Andy Lingua
Two Little Mice recently announced their next manual: Inferno (an italian setting for D&D5e produced in collaboration with Mana Project Studio). Until now we just knew some details about it, but thanks to an exclusive interview we managed to discover something more. Here’s what they revealed to us!
Is it the first time you work with the guys from Mana? And how do you think this will change the way you work? Or what will they add to your team?
Yes, it is the first time that we collaborate with Mana Project. We are excited to work side by side with a group that has repeatedly demonstrated its knowledge of both crowdfounding mechanisms and the fifth edition of the most famous roleplaying-game in the world. We have a very similar approach to work and we all believe very much in this project, we just have to give the best of us together.
What are the percentages of the manual that you intend to dedicate respectively to the setting, the rules, the characters and an eventual adventure?
The setting will have a lot of space in the manual and we can already anticipate that there will be a very substancial adventure. For the rest I can’t say anything else yet.
The characters will be the Lost, living people who find themselves in Hell. Will the bewilderment also be internal? Will a mechanic actively contemplate it? For example, will the only race be the Lost Human?
Inferno players will all play as the Lost. The dynamics of inner loss will be present in the game and, as in the case of Dante, will play a central role in determining why the characters are in Hell and what they will have to do. I can’t go into specifics yet, but previews will come soon.
You have declared that you intend to “bring Dante’s journey through Hell back to life in an extremely and incredibly faithful way”. Dante’s Inferno is a masterpiece of world literature, therefore a quality adaptation for roleplaying will require a profound knowledge of the work. Someone on the team is a particular expert on the subject with titles in this regard? Do you intend to contact any scholar or else? Or if it were “just” passion, what is your secret?
Two Little Mice was born from the meeting of two people who are first and foremost artists. We have both dealt with Dante’s work several times in our personal, scholastic and, precisely, artistic paths. We can’t boast specific titles on the subject, but we are eager to carry Dante’s words with passion and faithfulness into this new incarnation.
How did you come up with this project? What aspects frighten you most?
Like many of our other projects, we started from the desire to take our italian roots and make the most of them, fighting the esterophilia that has always characterized our debates. To do this, we want to translate one of the most italian works, unanimously considered a pillar of human history, in a playable setting of a world-famous roleplaying game. Certainly, in addition to the original material, we will inevitably have to deal with numerous transpositions of Dante’s work, many of which are interesting and successful. Aware that whatever choice we make in the various phases of this project will meet the favors of some and the skepticism of others, we will only try to do the best we can and we know by focusing on the affection we feel for the Divine Comedy.
From what I understood, you are going to go through crowdfunding. What are the reasons behind this choice? How are you going to manage the stretch goals? Will you focus more on adventures, on expanding the setting, on graphics or on physical material such as DM screens, dice, cards and other similar add-ons?
The crowdfounding will allow us both to create a setting that, hopefully, will have nothing to envy to other products that have far-reaching international productions behind them, and to spread the product globally. If we had opted for a more classic production method we would certainly have had to make many more sacrifices. Once again on stretch goals I can’t say anything else.
A characteristic of the Comedy was the presence in Hell of famous personalities, contemporary or antecedent to Dante, whom the Poet judged and included in the various circles. Will you also do the same thing? Will you make the ranks of sinners contemporary by adding new ones between the thirteenth and twenty-first centuries? Or will your Hell be populated only by canonical and mythological characters? And to which historical era will the Lost belong before entering Hell?
The peculiarity of Inferno is that it takes place after the journey that Dante describes in the Divine Comedy. Then the characters will find signs of the passage of the writer between the various circles. All the “classic” characters will be present where and how Dante placed them (I refer to the various Ulysses, Achilles, Chiron, etc…), accompanied by some others who are not mentioned in the original work, but which we will talk about later.
You talk about reviving Dante’s journey. Will the product therefore be focused on travel, exploration and journey tales or will there be elements for any kind of interaction with the environment and its inhabitants? Will the trip proposed in the manual (if any) be classified as a sandbox, free adventure or story-driven one?
We can state that the Hell proposed in the manual is not a fantasy-like kingdom with villages populated by demons that have their everyday lives. Dante’s hell is a much more supernatural setting, whose sole purpose is to trap and punish the damned, and as such it will follow its particular rules. The proposed journey will obviously be a trip that aims to cross hell, as the poet did, to reach the exit beyond Lucifer.
Most of the most famous fantasy role-playing settings have one or more pantheons and the game system you have chosen has, by birth, a polytheistic model with powerful but not omnipotent divinities. The setting of the Divine Comedy, on the other hand, presents an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent God and a Hell with very clear boundaries and with a very rigid hierarchy and structure. How do you plan to maintain the rolistic structure of characters and adventures in an environment with characteristics in some ways so opposed to the classic canons of the game? Can clerics and religious characters refer only to this one God?
In the game there will be a single divinity responsible for hell and for the laws that send souls to be tormented in this or that circle. The Lost will have peculiar archetypes that will help them interface with this divinity. The concept of alignment normally presented by other settings will have little sense of existing in this particular place.
We imagine that you have all read the original Dante’s Inferno. What are your favorite circle and character? Or do you have a strong passion for some usually forgotten aspect of the original work?
Simone opts for Barbariccia and the Malebolgie, while Rico prefers the Circle of Poets and Limbo.
