KAP: We are sitting down for a session of Das Schwarze Auge. I am a player and I have my character sheet (I always play some sort of noble paladin or neutral good scholar) What sort of adventure am I going to experience when you two are the dungeon master (is there a German word for this? )
GILGARETH: Yes, there is a German word for dungeon master. It’s »Meister« (literally Master, that’s why the first album of the this trilogy is called »Werkzeuge des Meisters«, – Dungeon Master’s Tools) or »Spielleiter«. Welcome to our table, KAP! For our album »Schatten über dem Nordland« we once wrote two small scenarios in the form of solo adventures, both of which never saw the light of day.
In the first scenario, you had to play as typical adventuring party of heroes sent by the old wizard Isenbart von Greifenfurt to seek two prized relics: the legendary »Klinge des Schicksals« (Blade of Destiny) and a shield forged from the mystical Endurium, also called Black Steel, hidden in the unfathomable depths of the dwarven mines of the Finsterkamm mountains. You had to use them in the correct sequence to fight the ancient dragon Naugadir, the bane of the Northlands, who lays villages to waste and sets the Northland ablaze, and thus free the poor folk from its gruesome oppressor. In the second scenario, however, you slipped into the skin of the dragon itself, understanding its ancient knowledge: Over millennia you have guarded the ancient nodes of astral power that mortal mages today call Arteriae Magicae or ley lines. Your guidance maintained the balance of the spheres, but now the clueless mortals, humans and dwarves, threaten your mission and threaten your land: They dig deep, unknowing and driven by greed, and threaten to unleash the ancient magic that slumbers beneath the Northlands. You observe how they build new settlements and mines, tear open the earth and search for treasures whose true meaning and danger they do not understand. You know that they could unleash that ancient magic which slumbers beneath the Northlands, and that could mean the end of the balance of the spheres… – you stand at the threshold of a decision: Will you continue to protect creation or keep the mortals away from the ley lines through destruction? Or we’ll play some prequel to that one? Sitting down at our table, you’re a young archivist, sent by Isenbart von Greifenfurt to search for an ancient manuscript about the legendary »Klinge des Schicksals« in some remote old monastery ruins, not in a grand wizard’s tower. Your search leads you to a half-forgotten village called Beonfîrn, clinging to existence at the very edge of the Orclands. The kind of place that’s been cut off from the rest of Aventuria for so long that it’s developed its own rhythms and its own suspicions. The secrets here aren’t written in books anymore, they’re buried in dialect, in folk memory, in the way the old women won’t look at strangers directly. The elder might know where the old monastery ruins are, the ones that collapsed into the marsh fifty years back, but he won’t tell some book-hungry stranger. Why should he? You’ll need to prove yourself, maybe help repair the palisade, maybe sit through his rambling stories about the winter of ’73 when the orcs came and Travia turned her face away. The challenge is earning trust, navigating unspoken rules. The dungeon might be the monastery’s flooded cellar, or it might be the social structure of the village itself. Either way, it’s about recognizing that knowledge always comes at a cost, and that the line between researcher and graverobber is thinner than you’d like to admit… – and now we have a dialectical, perhaps even Luciferian moment here: Light-Bringer as an epistemologist stance, Heralds of Light (or »Lichtboten« as we called our most transcendental tape from 2024), this encouragement of dissent and questioning, and the realization through experience that no single, absolute good exists. That is the beginning of ethics or even philosophical inquiry and to a certain amount that is also what DSA is about…
I was messaged earlier this year asking if I wanted to write something about the three tape collection coming out through Heimat Der Katastrophe. This wasn’t just a re-release of past material rather three new records all based around the German roleplaying game Das Schwarze Auge with illustrations from Caryad — an artist who did work for Das Schwarze Auge from 1996 to 2025. If you are aware of Gilgareth or have seen any of their social media proclamations then the above response to me asking what type of game are we playing seems completely normal. This is perhaps (…it is) the longest and most immersive answer to a lighthearted question which even includes the very kind edification of the German language.
Gilgareth have spent much of their existence being the kids who turn in an elaborate project for their school assignment perhaps even dressing up while doing some sort of in character presentation while others in the class silently curse because they are next. Since 2024, this German duo has dedicated their existence to doing everything which seems fun and making sure anything they give to the world comes wrapped in an elaborate decorations. Whether or not it is the bilingual text which accompanies their releases, the visual panoramas they post on their Instagram, or the fact they debuted their music with the tags “dark dungeon disco” which no one asked for but interestingly no one sent back, this group is perhaps the easiest project I can write about since they always have a story to tell.
