Shadow of the Demon Lord

All rolls are are either looking for 11+ or to beat a defense value. What really makes the system shine is the concept of boons and banes. Essentially, these work similarly to Advantage and Disadvantage from 5E, except that they aren't binary. Instead of simply letting you roll twice and pick the higher or lower, Boons and Banes stack upon one another or cancel each other out and end up giving you a number of d6 which you roll, keeping the highest or lowest result. This means that a Boon/Bane will never exceed 6, but it also allows you to stack them to have a greater chance of success.

Characters are made up of 4 choices over ten levels. You actually start out at Level 0 with nothing but your Ancestry, gaining a Novice path at level 1 which corresponds to the old-school standards of Warrior, Rogue, Priest, and Magician, at level 3 you gain an Expert path which further refines your character into something like a Paladin or a Berkserker, and at level 6 you gain a Master path which further refines you to something like a Pyromaster or an Assassin. There are no requirements between these paths except for it needed to fit a character's story, which can lead to some really fun builds.

The setting is metal as fuck, roleplaying DURING the Apocalypse as the entire world falls into madness and disorder and chaos and dark powers take hold. The world is collapsing and fundamentally breaking as the Demon Lord breaks free of his prison. Even the forces of Hell are fighting for their survival. Oh, and a shitton of British-style fairies and the like. Goblins and the Fey are a big part of the setting and wonderful capricious.

The game is also hellishly lethal with some monsters basically having the equivalent of 1d3 adventurers. This is actually expected as dead characters come back with healing potions. Oh, and health takes a lot of its keys from 4E which makes those health pots actually have kick.

>tl;dr: It's like a sensible man made 5E.

Does someone have a trove with the rules?

Nah, it's basically what 5E should have been. A really organic fusion of 2nd Ed and 4E in a way that it still comes out feeling like something new. And it has a lot of neat ideas. Boons and Banes, its magic system is incredible, and even stuff like its Initiative system.

Given the hellish lethality of combat, players go first. Just as a given. And each turn is divided into Fast Turns and Slow Turns. Some spells, moving and attacking, and the like count as Slow Turns which happen after Fast Turns which are just single actions. So Players' Fast Turns, Monsters' Fast Turns, Players' Slow Turns, Monsters' Slow Turns.

Yup. Molekin, they're on the cover of Demon Lord's Companion 2.

Gee I wonder if there might be some place where PDFs are shared. Oh well...

Sounds good. About it being played in the apocalypse, how grimderp is it?

This, also I like how spellcasters are forced to specialize instead of always having the spell that solves whatever the problem is.

someone was suggesting this game to me the other day. the words they used were "the setting is shit, but the system is awesome"
I don't know about you guys but I find that fluff is just as important as system, sometimes even more so.

from what I've read, on a scale from 1 to 10, it is about 2 minutes to midnight

So on a scale of Dogs in the Vineyard to Warhammer 40k, where would you place this and 4e in terms of heavy weight combat systems?

There's no reason you can't use the system with another setting.

So no?

Guess not, too bad we don't have a thread for sharing PDFs.

As much or as little as you like. This is the "Forbidden Magic" section it's about as extreme as you get in the base book.

There's some fucking metal stuff in this game though. Like Ogres that eat fallen party members then vomits them back on the rest of the party for high damage.

Well, Schwalb can definitely be an acquired taste. He's an old-school DnD dude back when having spells that caused your genitals to fall off and be replaced by a pus-drooling hole was normal, or a spell that makes you shit yourself to death. So it can definitely be pretty derpy at times, but some of the adventures have some really genuine fucked-up horror cooked into them. The Daemonculaba would not be an unexpected sight by players reach level 6-7, for reference. And the dude can write gore like no-one else.

This user had it right when he described it You start the game with the Apocalypse already unfolding, which is actually what the titular Shadow is. But the world has already gone down the path of darkness and you aren't going to stop the end. The best you can do is to save those your love, form a stronghold, and desperately hope to weather the storm. It's a game of small victories and utterly insignificant and unmourned deaths.

