Battle Systems’ dungeon crawler Maladum: Dungeons of Enveron, one of the best board games of 2024, opens preorders on Aug. 7 for its latest narrative expansion Maladum: The Forbidden Creed. The company’s founder Colin Young talked to Polygon about what’s new in The Forbidden Creed and offered an exclusive peek at the other projects he’s working on as part of the game’s years-long development process.
The Forbidden Creed will be released on Sept. 8, marking the first time that players who weren’t part of the game’s $1 million 2023 Kickstarter campaign can try it. While backers received their full orders last year, Battle Systems has been rolling out new retail products about every three months.
“You really do need to save gamers from themselves,” Young said. “They’ll have a much better experience if they follow through the core game and really get to understand it then add the expansions in, otherwise it can be a little bit overwhelming.”
Maladum is set in the far future of the world of Battle Systems’ 2019 cyberpunk dungeon crawler Core Space, meaning its fantasy flavor actually comes from nanites and aliens. Players control a band of adventurers venturing through elaborate 3D maps to fight monsters, look for loot, complete missions, and then safely make it back to camp. Characters level up between scenarios, and groups can follow the narrative campaign or just pick encounters that seem fun.
Harnessing Maladum, the game’s world for magic, is always dangerous since it can lead to unexpected effects. The Forbidden Creed further tempts players by introducing the concept of dark magic, which can produce really powerful effects but will corrupt your character to the point that you might lose control of their actions for a period of time. Players will also have to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of new companions that can be summoned or recruited.
“There’s this huge almost frog-like creature [that] gives you loads of extra storage,” Young said. “You can carry more things, but it lives off magic, so you have to feed it items. If you don’t [have] a spare item that you don’t mind getting rid of, it’ll just take something randomly from you that it’s protecting.”
Battle Systems will follow The Forbidden Creed with a direct-to-retail expansion introducing the Urmek, a shamanic species that Young said he spent a long time designing to make sure they looked more like aliens than fantasy monsters. Their drones are small, fast, and very aggressive, attacking with weapons that are strapped onto their arms.
They might be joined by Brutecks, hulking juggernauts that rampage across the battlefield. Urmeck also ride sharp-toothed, clawed, hairless beasts called Dreck into battle and while one controls the beast others will jump down into the fray to hinder players. The Urmek’s shaman leader can chemically enhance other Urmeck and manipulate the earth and nature, calling up horrifying plant abominations.
“You can lift the adversary out of the core game and plug these guys in and they’ll come with some unique kinds of terrain, items, and stuff, so you can experience the core box again with this new story,” Young said. “They’re going to challenge you in what skills you use and how you use your magic.”
Mounts won’t just be for enemies. The expansion includes a quadripedal avian creature trained to be ridden in war, a bison-like creature with four eyes and massive tusks, and other strange beasts that player characters will be able to ride, enabling combat on larger maps.
“With Maladum, we don’t have dogs, we don’t have horses,” Young said. “Those things pull me thematically straight out.”
The set will also include four new adventurers who are just as weird. Aurora Mundsdotir is a 12-year-old apprentice blacksmith who wields a pair of superheated hammers, kept glowing hot through magical sigils, holding them in big gloves chained to her arms so she doesn’t get burned. Rex Nairn is pioneering the field of demolitions and provides explosive powder to the four-armed marksman T’or Raan, who prefers to fight from range because he’s prone to flying into a berserker rage when in close combat.
Battle Systems is looking to make the game more accessible by revamping the user interface and all the website’s tutorials on how to play the game and construct its complex terrain. Sets that can be used to build crypts, mines, sewers, and more are sold separately from the board game and scaled so that they can easily be used for Dungeons & Dragons and other grid-based tabletop roleplaying games.
Their next crowdfunding campaign will raise money for a Hyberian terrain set, which is a village for crafting special metals that will include new buildings like a forge and tavern.
“We were a terrain company before we were a games company,” Young said. “If people have not seen it before and they’re [playing] D&D and the DM lifts the cover off this, it just transforms that experience immensely. I think that’s where it wins.”
Maladum: The Forbidden Creed is available to preorder now for $69.99 and will be released on Sept. 8.
