An Action Dungeon Crawler RPG for Players Looking for Something Different
Many fantasy games invite players into worlds populated by familiar races, familiar conflicts, and familiar ideas. Elves, dwarves, orcs, kingdoms, ancient prophecies. There is nothing wrong with those worlds. Many of them are excellent – like ours Eye of Ishtar – RPG Dungeon Crawler in Classic Fantasy world.
But what happens when you begin looking for something else?
What happens when familiar fantasy no longer surprises you?
That question became the foundation of Vritniht.
Paradigm Worlds’ Vritniht – Tentacloid Conspiracy is an RPG inspired by dungeon crawler principles. Vritniht replaces traditional fantasy with an entirely original setting populated by strange races, surreal environments, and unsettling realities.
If you enjoy games such as Eye of the Beholder, Ishar, or Might and Magic, the rules will feel familiar.
The world will not.
A World Built from Flesh, Bone, and Biomass
Vritniht takes place in a post-future reality ruled by Cartel-9, a secretive organization that combines elements of corporation, state, and religion.
The world itself is hostile, disturbing, and often difficult to understand.
Gigantic skeletons form landscapes.
Living biomass serves as architecture.
Creatures emerge from organic matter.
Dimensions overlap, collide, and sometimes break the rules players expect reality to follow.
Rather than relying on sudden scares, Vritniht focuses on creating a persistent sense of unease through environments, creatures, sounds, and imagery.
The result is a surreal horror experience where players are encouraged to question what they are seeing and where they are going.
Playable Races
Players create their own party from several playable races. Each race possesses unique strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities.
Brutoid
The strongest melee combatant.
Durable and physically powerful, but limited by low Manatao reserves and modest intelligence.
Ideal candidate for experiments with mutagen and gods ambrosia. Using mutation you can evolve it to leading creature.
His best skill is Tentacle Assault that hits all enemies around party in four directions.
Brutoid is not just pack of violent muscles, high health and good regeneration means survivability.
Fairy
A support specialist capable of restoring Manatao to allies. ManaTao is required for almost all skills from defence to attack, making Fairies extremely important in every party.
Fairies can sacrifice their own health to empower companions and may drain blood from enemies to boost their vitality over usual limit.
Finally they can give away their own life to deal massive damage to most dangerous enemies.
Fairies can be also very malicious, with high chance to cause critical damage.
Ushroom
A fungal lifeform capable of fighting both in melee and at range.
Ushrooms can spread healing pheromones that support nearby allies. Later in evolution they are capable of healing companions.
Resilient, can evolve good regeneration, can play any role, melee, range and support.
Marnival
Marnival may look terrifying, but that’s just their self defence mechanism. In reality, they avoid direct combat at all costs.
Despite their peaceful nature, they are invaluable to any party, since they are born with ability to heal, and revive fallen companions. Something that Ushrooms learn after time.
Their greatest strength lies in manipulating time itself. They can bend reality around and haste companions, better than any artifact.
Homunkulus
Versatile humanoids capable of interacting with distant objects and manipulating the environment. Doors, levers, if there is a mechanical mechanism around Homonkulus can activate it.
They can convert Manatao into devastating kinetic attacks. They also can learn to feed on enemies, able to boost health over maximum limit.
Animalus
Natural ranged fighters able to launch biological projectiles.
Their Sniffer-Snorter ability reveals hidden objects, valuable items, and nearby enemies. Many precious treasures will remain uncovered, without skilled Sniffer. It is almost hard to imagine what could be gone…
Artifacts bending time or electrocuting enemies. Modified fire extinguishers filled with flammable liquid, or experimental armours.
Animalus can sniff enemies as well, can even tell how strong it is. Their tentacle attack rips flesh from enemies and feeds owner instantly. In game terms 35% of dealt damage is transformed to health.
Caliban
Fragile in the beginning but increasingly dangerous as they develop.
Calibans are not specially strong, rather of poor health. Yet, they are malicious and deadly dangerous especially when underestimated.
Their secret lies in extreme precision making it easy for them to cause critical damage, piercing through skin or armour. They train whole life to surprise victim and eliminate it in first hit.
They also can spread pheromones, causing amok resulting in higher chances in dealing ‘crits’ by all companions.
Kumkata
Masters of indirect combat. Usually they support allies from behind the front lines.