This and 4E operate on completely different sides of combat. While 4E is far more tactical, SotDL is a frenzied blitz as you desperately try to take down unspeakable terrors without losing your mind or your body. It's designed under the impression that 1 character will die every level, at the minimum. When I was playing with with some friends, four sessions led to nine or so characters getting torn apart. We actually had people leave because they didn't like the fact that it was hard and punished you for doing dumb shit.

The setting and the system here is pretty tightly wound, though, unless you're porting it into another super-lethal setting. It'd work well enough as an alternate Warhammer RPG. And I modified it slightly to play a Weird West setting, but you will have to modify character durability if you don't want to leave a trail of bodies.

Can i get a group started? discord.gg/xg39Xkb

I actually like the setting a fair bit. It gives your broad strokes and some specifics but generally speaking leaves the world open to you.

Im willing to gm if i can get a group started and i have a google drive with the core rules along with a plethora of expansions for those that join

>having spells that caused your genitals to fall off and be replaced by a pus-drooling hole was normal, or a spell that makes you shit yourself to death.
I'm pretty sure that was never normal.

Don't forget. That ogre? Yeah, it has an ability that instantly kills any downed party member. And that's not a particularly uncommon feature of monsters.

Tales of the Demon Lord is a pretty good example of some of the heinous shit that you find. Hell, the second adventure which is when your characters have just become 1st level heroes features a young woman getting xenomorphed by a demon which either rips itself out of her or is cut free by a cult of demon worshipers which then goes on a killing spree while the party, a dozen bandits, and a pack of cultists all try to stab one another to death.

And that starting adventure? You probably won't have more than 1 character that has a sword, while the rest of you slap at your foes with staves and daggers.

I like the tone and some of the art, concept too, but I'm wary of the fact that it apparently eschews social focuses and roleplaying. Like, they literally refer to acts of diplomacy or intimidation as "social combat rolls".

That's actually a pretty common term for it, dude.

Social combat is a common term for subsystems to handle social checks. Burning wheel, for instance, is a full blown storygame where you use a variant on the combat mechanics to resolve social situations.

2nding this. I really enjoy the settings and ruleset. Combat has some interesting variations which make it fresh, but I made the mistake of running a one-shot of "Dead by Dawn" with a group that isn't a huge fan of heavily combat-based encounters. "Dead by Dawn" was 100% combat, with very little room for roleplay or social interaction. Overall, I liked the setting and the gameplay, plus it was easy to DM. I wish I had picked a better module for my players though, as they got super bored with the combat after the first hour or so.

I'm thinking about it. What schedule would you have

Id be pretty flexible but i cant tell. Im currently unemployed so i wouldnt know until then ya know. I do sotdl at a local coffee shop on thursdays to players that are new to roleplay

I'm in college, but I have Fri-sun off. I think I'll give this a try.

I honestly just want to use this discord server as a means for people to get their mitts on the rules and have people discuss or even play the game. Like i think its worth every penny personally but it sucks that the rules are behind a pretty hefty pay wall unlike dnd or pathfinder

There was a really nicely formatted and well-organized wiki that acted as an SRD of sorts, but Schwalb threw the book at them and it got taken down.

>yarr harr fiddle-deedee

And i guess i get it. I mean how else is the dude suppose to make money for it or even get some money to make future projects. But its hard to convince people to check out the game without iy being more easily accessible. But my google drive has adventures people can run along with several expanions in addition to the core rule book. So i have more than enough for people to get a taste for it. But if you like it please feel free to buy your own copies.

I just joined. Are you going to run a game through discord? Or is this just a way for people to get the books. Because I would like to play this although I wouldn't know how you would run a game through it.

Huh?