Our friendship goes back to a class trip as fifth‑graders, when we found ourselves in a youth hostel after a long day of hiking, visiting museums and bad youth hostel food. But that very evening the dormitory turned into a makeshift dungeon as Arne pulled out a copy of the old board game »HeroQuest«. The clatter of the plastic figures, the roll of the dice, and the sudden feeling that we were standing at the entrance of a real dungeon sparked something in both of us. It was the first time we realized that a simple game could become a portal to another world. Not long after that night, we stumbled upon a starter’s box of the German pen‑and‑paper RPG »Das Schwarze Auge« (DSA). In the late ’80s and early ’90s, DSA was the German answer to »Dungeons&Dragons« – actually, the father of DSA, Ulrich Kiesow, had translated D&D books into German before he started working on his own game. Back then DSA filled the shelves of every hobby store over here, and adventure modules were printed by the dozen. We dove straight in, filling xerox‑printed character sheets, sketching hand‑drawn maps, listening to weird synth computer soundtracks and medieval music. We were spending whole weekends wandering the continent of Aventuria, battling monsters, and hunting legendary relics. The depth of worldbuilding, the cultural weight, and the sheer amount of material available for DSA always kept it as our primary role-playing system.
While D&D emphasizes heroic action, combat and looting, DSA traditionally focused more on immersive storytelling, moral complexity, and character-driven narratives. For us as kids, playing in our native German made everything more accessible – the rules felt clearer, the magic spells and their incantations more tangible, and the entire world easier to inhabit. That accessibility is probably why Aventuria burned itself so deeply into our memories. It felt less like reading a rulebook and more like discovering an ancient grimoire written in our own language. It offered a particular deepness that still resonates with us today. Both of us kept rolling dice together until we finished school and moved to different parts of Germany. DSA slowly faded out of our lives, and we haven’t played it for almost 25 years now.
The old gaming sessions are long gone, and honestly, they wouldn’t work today for various reasons: time is more limited now, we have full-time jobs and responsibilities, life has moved on. When we started Gilgareth, it was an attempt to turn those fond memories into music. Every sound and every melody brings back our days of adventure and a time when the world was still full of magic. We wanted to capture not just the memories but the feeling of adventure as a child – the anticipation, the rustle of paper, the thrill of the unknown. A magic that reminds us of beautiful moments we can never truly return to. The very idea of nostalgia is a fond longing for something that can’t be brought back, isn’t it? That’s the bittersweet core of it. The project became our way of journeying back to Aventuria, not by rolling dice, but by composing melodies and writing stories that carry the same sense of wonder and discovery. Gilgareth’s idiosyncratic music blends those Aventuria‑inspired fantasy tropes with kind of unexpected elements that also belong to our shared nostalgia: riding rhythms and hoofbeat tempos, the hiss and flutter of worn mixtapes passed from hand to hand, the flickering VHS glow of ’80s pulp fantasy cinema, and vintage synthesizers that hum and crackle like a campfire shared with your adventuring party after dark. Gilgareth is our love letter to the wonder of old worlds and the quiet magic of growing up with fantasy in your heart. Every track is a tribute to the old days, but also a spark meant to ignite new adventures. So while we’re not sitting around a table with character sheets anymore, the quest never really stopped. It just found a new voice.
For us, this fantastic realm is more than just a fictional setting. Aventuria never left us – it’s a world we knew by heart. Decades later we can still recite spell formulas and remember the names of legendary heroes and hidden places. It’s more than crazy how deeply those realms and their lore etched themselves into our memories. These memories are real: The Middenrealm, for example, is one of the central and most well-known regions of Aventuria – a medieval fantasy monarchy filled with knights, wizards, monsters, and old legends. What still fascinates us about Aventuria is the depth and attention to detail of this world: there’s a rich history, different cultures, religious conflicts, and mysteries that continue to be expanded to this day. Aventuria was a second home to us for years, and with Gilgareth, we’re going back there today. Yet it also serves as the canvas for shaping our own interpretations, inventions, ideas, and imagination – but it’s always Aventuria at the core. A world we explored together.
