This. Its an Americans take on the very British dry black humour that was early W40k.
I play it weekly. I've played in the setting which definitely scratches the body horror / blood and guts itch, and I've used it for a sword and planet game. Echoing what a few others have said, the system itself is beautifully put together and simple in its execution. Also modular to a point that you can easily drop whatever doesn't suit your group (namely corruption or insanity and madness).
AFAIK the creator is working on a post apocalyptic version of the system a la Mad Max. PunkApocalyptic I e seen it referenced as.
Shadow of the Demon Lord Thread
Christian Clark
Benjamin Baker
Boons/banes are d6s you add or subtract from your roll. They signify advantages or disadvantages that you can get from circumstances, abilities, spells etc. For instnce outnumbering your opponent can get you boons. Being frightened gives you banes (among other things).
You can have both boons and banes on a roll in which case they negate each other 1:1.
One thing unrelated to boons that i like is the initiative system. Each round is split into Fast and slow turns. At the start of a round the players and npcs decide if they want to take a fast or slow turn. Fast turns always comes first, but you can only move or take an action with them. Slow always comes last but can take an action and move. Players with fast turns act first, players with slow turns act after npcs with fast turns, but before npcs with slow turns.
It actually gets pretty tactical when you want to do what.
Jose Smith
Oh yeah forgot that you only keep the highest number rolled on the boon/bane. So if you have 3 boons and roll 1,2,5 you add 5 to your roll and discard the rest. Same goes for banes where you just subtracts the highest value instead.
Julian Walker
Sound really good! Thanks
Samuel Reyes
How was he?
Hudson Cox
All the races seem to fit a standard range, but for the life of me I can't figure out how the pattern works.
Camden Harris
Doubtlessly the abilities of each ancestry are also take into account.
Justin Evans
Jace Baker
Definitely an old head in terms of tabletop rpg. Runs games effortlessly, and is pretty funny but a very specific dry humor.
Will play or talk about anything if you buy him a beer.
Connor Jackson
At almost every level of the game, if you dig into the mechanics, they just make sense and are intuitive and make playing the game feel so refreshing compared to other d20 systems. After jumping on the bandwagon of 5e, which I personally felt was a great improvement over 3.pf and 4e, playing Demon Lord definitely shines a light on how clunky a lot of the "legacy" mechanics of d&d that even 5e is plagued by.
Fun fact, Schwalb (creator of Demon Lord) did a lot of the design work in 5e, but a lot of which was scrapped in favor of legacy / classic feeling mechanics.