Pirate that shiz

It's a cosmic horror story where the equivalent to Azathoth is aware, directly malevolent, and -hungry-. It's Shadow alone (which the game is named after), is already killing your universe, and the best you and your allies can hope to do is to try and save what few you can and make a desperate, last-ditch holdout against the forces of Evil. It's a setting where Evil has basically won, and you're just moving through the withering remains of the universe it's afflictedscavenging the most meagre scraps you can find and gathering what artifacts and weaponry that you can, before it finally finishes it's plate.

>how else is the dude suppose to make money for it
Well, he did made $100k off of a Kickstarter for it. And he actually even have a Starter Product called Victims of the Demon Lord that offers up everything you need to make a baby character though it doesn't have any of the Expert or Master paths in it. But even that he hides behind a $3.33 pay-wall instead of just letting people browse it and get a feel of the game to decide if they want in or not.

He could make bank off of more setting guides, because the setting he's made is pretty fucking rad and manages to have everything from the Shire coping with the Apocalypse as best it can to a fallen church-state to a magitech empire with trains and the like. I'd love more information on Urth, and I'd be far more willing to pay for it than hackneyed shit like Demon Lord's Compendium 2 which he even admitted was mostly him tossing together ideas he didn't want to publish the first time around.

>We actually had people leave because they didn't like the fact that it was hard and punished you for doing dumb shit.

That dosen't sound good since tabletop players generally only come in "playing to have fun" and "insufferable faggot". If you eliminate the fun crowd that dosen't leave much.

Id do it through table top simulator on steam and use discord for communication

Maybe he is a tool. Idk. I like the game and i actually really liked the demon lords companion 2. Its in my google drive that i posted on discord

To be fair, the ones that dropped were legitimately retarded. Like stumbling around in a dark room with only a staff as a weapon shared between two people after seeing their companion that was a retired mercenary get his head ripped off and his entrails eaten. Or doing back to the place where a monster had killed the rest of the party alone at night to try to burn the house down.

If you fuck around and try to get your jollies in Shadow, you will die. And even if you do things perfectly, there's still a good chance that a body's going to hit the floor. To quote the core book, if characters aren't dying -- and dying often -- then you are doing something wrong. Hell, your fresh character even comes back with a healing potion to help make the next one last longer. And these were the kind of knuckle-dragging halfwits that don't play tabletop games for any other reason that having "le epic greentext stories." Good people and at least one was a decent player, but we're dealing with the kind that ask if they can name their character Ivana Stabalot or Pepperoni.

Eh, I personally have mixed feelings on DLC2. I now wonder if that abbreviation was intentional. Anyways, DLC2 to me just had a lot of dumb shit in it like half of the included races. Some of the magic and paths were neat, but we already had so many fucking options. It's what, something like 10
ancestries, 4 novice classes, 20 expert classes and 70 master paths? Along with something like 36 schools of magic?

SotDL doesn't have a lack of options available to players, but it could benefit amazing from something like an Atlas of Urth to go into a bit more detail about the setting itself. Tombs of Desolation was great for giving a good idea of what awaits you in the northern desert. Terrible Beauty does a great job at detailing the lands of the fey and all of the horrific shit that will happen to you if you go there. Exquisite Agony was an amazing book in regards not only detailing Hell but also The fact that the Christ-equivalent in the setting is nothing more than a sham cult created by Satan in order to weaken the faith in his fellow Old Gods by converting the world to a faith that eschews the pagan rivalries purely to focus on the New God which is Satan and Satan which is... well, Satan.

There was definitely something of an autist's perfection in the fact that everything originally was built on 4 Novice paths expanding out into 16 Expert paths expanding out into 64 Master paths.

Man I'd love to play this, but random autists on Veeky Forums through discord? Ehhhh.

Yeah. I actually found it to be a surprisingly good Beer 'n Pretzels game, too. The core mechanic is simple as piss, and Boons and Banes just click. If you write up the spellcards or just shell out the dosh to get the print-outs, it's a great way to delve into some heinous and downright horrific shit with friends while tossing back a few pints. Get attached to characters at your own peril, but if one does die, it doesn't take that long to make a new one and you have basically a limitless combination of paths to create whatever the fuck you want.

