I'm about to start my first campaign using Shadow of the Demon lord. The rules seem pretty streamlined but still fun and the horror fantasy setting is pretty dope.
Is there any advice people could give relating to this system? Any pitfalls to avoid, rules that should be tweaked?
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Do not expect it to play like a standard D&D clone. SotDL is like if D&D and CoC fucked and had a kid. Characters will die. A lot. And sometimes death is the most merciful fate they can receive. If your players are too soft to accept character death, I recommend jumping ship before setting sail.
That said, if you're keen for some rough treatment, go for it. It's not bad as presented, and it has a lot of neat ideas.
Make sure your players know it is high lethality. The last thing you want is autistic screeching when all but one of the party is dead in the intro
Open up a discourse to discuss the lore. The lore is good and talking about it can lead to good character designs, and it can help find a way to make satan less autistic.
Use the alternate initiative rules, either one works, they are much better/faster
Avoid playing the "gritty=filthy" equivalence as straight as the game seems to pretend it should be. Doesn't matter how hard you try, dung and filth are never gonna sound like serious and mature content, and the author seems to think you can't have darkness and corruption without a good sprinkle of disgusting and revolting details about the content of someone's bowels. Consider letting Goblin players pick their background quirks rather than rolling because having to hand people bottles of fresh shit gets old very fast.
Mechanically, it's obviously designed by someone that was a bit too butthurt about WotC not letting him insert his scat fetish fresh new spins on DnD5 ( the whole introduction is literally a critic to DnD pretending to be a praise), so it does not handle too differently but expect much more of a WHFRP feeling.
Keep in your mind that the demons are lovecraft horrors. Not fire and brimstone demons,diabolus has that covered
Be wary not to give them magic items a la DnD, magic items should come later and always at a cost
I noticed three things about it from a lookover. Planned to run a game but ended up going to a different system, so I've never used it in action.
1. It's very combat heavy. One of the introductory adventure books is a literal hex crawl with no roleplay involved, and from what I can tell the other adventures are heavy on fluff, but scarce on interaction.
2. It has a fuckton of advancement possibilities. It's almost hard to get your head around how many options players have.
3. It's edgy. Some of the edge is cool, some of it namely shit-related isn't. The devs themselves seem like cool dudes regardless.
I passed it up just because other systems do what I wanted to do better. That's subjective of course. The problems I think it has may be great features to someone else.
How much do I need to change if I want to run my own setting in it?
Also, forgot
4. The art's varying in quality. Some of it is pretty great. Some of it is pretty shit.
What setting?
When making starting equipment rolls use the system from the godless expansion, much better.
A home brew world where things aren’t edgy but still violent.
Well that's really simple if time consuming, just pick out the stuff you don't like.maybe ban the forbidden school of magic, ctrl+f search for 'shit' and delete everything that comes up. More details of your setting?
A random mixture of 4e D&D, runequest’s Glorantha, a kids book series called The Edge Chronicles, OSR settings and Wakfu/Dofus. And some minor things and history.
Most of that’s just setting rather than mechanics.
Bison-riders and horsemen use the same rules.
Well I know nothing about literally all of those so my help is sadly at an end :/ just keep in mind horror and violence isn't all bodily fluid. It could be something like the kind village elder was a demon wearing a skin suit.
Here's a doc with all the expansions. drive.google.com
Using SotDL for D&D, should half-orcs be their own ancestry or just orcs with high rolls on the appearance table.
All of that shit talk and lovecraft got me intrigued. What do you mean by lethality? How do you conduct a game where characters die in the introduction? Do they respawn or something?
Second one. SotDL even says that good looking orcs look like jotuns. But why would you play SotDL in D&D?
They can if the DM is feeling very generous, but you come back wrong. They have a section dealing with introducing new characters in the main book and you can follow the link above to look. People are lucky to have over 12 hitposts to start, and weapons usually have a D6 for damage. You need to plan and prepare for combat, maybe set some traps, change the terrain, get some help, but a base 1v1 fight = you lose.
Gives some additional starting money for the first adventure
Bump
What about level scaling. Could a level 6 character easily handle 4, 5 level 1 characters?
