With Shadow of the Weird Wizard out, I found my Shadow of the Demon Lord books on a storage shelf tucked away and safe. I pulled them out to join their sister's game, and together, they sat on the shelf as polar opposites. The underlying game system, minus the gore and horror, is quite sound and expressive, pulling more than its weight with the game's dice and stats.
The system is a very streamlined version of 5E, boiled down to the minimum needed to provide adventure and combat. The d20 systems work well, with a traditional d20 vs. defense roll for combat and a simple 10+ roll for all ability score checks and saves. The ability scores also serve as target numbers for attacks made against them, and the system really puts the ability scores to good use and makes every point matter since the modifier is a flat score minus ten value. There is no dividing by two to calculate a modifier.
Every point matters. The system handles everything with a stripped-down set of abilities. Boons and banes are genius mechanics. The entire system feels tuned like a Swiss watch.
Combining classes at the character levels is also genius, and there are no prerequisites. You can pick a caster class and blend magic and combat when you have that choice. Abilities, health, and stats increase as a result of class choices. The progression system is clean and seamless and produces far more customization and flexibility than 5E could with multiclassing. I can see why they turned this into a generic fantasy game; it puts D&D 2024 to shame and makes 5E look like a 10-year-old game meant to patch D&D 4E.
Instead of patching a few things and selling the same game for two hundred dollars, the system in both SotDL and SotWW are evolutions of class-based games with some of the best parts of JRPG class combination mechanics, like the ones in the original Final Fantasy Tactics. The progression system is one of the best parts of this game.
And SotDL gets dark. Some of the spells and dark magics are disgusting. The door is open to Terrifier-style adventures and mayhem. Characters can die often and often in the most grisly ways. The benefit of the progression system is creating a new high-level character is very fast, with no computer program needed, and it is just a few choices, and you are playing again. This is critical for a horror game, and many games fail the "ease of creating a replacement character" test.
And you get a little of the Mork Borg thing going on here. I loved Mork Borg since it was a wake-up call to the OSR and gaming. The world is ending. You are in the final days. The world can end in many ways, and the portents of doom change the campaign world and progress further. Characters suffer permanent changes, go insane, become corrupted, or fall to the dark one's powers. Things constantly get worse. Even monsters you may have thought of as enemies join the cause. Against all odds, your heroes fight - or fall.
But you have a chance of saving the world here.
If the world ends or you save it, you start a new one. There is a setting, and there is none. The next world experiences the horror.
Terror and the universe are infinite.
You can start the game with a blank-slate innocent world and watch the corruption slowly creep in, or you can start your game ten seconds to midnight when all hell is breaking loose. It is your choice. Something is perversely appealing about taking one of today's "safe space" fantasy settings and feeding it to demons. Turn the "we all get along" people in on each other. Watch the utopian cities fall. Let the seven deadly sins be at the front door, and watch greed, jealousy, hatred, and distrust tear the place apart.
Too many "save the world" 5E adventures boil down to a group of mustache-twirling bad guys, a few set-piece action sequences, and a series of dungeons. With the bad guys in this game, the world, reality, and society are tearing apart. When times go bad, everyone's true colors are revealed. That "Good Queen of the North" everyone loved as a benevolent GMNPC may just strike a deal with the Demon Lord to spare her people, and the party is sitting there with their jaws on the floor.
It was a foolish bargain (this is horror), but now the party is hunted by the army they thought they could count on. This game features epic betrayals as the world turns upside down, which is Game of Thrones-quality storytelling. You are playing the game right if players quit the game screaming, "That character would never do that in the novels!"
Oh, yes, they would.
But the heroes can save the world or what is left. And bring that queen to justice. It is a grim task, but hard times call for hard choices.
That is a call to action that inspires me.
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