A hybrid Roguelike and Real-Time Strategy game created by Michal Brzozowski, KeeperRL is often described as a combination of Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress, putting you in the shoes of an Evil Overlord with the task of building your own dungeon, recruiting monstrous minions, and conquering a procedurally-generated realm by defeating all who would oppose you. Aside from building and populating your dungeon, the game also allows you to assemble and directly control squads of monsters, either to defend your dungeon from raiders or to explore/raid faraway lands.
The game is available as an Early Access game on Steam
, with features being added or reworked with each update, though a lite version without graphical tiles is available for download on the official site. The game's final release is currently projected for Q1 2024.
This game provides examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg: If a creature is severely outmatched in melee, it's very likely they will end a few limbs short if not killed outright.
- Annoying Arrows: Zig-zagged. Mooks with little archery training will often miss and glance even weak enemies when using a bow, while specialized units (like Harpies and Skeleton Archers) are able to explode heads with a single shot.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- When traps have been triggered by enemies, they're automatically flagged for rebuilding.
- When raiding an enemy site, if the raid's leader die while you're controlling them, you're given the option to retreat to base with your remaining units, sparing yourself a Total Party Kill (and the painful process of having to re-recruit, retrain, and/or rearm all your raiders).
- Don't feel like stopping to manually loot every single corpse and chamber when you're raiding on the world map? Just use the "pillage" tabs when your minions return, and you can have all the loot automatically transferred to your dungeon.
- Artificial Stupidity: Rival Keepers can have hordes of minions and elaborate dungeons, but rarely shield themselves with these as well as their original player would. Sometimes, you can catch the enemy Keeper away from their monsters or even loitering alone outside the whole dungeon. Downplayed, in that it's an immediate game over when your Keeper dies, but a retired dungeon isn't counted as "destroyed" until you beat the Keeper AND all their highest-level minions.
- ASCII Art: The style of the free version, though the full version has an option to play with it as well.
- Badass Army: Well trained and equipped minions can become one, especially if used to defend your dungeon or storm an enemy site en masse.
- Badass Bookworm: The Warlock keeper has the potential to learn any spell in the game. Goblin Shamans also count, being more frail than their melee counterpart, but learning an array of powerful magic.
- Bad Boss: You can make your Keeper this if you like, but it's not the best path. Letting your minions die too often or even banishing unwanted minions will lead to morale problems, while spending the resources to make your dungeon luxurious will have the opposite effect. In the final version, dungeon luxuries will be required to keep more powerful minions.
- Being Tortured Makes You Evil: One way to gain more units for your army is to convert captured prisoners by strapping them to a torture rack. If they don't die in the process, they will join as controllable minions.
- Berserk Button: All enemies and rivals have a trigger that will lead them to either send a raiding party to your dungeon or visit you personally. For most of them it is stealing their items or killing their people, but having enough gold in your coffers, a high enough population, or building yourself a throne can trigger a dragon, cyclops, or rival Keeper (respectively). After you've started killing main villains, the remaining main villains (no matter what they are) will be triggered simply because you're obviously a threat.
- Blood Knight: All minions gain a morale boost whenever they kill someone.
- Bonus Dungeon: An island with a Block Puzzle may be generated in a region. Beating the puzzle results in a legendary monster joining your army free of charge.
- Booby Trap: You can line your dungeon with those to make life harder for raiders. Rival Keepers will likely have some of their own for when you come knocking with your own raiding party.
- Decapitation Presentation: You can execute prisoners and decorate your dungeon with their heads on a spike. Doing this will trigger enemies to attack more often.
- Dug Too Deep: You can dig beneath your dungeon to gain more resources, if you don't mind having to contend with various underground dwellers, from dwarves to dragons, to get at them.
- Evil Versus Evil: You're usually not the only Evil Overlord type on the world map, and the other factions can include rival Keepers with dungeons downloaded from other players who retired.
- Extreme Omnisexual: Succubi aren't picky when "entertaining" themselves with your other minions. Since this will raise their morale, it is actually a good thing.
- Giant Spider: These exist as random encounters and possible minor villains. There's also a magic ring that can summon a group of them around the wearer.
- Indy Escape: Boulders triggered by traps will roll in a straight line once they're triggered, and can be outrun.
- Light Is Not Good: Your Keeper can be one of several different types - evil wizards or black knights are the most obvious choice, but you could also pick a white knight whose immigrants will include angels and other "good" forces, and who uses peasants instead of imps to build things. Of course, you can still have a torture chamber and your goal is still to slaughter everyone on the world map.