Is it a game where high level characters are god like compared to low level characters, or does the lethality keep until the end?
In my experience (we got to level 5) the lethality holds up, but characters do become a lot more powerful over time. Especially from lvl 0-1 imo.
Defense is usually based on the stats, and to my knowledge getting high stats is pretty hard. Even in armor with a shield, you won't be getting much more than 20 armour, and most monsters have +x and boons on attacks.
Like in most games numbers give a big advantage, and getting flanked can fuck you
Unrelated to the game mechanics, but i've been thinking about a plot invovling the religions and fall of humanity. I'm not sure if it would count as a shadow and i would like some more ideas if anyone is interested.
Anyway the basic premise is that the world is going to shit, and some people (old faith most likely) have decided that it is the New Gods Fault.Some intellectuals run with this idea and "prove" that everything went bad after New God gained prominance and power. They also manage to convince some of the public that in olden times religions got it right and that no faith is truer or more right than others. This would lead to a growing group of people rebuilding old shrines and picking up ancient forgotten religions in an attempt to stem the Demon Lords tide of demons.
I was thinking of some people (orcs and goblins perhaps) ending up as the henchmen of these intellectuals who start to preach against the New God, perhaps going so far as to displace the priests and taking over their shrines and dedicating them to Dark or faerie gods.
In the end i was thinking that this development would end up being a catastrophic idea and some of these faiths end up summoning more demons or attracting the attention of the demon lord.
Also the Demon Lord is God
Seriously.
It's kind of an uninspired, shitty twist on a thing Robert Schawlb said he'd never reveal.
It kind of ruined the setting for me. So ignore the last chapter of "Hunger of the Void"
Huh didn't know that. Honestly my first thought was that the New God wasn't really responsible not that the old faith was either, but rather that someone was working to subvert the protection offered by these rituals and having people seek alternatives. Which in turn would lead to actual worship of either the Demon Lord or other dark beings. Like the Troglodyte god or an ancient Dragon etc.
Actually The new God is a shame made by Diablous (The Devil. Not to be confused with the Demon Lord) because...like, reasons that don't quite make sense.
He wants to make people corrupt, and have his inquisition kill people while worshiping him in disguise, yet puts forth a religion that is big on...like, virtue and shit.
I think Robert Schwalb never grew out of the edgy atheist phase of his adolescence.
Which also makes me think that the RPG community needs fresh talent.
That aside, Troglodytes have their own gods. They;'e all fake, and they;re all fucked up: Goddess of Self-Pleasure, God of Shitting, God of Spent Seed etc etc
er, "a sham"
Goddamn I'm tired.
Diablous wants genuine faith, he's sick of ruling Hell and now he wants in on the virtuous souls. So he created a genuine religion that says you either go to Heaven or Hell, both of which he runs for his own benefit. Heaven is real, but both Heaven and Hell are cons made to make this Faerie Lord as powerful as possible over his revivals.
Considering we have another Lands in Shadow out, is there a master release schedule somewhere? Like when will Schwalb release another "big book" or will he write small stuff until he can't write any more?
Welp, there's goes the remaining 10% interest I had in Shadow of the Demon Lord.
...
Seems in line with the rest of the setting, from the way you were carrying on,I thought it would be worst.
I mean, I was unimpressed for a few reasons. First is that he revealed what he said was originally was suppose to be kind of intentionally vague (that way you could have the Demon Lord be, like, anything), and what he decides to reveal is just fucking...well, dumb.
I guess he meant playing a DnD setting in SotDL rules, not the other way around. Which will be very lethal, but i can see it work.
My group spun this as diabolus really does want to be the virtuous god he talks about, so he's secretly making the new god cult bigger and stronger and when its strong enough he will assume the roke
Elves are weird blue and orange morality freaks. Around elves watch yourselves
Make sure your players realize that death will happy often. We had to pause our campaign because people got asspained that their characters kept dying when they were doing stupid shit, but even approaching a challenge with a solid plan, there is always a real risk of danger.
