse again. Your legs are like jelly. Your whole body is shaking.
Was it all a nightmare? Surely. Surely it was.
Blood patters on the floor. Reaching up, you find the gouges left in your face from your fingernails. A chill runs through your body, and you wonder if you will ever be whole again.
Devourer of Worlds is a swirling vortex of madness. It creates reality, and it consumes it just as quickly. To encounter the Devourer is to come to the brink of sanity, and then to peek over the edge to see what’s on the other side. Once you’ve looked into that cloying abyss, you will never be quite the same again.
When investigators encounter Devourer of Worlds, it sucks them into a black hole of itself, consuming them whole. Time and space are distorted for the investigators, and they find themselves swept away to another dimension of darkness and death. Eventually they will return to our world of concrete fact and tangible substance, but they will also appear at a random location on the game board, thus destroying any strategy or plans that the investigators might have been building. Which is fitting, in its own way. Because just as the team’s careful maneuvering is crippled, there is a question of whether the investigator herself will ever recover from what she has seen, or from the gaping emptiness she now feels lingering below the surface of existence.
Epic Monsters are tough in every way imaginable. They are hard to kill, and will occupy the game board for a long time once they’ve arrived. They each have their own unique skills and mechanisms to make the investigators’ days a living nightmare. Adding an Epic Monster to a scenario will ratchet the game’s difficulty to the next level. But, once you win against one, the satisfaction you feel at your success will be enough reward to want to start all over again.
To add the Epic Monster Bundle to your pledge, click on “Manage Your Pledge” on the Kickstarter page, click “Change your pledge”, and then add $59 to your total before hitting “Continue”. We’ll figure out what your additional money was for when the pledge manager goes out after the campaign.
Can you believe we only have a few days left in this campaign? What do you say we really kick it up a notch in this last week? There are some incredible things still to come that you won’t want to miss, so stay tuned and keep spreading the word about Deep Madness!
Thank you all for your support! A new scenario specifically designed for our Halloween special Unbound has been unlocked. Here are some new WIP photos for Unbound, 80% complete. The horrible Unbound will descent to Kadath soon.