Wanna make a gunslinger that shoots star magic out of his ensorcelled six-shooters? Do it. Want to play a Darkest Dungeon Leper? Do it. Want to play a tiny spider robot that drives around a mecha the size of a cottage and punches ogres in the face? Do it.

>>tl;dr: It's like a sensible man made 5E.
I actually met the guy who made it once: Robert Schwalb, one of the designers for D&D 5e.

He claimed all the ideas he suggested for 5e that got either changed to hell and back or cut out of the beta were used in this. (e.g. he wanted advantage and disadvantage to work differently, so he made boons and banes for SotDL.)

IMO, It's still ultimately a d20 system, but the paths are what really make it different from D&D.

It's like a fusion of 4e and 5e, but in a good way like you'd want.

It certainly makes a lot of sense, and that's why I described it the way I did. It's what 5E could have been, a wonderful little fusion of AD&D and 4E in a way that builds off of the elements of each in its own unique way. And a decent amount of it works well enough porting right back into 5E. I sure as hell haven't used Advantage and Disadvantage since coming across SotDL. Boons and Banes work so much better, and they aren't as insufferably binary in the way that 5E makes players not give a shit about trying to do things well once they have the manage to turn the Adventure light on.

If I wanted 4e or 5e, yes. But that's a different discussion altogether.

SotDL also scratches itches for 3.PF players, I believe.

The paths work great for this IMO because in practice, players will multiclass. I've seen enough 3.PF players talk about their builds to know that they inevitably have an absurd amount of classes in them.

So, SotDL gives them 3 different classes they can dick around with and cheese to their heart's content. Though the expectation is that you're picking things relevant to what your character has done, we all know there's gonna be a few dickheads that refuse to do that.

One time as I was playing it, I had a regular 3.5 player that was playing as an Orc that went Warrior, and as the game went on, it became apparent that his character had some really bad anger issues (Player didn't know Berserker was a class yet, but really loved playing short-tempered barbarians in D&D. Also, note, I never said he was one of the aforementioned 3aboo cheesemongers)

His eyes fucking lit up when he saw Berserker. But the drawbacks to it were MUCH worse than what he was used to in D&D, and he nearly killed the party several times because of it.

You get the class flexibility and tactical options of 4e, with the non-absurd math and streamlining of 5e.

>I've seen enough 3.PF players talk about their builds to know that they inevitably have an absurd amount of classes in them.
This isn't really true, players with a low level of system mastery may do this but those who know what they're doing typically just have a main class and maybe a prestige class.

Dick fall off spell lmao

Plus, you have what basically comes down to "Roll Under Stat" from Second Ed for skills. It technically isn't, but the math is pretty much the same.

Might just be a vocal minority I was noticing, then.

I'll admit I don't really play D&D much, so I don't know how what a more typical player is like.

Martials typically have multiple classes.

shit yourself to death rofl

Though technically, it's just the Heroic to Paragon to Epic system from 4E, simplified down to a 10 level system in a way that works beautifully.

you ain't gonna be lmao when its ur dick lul

I'm not particularly fond of it but I can at least say it's a polished and well-designed game that can compete with the big names, so it's leagues above the mass of shitty RPGs that get constantly churned out. In fact it'd probably be among the top 20 systems if you judge them objectively.

The game itself is awesome. The setting is the edgiest grimderp crap ever unfortunately

Just checked the discord. Very civil so far.

What don't you like

Oh, and I will say that while I do generally dislike DLC2, I do quite like the idea behind Group Themes as well as their implementation.

I do quite like the fact that your group can swap between them when you reach the different tiers as well, if the campaign has lent itself towards it. As a group of Cunning Merchants are forced to get their hands dirty and protect the community they prospered off of and become unlikely Peacemakers, or Loyal Soldiers turning to Desperate Rebels as their patron comes under the sway of the Demon Lord, or Slaves to Darkness finding unlikely redemption and becoming Embattled Survivors attempting to defeat the powers they once served.