>not using the game's built-in initiative system which is not only really fast and simple but also part of what helps to ensure that players have a solid chance in fights by letting them choose to alpha strike
wut
Not much at all. I've been using it for the same, and even tossed in a few quick-'n'-dirty hotfixes to let players feel a bit more like heroes in a deadly world than rat-catchers in a dead world.
Godless is pretty fucking amazing, and that's using SotDL to run post-apocalyptic adventures.
Shadow of the Demon Lord?
More like Shadow of the Pregnancy Fetish, riight...
>What do you mean by lethality
The average level 0 character has 10 hp. A greatsword deals 3d6 damage, and a thug trained to use a knife deals 2d6. The game actually explicitly tells you that character should and will die frequently, and if your character does die, your next one comes back with a healing potion. Which actually is effective, since it draws its healing from 4E's healing surges.
>Do they respawn or something?
Nope, then fuckers are dead. Make a new character at Group Level. Unless maybe one comes back as a Revenant, as one of mine ended up since the story for it fit in perfectly. This is actually somewhat nice since the system has such an amazing "build" system as far as the three tiers of classes and magic and the fact that there are no prequisities for anything. So you get to try out a lot of neat and fun shit simply due to the fact that death is far from infrequent.
One of the first campaigns I played of it, our first session consisted of 6 characters. Only 1 survived because he got knocked out and was sleeping off his injuries in a wagon. Next session, one death. Next session, all but three were killed. But most of those near wipes were caused because of players being stupid. When you approach a task at hand and act and think tactically, you stay together as a group, and you hold actions in order to smack shit that comes at you? You can manage to overcome the darkness and live to tell about it. Unless fortune is not with you that day.
Yup. Plus, he's stated as being perfectly happy to fuck out of Hell as soon as he can and let some other poor shitter take over ruling it if he managed to consume all religion. His eventual plan has him getting your soul regardless of if you are virtuous or wicked. Dude's just playing that long con.
The shit about the Demon Lord is retarded though, and I just disregard that shit. It's a malevolent force of all-consuming entropy, and that's perfectly fine for me.
Also, I do love how in SotDL angels are basically just succubi except for self-righteousness instead of lust.
Its even better than that, the angels make you think what ever you do for faith is right, even killing innocents that could be 'witches'. Then your soul goes to hell.
That seems a tad jacked up, but I mean, eh, Schwalb, you know?
have to agree here. he went for a gnostic tone which works for a dark/horror setting
Yup. Diabolus is hands down one of my favorite things in the setting.
I mean, it's an RPG where you are playing in the end of days, with the world increasingly beset by horrors and the inevitable destruction of the world, where your victories are either fleeting and meaningless or based around just trying desperately to save some scrap of the world as a last bastion to weather out the storm. Shit being jacked up and fucked is the entire crux of the setting.
If the person being lead by the angel was actually devout they would know not to listen to it, but they WANT to do evil in the name of the new god so it's their fault.
I will say, the class system in SotDL and the way it handles magic may be some of my favorite shit I've ever seen.
Shadow of the Demon Lord is pretty fucking cool. The problem is whenever people see something mature, something that deals with uncomfortable or inappropriate topics, they cover their ears and scream "EEEEEEEEEEDGE."
Basically. If it's played straight, it works wonderfully and the use of Horrifying and Frightening works nicely, and the Corruption system makes dark bargains feel suitably powerful but also damning. But then plenty of times you just look at the Forbidden tradition and giggle that you can make someone poop themselves to death.
>Some of the edge is cool, some of it namely shit-related isn't
If you don't think having an enemy intestines explode shit out of every orifice they have in a gory shower of terror is the best kind of edgy you can leave.
This is fine. It could be better, obviously, but you can make some quick edits to any part of this to make it fit your game better or leave it as is and be fine. It's "what if God had all of his good stolen from him by his creations?" and that's fine for creating a malevolent consumer who wants all his bits and bobs back. You, as a player, will also literally never know about this fact.
Yeah. I mean, fuck, I was DMing Shadow and I never read through a copy of that book, so it was never something relevant to me. And after I read it, shrugged, said this is dumb, and disregarded it.
