Darkfiber

What it is

The old shape: a party you roll yourself, a grid you walk a square at a time, corridors drawn in first person, and fights that happen in the corridor you are standing in rather than on a separate screen. Turn-based, unhurried, and unforgiving about what you bring back.

The setting is the same world as the rest of the games here, later. The datacenters won, then broke down, and a nanite bloom got into everything that was left — metal, machines and people. Faraday is the town that survived it, shielded and grounded where a signal cannot reach; the dead facilities under it are where people go to scavenge, and the machines down there are still on shift.

It is 5E compatible, on rules adapted for a party that fights in ranks down a corridor instead of on a battle map, and every class, protocol and creature in it has been renamed and rewritten for this world.

How a run goes

You build a party of up to six in Faraday — rolled attributes, one of six classes each — and stand them in a formation: two rows, three or four abreast, front rank first. The front rank trades blows; the rank behind it shoots, runs protocols, and is only reached in melee once the front has fallen. The enemy stands the same way, in up to four groups.

Protocols are the casting. Some people came out of the bloom able to push what the nanites around them can do — current, heat, cold, other people’s nerves — and they run it through an interface rig powered from charge cells. Charge comes back on a full rest, and a full rest is not cheap to find down there.

Faraday is the safe base and the reason to come home. The Outfitter sells and buys, the clinic brings back the fallen and purges Nanite Load — the bloom building up in a body the longer and deeper it stays below — and levels earned underground are only taken on the first full rest back in town.

The freight lift is the way between them. It goes from Faraday to every sublevel the party has reached, and each sublevel is a hand-built floor of doors, keys, caches and traps with something at the bottom of it that has to fall before the lift will go any further down.

What is in it so far

Six classes. The Breaker holds the front rank in the heaviest plating there is. The Ironblood has more hit points than anybody and an overdrive that halves what blades and blows can do to it. The Ghost picks locks and strikes where an ally has an enemy busy. The Scav shoots, tracks and reads a facility’s plant like a map. The Mender keeps the party alive. The Codewright runs the widest set of protocols, written down in a codebase.

127 protocols across six tiers, from routines that cost no charge at all to the few at the top that put a whole party back on its feet. 57 enemies, from scavenger gangs and rust-eating hounds to the machines that were never told to stop.

Six sublevels, every one built by hand. Sublevel 1, Hall C, the working floor where the people were, offices and server halls left as they were the afternoon the money stopped. Sublevel 2, the Power Plant underneath it, which kept everything above it alive and is still switched on. Sublevel 3, Hall D, the coolant plant, flooded and run by what lives in the pumps. Sublevel 4, the Cold Archive, tape and glass and frost. Sublevel 5, Containment and Air, sealed pods and the ducts between them. Sublevel 6, the Furnace. More are being built.

Credits

Models shown above. All but two are original designs by Geiger Enterprises, made into models with Tripo AI from the studio’s own art and rigged on Mixamo or in Blender for the game. The other two: the Relay Juggernaut is “Iron Juggernaut Game Ready FREE” by IronSpearStudio, from CGTrader under its royalty-free licence, re-rigged; the Pit Maw is a Mixamo character (Adobe). Most of the animations are Mixamo’s, used under Mixamo’s terms; the Rust Hound’s skeleton and clips are Quaternius’s (CC0).

Elsewhere in the game: props from KayKit Dungeon Remastered by Kay Lousberg and the Ultimate Modular Men Pack by Quaternius (both CC0); weapons and office props from CGTrader packs by draakzielvelit, r2detta, grantsj, RRFreelance and MartinSkch; lightning and fire shaders by Loop_Box and FencerDevLog (CC0).

Sound from the Sonniss GDC Game Audio Bundles and Kenney’s packs (CC0); the game’s credits screen names every recording, its library and its author.

Type: IBM Plex Mono and Oxanium, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

The portraits, monster sheets, title paintings, wordmark and icon were made for Darkfiber from its own art briefs. The posters on its walls are Hyperscaler’s. Everything else is built in code for the game.

The full list, file by file, is the Credits screen in the game.

Licence

This work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 ("SRD 5.1") by Wizards of the Coast LLC and available at https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document. The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.