"Dominion of Darkness" is a text-based game/interactive fiction with strategy and RPG elements, in which the player takes on the role of the Lord of Darkness. There are four playable character types, each with the goal of conquering the world and the Free People's Kingdoms - albeit with different methods of that conquest and plans for the fate of the planet.
In order to achieve his goals, the player will take various actions - expand his influence and gather followers, plot and corrupt local authorities and heroes, gather armies and carry out raids, recruit commanders and specialists, and gather magical artifacts. The course of the gameplay can take different forms - each time earlier decisions affect the opportunities available at a later stage, random events also play a role.Game is currently available on itch.io
for free. It is actually still in "prototype" phase. Developer is working on full, extended version.
This work contains examples of:
- The Alliance: There is a risk that the Free Peoples will unite against the players and attack their Fortress before the player has gathered a force adequate to conquer the world.
- Always a Bigger Fish: Lord of Pain is an Eldritch Abomination that makes player characters look like mere fleas. And God help you if you strike a deal with his envoy early on.
- Anti-Grinding:Â Trying to continuously increase influence in the same faction of the Free Peoples is a great way to raise suspicion within that kingdom, which will only make your life harder. And since short for a tiny handful of random events, there is no way to decrease that rating, you are better off juggling two different factions.
- Appeal to Tradition: Dwarves are prone to this on their own, but the more you interact with them and infiltrate their ranks, the more luddite and obscurant their views become, enforcing Medieval Stasis on their holdings.
- The Bad Guy Wins: The goal of the game, since players control actions of the Villain Protagonist.
- The Chosen One: He can appear in most gameplays. Player can try to assassinate him before he will became truly dangerous, which can further backfire, causing Create Your Own Hero. There is also a clear distinction between the two of them: humans get a prophetised Folk Hero of humble origins who rises to prominence if not stopped early on, while elves have a highly promising Magic Knight already in the middle of his studies when the game starts.
- Antimagical Faction: Worshipers of the Guardian of Order are these. They can be obstacle in player's way by blocking his magical powers during confrontations, but they can be manipulated into weakening player's enemies magical power by instigating antimagical hysteria.
- The Corrupter: The gimmick of Insidious Tempter/Temptress playable character, which can make various factions and characters switch to the evil side or at least became neutered.
- Disaster Dominoes: If RNG declares few of the basic, setting-up events as fails for your character, it will drag your entire faction down. The most prominent example is failing early game attempts to get rid of The Chosen One, which will make him only harder to deal with later on.
- Divide and Conquer:
- Facing The Alliance of all of the Free People (or really, just two factions) can be a pretty daunting task. Facing them alone after fabricating a conflict between them, however...
- Humans are particularly prone of falling into squabbles, which makes defeating them significantly easier.
- Evil Is One Big, Happy Family: Played with. Some races and factions are naturally inclined toward evil and will offer their services on their own. Others will have to be beaten or even outright conquered first. Achieving this trope to full extent can be pretty tricky, if enormously beneficial, since it offers a truly powerful and versalite roster of units.
- The Good King: Humans are initially led by a just, but old and frail king. About two-thirds into the game, he dies peacefully of old age. He did, however, groom an even better successor, a dashing, yet kind, well-read and brave prince... which naturally means your job is to make sure he never gets crowned and instead his incompetent younger brother gets the crown.
- Honey Trap: The player can try to use the half elf Laryssa to seduce an important male character and gain influence over him. She is particularly good at making the elven chosen one focus more on romancing her than studies and training, making him easier to defeat.
- Insistent Terminology: Despotic Tyrants definitely prefers to call their summoned monsters as "angels", even if they don't really differ from demons used by other characters. This is intentional.
- Logical Weakness: When infiltrating kingdom of humans, you can start a new cult. One of the options is a fatalistic religion that makes everyone passive and easy to submit to the higher power (which is you), making them easier to further infiltrate and conquer... except that it can also render your recruitment action moot, as nobody will consider joining your evil horde. On the flip-side, if you decide to promote brutality, warfare and the superiority complex, humans get additional rolls for events that increase their armies, ready to fight against you and your potential pawns.
- The Magic Goes Away: One of the best possible outcomes when dealing with Elves, the most magic-inclined faction, is to tempt or force them to simply leave their kingdom and sail across the sea.
- The Many Deaths of You: The game is chock-full of game-over prompts that colourfully describe the failure of your current character to achieve their current task, no matter how mundane it might be. Handful of those also counts as Non-Standard Game Over.
- Medieval Stasis: You want this to happen to dwarves, or else their advanced weaponry will make short work of your forces of evil.
- Metagame: The game is intentionally designed to prevent players from using common sense solutions and instead fully embrace playing as a Card-Carrying Villain - certain events even go as far as Leaning on the Fourth Wall. While there is a very small probability of early game actions to succeed and thus give big, long-term advantage, it is better and easier to just go with the flow of events and gradually build up your forces and influence.
- Monster Protection Racket: When playing as Tyrant type of character, players can cause demon invasion and later defeat it, making them saviours in the eyes of the survivors.
- Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Reclusive, tech-inclined bunch of traditionalists that are very easy to offend. Beware, however, when The Chosen One convinces them to join The Alliance, for they will became an unstoppable juggernaut or might even help to beef armies of other factions.
- Path of Inspiration: There is a handful of cults and sects in-universe that are all very blatantly engineered religions to fulfill specific roles. You yourself can start one of those when infiltrating human domain.
- The Quisling: Two kinds of them:
- Each faction has a handful of named characters that will willingly and on their own serve your character, fully aware of what's up and who's their new boss, yet do so on their own.
- The more influence you hold over your faction, the easier it is for the final battle to never happen, as the handful of loyalists will be easily massacred by their own side, and their heads will be brought to your character on a silver platter. This even includes members of such faction bolstering your ranks for battles against other kingdoms.
- Random Event: The basis of the gameplay is to just throw semi-random events at players and judging the outcomes of the decisions taken based on prior decisions and good, old RNG.
- Random Number God: The game operates as check on various values, and then rolling the actual outcome. Unless having related value high enough to automatically succeed, even an "almost" guaranteed action can still fail.
- Relationship Values: Indicators determine the strength of a player's influence between different nations. High values make it easier to carry out intrigues in the territory inhabited by a given nation, are part of subjugating it without military conquest and affect the morale of followers recruited from among its members. And some of player's lieutenants can betray him if at least some of their desires would not be fulfilled.
- Set a Mook to Kill a Mook : One of viable tactics. Sowing enmity and misunderstandings between nations prevents them from uniting against the player and weakens their own military because of infighting.
- Standard Fantasy Setting: Played absolutely straight, to the point of exaggeration. The game embraces various high and dark fantasy cliches and runs wild with them, often with a hefty dose of Black Comedy.
- Timed Mission: While the game doesn't state it outright, there is a finite number of turns to be played, and then it goes into the final phase, where your forces have to face the armies of Free People one way or another.
- Villains Act, Heroes React: Very literally so. Excluding a few hard-coded events, most of them only happen when players interact with a specific faction and then the game checks for their influence among it to generate further events. And since your only interaction is trying to infiltrate and subvert specific kingdoms, you are very literally the force of evil for the good guys to notice and stop.
- Villain Protagonist: The core concept of the game is being in shoes of a stereotypical high fantasy villain, bent on conquering the whole world.
- Villain with Good Publicity: With high Influence enough, player can subjugate country without using military force.
- We ARE Struggling Together: One of the most effective strategies is to make sure the Free People will never unite into a single front and turn into petty bickering rather than face players' conquest.
