Sayonara, Devil World!!!

19 Dec, 2025

I've waited until Nathan had put his thoughts out because I knew I would echo many of his sentiments, as it's something we've talked about at length.

This was a thirty session campaign, throughout which I played as three serious characters and two stopgaps. I think it would be nice to discuss my likes and dislikes about the campaign centring them and my experience with them, as they divide the campaign into neat little chunks. I will try to be sparing with the actual details of the adventures.

Expectations before the campaign and historical context

My headspace coming into this campaign was one of unshackled optimism. We had just went through a series of very gruelling sessions in our Wolves Upon the Coast campaign, which ended up devolving into a revolving door of characters where we were constantly underpowered and without much to do. A large part of why that happened was just bad luck, we kept encountering really tough odds and rolling badly in very critical situations, but in hindsight, it also had a lot to do with how we approached the game as the group: by being too fast and too loose with it.

We might have benefitted from going at things slower, but instead we kept getting in way over our heads, and when we did slow down, the lack of progression took its toll. So it goes.

Nathan's pitch for the campaign, dropped at 21:44 (UTC-3), on Friday, February 14, 2025, was this:

1000 years ago the Four Sages sealed Lucifer at the conclusion of the Final War. The secrets of ancient humans still lay dormant, ready to be found by brave adventurers. Humans clash in endless warfare as the forces of Chaos prepare for the reincarnation of their great leader. What is your destiny, World Hero?

You have travelled together to the Wylderwoods chasing rumours of great treasures in the Northern Palace. Go! Gain experience by killing monsters and finding treasure!

We'll play using Houseruled OD&D (Target 20/OED as its basis). The general campaign plan is to move between dungeon, wilderness and domain play in a fairly expedient manner. Expect fantastical pulp fantasy hijinks with a solid dose of sci-fi.

The campaign began the next week.

Kimimi, the Man-Eating She-Monster

My first character, and favourite by far, was Kimimi the Man-Eating She-Monster, a level 1 Magician whose name I stole from a great videogame reviewer of the same name. The idea for her was that she was a witch's familiar that had fallen into a magic cauldron and transformed into a human, and was both not very happy with that and also a bit uncertain on how a human should act, and was thus prone to being callous.

Kimimi was interesting because a lot of what happened to her, happened because of me struggling with the system. For the first two sessions we went dungeon crawling into the aforementioned northern palace (whose name we promptly forgot and started calling "the blue ruins" instead), and Kimimi just had nothing better to do after her spells of little utility were up, and so I started trying to branch out and dual-class Kimimi into being a Fighter.

This eventually culminated into a sort of character arc happening during the downtimes where she got close to a knight who had lost his son, Sir Barral, and became his apprentice. It got kickstarted when she first killed a normal person, and happened mostly impromptu; I certainly didn't come in with any plotting or idea for that, it just crystallized after a few sessions.

She did eventually succeed in her quest, dual-classing into Fighter as Dame Kimimi, had a heart-to-heart with someone¹ where she proclaimed "I don't want to be this animal anymore!!!" while crying inside her pointy hat for the first time, and became a wind-themed spellsword.

I had the most fun with Kimimi because it was when my interests most aligned with the other players', and even though I didn't have much to do in the very first sessions, this was compensated by interesting downtime, and by Kimimi having a chance to shine whenever I came up with some cockamamie scheme to help the lads with magic.

This alignment of interests would not last forever. Around session 8, Nathan tried to make good on his initial pitch of "move between dungeon, wilderness and domain play in a fairly expedient manner", and tried to shift gear into a mystery arc, mostly relying on the characters being decent people to accomplish it. Except the other players weren't very interested either in the mystery structure or roleplaying as decent people. In fact, this is where I started noticing that the other players actually prized very much the arcade nature of the game, and how it allowed for more standard, "fuck you got mine" minded characters.

I don't mean this as a negative, to be clear. In fact, if anything, I think Jenx put his perspective best in his own retrospective:

Devil's World Heroes was not the kind of game where we spent time exploring the deep interiority of our characters, bonding with various NPCs and enmeshing ourselves in the deep and rich setting. We regularly had 7+ players in a session, there was no time for that shit. So instead we just gamed. Go to a place, kill anyone who looks at us funny, take their shit, keep pushing. End of session - tally up your experience points and move on.

