Dark Souls tabletop RPG rulebooks will be corrected and reissued, say creators

Steamforged Games will correct and reissue manuals for Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game, whose rulebooks have been in circulation for a month and are reportedly shot through with errors.

“[T]he best course of action is to order reprints of the book,” Steamforged said in a statement Tuesday afternoon, “issuing replacement copies to those customers who have already bought or pre-ordered the Standard Edition and/or Collector’s Edition.” Steamforged added “a sincere apology” for the errors and thanked players for bringing the problems to light.

That began last week, when collector’s edition buyers in Europe and the United States got their advanced copies, and found mistakes ranging from spelling errors all the way up to game-breaking inconsistencies in the rules. The books’ full launch in the U.S. comes May 16.

Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game, is a tabletop role-playing game adapted from both FromSoftware’s A-list video game franchise and an open-source version of Dungeons & Dragons’ 5th Edition rules. Steamforged announced pre-orders for the game back in January, riding the coattails of the commercially successful but critically middling tabletop game it Kickstarted in 2016.

Last week, players who bought in early reported serious inconsistencies in what they were reading from their rulebooks. In one instance, a Knight wouldn’t have enough strength to wear their own starting-level suit of armor. In another, Casters couldn’t wield a recommended weapon. Steamforged, in a statement to Polygon, said it took the complaints “seriously” but didn’t, at the time, consider them game-breaking mistakes.

“Although these concerns shouldn’t affect the playability of the game, we’re always striving to strengthen our processes to ensure our loyal fans continue to enjoy the games we release,” Steamforged said last week.

Tuesday’s statement applies not only to hard copies of Dark Souls: The Roleplaying Game’s standard and collector’s edition, it also means PDFs for the game will be rewritten and reissued. Their release date and information on how to obtain updated copies is “coming soon,” Steamforged said.

“We ask for a little patience as we gather more detailed information regarding these reprints, the timescales involved, and how best to ensure we resolve this for each affected customer,” Steamforged said.