There's literally no reason for a player to ever read that book either, as it's pretty much entirely DM material. Sort of like Exquisite Agony. The tweeest that the New God is actually Diabolus is something that I personally love the fuck out of, and I like how they actually do hint at it throughout all of the other material about the New God but it's always shit that you could just as easily overlook. But again, that revelation isn't something that is in the section of the book that your players will ever really see.
Plus, the way that you worded it is actually a lot more concise and interesting that Schwalb's wording. I just personally wish that for something as omnipresent as the Demon Lord he had presented a number of possibilities. We get what, like a dozen different manifestations of the titular Shadow of Him, why can't we get a half dozen different options for what He might be? In fact, Disciple of the Demon Lord does exactly this. It presents us with a list of different aspects of the Demon Lord that get worshiped.
>The Glistening Prince
>The Eternal Shadow
>The One True God
>The Skull King
>The Mother of Monsters
>The Nameless One
Yet instead, we just get it word-of-god confirmed that only one of these is the "true" face of the Demon Lord.
I still love how one of the possible Shadows is literally aliens invading.
>Lights in the Sky (Starting)
All across the continent, people see strange lights in the sky. Some are weird blots of colors, while others are ripples (similar to the Aurora Borealis). The lights show up sporadically for a few weeks and then stop.
>Landfall (Novice)
A pinhole of darkness appears in the sky above a city and then spreads wide, displaying a field of alien stars. Weird skyships drop through the gap, each one bearing the foot soldiers of an invasion force. The invaders crush the defenders and fortify the ruins that are left behind. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the hole opened in the sky remains open.
>War for Urth (Expert)
The conquering force spreads like a virus across the continent. Armies of alien creatures protected by impervious armor and wielding strange weapons have little trouble taking territory from the defenders. Refugees flee before the advancing forces. The ones too slow to escape become slaves. Behind the invaders, the hole remains open, but the edges begin to fray and demons occasionally slither through the gaps.
>Enemies to Allies (Master)
The trickle of demons escaping from the gate the invaders opened becomes a flood. Now the invaders find themselves set upon by the horrid host. To preserve themselves, the invaders must defeat the demons and close the gate, but they cannot do so without the aid of the most powerful magicians in the land. If the demons would be stopped, enemies and allies must come together to defeat the common foe.
So I just skimmed through the book and, mechanics-wise, it looks a better designed 5e. I know that this came out in a time when the market for medium-crunch fantasy games has a new 300 lb gorilla and several smaller but decent alternatives, but the system looks really good. Do you think that marrying it to a risky setting was a mistake?
>better designed 5e
It isn't just that. It's a 5e that actually lives up to the promises that it had espoused by actually marrying elements from AD&D, 3.5, and 4E together into a cohesive whole that works very well. Marrying it to its setting is risky, but you can honestly tweak it pretty effectively with Forbidden Rules and simply blotting out certain sections in order to adapt it to other things. It takes a bit of homebrewing, but it works pretty decently. Godless being a good example of how you can pretty easily turn it into a Post-Apocalyptic RPG. Likewise, by working the two together so tightly, it really does help boost both.
Most people's memory of the "feeling" of WHFB come through the world that was presented by the second edition of the RPG, and Urth has a very deliberate "feel" to it that can only really be had by using all of the different subsystems that Shadow offers: corruption, insanity, clockwork, magical traditions, etc. Through tweaks, I'd been using it to run a Wild Western Fantasy game that works damn near flawlessly.
Yeah, the class system in general seems very portable to other settings but making each of the subsystems like insanity still be meaningful is the difficult bit. The game has to have a horror undertone in order to work but I think you could stretch it to work fairly well with a whole lot.
>making each of the subsystems like insanity still be meaningful
Well, that's the thing. You don't have to make them meaningful. If you aren't playing a game with a metaphysical force of corruption that eats your soul dead when you get to 10, just remove Corruption as a statistic and then look at the various things which refer to Corruption.
It's essentially the same as the Magic Point system from Forbidden Rules. You strip out the use of castings and then you look at all the things which effect or are based upon castings and modify them as needed.
Bump
>there's a Master path that gives you a fucking magitech mecha to punch demons in the face
Hold the fucking phone. Schwalb, you have my attention.
