The Throne BelowThe Throne Below

The priests sealed you in stone and prayed over your grave for a hundred years. But prayers rot, and stone remembers.

You are the ancient evil buried beneath the holy kingdom of Vael, and you are waking up.

The Throne Below is a dark dungeon-management game in the spirit of the grim, gloomy classics of the 90s: no cute minions, no jokes, just torchlight, screams and the slow work of evil. Dig out your realm, raise a legion of monsters, break the captives the kingdom sends you, and keep your monstrous heart alive when the Order of the Pale Sun comes down to burn you out.

• Mark the earth and your Thralls tear it open. They dig, claim the ground for you, pack and reinforce the walls, and haul every scrap of gold back to your Vault.
• Take things in hand. Your Claw snatches up creatures and drops them where they are needed. It carries captives to your devices and slaps the idle back to work.
• Build rooms that call monsters. Dens and Grub Pits keep your legion rested and fed, Blood Pits train them, and a Sanctum unearths new rooms and powers. What you build decides what crawls out of the Rift.

• Ten kinds of servants, from ghouls, skinners and bloatfiends to giant crawlers, skinless hounds, occultists, wraiths and revenants.
• A legion with appetites. Your monsters want a nest, food and their wages on payday. Neglect them and they grow angry and leave. Slap them and they work harder, and remember it.
• Possess any creature. Look out through its eyes and fight the Order in first person.
• Eight dark powers, including Hellfire, Collapse, Frenzy, Dark Mending and the Eye of Night.

• Nothing is wasted. Prisoners left to starve in your Cells rise again as skeletons. Captives break in the Torment Chamber and join you, or die there and linger as Wraiths. The dead left to rot in your Crypt rise as Revenants.

• The Maw is your heart. If it dies, you die. It grows hungry: feed it the living, or it will take one of your own.

• The Order of the Pale Sun comes for you. Footmen, archers, templars, magisters, sisters and inquisitors march down through their gate, and their Delvers tunnel straight toward your heart.
• Fog of war. You see only your own ground and what your creatures see. Something is digging out there, and it is not yours.
• Break the kingdom. Kill the Lord Protector in his candlelit keep to win the realm.
• Made to be played in the dark. A low-resolution, torch-lit look, a living soundscape of drips, chains and distant screams, and the Voice Below, which whispers to you in a tongue of its own.

The Throne Below is in development. The first realm, The Waking, is playable from start to finish. Planned for the full release:

• A campaign of realms across the kingdom of Vael
• Rival dark lords to fight for the underworld
• Doors, traps and a Workshop to build them
• Saving and loading
• More creatures, heroes, rooms and powers
• Creature portraits and a fuller legion screen

Wishlist The Throne Below and descend with us.