Fantasy and dungeon synth have an inescapable bond. Though I am perhaps the first to support a genre going outside of its conventions, dungeon synth, both in its 1990s iteration as a black metal subgenre and as a 2010’s revival were rooted in fantasy and fantasy roleplaying games as a motif. “Dungeon Synth,” a term coined in 2011, was used to describe moody atmospheric music which invokes a feeling of this old school hobby of crawling through passageways. “Dungeon Crawling” is a staple of old school RPGs where most of the game takes place in labyrinthine dungeons and sees characters scavenging for treasure and story clues while avoiding traps and monsters. In most instances maps of these dungeons were made during gameplay and the characters always sat at the frotnieer of the known and unknown using the gameplay to clear the fog of war (dungeon war). Dungeon crawling is a motif which has largely been phased out of modern gaming in place of more narrative approach but still exists as an aesthetic for people to reminiscence or fantasize about long hours of randomized gameplay without responsibilities. Though dungeon synth now has come to mean many things, its early days (both in the 1990s and the 2010 revival) had large nods to these fantasy motifs and the magic which comes through offline imagination and plundering the depths of the unknown.
In Germany, Das Schwarze Auge is the largest tabletop role playing game sold and overshadows Dungeons and Dragons in popularity. This popularity is in contrast to its obscure nature for the rest of the world. Gilgareth’s relationship with Das Schwarze Auge feels apart of a larger cultural relationship the country has with this media and Werkzeuge des Meisters is a love letter of sorts to not only the media but also to a bittersweet memory one has with a time when they could focus all day on playing games and thinking about games. If you were not aware, (like I was) Gilgareth has spent their entire career dedicated to Das Schwarze Auge and the setting of Aventuria. The partnership between the two creators seems to be forged in the crucible of these gaming sessions and their records are artifacts of both memories and imagination which came from the time when they could just game all day. While dungeon synth historically has been grim and celebrates the dark atmosphere which come with crawling through dungeons, anyone who has even spent one session at a table knows it can be anything but grim. How can you be grim for four hours eating snacks with friends? This is perhaps one of my favorite traits about the Gilgareth as I am hard pressed to find another example of optimism which runs throughout music and caputres of the magic of exploring with friends and having everyone on the same page of enthusiasm.
What we tried to create is the soundtrack to a game that happens in your head. And in our memory. The whole trilogy tries to reconstruct that overwhelming feeling we had as kids when we opened a fresh boxed set of »Das Schwarze Auge« (roughly translated as The Dark Eye), often simply called DSA. Back in the days DSA expansion sets were sold in sturdy cardboard boxes – almost like board games – filled with maps, booklets, illustrations, rulebooks for the Meister (the Dungeon Master), campaign volumes, and regional sourcebooks. They promised more than paper. They promised worlds As teenagers, we often had to decide whether to spend our carefully saved pocket money on a new RPG box or on a new music album. And honestly, those adventure boxes felt like they contained entire universes: infinite possibility, secret knowledge, hidden doors. And this very idea is actually the perfect starting point to shed some more light on the historical and epistemological differences between DSA and D&D: Of course, at this point, we cannot and do not wish to speak for every single DSA group out there, past and present, just as our version of Aventuria is but one interpretation and there are hundreds and thousands of them out there. But for us, however, this proto-pedagogical, anti-authoritarian attitude lies at the very core of DSA’s DNA, so to say. And this seems to us inseparable from the person of Ulrich Kiesow, Aventuria creator and founding father and his desire to create a structured, relatable, and (even if it sounds strange in this context) realistic experience that goes beyond pure monster-slaying. Kiesow studied history, sociology, and German studies. There’s always an encouragement to understand, discover, problem-solve, and communicate and this is, for us, the canvas upon which he brought his fantastic world to life. Classic DSA is an attempt to simulate a credible, consistent fantastic world where players grow into heroes as normal people. That’s the key to understanding Kiesow’s early vision of Aventuria: he wanted to give players a complex world and encourage them to solve problems creatively instead of just drawing their swords. A first-level DSA hero is extremely vulnerable. A single hit from a crossbow can be fatal. It’s more about experiencing the world, role-playing in the truest sense of the word. This approach creates a very grounded, almost simulationist atmosphere. This stands in contrast to D&D, which is much more heroic and action-heavy by design, focusing on dungeon crawls. It’s about legendary heroes fighting epic evils, with high stakes and powerful spells. A typical classic DSA adventure often consisted of a long journey, gathering information in a city, talking to NPCs and solving problems that doesn’t always involve violence. Combat was often just the climax, not the main content of DSA adventures. This has deeply shaped us and is reflected in our specific approach to our own world-building and storytelling to this day – perhaps that is the ultimate Luciferian bargain: trading the simplicity of heroism for the complex responsibility of thinking for yourself. That, or we’re just getting old, haha…
With this HDK trilogy, we wanted to rebuild that idea of a classic box set in musical form. Perhaps we can translate that sense of wonder into sound. We approached the trilogy as if it were an old-school RPG release:
WERKZEUGE DES MEISTERS functions like the core rulebook – the mechanics, the tension, the clash of steel and spell, the architecture of fate. It’s about structure, power, and the invisible hand behind the screen. Musically, this aspect is reflected in a more nostalgic, earthbound 80s sound aesthetic – a narrative thread we’ve been pursuing with Gilgareth since our earliest releases. The music is dedicated to classic digital synth sounds, sometimes rough and edgy, sometimes celestial, in parts clumsy and wonky, but all of them mighty. Accompanied by iconic drum machines, the tracks are mixed and recorded using analog equipment, some of which is delightfully worn and imperfect.