AND you get lay on hands for robots
It actually gets even better, user, since you probably at some point picked up Technomancy in one of your earlier paths. Technomancy, also known as the magic that gives birth to crossbow turrets and flammenwerfers. Plus, if you really go balls deep on some Technomancy, you can actually get a fuckheug mecha for those times when you need to trade up from just piloting Gurren to piloting Gurren Lagann.
If you choose clockwork ancestry you can become the goddamn emperor with this. Pimp slap large demons with your drill that will pierce the heavens.
Im dming a godless game this weekend, you seem interested in this stuff, wanna join the discord?
Yeah, that's not as bad as I thought it'd be. I was thinking it would be full-on "SotDL's God is an evil prick who made the world shitty for sadism", instead it's just more like "What if Satan won" or something.
Still a little dumb and edgy, but not fedora-up-the-ass tier.
I see it as 'god' is pissed the genies took some power without permission to make the world, now he's pissed and trying to get his stuff back.
First user you tagged, and nope.
Yeah. Basically, it's like if in Christianity, angels literally robbed God of his goodness in the process of creating and shaping the world out of His divine flesh, and now there's nothing left of Him except for hatred, pain, and hunger.
well thats a shame, I only have two people and I want to be a bit grand in scale. oh well. and yeah your analogy is right and it fits into my head canon that those who escape the reincarnation cycle are reabsorbed into the demon lord, so he slowly turns back to normal.
>you create and chuck a wrench
lmao
I love the fluff of clockwork, but WHY do the stats have to be so shit?
Nigga, wtf? Clockwork stats are hilarious OP. You are damn near fucking unkillable and can get dropped and brought back over and over as long as someone in your party can manage to rewind you. Anytime we had a clockwork in the party, that motherfucker did work.
I agree the mechanics are alright, but I said the stats: strength, agility, intellect, will are all the lowest of all the ancestries. also as a side note 'grind the gears' is not a worthwhile upgrade.
Oh yeah, and one thing I would definitely recommend to absolutely everyone. Play with Group Themes. Just fucking do it. For the love of God, do it. And if you aren't going to use them for whatever reason, consider aping a system like Stories from Godless.
Yes, because you are a purpose-built machine. You can rejigger one point from one attribute to another, and then your purpose gives you a juicy +2. In addition, you're damn near unkillable. And Grind the Gears is a gamble, but it's also a really powerful one especially once you get around that level and have solid attacks, weapons, or spells. Plus, keep in mind that you can spend Fortune to turn any d6 into a 6 to confirm that you don't go Inactive.
that's sotdl for you
some of it is funny and cool and the rest is shit fetishist edgewank
play a one shot first, so you can get the hang of balancing in a high lethality system and the players can get a handle on the controls
Know what I really need to know, but hasn;t been addressed, and I think Schwalb should address?
How Forbidden magic works on Clockworks, and to a lesser extent, Changelings. Idk how Hateful Defecation, Part Flesh From Bone, Desire's End etc is suppose to work on critters that lack certain anatomical bits.
Can you run a more lighthearted game with the system? How much work is it to take out the insanity and corruption systems?
Apparently he's working on a more lighthearted system. I believe he's calling it "Shadow of the Witch-King". I think it's set in the same world, just thousands of years before. I heard it in some podcast he was doing.
I'm no expert, but I'm powering through the core book now and there aren't really a ton of classes that have built in ties with those systems, so I guess it's just a matter of taking them out. I'm not at the spell chapter yet though.
I was going to call you a prissy little elf girl before I read that bit about the goblins. Say what now?
Is SOTDL the bridge between player customisation of 5e and simplicity of OSR?
Um
No, not really.
What is this even supposed to mean?
>Especially from lvl 0-1 imo.
This is by design though as far as I can tell - at level 0 you are effectively a disposable background npc. Level 1 is where you actually become a 'character'
Basically. Which is why I will fundamentally fight anyone that doesn't play level 0 with the equipment that it was intended for.
You really are just a bunch of nobodies with sticks and knives, and maybe. MAYBE. One of you is actually wealthy enough to have a hired guard that actually has a weapon and armor.