Kumkata can be dangerous: its most powerful offensive skill is Firezilla Spit – natural flamethrower skill – burning enemies, resulting in additional weakening effects.
Kumkata can call additional creature to party – a familiar. It can grow like other party members. At the end of growth familiar can evolve finally to another creature like Brutoid, Ushroom, etc. After that Kumkata can call new familiar and start cycle again.
Kumkata can also call for help, for a short time a powerful creature called Kirkegor will join party and fight alongside. Kirkegors do not stay with party like familiars, but quickly depart to their plane of existence.
Best races to play?
For new players, Brutoids, Fairies, Ushrooms, and Marnivals provide the most accessible starting experience.
Homonkulus is still quite easy to roleplay, but Caliban, Animalus or Kumkata work best when you exploit synergy between races, and that requires some game experience.
Creatures you know, creatures you meet.
There are more creatures you will be able to recruit to your party during your journey. Most of ‘monsters’ presented earlier on 20-year old photo sessions is recruitable. So you will be able to lead original Foliotron in your game.
To recruit new creature you need to find it. They are held in cages, some of them hidden, others in plain sight, but in contested – usually well guarded (= dangerous) areas.
There are mutants, morloks, marasmagi and foil visitors. Each with their special skills, functions, etc.
Freedom of Party Building
Vritniht follows a philosophy common throughout Paradigm Worlds projects: giving control to the player.
There is no strict party limit.
Players decide how large their group becomes and which creatures they choose to recruit.
Throughout the game, imprisoned creatures can be rescued and added to the party, including individuals possessing abilities unavailable during character creation.
Not every creature opposes Cartel-9.
Not every creature supports freedom.
Who joins the party is ultimately the player’s decision.
The Developer Center
One of the most unusual features in Vritniht is the Developer Center.
This menu allows players to customize many aspects of the game experience.
Options include:
- Experience gain rates.
- Party size adjustments.
- Enemy population settings.
- Teleportation between discovered locations.
- Item spawning.
- Quest manipulation.
- Various experimental features.
The purpose is simple: allow players to shape their own experience and experiment with different styles of play.
Some may choose a difficult survival experience.
Others may prefer creating large armies and exploring freely.
Both approaches are valid.
Progression and Statistics
Traditional RPG statistics remain at the core of character progression.
Players will recognize common attributes such as:
- Strength.
- Constitution.
- Dexterity.
- Intelligence
- Wisdom
However, Vritniht also introduces less conventional stats like:
- Mutagen
A biological statistic influencing regeneration, mutation-related abilities, and numerous race-specific powers.
- Monster Rank
A milestone-based progression system representing a creature’s evolutionary development and authority in the world.
Increasing Monster Rank improves multiple aspects of a character and can dramatically change its effectiveness.
A Living Party
Although still early in its development, Vritniht has already begun introducing personality systems.
Party members occasionally comment on events, locations, and situations encountered during exploration. (To be honest, dialogue is bit random now, but important first steps been made)
Future updates are expected to expand these interactions and provide additional mechanics, playstyles, and optional systems.
The objective is not to overwhelm players with complexity from the beginning, but to grow the game gradually while preserving player freedom.
A Strange Place
Even by Paradigm Worlds Standards
Anyone familiar with previous Paradigm Worlds projects already knows that normality is rarely the goal.
Vritniht embraces that philosophy more openly than most.
Many of its creatures, environments, and visual concepts originate from photography projects and experimental designs, later transformed into game assets through modern AI-assisted workflows and Unreal Engine 4 technology.
The result is a game that deliberately explores unusual territory.
Not because it wants to be strange for the sake of being strange.
It is a multi-layered story, and it can be read in many different ways. You can read more about how the world was designed here:
Vritniht: RPG Horror Game made from 20 years’ old Photography – MODDING SIMULACRA
As a kid, I grew up surrounded by literature that had to pass through censorship before it could be published.
That raised an interesting question: how do you smuggle a message through censorship?
Let’s call it a message of freedom.
You have to get past the censorship, but at the same time, somehow communicate with the people who are meant to receive that message.
In a way, you have to learn to think in two ways at once. You have to develop your imagination when it comes to creating and interpreting symbols, metaphors, signs, and hidden meanings.
It is almost like learning an alternative language — or a completely new kind of geometry.
And this is how Vritniht was created.
It is a vessel for a myth.
A seed of an idea.
Maybe a warning.
Or perhaps a prophecy.
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