Steam Page for the Black Reliquary
What is the Black Reliquary?
The Black Reliquary is a total overhaul mod for Darkest Dungeon. Its goal is to completely replace the game’s setting, enemies, locations, and story and redo the gameplay such that it feels like an entirely new game. Even at its current incomplete status, the Black Reliquary is one of if not the largest and most ambitious Darkest Dungeon mods currently available, and has even drawn recognition from Red Hook, the developers of Darkest Dungeon themselves, gaining permission to establish its own separate steam page.
The Black Reliquary adds entirely new dungeons to visit and enemies to conquer on your journey while retaining the classic Darkest Dungeon heroes and formula.
The Black Reliquary is now a separate download from Darkest Dungeon, after discussions with Red Hook and Valve. This allowed us to implement several key features not possible as a workshop mod, like an altered main title screen and more extensive localization changes.
My Contributions
During my time working on the Black Reliquary, I have worked on design, scripting, animation, and even animation and concept art. My primary contributions are as a balance, systems, and content designer.
Balance Designer
As a Balance Designer on Black Reliquary, I was responsible for maintaining the health of a complex combat ecosystem across heroes, enemies, items, and encounters. I met weekly with other designers and testers to review balance and design concerns, ranging from small numerical tweaks on underperforming characters and equipment to full-scale reworks of heroes and boss encounters. My decisions were grounded in a mix of personal play experience, playtest data, tester feedback, and broader player sentiment, with the goal of supporting both the intended fantasy of each piece of content and the overall difficulty and pacing of the game.
One of my major hero reworks was the Flagellant, a low-HP, bleed-focused character whose gameplay fantasy and practical viability had drifted apart. In his original state, the Flagellant’s damage-over-time attacks were extremely strong, but he was so fragile that players were often discouraged from fully engaging with his low-HP playstyle or using him as a front-line tank. This resulted in one-dimensional, overly safe play patterns that made him simultaneously one of the strongest heroes in the game and yet unsatisfying to play, because his core risk-reward fantasy rarely came into full expression. To address this, I deliberately diverted power away from his pure bleed skills and reinvested it into his protective and healing abilities, while also improving his defensive stats. This allowed him to function as a more reliable tank/support hybrid while still retaining his identity as a bleed-oriented hero, enabling playstyles that leaned into his intended high-risk, high-impact fantasy rather than avoiding it.
I also led a significant rework of the Judicator, a synergy-driven hero designed to showcase several Black Reliquary-specific mechanics such as Expiated, Amberblight, and religious affinities. In practice, her kit suffered from wildly uneven payoffs: a few standout abilities carried most of her value while others underperformed to the point of being ignored. This pushed players into a narrow, spammy support playstyle that contradicted the original design goal of a flexible, jack-of-all-trades character. My redesign focused on smoothing those extremes by nerfing her most overperforming skills and reworking several of her other abilities to increase her personal offensive contribution without stripping away her supportive role. The end result restored her more well-rounded nature, increased the number of viable team compositions she could thrive in, and better showcased the underlying mechanics she was meant to highlight.
On the encounter side, I redesigned the Warhawk Matron boss fight to resolve both mechanical and thematic issues. The original version was a static, grindy encounter characterized by high damage numbers and a boss that cowered in the back rank for most of the fight. This not only limited viable team-building options—over-favoring certain reach tools and compositions—but also conflicted with the lore concept of the Matron as a predatory, commanding threat. In my rework, I rebuilt the encounter to be more dynamic and positionally expressive, leaning into the Wildlander faction’s established positional mechanics and integrating elements from later factions whose mechanics the Matron is meant to “borrow” through her ammo system. This made the fight more engaging, more thematically authentic, and more consistent with the game’s broader encounter design language.
Across all of these efforts, my work on Black Reliquary strengthened my ability to diagnose balance issues, reconcile fantasy and function, and iterate toward solutions that support both player satisfaction and systemic integrity. It also gave me extensive experience collaborating with a multidisciplinary team, communicating design changes clearly, and using feedback loops to guide ongoing tuning over the life of a complex, interlocking set of systems.
The original iteration of the Warhawk Matron had several problems, a static grindy fight characterized by bloated numbers and the boss cowering in position 4 the entire fight, which both limited teambuilding opportunities and contradicted the lore of the Matron. I redesigned the fight to be much more dynamic and utilize the established positional flexibility of the Wildlanders to create a much more tactical and engaging encounter.
Content Design
As a content designer on Black Reliquary, I focused on creating memorable, mechanically expressive bosses and heroes that brought their core fantasy to life in play. My work ranged from building bespoke encounter mechanics and AI behaviors that define how a fight feels moment-to-moment, to designing complex, transformable hero kits that demand careful tuning to stay both powerful and fair.
I designed the initial mechanics for the Janissary, a mobile, agile duelist who anchors one of Black Reliquary’s most beloved boss encounters. The core of the fight is a formal duel: the Janissary selects a target and engages them in a focused, positional battle, while his “honor” dictates how the rest of the encounter behaves. To reinforce this fantasy, I adjusted the AI of allied enemies to avoid targeting the chosen duelist, making the mechanic feel intentional and legible rather than arbitrary. The result is a fight that stands out for its personality, clarity, and tactical pacing, and is frequently cited by players as one of their favorite bosses in the overhaul.
For the Gastrosaur, the goal was to create a boss that embodied barely-contained chaos—something that would feel more dangerous the longer you let it live. The fight is built around a rampaging escalation curve, with the Gastrosaur’s behavior becoming increasingly wild and unpredictable as its health decreases and it throws off its handlers. This design pushes players to plan carefully, manage risk, and coordinate their team tightly, because small mistakes compound quickly under its mounting pressure. The Gastrosaur ended up as one of the most volatile and punishing bosses in the game, rewarding parties that can execute a clear strategy under intense pressure.
I also implemented the Dredge, one of Black Reliquary’s most complex hero classes both technically and mechanically. The Dredge is designed as a backline support/DPS hybrid who can temporarily transition into a massive DPS/tank hybrid through her mecha form. Making that fantasy work required careful iteration on both her baseline kit and her transformed state: damage curves, survivability, cooldowns, and resource hooks all needed multiple tweaks during and after development to keep her powerful, readable, and fun without overwhelming the rest of the roster. The design incorporates clear thematic and mechanical nods to inspirations like Titanfall and Pacific Rim, while still fitting smoothly into Black Reliquary’s existing systems and encounter design.
Across these content design efforts, Black Reliquary pushed me to think holistically about how fantasy, mechanics, and encounter structure come together to create memorable experiences. Designing bosses like the Janissary and Gastrosaur, and a complex hero like the Dredge, taught me how to build around a strong thematic pillar, then iterate until the kit, pacing, and player decision space all reinforce that identity. It also gave me practical experience scoping and implementing content end-to-end: writing specs, hooking things up in-engine, adjusting AI and abilities, and responding to playtest feedback without losing sight of the core vision. Most importantly, it sharpened my instincts for creating content that is not only mechanically interesting, but clear, learnable, and satisfying to master—skills I’m excited to bring into a professional studio environment.
A fan-favorite encounter, the Janissary fight is a careful dance between precision and disgrace: the boss marks one hero as their duelist and fixates on them, forcing the party to support their champion while still holding back the rest of the enemy line.