Builder's Manual · Chapter 1

What This Project Is Trying To Do

Project: Fogbound is a Dead by Daylight tabletop adaptation built on a light D&D 5e chassis. It is not a generic horror system with DBD paint — it is a specific emulation of a Loop: Campfire → Trial → Outer Realm → Call → Campfire, where ordinary people from every era endure pocket-dimension Trials run by Killers while an unseen Entity feeds on hope.

Design Intent

Three goals drove every file type and guide:

1. Intimacy over spectacle. Survivors are not heroes. They are a nurse, a miner, a mechanic, a teen — diverse, era-specific, tired and dirty. Killers are towering, physical, low-angle presences. The Fog is a character. If an addition makes the game feel more like heroic fantasy and less like a cold, wet, analog horror film, it does not fit.

2. Loops, not levels. Progression is lateral and accretive, not vertical. Bloodpoints buy equipment and perks; Core Essence ticks down with deaths; Drained and Memory Fragments create short-term scars. The Archive of Blood epitomizes this — power that accumulates in a stealable physical object rather than a safe character level.

3. Paranoia as a mechanic. Light/Dark alignment, the Rule of One, and betrayal moves (Sandbag, Snitch, Left Behind) exist to make trust a resource. The system assumes Session Zero consent for PvP — the Builder should preserve that opt-in boundary when extending social mechanics.

As a Builder who cloned this project, your job is not to add "more content." It is to add content that makes the Loop tighter, the Fog thicker, and the choices harder.

Two Audiences, Two Books

Player's Handbook tells players how to play — rolls, Trials, Outer Reaches, gear, alignment, and what the Archive costs them.
This manual tells you how to build — how the file types are structured, what conventions keep the game coherent, and where to extend without breaking the Loop.

A rule the player needs and the builder extends belongs in the Player's Handbook as the playable rule, and here as the extension contract. Don't duplicate — cross-reference.

What Fogbound Refuses

No classes. Survivors differentiate by backstory, S.U.R.V.I.V.E. spread, and perks — never by class chassis.
No gold economy. Bloodpoints are XP and currency in one.
No sunny days. Even Outer Realm "day" is haze-obscured. No neon, no glowing magic, no smiling.
No resurrection from 0 Core Essence. The long clock matters.

Build with those refusals in mind and your additions will feel native.

Manual updated Aug 26, 2026.

D&D 5e — Fogbound S.U.R.V.I.V.E. d20

Project: Fogbound

Project: Fogbound is a D&D 5e-based survival-horror tabletop RPG set in the Dead by Daylight universe. Ordinary people from every era — nurses, mechanics, students, miners — are torn from their lives by the Black Fog and trapped in the Entity's Realm, an infinite nightmare where hope itself is harvested. Death is not an escape, only a loop.

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CreatedAug 25, 2026

UpdatedAug 27, 2026

Dead by Daylight Survival Horror — D&D 5e

Death is not an escape. Only the Loop.

You weren't supposed to be here.

One moment you were where you belonged — a kitchen in 1973, a hospital in 2024, a coal mine in 1898 — and the next the Black Fog took you. It is not weather. It is a thick, low, living mist that clings to your ankles, swallows sound, and hides something vast and hungry.

In **Project: Fogbound**, you play ordinary people trapped in the Entity's Realm, an ageless cosmic deity that feeds not on your death, but on your hope and despair. You do not age. You do not starve. You do not die permanently. But every death on a sacrificial Hook chips away at your soul — your Core Essence — until nothing is left and you are discarded into the Void forever.

**What players do:**

You will create a Survivor defined not by a class, but by who you were before the Fog and how you S.U.R.V.I.V.E. — seven attributes (Stealth, Urgency, Resilience, Vitality, Intellect, Vigor, Experience) and the skills that keep you alive. You'll choose one Perk that reflects your identity and carry your history, your inventory, and your diminishing light with you.

Each session follows the Loop the survivors whisper about around the fire:

**The Campfire → The Trial → The Outer Realm → The Call → The Campfire again.**

At the **Campfire**, the only safe haven, you rest under fragile protection, trade stories with other lost souls, and spend Bloodpoints — the Realm's only currency — to heal, unlock Perks, and manifest tools from the fog.

In **The Trial**, you are thrown into a closed pocket dimension ruled by a random Killer — a human monster perfected by the Entity. You must find and repair five of seven generators, power the Exit Gates, and escape while the Killer's heartbeat grows louder with every step. You cannot fight it and win. You hide. You run. You slam pallets and vault windows, and you pray your friends reach your Hook before the Entity claims you.

Between Trials, you may choose to leave the Campfire's light and enter the **Outer Realm — the Void-Wastes** — a vast, non-Euclidean sandbox where the Entity has stitched stolen memories together: a Victorian asylum stitched seam-to-seam to a rain-slick 1960s gas station, a rusted junkyard mountain dissolving into white void. Here you scavenge for weapons and anomalous items, hunt for lore and Auric Cells, meet other survivors who may help or betray you, and search for hidden Bloodwebs. Every Short Rest, every new road, and every time you draw attention, the GM rolls the Fog Die — on a 1-3, ash fills the air and The Call drags you screaming into the next Trial.

This is not heroic fantasy. There are no glowing swords or sunny days. Combat is lethal, noise is information, trust is a resource, and the Fog is always watching. The question is never *will* you escape — the Entity ensures there is no way out. The question is who you will protect, what you will become on the Light-to-Dark spectrum, and how much of yourself you have left when the Fog finally stops calling your name.

Glimpses

Inside the World

352 entries · 8 types

Characters

128 total

Creatures

15 total

Equipment

45 total

Game Starts

2 total

GM Instructions

16 total

Locations

50 total

Lore Tomes

43 total

Perks

53 total