Introduction

It is the mid-1560s in Feudal Japan and the entire country has been engulfed in a brutal civil war for over 100 years. While the countless Samurai Clans battle one another for dominance, a blazing meteor streaks through the sky...the ‘Sword of Heaven’! Crashing into the Sacred Mountain, a cataclysmic explosion showers the countryside in a glowing, black rock... Dark Stone. Collected up by the nearby Clans and greedily hoarded into their fortresses, the Dark Stone has magical properties as it is forged into weapons and armor, giving any who wield it an edge in battle. But the power of the black rock could not be contained! Portals to other worlds rip open wherever the Dark Stone is concentrated, unleashing a great Darkness to spread across the land!
Now hordes of creatures pour down from the mountains and overrun castles from within, ravaging the countryside. While most flee in terror, some heroic individuals step forward to help hold back the Darkness! Fighting their way through the hordes to seal these portals, only the bravest warriors dare enter... the Forbidden Fortress!

Shadows of Brimstone: Forbidden Fortress™ is a fast-paced, Cooperative, dungeon-crawl boardgame set in war-torn Feudal Japan, and mixed with Unspeakable Horror! Each player creates a character, taking on the role of a classic Japanese Archetype, such as a Samurai Warrior, Traveling Monk, ninja Assassin, or Sorceress. Forming a party of Heroes, the players take their characters deep into the castles and temples that have been demonically overrun by creatures of myth and legend.
The Heroes can embark on a variety of different missions, from finding and sealing a gateway to another world, to rescuing a local Warlord’s son who was hauled off in the night by a horrible creature. The Heroes explore a dynamically generated fortress, overcoming dangerous encounters and fighting savage creatures, while collecting up useful Gear and ancient Artifacts to help them during their adventures. Heroes can even find portals to other worlds, stepping through to continue their adventure on the other side

Game Overview

Forbidden Fortress incorporates the best aspects of RPGs, Miniature games, and board games, keeping the focus on fun adventure - fighting creatures, getting Loot, and story-driven encounters. Game play is streamlined to be fast and fun, keeping exploration and combat easy to understand and open to a wider audience. The game is popular with both male and female players because every character in the game has a double-sided Hero Sheet with the Male version on one side and Female version on the other.

Fully Cooperative Dynamic Gameplay

We worked hard to inject a lot of replayability into the game. Each Core Set includes 12 missions, with many more that have been released in expansions, and each time players embark on a mission, the game and story unfold in a randomly-generated way, using decks of cards to dynamically determine how the board is constructed, the enemies that attack, the story-based encounters, and even the Loot that the Heroes collect. As a fully cooperative adventure, all players work together to defeat the game - there is no game master! This also makes the game ideal for solo play.

Shadows of Brimstone: Forbidden Fortress™ has a built-in campaign system, allowing characters to keep the Gear and otherworldly Artifacts they find, while earning experience to level up and increase their stats and abilities. Each different Hero Class has a unique skill tree, letting players develop and customize their Heroes over the course of many games. The game difficulty is designed to scale to the number of players, and the enemies grow more dangerous as the players go up in level. Most importantly, characters can easily jump into and out of games, so if one player in a group cannot play one week, the group can play a mission without them or add new players to an existing group. Players can also easily take their established characters to other games, playing with several different groups.

While the rich theme of Feudal Japan is gritty and exciting, Shadows of Brimstone comes to life when players step through a portal to explore an alien world with katanas in hand! Shadows of Brimstone’s setting allows for a lot of thematic variety and future expansions - the possibilities are limitless.