If you were a child of the 1980s and you weren’t spending all your time playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) then what were you doing? Riding your bike and playing Nintendo? All fine activities and not to be ignored as a free-range child of Boomers, but those were the years you’d find a mildly worn copy of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in many a basement. With its black and white sketch art and immersion of a world of our own creation, it became an iconic piece of Gen-X childhood. And that’s the feeling that Talesworth Game Studio hopes to imbue with The Secret of Weepstone, a hand-drawn black and white dungeon crawler releasing on Steam next year.
The Secret of Weepstone is an RPG that leans heavily on the game mechanics of our past (and present, if you consider games like Baldur’s Gate 3). It features dice rolling for skill checks and combat, dungeon puzzles, plenty of treasure, looted weapons and gear for your party, and black and white hand-drawn creatures and gore. It’s a tribute in form to all the role playing games that shaped our youth and invigorated our imaginations.
Revealing the secrets
To find out more about The Secret of Weepstone and it’s unusual design in the age of AAA games and infinite budgets, I reached out to Sean Gailey, Owner and CEO at Talesworth Game Studio, and responsible for the vision behind the game. The last time I spoke to Gailey it was regarding J!NX, a cheeky t-shirt brand for nerds. So really, he never left his core audience, just created a different product to feed their nerdy proclivities.
“J!NX was my ride or die from 1999 to 2023, and when it was time for the next thing, there was no question that it would be going full hog on game development,” Gailey tells me via Discord. “Among the many game ideas that I had been kicking around for years, the concept of The Secret of Weepstone felt the most genuine, impassioned and challenging.”
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Gailey holds a degree in video game design from Miami University and has been designing computer games since the age of seven. While many of us were flying the chopper to the left to skip the map, Gailey was using a Radio Shack TRS80 Model III to hone his video game creation skills. But it would be a while before he’d have something to show for it.
“It took me until I was 30 to actually finish making a game though. Turns out that was the hardest part.”
D&D inspired design
The look and feel of the game falls close to Gailey’s original vision, meshing together 2D and 3D concepts to bring to live the classic cross-hatch black and white style that may be familiar to those of us who have gotten the death stare from a dungeon master. There was, as Gailey puts it, “endless tweaking” to settle on the right vibe and feeling of the art found within the early 1980s Dungeons & Dragons modules. Thankfully, he had plenty of memories to call upon.
“My first adventure was S2: White Plume Mountain and remains one of my personal favorite modules of all time. My cousin Jonathan was DM’ing using a hybrid of rules from both D&D and another lesser-known game of that era called Chivalry & Sorcery. My cleric, Rindoc, wasn’t alive for very long, but nevertheless I was immediately smitten with the experience. It was all I could think about.
“Shortly after, I received the Moldvay ‘Purple Box’ as a gift from someone that clearly wasn’t afraid of the satanic stories about D&D in the news. We cracked it open, my brother spent a few hours skimming the rules, and then we started rolling dice. The memory is so vivid in my mind. We played for hours and hours. I immediately ran to my local bookstore to buy my personal holy trinity: the AD&D Player’s Handbook, DM Guide and Monster Manual.
“The art in those books cemented the way I envision everything fantasy. I admired the imperfections of the early artists, and the challenge and limitations of working with only black and white.”
And in a world of AAA games, sticking with this very unique vision does come with its own set of risks, but Gailey isn’t too worried. “I also know that the decision to go all black and white may be divisive. Innovating always comes with that risk. But, Lucas Pope’s game Return of the Obra Dinn provided all the inspiration I needed to lean hard into my decision.”
Between D&D, and all the other TTRPGs that followed, Gailey had discovered a life-long influence in art and design. Like many of us influenced by something prophetic (to us at least) during our formative years, it became a constant thundering voice in his head whenever he set out to create something.
“It’s hard to imagine what my life would be like if I had not been introduced to D&D at such a young age,” Gailey adds.
Every adventurer needs a team
But Rome wasn’t built in a day, or, The Secret of Weepstone wasn’t built by one man in a garage with a Radio Shack TRS80 Model III. Once Gailey had his vision in place, and art style in mind, he still needed to build the game, and for that he needed help. The first stop was eventual game publisher DreadXP and Director Hunter Bond.
Bond is (currently) writing the story and helping to develop the rule system for The Secret of Weepstone. Bond has a history of running RPG campaigns, which Gailey has participated as a player, and is somewhat of an encyclopedia of RPG games released within the last two or three decades.
“I knew his style was the perfect fit,” Gailey says of Bond. “I asked him to ‘write it like you’re 16 years old again’. In other words, write it in the style of the adventures of that era. Let’s make it pulpy and avoid anything too highbrow or complicated. There is, of course, a little bit of the humor that’s forever been a part of D&D for us. Hunter has already written lots of interesting characters and what we hope to be many memorable interactions. Hunter describes the tone of the story as an Appendix N fantasy cosmic horror in the style of writers like Lovecraft, Howard, Dunsay and Blackwood.”
Gailey admits that yes, it’s early in the game development. The look of the game in the screenshots won’t change too much, and combat mechanics are just being developed. Turn-based combat will be how the action is based, and Gailey is working to ensure the spirit of tabletop D&D is infused into The Secret of Weepstone, while admitting that “not every tabletop concept works in a computer game, so the challenge is to keep the spirit of early TTRPs while not being beholden to every single rule”.
To create that D&D concept within a PC game, Gailey would need to assemble his party. While he’s a coder, game designer, and “hack of a 3D texture artist”, he’d need some help from illustrators, in addition to Bond on story. Gailey was quick to mention the talent he’d assembled.
“Ian MacLean and Tommaso Galmacci are illustrators who really helped bring my initial prototype to life. Then I asked Ricardo de Gaspar, Jonathan Everett, Hugo Araújo, Carlos Castilho and Bill Harbison to add some of their magic. The old RPGs featured so many fantastic artists, and I have the same goal for The Secret of Weepstone.”
There was one last piece of the puzzle. Who would be the Dungeon Master? If you’ve ever played Dragon Age Inquisition, Warhammer 40K, Honkai Star Rail, or Brawl Stars then you might be familiar with the voice of The Secret of Weepstone, Steven Kelly.
Says Gailey, “When I first heard his voice, I knew he was just perfect for the role. His cadence and tone reminds me so much of a tabletop experience.”
Check out The Secret of Weepstone at PAX West
The Secret of Weepstone is seeped in D&D nostalgia. The cross-hatch black and white art, the rolling of dice to determine skills and combat, and the creature design all conjure a simpler era when gathering around a stack of papers in a basement was a hell of a Saturday night. And you can check it out yourself this week if you are anywhere in the Seattle area.
A playable demo will be available August 29th through September 1st at the DreadXP booth at PAX West. The game itself will be out sometime next year on Steam, so you can wish-list it now. There’s also a Discord and Instagram page, in case you want to get in on the early conversations and bond with other D&D fans eager to go on a new type of dungeon crawl.
While The Secret of Weepstone does offer a fresh take on classic dungeon exploration under the general structure of D&D, Gailey hopes this is just the start. “The other route I’d love to explore is to license and recreate a classic D&D module like White Plume Mountain or Keep on the Borderlands. I think it would be really fun to walk through those dungeons and experience those classic adventures in a new way.”