Off the Shelf: Shadow of the Demon Lord

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.

Mail Room: Shadow of the Weird Wizard

The hardcovers from the Shadow of the Weird Wizard game Kickstarter came on Halloween, which is a strange twist. This is the "not-horror" version of the Shadow of the Demon Lord game, sort of the same system and adapted for generic fantasy games, with a slightly "strange" twist, like a Dungeon Crawl Classics sort of feeling with mysterious magic and a world in danger and needing heroes.

Part of me feels Demon Lord is the more compelling game since the horror genre is woefully thin and underserved in gaming, while the generic fantasy genre is oversaturated to the point of "why bother?" Call of Cthulhu, Alien, and a few others are the big names right now, with Demon Lord nicely covering fantasy horror and delivering on the source material with some disturbing content. Demon Lord is the most "R Rated" of the bunch, and while it appeals to a niche horror audience, it does that very well.

The question arises, do I need another generic fantasy game? Whenever I put 5E in storage, I get this explosion of options that "do fantasy better." Castles & Crusades, Swords & Wizardry, OSRIC, Dungeon Fantasy, and Dungeon Crawl Classics are my amazing games that do the genre well. One of those is a GURPS game! C&C does a 5E-feeling game exceptionally well, with 90% less work. OSRIC is the best first-edition game out there. S&W is zero-edition awesomeness. DCC is emergent play through tables of chaos.

5E tries to do all of the above genres, but it does them terribly. I have "evil campaign" 5E books, but they are still overpowered 5E with a cheap Halloween mask on. I have unpredictable magic systems for 5E, but they rarely go far enough to be fun. I have books that mod 5E to be old-school, but they are patches to games that emulate the originals and do it far better.

Demon Lord survives because few games do horror and darkness as well as this game. The game does not need a fear mechanic since the players are the ones who feel it.

I like that the only dice used (in both games) are a d20 and a few d6 dice, which feel like white box gaming. Also, the game does not use "DC" - all tasks are attacks that roll against a monster's defense or challenge rolls against a straight target number of 10. Ability score modifiers are 10 minus the ability and added to the roll. Attacks against an attribute use the attribute as the target number. Attributes can be attacked to produce stunts.

The rules are dirt simple. They are more accessible than 5E by far and much more expressive and dynamic once stunts are used. You don't need D&D's weapon masteries and extra rules for weapon properties and what they do; you just stunt and roll against a creature's attribute. Who needs all those extra rules and unique weapon properties? Who cares? If I want to trip someone with a longsword, let me try, and throw a bane on the roll if the weapon wasn't "made for it" if that is the ruling at the table.

In the 2024 edition, D&D adopted the "more rules for everything" policy, which is a mistake. 5E, in general, follows this policy, too. An expressive rules system does a lot of the work for you, and all you need to do is pick up a copy of Savage Worlds to know this.

Expressive game systems beat ones that rely on rules for everything every time. The more a game allows you to freeform and try things, the more fun you will have.

Demon Lord starts you as a "level zero" character with an ancestry, profession, and wealth level, which can all be determined randomly. You pick a novice path (character class) when you complete your first adventure. So, a "funnel" game is going on here, and the characters are quick and straightforward to create. SotWW has this option, too, in the Sage's rulebook.

From the SotWW rulebook, page 8:

Shadow of the Weird Wizard is based on Shadow of the Demon Lord but sheds much of the bleakness and foulness of that game. Here, you play heroes who struggle to help those in need against sickness, despair, and corruption. You can make the campaign more gruesome if you wish, but the intent of this setting is for you and your friends to do good deeds and feel great about doing them.

Interesting. If you want, you can play this like the sister game, and the door is open for using it for horror. The characters are tougher and more heroic, so the deadliness likely isn't there for that fear factor.

Weird Wizard needs a niche, but my generic fantasy space is crowded. But that stunting mechanic and how simple the rules are grab my interest. The combinable classes and unlocking new ones as you level is a brilliant piece of game design. It feels like the classic game Final Fantasy Tactics, where you could have heroes who combined the classes' abilities as they leveled. You could have unique heroes with synergistic abilities.

The base game only has a human ancestry; all others are in a PDF supplement. This is an exciting choice and makes the game feel like Runequest. I like this choice since it allows groups to customize their worlds without including everything. This also keeps the core rulebook streamlined.

Survivability from Demon Lord has improved dramatically. The fonts are smaller, which could be better, but it is still readable. Also, the combat system has been tweaked to be more dynamic and tactical. In some ways, it feels like a 2.0 SotDL revision.

SotWW is a generic fantasy game for those who want a more traditional experience without all the gore and darkness of SotDL. It is a viable 5E alterative for high fantasy, and in many ways, offers greater customization and flexibility for characters than a shelf full of 5E books.

Off the Shelf: Shadow of the Demon Lord

Christmas is not the day to pull this one off the shelf. But I did.

I did not have this one in storage; it sat on one of my secondary shelves, waiting for another look. With Lamentations off the shelf and DCC begging for attention, I am pulling out older games in my collection and looking for the definitive fantasy horror experience. Some games, like Forbidden Lands, do the survival and exploration well, but not horror.

In many ways, this game destroys the Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Dungeon Crawl Classics games in horror fantasy.

The rules? It's a mix of 4E and 5E, and it makes sense since the designer worked for Wizards and on many of their darker and demonic books. The rules are a masterful mix of White Box sensibilities and 4 and 5E but with everything streamlined and improved to make the gameplay seamless.

