The Secret of Weepstone speaks to me on a deep level as a longtime Dungeons & Dragon player

As someone who has been playing Dungeons & Dragons for close to two decades now, there's just something special about rolling dice and maneuvering around traps and monsters in a scary dungeon that speaks to me. The combination of not knowing what may be lurking around the next corner and how badly my dice will screw me over creates a special sort of tension that most video games just aren't able to replicate in quite the same way. During PAX West this year, I stopped by the DreadXP booth to check out one of their brand new titles, which captures not only the spirit but the black and white grim fantasy aesthetic of Advanced D&D and other TTRPGs from the 70s and early 80s.

The Secret of Weepstone is a first-person dungeon crawler where your party consists of different villagers from the village of Weepstone that you then take through adventures to discover that titular secret, mentioned in the title. The game is still in development, due out in 2026 sometime, so only a few of the villagers were able to be picked from, but some examples included a burly blacksmith and a young thief. In general, they fit the standard sort of roles you could expect in an RPG. With my party picked, it was off into the dungeon I went.

Weepstone is based on the 1981 release of the Basic and Expert sets of D&D, a ruleset whose goal was to streamline the onboarding process to get folks playing the tabletop game and not completely overwhelm them straight away. The adventure featured in the demo, "The Depths of Weepstone Keep," tasked the party to search the keep and find the source of the local Lord's torment. All of this told via the cover of a very 1980s module booklet, complete with black and white artwork, recommended character levels, and other winks and nods. By this point, my face was already showcasing a large grin, and it didn't leave my entire time playing.

This RPG adopts an inky black and white art style with the main bits of color coming from the dice you roll during skill checks or during combat or when you bring on up the "map" which is a page out of the module you are playing. Everything about it looks hand-drawn and straight out of one of the old books and what I originally thought would be a standard grid-based movement affair was quickly dashed as it turns out you move in real time. Opening doors, flipping switches and navigating the keep felt like I was playing a classic fps game. Considering I was expecting something more akin to Wizardry or the Etrian Odyssey games, where you move square-by-square, this was a pleasant surprise, despite it not feeling quite as TTRPG-esque.

Combat, on the other hand is chock-full of dice rolling goodness that feels straight off the tabletop. Both your party and allies will be slinging dice checking for hits against their target's armor and dishing out different types of damage dice. Having to manage and move your villagers around between front and back rows adds a bit of extra strategy too. Each character in your party begins as a simple level 0 villager and it isn't until they reach level 1 that their unique skilltrees unlock, an approach that is pulled straight from the B/X edition of D&D. This makes the early goings of your party rather dangerous where at anytime one of your characters could die, be it from an enemy's arrow, or how it was in my case, falling down a hole in a latrine. Talk about a crappy way to go.

What is pretty neat, though, is that sometimes, a character's death may actually be to the benefit of the rest of the survivors. Each character comes with a powerful boon called a Mortal Favor that activates after they die. Starla (my character that fell down the hole) had the ability Altered Destiny, which allowed the party to reroll a single to-hit or damage roll result once per combat. A free re-roll during combat? Yes, please!  And the inclusion of these Mortal Favors has me brainstorming what sort of wild combos may happen if you have only a single character still alive with five of these powers available at once!

Speaking to Hunnter Bond, director at DreadXP (Weepstone's publisher) and one of Weepstone's developers, he explained how he and the rest of the team are approaching Weepstone and its story from a standpoint that they were creating a module - a standalone ttrpg story - and not a video game story. "So the original idea behind the game had always been to approach the writing and design end of the levels as though we were writing a module, and in fact when we started work on the game I was writing out each room as a module, including box text for room descriptions and instructions to the "DM" about the rooms," Hunter explained, " One of the most interesting things to come out of working on the project so far has been seeing how much work you're really doing when running those old modules, in the form of creating interactions, dialog etc. If you go back to classics like Keep on the Borderlands, or Palace of the Silver Princess, you'll see that they're functionally frameworks, and all the fun obviously comes from the play. That was a major factor behind the approach changing from our initial conversations about adapting an existing module to using a story that I'm writing along with Sean." 

This focus on designing the title from this perspective looks to be resulting in a pretty neat bonus for fans of playing in-person TTRPGs - you will be able to play these with your actual D&D group when Weepstone launches. "So, the plan is that at the end of development, as Sean is wrapping up the inevitable home stretch of any game's development cycle that ends up primarily being bug fixing and polish, we won't have any new writing needed so I'll use that time to focus on going back and writing the adventures into usable module formats. We haven't decided 100% on how those will be shared once the game's done, but I know that I have a goal at least personally. I really hope that after playing through the game, equipped with usable modules that represent the adventure you just played, some people may feel empowered to go grab a copy of their favorite compatible OSR or OSR-adjacent rules such as Old School Essentials, or even the original Basic/Expert boxes and share a new-found love for classic dungoen crawling with their friends at the table." So not only will you be getting a great video game to play that doubles as a rewarding "How to DM" tool, but also another one to play during your next game night with your friends around the table! 

The Secret of Weepstone ticks so many boxes in my list of interests that at times it feels like it was made for me. With its inky art style, flexible party compositions, TTRPG-inspired systems, and crunchy stat and gear goodness, my short time with it has already made it one of my most anticipated games of next year. You can currently wishlist Weepstone over on Steam with an expected release date of sometime next year.