Deathbringer's Satirical Commitment Issues

Deathbringer is bad satire, it is trying to simultaneously mock and be 80s grimdark chain-mail bikini fantasy. That’s why it sucks. Now, Magnolia Keep¹ has definitively killed and then kicked the metaphorical horse that is “the hottest TTRPG on crowdfunding”. I am not here to just jump on the bandwagon, as fun as that has been on Discord. See I suffer from the unfortunate disease of being able to see the potential in things and wanting to fix it. Doubly so when the thing that is so clearly missing is a sense of humour. Plus I keep getting ads for this stupid thing so I need to work the sliver out of my brain somehow.

The Problem

Everything wrong with this game comes from it trying to have its cake and eat it too. It clearly and desperately wants to be seen as a satirical take on 80s chain-mail bikini fantasy whilst also relishing in the male gaze. These two positions cannot coexist; one will overtake the other and in this case it has erred on the side of making every woman an underwear model. No joke you can write can get you past that first impression.

Now of course there were other issues (outlined by Magnolia Keep¹) but they stem from this root. Every bad, tone deaf choice made comes from a fundamental lack in being able to commit to the bit. It shows in the highly rendered 5e style art rather than anything resembling Frazetta, the ads showing characters in a metal band mimicking 5e ad tropes and the confused comparisons to Dark Sun despite only really sharing tone. It reeks of an unclear core vision for the project, instead being a mishmash of contradicting elements. It’s a mess.

The Solution

The core idea is, I think, a good one. A satirical take on 80s grimdark chain-mail bikini fantasy is at least somewhat new ground in the OSR². All they needed to do was have a writer help Prof DM create a consistent comedic voice and a lot of the issues would have been avoided. It needs a clear angle so the other decisions can be filtered through it. If the Professor had just committed to the satire, all this might have gone differently.

Now the question is how could this have been more effective satire, rather than a regressive revel in old tropes? In the spirit of fixing things I want to answer that question. Not that I think anyone will listen and change this already very successful if fundamentally flawed game. If anything it is more working out my own creative muscles, testing my own comedic chops against a premise I would not have picked for myself. So without further ado let’s start with…

The Deathbringer Himself

It’s clear that the Deathbringer is intended as a comedic character. Ignoring that he may have been nicked from Games Workshop, he’s an overblown version of the violent barbarian hero. He lives for combat and taking treasure from the newly deceased. The look here also contrasts heavily with the vitalism of Conan the prototypical barbarian. This works to depict him as the dumb brute of bad 80s fantasy rather than the keen and agile Conan. Alone this is functional parody but he is also this game’s poster-boy so we need to do more. We need jokes.

The simplest and most effective use of a character like this is to use him like Judge Dredd. Early Judge Dredd comics engaged in this nice bit of double dipping where the Judges and their violent response to crime functioned as satire of US police officers, and the criminals they killed functioned as satire of the negative aspects of US culture. It’s fun, addictive and criminally easy to pull off in small doses, like when you are advertising a TTRPG crowdfunding campaign 👀.

You want to sell your game on how it cuts through the cruft of other systems and settings? Have Deathbringer literally cut through them. The ads for this game would be 1000x better if it was just Deathbringer dismembering an NPC in the middle of their long backstory or another hero explaining their class features. Oh, this town has a long and storied history? Well Deathbringer just tossed the history book at your mayor’s head and is hacking off his limbs. What now?

Chainmail Bikinis

Every woman on the crowdfunding page is a small-waisted, big chested white woman. Now I like a sexy lady as much as the next guy but do we really need a cookie cutter army of them. I’ll give you one Red Sonja parody given the subject matter but then you have to shake it up. In a world so violent as to make a character like Deathbringer there is no way all the women would be this comfortable being next to nude. Not only that but they are all the same kind of attractive woman with nothing for the ass man. Frank Frazetta would be ashamed.

The most obvious solution (other than including some less sexualised and more diverse women) is to put a dude in chainmail underwear too. Of course for this to be effective satire it needs to risk upsetting the exact guys who are into the chainmail bikini. This means making your male underwear model attractive to women and the male gays. It’s the basic “let’s see how you like it” play where the normal people in the audience get to laugh at everyone who takes it too seriously.

Another way to deal with the sexism of the material we’re parodying is to just plop a modern woman into it. Make a normally dressed straight-woman to play off the setting’s silly or regressive aspects. Better yet have her tag along with Deathbringer to offset his ultra-violence. Now you have an audience POV lens to help frame everything as something to point and laugh at.

Lady Deathbringer

The gender-swap of our poster-boy deserves her own section, because she is the most obvious symptom of this game’s problem with women. She is supposed to be Deathbringer’s female counterpart but instead she is another bikini girl but just a little more muscular and wearing a helmet. It sucks. On its most basic level all they needed to do was give Deathbringer more female proportions, keeping her just as cartoonishly muscular and just as armoured, and the job would be done.

If you want to have more fun with it you could do a Ms Pacman thing. Make Lady Deathbringer 100% identical to Deathbringer just with a little pink bow and maybe some eyelashes on the helmet. It’s absurd era-appropriate parody. It could also allow you to jump on the trend of giving the grimdark a girly-pop makeover if you go more overboard with the look.

Fungus licking cannibal

This one was pretty shocking to me. I could see how someone might accidentally take the detour from pulp fantasy into bikini girl world but this choice was just odd. It’s out of place and of course pretty racist. The only way to salvage this, and this is a tremendous leap, is to turn it into a pun name. The monster is actually a fungus that licks cannibals. Otherwise just cut it; it’s not really worth saving.

Bringing it all together

Let’s bring this all together into what I think would be a pretty good trailer for this made up better Deathbringer.

We start with a classic scene; an evil wizard atop a ziggurat, ritual knife held aloft, seeking to plunge it into the scantily clad woman tied to the blood altar. The steps of the ziggurat are teeming with dark creatures of ill-intent. Then we see him at the bottom of the stairs, Deathbringer.

The unholy hordes swarm Deathbringer as he begins to swing his axe. Each stroke of his mighty axe rips through handfuls of the demonic monstrosities at a time. Now the wizard finally speaks, “It is too late Deathbringer, it is as foretold–” and his head leaves his body.

“You saved…” starts the former-sacrifice as Deathbringer strolls past, ignoring her, “me…” Deathbringer leaps down the other side of the ziggurat to continue his battle.

Conclusion

The ads for this game have been incessant, which in a way makes sense, I’m the target audience. I like beer and pretzels D&D and violence and yes on occasion boobies. The problem is it is not all done with tongue in cheek. It doesn’t commit to the satire and instead asks to be taken seriously, or at least as seriously as people take 5e. You fundamentally disrespect your own material when you don’t follow through on your premise like this. Either the setting is a joke (with town names like Pissburg), or it is not. It can’t be both. That’s the lesson in all this; pick a lane and commit to it.

1. Read the excellent original and the follow-up ↩︎ ↩︎²

2. Sans all the debate and pedantry that comes with such a claim. ↩︎