GOING MEDIEVAL. The new role-playing game The Darkest Age is designed to give distinictive and powerful roles to women, including that of the midwife, left, who is key to helping the human race survive. Other characters include an inquisitor (center) and zombies (right).

While I doubt anyone reading this lived through the Dark Ages in medieval Europe, you now have the chance.

The Darkest Age is a new horror survival role-playing game created by Eau Claire native Eric Staggs (winner of the Writer’s Digest Genre Fiction and Aviator Magazine Editor’s Choice awards) and written by Staggs and UW-Eau Claire graduate Rob Gee, who has worked in the video game industry for more than 15 years on titles such as Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy, Singularity, Star Trek Voyager Elite Force, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

The Darkest Age is a Dungeons & Dragons style game, set in an alternate history 1350 medieval Europe where people killed by the Black Death have been turned into zombies. The game uses the d20 Open Game License, a game system developed by Wizards of the Coast (creators of Magic: The Gathering and the Pokémon Trading Card Game). The d20 system has been used for countless tabletop role-playing games, where all you need is the game rule book, some friends, various dice to determine success or failure, and a Game Master (GM) to run the game.

“(Zombies are) a metaphor for a civilization gone wrong.” – Eric Staggs, creator of The Darkest age, a zombie-themed role-playing game

A healthy imagination will go a long way as well, as it is the greatest benefit to the d20 system. “The Darkest Age setting is best explored through an immersive story-driven type of game system, allowing players free choice to customize their characters, interact with NPCs (non-player characters, controlled by the GM), explore evolving plot lines and dealing with the dangers, both dead and living, native to The Darkest Age,” Gee said.

He continued to explain that the system allows for complete customization of the story and characters. The GM lays out the groundwork, but is able to adapt and move the story to where the characters are going. There is always an endgame or goal to play toward as well. Depending on how the game is run, it can take a few hours or a few years to complete.

The original idea for The Darkest Age came from the mind of Staggs, who has been fascinated with zombies ever since he wrote a research paper in film school. “They’re a metaphor for a civilization gone wrong,” he said. “The popularity is indicative of the cultural zeitgeist – it says, we know something is wrong, but the only way we can think to fix it is to, literally, devour everything and start over. From this perspective, zombie fiction and related media are all pretty profound.”
With this developed theme at the core of the game, Staggs and Gee, along with UWEC graduate Julia Gengenbach as a creative collaborator, began creating the world of The Darkest Age. Staggs described the process of meeting, creating, and working together as “long and brutal and bloody – much like the game.”

“We met regularly for weeks, with charts, diagrams, ideas, notes, scraps of paper, sharp sticks, harsh language,” Staggs said. They did research, including the twelve different books entitled The Black Death that Staggs read before writing, play testing, re-writing, and play testing some more. Toss art direction, design and layout on top of all that and you begin to see why a year of development went into this game.

It was also very important to the writers to focus on gender equality and the roles females have in the game. “Think about it,” Staggs said. “Who cares who saves your life as long as they can do it?”  By thinking about it in this way, the designers were able to connect historical roles of women to important functions they would have in this alternate history. For example, the knowledge of midwives would be essential for the future of the human species (keeping children quiet and delivering healthy babies would be essential to the human race’s survival as a whole). Creating the game with gender equality in mind was important for the game creators as they wanted to even the playing field for the emerging market of female gamers. “They’re sharp, critical, informed and curious,” Staggs said. “We had to work very hard to match that audience.”

Staggs had a personal incentive as well. He has a daughter of his own. “I get frustrated when I see society’s expectations of females,” he said. “There’s absolutely no reason girls shouldn’t be at the table, rolling dice, writing stories, learning about history, critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, and taking on the roles of influential and powerful people – even if it’s in a game setting.”

The Darkest Age was published by New York-based Spectacle Publishing Media Group, which Staggs founded. “We set out to create a company that changed the publishing world – we cut out agents and give the authors the best contracts in the business,” Staggs said. They have even received so many submissions for publishing that they had to freeze submissions until November.

The Darkest Age can be purchased as a softcover hard-copy format or as a PDF eBook from drivethrurpg.com. To learn more about the game itself, visit www.darkest-age.com.