In this instance, it materialized in the world of the game by humouring the mystery for two sessions, then Kimimi was killed by a character named The Captive Prince² and the party decided we simply had no time to be "side-tracked", we had a dungeon to get to.

This was frustrating for me, both because it was sidelining a mode of play I quite enjoy, but also because it felt like a step backwards. Instead of moving out on the broader world and engaging with it, I knew we were going to spend the next couple of sessions tucked inside a hole somewhere, doing what I felt was the equivalent of filing my taxes: an initial formality, and a step on the ladder towards domain play.

I don't want to be too down on it, however. The overall world was still vibrant, playing with other hobbyists, as Jenx eloquently put it, made things as painless as possible, and the dungeon in question was the bellly of a giant king where we fought chicken drumsticks and beefcake ogres, so I can't be too grumpy about it. It was just laid out in no uncertain tones that this was what the game was going to be.

Basic Holmes (later "Expert Holmes")

My second character was a cleric-wizard named Basic Holmes who spoke in an exaggerated southern drawl, which quickly became an eerily accurate Foghorn Leghorn impression. As you can probably tell, I was trying not to take the game too seriously by this point, and try to enjoy the arcade silliness a little bit.

Holmes survived for 6 sessions and could only cast spells for about half of them, except by now the other characters were much stronger and also much more adept at NPC-wrangling, which was where Kimimi had shined the most (besides having clutch spells here and there). After fighting some 30 chicken drumsticks, the Big Boys³ decided they were not going to take shit from anyone. I don't think most players even noticed very much the shift between how we interacted with NPCs at the start - pragmatically, but still interested in their quests and lives - versus how we started interacting with them after this point.

This meant Holmes, a healer, had very little to do inside combat due to having already used his healing spells, and very little to do outside of combat, both because the party wasn't interested in interacting with people in that fashion, and also because we were mostly in the wilds and in extremely dire straits at this point.

The Foghorn Leghorn impression was always funny to me, which was heartening, but this is about where I stopped caring too much about my own character and place and started taking things a bit more holistically.

His best moment only truly came when the entire rest of the party was spent. We found a vampire manor and just had no choice other than spend a while there or risk travelling through the second most perilous area of the game. This culminated in Holmes killing the vampire by reflecting sunlight with a mirror on him; a moment of ingenuity which saved us much grief.

Holmes was unceremoniously shot dead right before a bossfight, at level 3, and passed on his name to another character, which made much better use of it.

The miniboss before that, though, was Sir Barral Jr., friend to Prince Wynsel and son of the former Sir Barral. Kimimi had known he had been lost and where he was for about 8 sessions before the party decided to go there. His tale was one of woe. As a young man, around 16 I believe, him and Wynsel went hunting in the forest. There they found a Titan, a mecha from the wars from hundreds of years before, which started merging with Barral. He heroically sacrificed himself, telling Wynsel to go back home, and spent the next few years having his mind broken into shape by that of the previous mech pilot.

It was the lack of this son which had turned two NPCs, Sir Barral and Prince Wynsel, against one another, which prevented Wynsel from ever learning how to ride. Kimimi's plan had been to reconcile them and unite against the overall threat, Tyrantax, who lay far to the west.

In-world, Barral Jr. was a tremendously tragic and important character. We managed to save him and stop him from killing himself after the fight, and he was promptly rejected by his father, who did not believe this to be his boy. Wynsel had a world of grief for his friend, who had his teenage years robbed from him, trapped in pain inside a swamp.

Unfortunately for him, with Holmes dead, I needed a new character.

Sir Barral Jr.

Barral Jr. was when I kinda stopped giving a shit and decided to go beast mode, predicting he wouldn't live very long and I could just ditch him for someone cooler. After 16 sessions, or 4 months of playing, it was abundantly clear that a high context character such as he wasn't a good match for the group, and Nathan was giving indications that we might end the campaign soon, which was true, in a sense. The next arc was the last, it just so happens that it was also as long as the entirety of the campaign up to this point combined.

I played Barral Jr. as a complete juvenile shitlord. How much of an asshole he was relied entirely on what would be funnier at the moment. This earned him a King John-like fame of being completely unreliable and sociopathic, despite never actually going the length to kill someone who hadn't crossed him.⁴ He was basically a Guy Gardner.

