Dungeons & Dragons is a rich playground of fantastical tales where warriors, wizards and elves can take on monstrous foes for unimaginable spoils … or you can spend an entire evening completely undermining your dungeon master by killing off important characters, focusing on unrelated items and improvising your own disastrous adventure. This is often where the best stories are and where Esoteric Ebb takes its inspiration.
Part tabletop game, part RPG, you play as a cleric who has been sent to investigate the destruction of a tea shop in the city Norvik, which is about to hold its first ever election in five days. You’ll talk (and occasionally fight) with the local residents to uncover the truth and affect the outcome of the election. Or perhaps you’ll just fight some seagulls. You can choose your own path, but, much like in D&D, your success comes down to dice rolls and having to live with the consequences if you fail them.
“Every single choice available in the game is something that I anticipated,” says writer and developer Christoffer Bodegård. It’s particularly impressive because every interaction in even a tiny area of the game feels so open-ended. All of the dialogue choices and touching of random objects have been thoughtfully considered by Bodegård to give the feeling of freedom in a confined space. The experience of playing D&D and your players doing unexpected things has come together in the game.
As a cleric you may be taking on the role of a detective, but you can cast spells to read people’s minds to gain an advantage or even speak to the dead to uncover other lines of inquiry. Your cleric is entirely your own as you can customise their accessories – and their personality, with classic D&D stats such as charisma and strength. You could make yourself strong but with low intelligence so you might win a fight but not be smart enough to get a truthful answer out of anyone because your dice rolls can never get high enough.
“At some point I was like, well, I play so much D&D, why not just make my own homebrew?” Bodegård says. “I wanted to do something entirely different, and that’s what inspired the basis of the world of Esoteric Ebb, which is just taking D&D and looking at it from a weird, esoteric, realistic angle. Like, what if these spells actually did exist? How would governments form? How would various powers exist in relation to these actual D&D mechanics? If we can create food and water from a spell, how does that affect the economy? And just looking at it from that perspective.”
Norvik may look like a small, medieval-style city on the surface, but because so much consideration has been put into how the place works with its various political parties and citizens, it feels like a real place. Just one with monsters working at shops, and magic. Bodegård’s focus on the depth of the setting and the sheer scope of all the dialogue choices makes for an enticing prospect. “As long as I’m entertained by the thing I’m writing, I can keep writing, and the second I’m bored, I stop.”