I wish I could ditch the grimdark. I'm fine with lethality because that makes you fucking think and git gud. But I could use less dick fall offs and closed anuses or what have you.
I wish someone did hack this thing a bit so I could play the build I want in hard as fuck encounters, but in an overall sane world.

I mean, all that really requires is trimming out the magical traditions that advertise themselves as grimdark, like Forbidden. You'll still get some and there's plenty of horrific diseases -- hell, Pepto-Bismol is even a standard alchemical item you can find in most places to stave off the shits if you use Schwalb's Big Book of Gross Diseases and Infections. But nothing that's necessarily mechanically neccessary outside of the Forbidden tradition and probably a few others here and there.

How do I do a rap god character in this game? I'm talking about melee (because niggas ain't 'fraid of shit) and negative status effects (dissing, basicallly). I would also like to ride an expensive carriage, and have a wench at my side.

Mearls plz go

The fuck is a Mearls?

Yeah, I like the game

Stay away from some of the splatbooks, mind. He up and ruins his own setting in them. Specifically Exquisite Agony and The Hunger of the Void.

Avoid those if you want to keep that feeling of creepy, dark fantasy to the game. He reveals too much of the setting in those two books, and what you discover is...well, not only spoils the setting as I said before, but spoils the setting in the worst, dumbest possible manner in my honest opinion.

So how can I cut out the edge for a player group which doesn't do that sort of thing?

Or keep the rules but use them for my own setting?

Actually, how do I create my own balanced ancestries?

Hey now, Exquisite Agony was fucking great. The twist that the setting's equivalent of Satan invented Christianity just to leech faith away from his fellow Old Gods was absolutely fantastic and works perfectly for this sort of grimdark setting. How better to get across the hopelessness of the setting than for Christ to have died in a gutter, eaten by dogs, nothing more than a delusional charlatan who heard the voices of the Deceiver.

It's not something that you want your players to read, but it's definitely a very well-implemented tweeest that the setting hides except for in that book. Honestly, I'd say most of the splatbooks are really something you just want the DM to read, rather than players. I can't say Hunger in the Void as I haven't read it myself.

Just change some of the fluff and drop any reference to troglodytes smearing themselves in shit and fingering themselves in the middle of combat as the pain they feel gives them throes of ecstatic passion. Drop the Forbidden tradition. Really, just time some White-Out any time you see mention of genitals or feces, and you're probably good enough.

As far as Ancestries, it's honestly not that difficult. Just look at the existing ones for a solid framework.

GMs are always in high demand, it's piss easy to find a group with basic people skills even if you aren't running 5E

>Exquisite Agony was fucking great.
It doesn't make sense to me how this is supposed work.
>Trick mortals into thinking some of the fairies are gods.
Cool, on board.
>Agree to fuck off from the world along with the other now godlike fairies.
Ok.
>Telling mortals that the made up fairy gods were not gods and that there is a higher power (made up or not) doesn't fuck over the power you gained as a made up fairy god.
... Look, I'm not expert on theology, but I don't think you get to charge your spirit bomb with energy sent to the wrong address
>The new faith so full of sadist assholes and ignorant fucks that their beliefs power the same guy as literal devil worshipers.
This is just bait

That's the thing, he's basically just playing both sides of the bet. If the Old Faith wins out, then he gets to stay around as the Devil. But if the Cult of the New God wins, then there are only two of the great fey left being exalted: him.

Now, what would actually happen if this were to occur? It's actually not really known. Diabolus intends to simply slink out of his position as the Devil to become the New God full-time and let some other devil rise to the title. But that very well might not be possible. Hell, he might end up becoming both in some sort of twisted Two-Face deity that is both the New God and the Devil at once.

Remember the times that the New God has come to prominence in. The world is ending, and the Demon Lord is testing his prison. The Cult of the New God is a power-play made by the Devil himself in the waning hours of the world. An effort by the great deceiver to burn away the religions of old and give him enough power to stave off the demons that are even attacking Hell itself. This isn't something that's necessarily the most well-thought gambit.