SIDEQUESTS is the adventure compendium – ten self-contained journeys, each with its own mood and quest: forests, deserts, courtly intrigue, dragon myths. The sound is noticeably more medieval than on the core rulebook, warmer and more analog. These are forgotten acoustic fantasy dance pieces. Sometimes elvish, here and there inept like it was made for an ogre high school party. The sound is heavily dependent on a recently discovered medieval groovebox, perfect for creating dungeon raves and your next dancing plague. Here, we are fully in the game.
AVENTURISCHE FLÜSSE is the regional sourcebook – slower, more atmospheric, almost cartographic in sound. It explores space rather than action, movement rather than combat. The rivers as lifelines, borders, myths. The tracks were conceived as ambient sketches from the very beginning and always meandering, changing, constantly in a flowing state. The melodies and patterns were mostly created by improvising over the previous parts, changing them and rearranging everything afterwards.
Heimat Der Katastrophe (HDK) has always been a source of fascination for me not only as a publisher of wonderful music but as an outlet which seems to dedicate a staggering amount of work into their releases. Whether or not it is full gaming systems designed within their tape cards or the impressive dice collection which seems to adorn and match the colors of the media, this publisher posses the enthusiasm for adventures as well as the means to make visually stunning displays. In the early days of 2021, I interviewed this publisher and since then I feel I have watched their label out out material not only in the dungeon synth genre but across styles including synthwave, library music, fictional film soundtracks, and the wild hinterlands which lay outside genres. The creators for HDK seem to approach releases much int he same way Gilgreath does and throws themselves into the idea leading to not just releases but releases with playable scenarios and handdrawn maps.
To be completely honest with you: we were dreaming of working with HDK one day even before we released our first demo. Their attention to detail, the incredibly coherent visual language, and the sheer quality of their releases speak for themselves. But we never thought of actively pushing ourselves into the picture too early. We didn’t want to rush anything or knock on their door before we were ready – so we focused on finding our own sound, putting out our own releases, and walking the DIY path for a while. We spent time preparing, leveling up, and gathering XP, and we made some wonderful friends along the way (Shoutout to George Dale of Shadows – one of the finest people around!). But when our trilogy concept started taking concrete shape last year, when the idea of this imaginary RPG box – complete with rulebook, adventure module, and regional sourcebook – began to grow inside us, we knew it was the right moment to make a proper courage check. You know, the kind you’d roll with your attribute and hope for the best. So we dropped HDK a short message with demo versions of the three planned releases. It felt a bit like entering a new hex on the map – cautiously hopeful, d20 in hand. And honestly? The response was more than we could have hoped for: HDK understood our vision immediately, and the collaboration has been a dream ever since. It’s like finding the perfect party for a long campaign – everyone brings something unique to the table, and suddenly the adventure feels bigger and more alive than you ever imagined.
Below is a stream of the first record Werkzeuge des Meisters from the trilogy of the same name. If you have ever spent time with a dungeon master…or Meister…who spends all week preparing material for gaming, this is perhaps the best way to start as the marquee adventure. The supplementary records can also be thought of as additional records designed to allow listeners to immerse themselves in a world by their own design. Three record might seem like a lot of material for one person to consume but much like the gaming hobby supplementary books are only designed for options for those who want to go even further. I spent many years running games for people and Gilgareth reminds me of the people who keep gaming sessions together with planning, patience, and above all a professional enthusiasm for entirely optional but people are going to do it anyway since its fun type of fun. This was one of the easiest articles to write becasue I sort of get what this duo has been striving for. Perhaps it is becasue of my own history as a Dungeon Master, Game Master, Referee, or Meister as I know that feeling of accomplishment when the amount of work you do connects with a player and shows them the possibilities of world building.