- The Minion Master: Shaman units are this, summoning multiple spirits to battle with.
- Mugging the Monster: Bandits are among the weakest enemies that can attack you. And unless you stop them from spawning by killing all their leaders, they will keep showing up and attacking your dungeon (which may already have a garrison of Vampires, legendary mutants, and other ungodly monstrosities) armed with dinky swords and demanding a bribe in gold to leave you alone.
- Nobody Poops: While minions occasionally need to sleep (including undead, which use coffins instead of beds), they have no other needs. Feeding them by raising animals is optional, and the only net effect is raising their morale when they're well fed and increasing the population cap.
- One-Hit Kill:
- Boulder traps are an all-or-nothing affair, as they either kill the victim with one hit or the victim manages to evade. Web traps negate any chance to dodge, leading to many players using the two in tandem to ensure adventurers invariably die upon triggering the trap.
- The Kraken also has two instant-death attacks: swallowing the enemy whole or dragging them underwater.
- Optional Boss: You can discover an altar in the world which, once you've conquered the region, disappears letting you challenge and fight the Evil God Adoxie.
- Our Goblins Are Different: Goblins are weak cannon fodder in most fantasy settings, but with the right investment, your goblins can become powerful wizards, shamans, or even front line soldiers.
- Our Minotaurs Are Different: Minotaurs can be generated as rivals and attack your dungeon. They can also be captured and converted.
- Protection Racket: When provoked, other factions on the map will launch raids on your dungeon, but raiding parties will sometimes offer to accept a payment to not invade you. Refuse, of course, and the raiders will immediately give you a chance to show that they're Mugging the Monster.
- Rank Scales with Asskicking: Until late-game, the Keeper will generally be your strongest unit. Even then, the Wizard has access to a vast variety of spells will make them incredibly useful to have in a fight, while the Dark Knight can keep their combat stats on par with the strongest monsters. The leaders of tribes and villages also have slightly higher stats than their respective mooks.
- Soul Jar: The Necromancer Keeper can create a phylactery to keep their soul in, which then acts as a respawn point if they get killed. They will naturally lose this advantage if the phylactery is destroyed.
- Standard Fantasy Setting: Dwarves, elves, goblins, demons, trolls, and most of the other stuff you'd expect to see. But that only makes it all the more satisfying to tear down.
- Succubi and Incubi: You can summon succubi for your dungeon. While they are in fact quite weak as fighters, they can pacify enemies with a touch, provide "recreational" morale boosts to other minions, and breed with them to produce legendary minions.
- Swamps Are Evil: Hydras on the world map inhabit swamp-like biomes. They particularly like to hide in thick clouds of fog that will keep you from seeing them until they're right on top of you.
- Three-Way Sex: A Succubus will mate with any of your other minions at any time... even if the chosen minion already has another Succubus mating with them!
- The Undead: The undead are one class of minions you can recruit, and include Skeletons, Zombies, Vampires, and Mummies. They're generally harder to kill than living minions, but have some other weakness (sunlight, fire, being chopped apart, etc).
- Villain Protagonist: Exactly what you are. There is no path to coexistence or even Villain with Good Publicity for a Keeper, only the extermination of all rival factions.
- Weakened by the Light: Vampires and Zombies instantly burn up and disintegrate if they find themselves outdoors during daytime. The Necromancer Keeper also suffers from this weakness, but they can also remove this trait from their creations with the right basalm.
- We Cannot Go On Without You: Lose your Keeper unit and it's game over.
- We Have Reserves: Exploited for all it's worth as a Necromancer Keeper. This player character has no population limit for their undead minions, but most of their early to mid-game units are weak without using basalms in their creation and most have no way to heal themselves (vampires can regenerate body parts if they bite someone). This encourages the player to make massive hordes and then throw them at the enemy, then augment the next horde with better equipment/basalms to start all over again.
- Would Hurt a Child: Human and Elf settlements will have children running about which your minions can and will gladly slaughter. Or capture to torture into laborers.
- You Are Already Dead: Poison takes away a fixed 3% of a creature's health per tick, unless it's resistant or immune to poison. And since the basic duration for poison is 60 turns, if even a lowly snake or spider manages to wound a minion and there are no sources of healing nearby, that minion is pretty much doomed.
- You Are Who You Eat: The main trait of Doppelgangers, to which you can feed other minions to let them inherit some traits, including body shape.
