Shadows of Brimstone - So what is it?

Shadows of Brimstone is a cooperative dungeon crawler set (initially) in the Wild West, published by those crazy people at Flying Frog Productions.

Unusually, the core game comes in two versions, City of the Ancients and The Swamps of Death. Each core game contains The Mines location (which is where you start each adventure) together with a different Other World location, which you can travel to through portals, more of this later.

Each player chooses a character from the 8 classic western archetypes currently available, such as US Marshal, Crazy Priest and Mexican Bandit and collects together their starting gear.

Each adventure can either be taken from the Adventure book where the layout of the Mines is pre-mapped and the events pre-scripted, or take on a completely random map layout on their quest for money and loot.

Players can keep track of their character's experience, stats and equipment and keep them from adventure to adventure, levelling up as they go. Between each adventure players can go to Town and visit various shops to buy new equipment, heal various aliments and do any character-specific events (the Outlaw can try to rob the Bank!).

An experienced Outlaw

The gameplay is familiar if you have played a few games like this. Each turn every character/monster activates in initiative order and can move and then attack. When a character attacks, you count up how many ranged shots or melee attacks they have and roll to hit and wound. The target can then roll to defend and takes wounds accordingly.

Every monster have their own stats and rules which are printed on giant cards.

When you move to the edge of a map tile, a new one is drawn from the pile and you carry on, much like Warhammer Quest.

The blue and white blob is a portal to another dimension...

As previously mentioned, some map tiles have portals for exits. When you go through a portal, you randomly draw a card from the Other World deck to find out which dimension you end up in. This is where the City of the Ancients and the Swamps of Death come in. Each Other World has their own loot deck and event deck. Therefore, you start your adventure in the Wild West, but could end up knee deep in a swamp being attacked by dinosaurs or find yourself in a frozen abandoned city surrounded by alien technology!

There is already a ton of expansions and additional characters planned. I'll have a look at these in the next post.