Of The Damned Series

What You're Actually Dealing With

The Of The Damned Series refers to a collection of mods and total conversion projects that have circulated across various gaming communities, most notably within the Total War franchise ecosystem. These mods rework existing titles with dark fantasy aesthetics, altered unit rosters, custom campaigns, and modified mechanics that diverge significantly from the base game experience. I spent roughly two years working with these modifications across different titles. The core issue most people hit immediately is that these mods are not standalone products. They layer on top of an existing game installation, which means your ability to use them depends entirely on having the base game legally owned and properly installed first. You cannot skip that step. The mod files reference engine-level assets from the original game, and missing even one DLL or configuration file will cause crashes that are nearly impossible to diagnose without understanding the mod's dependency chain.

Of The Damned Series download and installation basics

The most common source for these modifications is the Nexus Mods website or the official Total War mod forums. Download the specific version that matches your game's patch number exactly. I cannot stress this enough because the single most wasted weekend I've had was installing a mod built for version 1.8.10 onto a game running 1.9.30, then spending six hours chasing a save corruption issue that turned out to be a simple version mismatch. The mod author's release thread will list compatible versions. Read it before downloading anything. Installation typically works like this. Extract the mod archive into your game's mod folder, which on Steam installations is usually found at SteamLibrarysteamappscommonTotal War Rome IImod or a similar path depending on which title the mod targets. Some newer releases include launcher tools that handle activation automatically, but older packages require manual enablement through the in-game mod manager or by editing the mod list configuration file directly. One edge case that caught me off guard: the damage scaling in the dark fantasy unit variants is not linear across difficulty settings. I ran into this when testing the series on legendary difficulty. Units that performed reasonably at normal difficulty became outright brutal at higher settings because the damage multipliers stack differently than the vanilla game expects. The workaround I used was disabling a few of the more aggressive unit modifications in the config file and retesting. You can find these settings in the mod's .xml files under the damage_multipliers section. It takes about twenty minutes to adjust rather than the three hours I originally burned trying to make the mod work as-is at maximum difficulty.

What makes these mods different from standard modifications is the extent of their asset overhauls. Standard mods might change unit stats or add a few custom campaigns. The Of The Damned Series typically replaces entire texture packs, retextures building models, alters audio libraries, and sometimes introduces new faction mechanics that require you to understand the underlying battle calculation system to use effectively. Here is a nuance that almost nobody mentions in the release threads. The mod's custom factions often have hidden diplomacy flags that do not appear in the interface. I discovered this accidentally when my faction refused to declare war on another AI-controlled faction despite having a grievance that should have triggered automatically. Digging into the diplomacy .csv file revealed that the AI decision tree for that particular faction pair was commented out entirely. The mod author had left placeholder code in place but never filled in the behavior logic. This meant any player using that faction would experience unexplained diplomatic stagnation. The fix required either loading a save file after the AI had already made its initial faction decisions or manually editing the diplomacy CSV to uncomment and populate those decision nodes.

Performance considerations you should not ignore

Running any modification of this scale impacts your system differently than the base game. The custom texture replacements alone can increase VRAM consumption by approximately two to four gigabytes depending on your GPU. If you are running the mod on a system with eight gigabytes of VRAM or less, you will likely experience stuttering during large battle sequences where multiple custom unit models load simultaneously. The solution is reducing texture resolution through the mod's configuration options, which typically cuts visual fidelity modestly while restoring stable frame rates. This tradeoff usually matters more on battle maps than on the campaign layer. Save game compatibility is another practical concern. Once you activate a mod of this scope, your existing saves become unusable. The mod changes unit definitions, campaign map assets, and sometimes core engine parameters. Attempting to load a vanilla save with the mod active will almost certainly corrupt the save file. I have seen this happen repeatedly in the community forums. The safest approach is to start a fresh campaign from the beginning with the mod enabled from turn one. If you want to preserve your vanilla progress, keep that save on a separate profile or install directory. Updating these mods after a game patch is where most people encounter failure. Game patches often overwrite or restructure files that the mod depends on. After a major Total War update, I routinely spend between thirty minutes and two hours checking whether the mod has received a compatibility patch from its authors. If no updated version exists, you are generally stuck on the previous game patch until the mod author releases a fix. This is not a minor inconvenience. It means your ability to play the modded experience depends entirely on the author's responsiveness to the developer's patch schedule, which varies wildly between projects.

Community resources and troubleshooting

The most reliable place to find help is the mod author's original release thread. These threads typically contain pinned posts with known issues, workarounds, and compatibility notes. The comment sections are also useful because other users often report problems they encountered and the solutions they found. Secondary support exists on subreddit communities dedicated to the specific game title the mod targets, though the relevance of those discussions depends on how recently the mod was active. If you are experiencing crashes that the author has not addressed, the first diagnostic step is isolating which component is failing. Disable individual submods if the package contains multiple integrated modifications. Run the game with logging enabled if the engine supports it. Check the Windows event viewer for application crash entries. These steps typically narrow the problem down to a specific file or conflict within a reasonable timeframe rather than leaving you guessing about the root cause. The Of The Damned Series modifications offer a substantially different experience from the base game, and they demand more from your system and your patience than casual modifications do. Understanding how they interact with the underlying engine, knowing where to find support, and accepting that maintenance is part of the process will determine whether you have a functional setup or spend weeks troubleshooting avoidable issues. The modifications are worth the effort for players who want a darker, more mechanically divergent experience, but they are not something you can install and expect to run smoothly without reading the documentation carefully first.