Twenty Sides Studio · Our First Post · The Beginning of Something Dark and Wonderful
The torch gutters. The last spell was cast two corridors ago. Somewhere ahead, something breathes in the dark, patient and waiting. You look at your companions. You look at your character sheet. You make a choice.
That moment. That specific, stomach-tightening, leaning-forward-in-your-chair moment. That is what we are chasing.
We are Twenty Sides, a TTRPG live play podcast that has spent years around tables and microphones telling stories, rolling dice, and falling in love with this hobby over and over again. We have played the classics. We have homebrewed, house-ruled, and debated system design across countless sessions. And somewhere along the way, a question started following us:
What if we built the game we actually wanted to play?
That question became Risen Kings. And we want to tell you about it.
A Bridge Between Two Worlds
The tabletop landscape right now sits at a fascinating crossroads. On one side lives the Old School Renaissance, games like Shadowdark that embrace genuine lethality, resource pressure, and the weight of a dungeon that does not care whether you survive it. On the other side stands Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, the most accessible and expressive version of this hobby that has ever existed, a game that has brought millions of people to the table for the first time.
Both of these worlds have something the other needs.
Risen Kings is our attempt to build the bridge between them. It takes the lethality, the exploration pressure, and the resource attrition that make OSR games feel genuinely dangerous, and marries it to the expressive class design and accessibility that made 5e a phenomenon. The result is a game that feels familiar enough to sit down with quickly and dangerous enough to make every session matter.
Ten levels of core play. A dark, gritty medieval world. Real consequences for real decisions. And classes with enough depth that every character at the table feels distinct, capable, and worth playing.
A Few Things We Are Particularly Excited About
Mana and Energy
Every character in Risen Kings runs on a resource. Spellcasters use Mana. Martial characters use Energy. Hybrid classes use both. These pools power your abilities, your spells, your defining moments in combat and beyond.
But here is where it gets interesting: Mana and Energy are not just mechanical fuel. They are your life force. When a character is Downed, they do not roll death saving throws and wait. They begin burning through their resource pool, losing more each round they remain on the ground. When that pool hits zero, they are gone. The clock is visible. The urgency is real. Stabilizing a fallen companion is not a checkbox, it is a race.
This system also shapes how you spend resources across an entire session. Long Rests can only happen in Safe Havens, specific locations the Game Master designates as truly secure. Between those sanctuaries, Short Rests offer partial recovery through Recovery Dice, a small breath before the next corridor. The question of when to push forward and when to pull back is never a trivial one.
The Chaos Point System
Monsters in Risen Kings are not waiting to be depleted. They are escalating.
At the start of every round of combat, the Game Master gains Chaos Points. One point at round one. Two at round two. Three at round three. These points are spent on special abilities unique to each creature, abilities listed right in the stat block: devastating strikes, terrain manipulation, desperate and dangerous gambits.
The longer a fight drags on, the more dangerous it becomes. Players who strike decisively and end encounters quickly will be rewarded. Players who let a battle stretch into round five or six will feel the pressure mount in ways that are increasingly difficult to manage. It is one of our favorite systems in the entire game, and it transforms every combat encounter into something with a pulse.
Tension Dice and the Cost of Recklessness
Exploration in Risen Kings has teeth.
Whenever a character fails badly, makes a loud noise, or makes a careless decision in the dungeon, a d6 is rolled. On a one, the party gains a point of Tension. When Tension reaches three, something goes wrong. When it reaches six, something goes very wrong. Then it resets, and the pressure begins building again.
Tension Dice do something we love: they make the world feel reactive without requiring the Game Master to manufacture drama artificially. The consequences emerge from play. From choices. From that moment when someone decided to kick the door instead of check it.
And there is more waiting beyond these three systems. A light management system with six distinct types of darkness, none of them friendly. A Strain system that breaks your equipment before it breaks you. Classes with dual defining features that shape how every character plays from the first session. Bloodlines that give players a sense of who they are without telling them who they have to be.
What to Expect From Us
We are deep in development. Core mechanics are locked. Classes and Bloodlines are being built out now. Our goal is a complete Player’s Handbook that gives everything needed to run a full campaign in the world of Risen Kings.
On this blog, we will pull back the curtain regularly. Design diaries. Early previews. Honest conversation about what is working and what we are still wrestling with. We have no interest in marketing language. We are interested in making something genuinely great and bringing you along for the whole messy, exciting process.
We started Twenty Sides because we love this hobby. We are making Risen Kings for the same reason.
We hope you will stick around to see where it goes.
The Twenty Sides Team