Among many FromSoftware signatures, the Dark Souls developer’s NPCs always seem to talk, you know, like that. They’re cryptic and brittle, giving the minimum amount of information and surrendering zero context while they laugh, chuckle, or even chortle in the most unsettling way possible. Then you do a few quests, forget them for a while, and come back to find you missed one of their key triggers so now they’re a corpse with an item drop attached, or else they’ve gone loony and try to attack you.
Could a whole game be about Doing The Fromsoft NPC Voice? Turns out it can.
They’re pretty easy to read for filth, is what I’m saying, and a particularly gutting goof at the weirdos’ expense caught tabletop RPG designer Grant Howitt—you may be familiar with his other works such as Bear RPG Honey Heist—like a bolt from the blue. “*Trailer for new fromsoft game* Ahh,, fucked up little man,” wrote Twitter user @kevins_computer on June 10, 2021, presumably in response to the Summer Game Fest debut of Elden Ring’s first gameplay on the same day. “Youre [sic] so fucked up, and nasty . everything, it sucks soooo bad. only you, thje [sic] most fucked up and nasty of guys, can make it suck less.”
“The tweet infiltrated my mind. I would walk around my flat intoning it, in part or completely, for days at a time,” Howitt told me over email. “There’s something so delightful about embodying the earnest but often fumbling tragedy of these grubby little weirdos.
“Could a whole game be about Doing The Fromsoft NPC Voice? Turns out it can. So I batted around some ideas for a couple of weeks and eventually ended up with this weird upside-down map-making game, but it’s really just an excuse to Do The Voice.”
Cue Fucked Up Little Man, which Howitt first shared to Twitter, Patreon, and itch.io in August 2022. Like much of Howitt’s work, FULM is an experimental, one-page (and likely one-shot) RPG with an emphasis on improvisation and social interaction over crunchy mechanics. Like some other indie RPGs (Howitt cited Polaris as an example) a given round of FULM will just have one player, but many “GMs.”
The player is a “Damned One,” the classico placid, gormless, god-slaying Soulsborne protagonist type, while everybody else roleplays—you guessed it—fucked up little men. In addition to coughing and chuckling their way through Oscar-winning performances as “Regretful Physicians” or “Mutter Witches,” the fucked up little men also sketch out the map the Damned One explores, setting challenges for the active player on the way to a boss fight. The Damned One rolls a d6 to pass or fail challenges imposed by the other players, with steep penalties for failure and little room to succeed, with the Damned One mantle passing to another player on death. When attempting a skill check that killed another player, the Damned One gets a bonus to their roll from the “echo” of their forebear—a nice riff on the bloodstain/summoning mechanics from the Souls games.
“The first draft of the game was a regular party-style TTRPG where you all played Fucked Up Little Men, and I realised that the GM wouldn’t get to Do The Voice, and that felt like they were missing out,” Howitt said of designing the game. “So I inverted the whole game to give everyone a chance to go ‘heh, heh, heh’ or what have you.” As for the roll-buffing echoes, Howitt characterized them as “a completely unintentional side-effect of a last-minute decision” intended to speed up gameplay, but he’s happy with how well it emulates the collaborative dimension of Souls games.
Howitt’s actually coming at the games from a different perspective than most players’ familiarity with co-op or asynchronous collaboration: “I got invaded once as part of a Covenant quest in [Dark Souls] and it gave me heart palpitations, so I’ve done every single one on my lonesome,” said Howitt. “It’s very strange watching someone else’s playthrough because there are ghosts of other players running around the place, and it feels… rude? Definitely intrusive, anyway.”
I asked Howitt how much carryover he thought the design of his games might have for CRPGs, and I was surprised at his response: “I look at games like Lethal Company, or Among Us, or Chained Together (is that what it’s called? Only Up in hell, you know the one) and they’re far closer to what I enjoy in TTRPGs,” Howitt said. “Short-form, improvised chaos loosely based around a theme where players are encouraged to communicate with one another and manage insufficient resources. There’s a joy that arises from emergent situations, and those games tap into it, and that’s the core of good roleplaying to me.”
You can follow Grant Howitt and check out his other work on Twitter, Bluesky, Patreon, or itch.io.