I can't lie, this was pretty fun on occasion. There is a certain power fantasy to being a complete asshole that simultaneously cannot be ignored by just being way stronger than expected (Barral Jr. began at level 3 and his right arm could turn into anything, a fact I exploited profusely).

However, it was ultimately a joke that ran for too long. As Nathan put in his own retrospective, if Devil World Heroes was popcorn, then Barral Jr. was the frozen lasagna of it all: entirely un-nutritious, way too much at once, yet perfectly suited for that specific mood.

Part of my experiment with Barral was mimicking the behaviour of the other players and seeing if it went well with me, particularly Jenx and Zygocact (playing Meatface and Bahat Ghul). My ultimate conclusion was a soft "I get it" followed quickly by "But it's not for me".

What left me unsatisfied with Barral Jr. and Devil World Heroes as a whole was that too much of it appealed to what I like in a videogame rather than what I like in an RPG. In a videogame, I don't mind it when a "dungeon" really is a series of rooms where you find fights and items with little else of much substance. In a videogame, I don't mind it when I'm locked into a single mode of play for the entirety of it, because there is only so much that a game can be programmed to do. In a videogame, I don't have my wizards have an emotional breakdown at her actions and truly strive to change her ways and live by a code of honour.

I think that, for the arcade gaming ethos which Jenx lays out in his post to actually be effective, you either need to be very fed up with more roleplaying intensive games, or just really really enjoy the loop of dungeon play for itself, and I do not.

Recent experiences have told me that I do enjoy dungeons as a play space, but I don't find any of it interesting by itself. I wouldn't find it very interesting to play in an open table, for instance, where the fun part is the moment to moment dungeoneering rather than the longviewed campaign.

The series of sessions that really solidified this to me were the Dhunprick ones in Devil World Heroes. From sessions 19 to 22, Nathan had to take a hiatus, so Mr. Mann put on the pointy GM hat and ran us through Dhunprick; a grease-themed psychedelic dreamworld inhabited by snot people and beset by sand-themed pirates, where we fought such enemies as Sandpaper Phil, a 20 HD pirate, and the Invisible Hand of the Market - a literal invisible hand in the middle of a market.

Part of Dhunprick was Dhunprick Manor, a sprawling dungeon made by Mr. Mann for the purpose, filled with (endearingly) zany nonsense and kooky freaks.

Now, I have respect for Mr. Mann as a DM, I liked pretty much all of the games he's run for me, and I think Dhunprick Manor is a decent traditional dungeon, but crawling through it made me want to rip my colon out through my mouth with noting except sheer force of will. This was because, despite being a fine dungeon, it was all about the dungeon. There was some background which went entirely over my head, very few NPCs, and when the nonsensical ethos of the Big Boys and the shitlordy ways of Barral Jr. collided with a worthy tonal adversary, the result was that the world and the players were in perfect synch, and it made me tremendously bored. I did not care for what was happening, for the dungeon, for my character or anyone else's.

All that we had in those moments was the procedure, the raw arcade gaming. No broader world, no deeper characters, just lads fucking with doors and killing foes. It was the ultimate sublimation of the direction DWH was taking (even though I would argue, tonally it was completely different), and it was entirely uninteresting to me.

So did ya hate it the whole thing Havoc

yes, go fuck yourself

Not at all. Devil World Heroes was my first true, proper dungeon game, and it left a hell of an impression. I didn't mention some of the more obvious things because Jenx and Nathan already put them very eloquently in their own reports, but I particularly subscribe Jenx's point on playing with fellow hobbyists and how DAMN good Nathan is at running fights.

Before playing DWH, and for most of my gaming career, I fully believed I just didn't like fighting in RPGs. And to an extent it is true, mostly for the reason that, with tactical infinity, violence becomes unnecessary. But Nathan illustrated to me in exhaustive detail how exactly to pull off the best damn fights I ever had in my whole life.

Even in the worst sessions, when I was the most detached and having an unfun time, the rest of the group made it as painless as possible. Everyone was always on top of their game, everyone paid attention, aside from one session we didn't lollygag with excessive preparation, and for the first third of the campaign when I was completely down with the sickness, it was definitely one of the coolest campaigns I participated.

Ultimately, Devil World Heroes was a massive learning experience for me and it taught me much of what I like or dislike in RPGs, and for that I will always be grateful, both to Nathan and the rest of the lads. That's worth its weight in gold.

#devil world heroes #play reports