Game Design
Nicola de Marco is an italian rules and lore designer for Role Playing and Tabletop Games, with a background in popular science, historical research, and mythology and focusing on emergent gameplay, emergent narrative, and ludonarrative coherence.
Kisarta.
Kisarta is a dark fantasy setting for damned souls and otherworldly horrors, a netherworld of connected Domains ruled by powerful eldritch entities called Guardians. Death is everything that exists, and this realm functions as the final stop for creatures coming from all other universes: wherever (and whenever) one dies, they might end up in Kisarta if they're unfortunate enough. In this boundless, timeless world of agony, the Lords of the Black Circle incessantly scheme and plot to skew the balance of immaterial power...
Nicola worked as a Rule Designer, crafting the 5 brand new classes for 5E, and as lore design consultant and assistant. He also worked as Lead Game and Lore Designer for the Codex of Kisarta supplement.
Awaken - The Liborian Saga
Liborian Saga is a Setting Sourcebook for the Awaken RPG (The Games Collective - Studio2 Publishing), a very dark spin on slavic and mediterranean mythology, co-written by Nicola. The sourcebook contains a host of new creatures for the game and hundreds of details, mysteries and plot hooks about the land, sea and cities of the Liborian region of the continent, along new usable items and substances, rules for naval combat, weapons and powers for playing characters.
Dungeon Masters’ Guild Products
Nicola has published different products (brand new classes, subclasses, creatures and so on) for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons through the official website of the Dungeon Master’s Guild, mainly on a pay-what-you-want basis.
The Magus Class
A powerful arcane martialist class and 5 specialized subclasses.
The Way of Vows
A 5e Monk subclass based on real-life monastic traditions from all over the world.
The Trapmaster Archetipe
A subclass for tactical rogues that want to unleash the bite of mechanical traps on their enemies.
Creatures of Salvora
A conversion of many creatures from the world of the Awaken RPG to the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition ruleset.
The Weaponsmith
A reverse engineering of the weapons system of 5E D&D, allowing for any new weapon to be balanced and used in the game. A Copper Best Seller product.
Adaptations
Ryuutama.
Ryuutama is a Natural Fantasy TTRPG created in Japan by Atsuhiro Okada and adapted to Italian by Isola Illyon Edizioni.
Nicola is responsible for the translation and adaptation of the base manual of the game from English to Italian.
Dungeons of Draggmar.
Dungeons of Draggmar is a brutal board game devised by The Moongrel. It is inspired by classic dungeon crawlers and modern hardcore video games such as Darkest Dungeon.
Nicola was in charge of translating and adapting the game from English to Italian and has been involved in playtesting it before physical release.