I like how people seem to play this game in a much different way than me and my group. I actually didn't liked that much the whole apocalyptic thing and just made it a background thing, the world's kinda fucked up and loonies are putting holes in dimensions but the player can do something about it. I actually started playing it completely straighted but since my players didn't liked the fact that a character died like once a session I toned it down and now we pretty much play it like a dragon age like kinda thing in ambiance but with the very good rules which avoid a lot of the D20 system problems.
And to see that a game can allow those kinds of different games well I think it shows just how good a system it is.

Fucking hell I made a lot of typos and I'm sorry for that.

Glad someone agrees with me

I mean, Hunger of the Void is what really made me "...are you serious, Robert?"

Pretty much

The Demonlord is god who is angry and mad cuz genies were leeching off him and the demiurge and is now eating/taking apart creation

And that just spoiled the setting for me.

As for
>Hey now, Exquisite Agony was fucking great.

Not really, even Hell and the critters in it were kind of..y'know, meh.

Fair enough. What'd you do to make your player's characters more resilient? When I was using it to play a more Heroic game I just gave players an extra 20hp.

Nothing on them, I just tone the ennemies down, making them a bit less powerful and most of all a bit less violent. Most of them are okay with cutting a deal and won't try to necessarily kill them on sight. We're not really focused on combat anyway so it doesn't bother them. I also cheese a lot more of the rolls than before, when I really think it wouldn't be fun I just decide what the dice does.

>tfw you were planning on running a campaign in feudal Japan in the wake of a Meiji Restoration that was actually a kami coup
>months later, you come across Mists of Akuma in the the SotDL mega
>amidst a sea of trash, bad art, and some neat ideas, there's a full bestiary of Japanese monsters even including Gashadokuro
Fuck yes, kami tyranny is back on the menu, boys.

Eh, I found it decently enough. Maybe it's just personal preference, but I at least found Exquisite Agony a fun enough twist that goes to show how awful the setting is. That spoiler about Hunger of the Void is pretty fucking lame, though, I'll admit.

Honestly, Schwalb is a great example of a Lucas. He's got some amazing world-building and some really interesting creations, and then he's got stereotypical 50's black diner frycook whales with four arms. And you just ask where it all went wrong.

Fair enough, though I find that just cheesing the dice takes some of the meat out of it for me. The +20 hp worked pretty well to make players more resilient -- and more importantly -- increased their totally-not-healing-surge values. Though honestly, with the new Group traits that came with DLC2, I might could tamp that down even lower.

>That spoiler about Hunger of the Void is pretty fucking lame, though, I'll admit.

You know what?

Since you've met me halfway, I'll just say it's my taste, then. I didn't think it to be a good, or even an original twist, but I will agree that it showcases how the setting is just fucked.

The spoiler is lame, but also it...goes against what he has said in the past about the Demonlord being, like, anything from Azathoth to Orcus to whatever. Defining it was bad enough, but to define it like that is friggin dumb.

Now, if he were to say "Who is the Demonlord?" and have a handful of suggestions, even including the spoiler'd one above, I'd be fine with it. But it just seems like a setting-sabotage, feel me?

I don't really like cheesing the dice either but I've come to accept that my players are not me and that they like a well made story even if I'm sometimes bullshitting to make it works. The most important thing to me is that they have fun and since I do too then I accept to go a bit against what I prefer.

Fair!

Yeah, The Devil is Actually God isn't a super original twist, but it is an interesting one when handled well enough, and I think that Diabolus bieng the New God could actually be pretty interesting, especially if we got some more information on the Holy Kingdom. It helps to illustrate the futility of the setting -- best left to the eyes of the DM -- that even as players might champion the New God and move to spread the Cult, alleviating suffering and banishing purging monsters and the undead, all they are really doing is dealing more cards into the hands of the Devil.

