The Luthreion. The Archonate’s grand arena, its sacred monument to gore and violence. A feast of carnage for the people of Naucrene, who come in droves to watch the gladiators do battle; a proving ground for the Order of Pyrias to hone their sorceries on twisted warbeasts and human flesh; a golden opportunity for the city’s elite to win the love of the crowds.

And for you, a prison. The place where your humanity will drain away, drop by crimson drop, until there’s nothing left of you but a slab of scarred and mutated flesh lying dead on the sands. Sure, you can keep that fate at bay for a while – maybe even win some fleeting glory – but your luck won’t last forever. One day, sooner or later, the Luthreion will claim you.

Unless, of course, you can somehow gain your freedom before that day comes.

The Game

Morituri is a Forged in the Dark game about inhuman gladiators fighting to escape from an arena run by corrupt nobles and sadistic blood mages. You’ll do battle in the arena, fighting against rival gladiators and horrifically mutated creatures; you'll gain terrible scars and preternatural mutations; and in the shadows you’ll work towards your escape, clawing for every scrap of leverage or control you can get your hands on.

The game alternates between the characters' gladiatorial bouts and the time they spend recovering in their training grounds. The time between bouts, the ludus phase, includes standard Forged in the Dark downtime mechanics, but also normal roleplaying scenes — up to and including covert or dangerous missions that would be considered scores in Blades. The characters might indulge their vices in one scene, slip out of their cells that night to threaten an administrator, and return to the training grounds the next morning to pick a fight with a rival gladiator.

Tactical Combat

Morituri is built to provide dynamic, tactical combat without sacrificing the flexibility of fictional positioning. It introduces a system of tags that feed into the normal flow of the action roll, highlighting the important factors for position and effect and giving the players a foundation to make interesting tactical decisions. The weapons that each combatant uses will be critical in determining how effective or dangerous an action might be, as will the traits of the enemy combatants — human or otherwise.

The characters themselves have plenty of options in a fight: besides an array of special abilities, Morituri has six different actions that explicitly relate to violence. Each PC can specialize in their own brand of carnage, or branch out to take the approach that best fits a given situation. The PCs will also gain powerful mutations, monstrous abilities that open up even more possibilities and give them an edge both in and out of the arena.

Development Status

This document is an early release of Morituri, and it omits many of the core mechanics that the game shares with Blades in the Dark. If you’re familiar with Blades, or with other Forged in the Dark games, this release will have everything you need to play. The rulebook begins with an overview of the differences between Morituri and Blades, and the following pages flesh out the system in more depth.

If you aren’t familiar with Blades in the Dark, you can read through the reference document here: https://bladesinthedark.com/basics. In particular, you’ll want to review the Basics section, as well as the Teamwork section (a subpage of The Score).

A full, standalone version of Morituri is in the works, but there’s no fixed release date yet.

Credits & Licensing

Design, Writing, Layout: Joe Adkisson
Design & Editing: Will Adkisson
Art: Simone Tammetta (Old Raging Barbarian)
Playtesting: Will Adkisson, Thomas Burke, James Emery, Michael Stoneman-Powell

This work is based on Blades in the Dark (found at http://www.bladesinthedark.com), product of One Seven Design, developed and authored by John Harper, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)