A few days have passed since the announcement of Inferno and Mana Project Studio and Two Little Mice have already released some interesting news about it.

First of all they confirmed that the manual will be a setting for D&D 5e. It will be proposed through the winning formula of the Kickstarter, as already happened for Journey to Ragnarok and Historia. This will allow the buyer to get extra benefits if he decides to finance the project. And I, personally, will not hesitate to do so, according to the quality of the previous works and the premises for this one.

Where and when will we travel?

First of all, the approach used by the authors should be pointed out: this is not an “American-style” vision of the work of the Supreme Poet, as already happened in various videogames, but a reinterpretation as faithful as possible to the original. Hell will not be some strange futuristic structure, but a simple hole in the earth, able to contain the souls of the damned. The original work has been read, understood and re-proposed. The events take place after the passage of Dante, so after the events of the Divine Comedy. This means that his passage has in some way altered the situation of the circles he crossed. Moreover, not all the same characters will be found: those that are uniquely and personally linked to the figure of the florentine poet are to be excluded. They will therefore belong to christian mythology, but also to the classical one. It is not yet very clear whether they will be figures related to a precise historical period or not.

Who will we meet?

Va però fattHowever, a very important distinction must be made: the figures encountered during our journey will be Shadows, what remains of the souls of the damned. They are already dead and therefore can be destroyed, but they will return cyclically. However, it is not yet clear how this mechanism fits into the setting. Unlike Dante’s journey, we will not be protected by Divine Providence and we will not have guides, so we will have to face alone these threats.

Who will we be?

On the contrary, the characters we will interpret and who will descend into Inferno are living people who have “lost” themselves in life and come to this place for the most diverse reasons. Our alter ego will therefore belong to an original race, the Lost Ones. What distinguishes these creatures is the obligatory passage through Hell, seen not as a goal but as the only way to reach something higher, like Paradise. Mechanically at the moment we know little, if not the value of the archetypes. They represent the corruption (perhaps the dominant sin) that will represent our Lost One. Only a conceptual example of them has arrived:

It should also be remembered that copyright has (obviously) been free for some centuries now. This therefore translates into the possibility of using the original names of the places and characters encountered without any problem. Theoretically, therefore, there would also be the conditions for developing similar works that depict Purgatory and Paradise, but we must first see if this is part of the authors’ programs.

Stay tuned in order to being informed about the development of Inferno!