If anything it's even more customizable than 5e. Not really OSR tho, it's simple and deadly but the design is very clean and modern (and occasionally dissociated ).
The more I read the more I think that this with a less grimdark fluff would have been the perfect 5e.
>perfect 5e
Basically this, and a lot of it is because of the fact that it does what 5E was originally sold to us as, a distillation of the best things from all the various forms of DnD put together in a unified whole. And Next was actually doing a decent job at that until Kike Mearls decided to throw away everything even remotely associated with 4E. SotDL is a perfectly seasoned soup that takes elements from the games that came before it and unifies them together into a single cohesive form.
DESU I don't see a ton of 4e in this - maybe the fact that a few abilities have "reset with rest", but I'd hardly consider them specific to 4e. There are pretty big tonal and mechanical differences, and the tacticool aspect is much more limited. Even then, I'm really liking what I'm seeing.
Healing is 100% taken straight from 4E in the notion of using healing surges and having the game's healing by factored off of a static value which boosts reliability in the combat of a highly-lethal system. Likewise, boons and banes are basically just a better version of what 5E attempted to do using the Advantage mechanic from 4E. And also the whole use of Injured as an in-game metric for determining effects and abilitites so that HP isn't a binary "I have some or I have none" which is directly taken from Bloodied in 4E.
That's just off the top of my head, and one of them is a massively critical aspect of the game.
It's more of a fusion of the arrogant self-importance of World of Synnibar with the puerile gross-out humor of FATAL.
How viable is an entire party of this? Is there enough variation for a party of 3 or 4 to each have their own flavor?
Well, you probably could actually give it a shot. I'd probably have a Priest of some sort to help out healing your meaty bits. But that's one really neat thing about SotDL's path/classes. There's literally no pre-requisite for anything, other than "it makes sense given your character story." So your Magician whose been shitting out Technomancy can end up going Technomancer instead but use the Mecha that he uses a spell for, while the rest of the party goes Engineer and ends up with a group of Fittan Robots.
Since you "use its attack options and actions in place of your own" that means that the Eidolon's punches are viable picks for all of your Warrior and Rogue's various attack buffs. Can't say how viable it would really be, but it's definitely be a fun campaign.
To build on that, simply using the Novice and Expert paths in the core book alone, you have 64 different combinations of Novice and Expert paths that could end up going into an Engineer. The core book has the basic 4 Novice paths of Magician, Priest, Rogue, and Warrior, then you expand out into 16 different Expert paths ranging from Artificers and Oracles, Berserkers and Paladins.
I think in either demon Lord's companion, forbidden rules, or the clockwork extend char gen book they talk about ways to have that make sense. Forgot which one though. And changlings change allllll the way through, so their anatomy changes. When they die they turn into mud covered sticks though
While I do quite like the default Fortune system, I think I actually prefer the variant in Forbidden Rules. Not only because of how intriguing I find the idea of having the amount of Fortune available being variable and unknown to the players, but because I absolutely love the idea that unspent Fortune still has an actual impact at the end of the season by making the players' adventure be quite literally fortuitous and allow them to stumble upon increased rewards.
>Fortune Points
In this variant, Fortune is replaced as a game concept by fortune points. Instead of receiving Fortune as a reward, the group begins with a pool of 1d3 + 3 fortune points at the start of each adventure. The GM rolls the die and keeps the number a secret from the players. Provided the group has fortune points remaining, a player can expend a fortune point
to do any of the following:
• Take another turn during the round
• Heal damage equal to twice the character’s healing rate.
• Turn any creature’s failure into a success
• Turn any creature’s success into a failure
Once a fortune point is spent, it is gone. However, whenever the GM would award Fortune, the pool of fortune points increases by 1. At the end of the adventure, the GM can turn unspent fortune points into treasure, exchanging each fortune point for 1 gc. The group might gain this additional wealth as a reward for accomplishing its mission, or receive the funds in the form of discounts on purchases made before the next adventure begins. When it’s time to start a new adventure, the GM rolls the dice and notes the size of the new pool of fortune points.