The next videogame getting its own tabletop RPG is Diablo, an RPG that doesn't have any RP in it

(Image credit: Blizzard)

It used to be rare to see a videogame get directly translated into a tabletop RPG. There was Dragon Age and for some reason Street Fighter, but not much else. Now you can choose from a veritable smorgasbord of the things, with pen-and-paper versions of Fallout, Dishonored, Sunless Sea, Dark Souls, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Homeworld, and probably more I've never heard of floating around. Next up: Diablo.

Admittedly there was an official D&D setting based on Diablo 2 back in the day, and the fact it was specifically Diablo 2 tells you how long ago that was. The upcoming Diablo TTRPG will be more bespoke, with its own "custom d6 dice pool system" put together by a team of designers led by Joe LeFavi (of BladeRunner: The Roleplaying Game). Which is nice, because if you want D&D with the lights turned down you can just play Ravenloft.

One focus of these new rules will be making you feel like a proper badass right out of the gate. None of this zero-to-hero mucking about—your barbarian, druid, necromancer, rogue, or sorcerer should feel like they've got this dungeon business down pat from session one.

For those people who care about Diablo's lore (both of you), the TTRPG will be set after the events of Diablo 4, which doesn't mean much to me even though I finished it and had a pretty good time while doing so. The RPG's designers have the unenviable task of turning it into "over 300 pages of game rules" and "rich lore". The book will have a bunch of maps and art as well, which I suspect will be rather nice because Diablo's always had the best art of any Blizzard game.

As well as the core rulebook Diablo: The Roleplaying Game will have an anthology series of one-shot adventures, which seems like the perfect format for a tabletop version of an action RPG. It's basically drop-in/drop-out co-op only around your dining room table, with dice. Writers for these adventures include John Harper (creator of Blades in the Dark) and Graham McNeill (author of about five million Warhammer books).

Diablo: The Roleplaying Game is scheduled for release in 2026, ahead of next year's BlizzCon, but will have a Kickstarter in the fall because everything tabletop's got to have a Kickstarter to get the buzz going these days.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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