And holy fucking shit, you can't deny that Angels in the setting aren't at least a little bit both grimdark and metal. Essentially a succubus for the faithful instead of the lustful.

See I...didn't care for the angels as I recall. I'd have to take another look.

Anyway, for me personally, I think I would ignore the books or use them sparingly, especially Hunger of the Void. idk, maybe I'm a butthurt theist faggot or something lol

From what it sounds like, I'd probably ignore Hunger in the Void even if I read it, but I would definitely include the tweeest from Exquisite when running the game. Besides, it's not like it will ever come up in the average game until the very very end of the campaign, and it's not like your players are ever going to want to go to Hell itself when you're living in Hell on earth.

Okay, so for the people who've been asking why this and not 5e or any D&D edition or w/e.

First of all, classes. Modern D&D drops this huge slab of class options on you, which are explained from the tip of the iceberg basically. You need to get your head around, what's the class' gimmicks and overall structure are, and then navigate this labyrinth of choices, which are to be honest also presented quite poorly, as in layout etc.

SotDL is Lego. There's literally 0 interdependency, neither horizontal (at a given level) nor vertical (choices at lower levels affect/expand/shrink your options at higher levels). Shit's about as modular as it gets in RPGs.

From a standpoint of a player:
At level 0 you can move 1 attribute point from one place to another: make 10 10 10 10 into 9 10 10 11.
At level 0 you choose your race. Boom, half the character list gets filled automatically either from hard-coded values or from simple derivatives of those values.
At level 1 you choose your Novice Path. From whopping 4 (four) options. Descriptions of which take 1 (one) page each, including art and a completely optional fluff table. And literally everything that has to do with this specific choice is given, fully, on that same page.
At level 3 you choose your Expert Path. There are 16 of them. Again, 1 (one) page for each.
Etc.

Picrelated is the advancement table that is universal for everyone.

I just had a 15 minute discussion with two guys I'm gonna DM a one-shot for. It was enough to explain basically everything they needed to know about the game as players, and we also had like 5 minutes left for some banter.

When are you doing this one shot? Id like to join

>more information on the Holy Kingdom
check the Kingdom of God splat

>Devil is Actually God
That isn't even the problem. It is stupid because it is being presented as dualistic monotheism when the setting cosmology does not work that way. Diabolus is not Satan or the Devil. Diabolus convincing mortals to worship a being that he is not and does not represent to mortals should not empower him. I could see how him ruining the Old Faith could weaken the great fae. But that is working by weakening the connection mortals make between the great fae and what they had been made to represent. None of the 4 truths of the New Faith fit Diabolus better than they fit Father Death. Guarding against corruption is literally counter productive for the guy that is empowered by torturing corruption out of mortal souls. Mortals not worshiping the fae does not default to worshiping one of the fae, least of all the fae that isn't like the thing mortals are now worshiping. Fuck, this is pissing me off more than it should.

user, do you usually let the make-believe Devil from a board game for kids trigger you this hard?

lol fuck off guy

I'm glad you understand why I didn't care for it.

If Robert Schwalb would've put a bit more thought into it instead of liberally throwing around heavy metal ideas and names (First Emperor's name is Eronymous ffs), it probably could've worked in a way. Instead it seems silly: guarding against corruption is counter productive, and only the sadistic asshole inquisition are the one racking up corruption because of this religion Diablous made up, when Diablous's main aim is to make souls corrupt so him and his minions can feast.

Like, it just doesn't seem to fit very well.

Diabolus' main aim isn't to do shit for his minions, even the little blurb that someone posted upthread before states that. The Devil would be perfectly happy to rise out of Hell after starving the Old Gods of worship to become the New God full-time and let Hell take care of itself. All Diabolus wants is power and worship for himself above all others. Sure, he'll take the worship of the wicked and the corrupt, but what he's really after is a massive congregation of righteous worshipers that are going to be his throughout each and every cycle of reincarnation.

Derp on my part, sorry.