And the character advancement and builds put 5E to absolute shame. Building characters in this game reminds me of one of those JRPGs where you can combine three classes and get something incredibly cool and fun - like nothing else you have ever seen. For those not into horror, this system is coming to a more traditional fantasy game called Shadow of the Weird Wizard.

Fantasy horror gaming? This is the place to go. Full stop, end of story. Games like Warhammer get too bogged down in the percentages and the realism. Lamentations I love as a basic B/X with gonzo adventures, but it needs those add-on adventures to shine; very little in the rules make it a horror game. Dungeon Crawl Classics borders on a gonzo and crazy version of Gamma World mixed with a fantasy game. Parts of it feel wacky and over-the-top, which is where the game shines.

The Demon Lord game makes me box up Lamentations, which is sad since I like that game. The Lamentations game hints at the darkness and has one objectionable table result. Shadow of the Demon Lord delivers a total horror game; start to stop. The sex is kept out of the game, which is honestly how it should be. Sex is a touchy subject; every group will be different on what is considered "okay."

Every group should decide for themselves if they open that door.

SotDL is pure DIY insanity and horror. The rules and spells reinforce the genre. You can play this anywhere from a year-zero beginning of the end to a full-on end-of-days experience. This works well for one-shot adventures and non-world-ending horror.

And it keeps the rules dirt simple, to the point, and familiar. I know a few B/X-type games that are far more complicated than this. The initiative is baked-in. Fast turns, slow turns, and end of the round. Players always go first in a turn, then monsters. To-hits are modified d20 rolls against the defense. For all other actions, the target number is 10.

Toss out most of your other dice, even the d100s, since there are no d100 charts. This game just uses d6 and d20. You will never confuse a d14 and d16 here. You are not flipping through the book to consult spell charts.

And you could buy and buy and buy expansions and have a lifetime of things to do. There are an insane amount of books for this game, and the primary book is enough for years of fun. There is a rules hacking guide and companions that multiply the upper-level paths, allowing for a near-infinite amount of character customization. There are no restrictions on character type combos; your rogue could become a paladin and then finish as a pyromancer. That character is not gimped either; they are pretty kick butt even with less-than-ideal magic power choices.

Progression is fast by default, but you could slow this down or speed it up. You do this by milestones, so you are not doing the XP thing.

The game was written with pre-safety tools, so bring your own if that helps you find players. I can't fault it for not having them, nor should you fault any game for the same. Since tastes and attitudes change, these should be optional community tools and not written into games. I would not play this with a younger audience and walk carefully with new players until I get to know them better.

You could rule the horror stuff out and play this as a 5E variant, but that is what Shadow of the Weird Wizard will do.

But if you can find a table with horror film fans, wow, you are in for a fun time. You are free as a GM to say, WTF, this crazy thing happens - and this is the game. You can stay more in the rules and play it like a lethal and gritty 5E. You could shift anywhere in between.

The best thing about this game is it is built to do one thing well. And it excels since it simplifies everything else.

You don't need to play in their world. They have clockwork kin and black powder, so you could play in a late Renaissance world, Victorian era, or Steampunk Industrial Revolution. There is a master path of gunslinger that lets you craft your own personal six-shooter. This game has the same 'cool factor' as Deadlands. You could easily reskin the path as a rifleman, let them only use rifles, and craft a lever action with six shots.

You could play a clockwork Clint Eastwood, who specializes in assassinating powerful undead and has bullets with the names of vampires on them that they will use someday. Give them a fistful of boons when the moment comes to use the 'Strahd bullet.' I don't need enchanting mechanics, unique magic items in a book, crafting systems, special classes to craft these, or anything else to make this happen. If a player legitimately saves this otherwise typical bullet, and even chases after it if it gets lost, and says, 'This is the one, and there is no other,' - then those actions enchant that round of ammunition with the power of 'the rule of cool.'

If you start the game at level seven, you could start playing with that character.

What is not to love?

You can't do that in 5E or Pathfinder 2, or it takes weeks of play to get there if you manage to hack something similar together, and the character sheets are atrocious tax forms and need computers to figure out.

I could build that character on paper in five minutes in SotDL with simple additions and a few selections. And if you feel a level ten cap is too low, and your progressions will be capped, there are rules in one of the hacking guides for going past that level and turning into epic superheroes.

Yes, the game is a horror game, but in many ways, this game gives you the tools to build larger-than-life characters on the level of anime and manga to slap evil in the face and say, "Not today, darkness."

Mail Room: Shadow of the Demon Lord

 

What an incredible game.

This is like a rules-light, R-rated (violence, gore), 5E for horror adventuring.

One of the best play-throughs of the game was where the game's creator ran the Penny Arcade crew through the game as a demo, and the entire video is worth a watch from beginning to end, but be forewarned, this does get pretty graphic. 

What I love about this playthrough is it shows the creator's intent for the tone and play style of the game. Often, groups fall into this D&D norm "adventurer mentality," sort of like, "If a dungeon exists, we must go in and clear it!" sort of ARPG feeling many games fall into. You see this in the OSR too, and this is that sort of "mega-dungeon mentality" where you have a few million ten-foot squares to explore, keyed encounters to clear, traps and puzzles to solve, and treasure is littered around the place waiting for you to pick up.

This game is different from that.

The combat mechanics are tight and built to run fast, unlike 5E, so there is the tactical challenge and numeric balance. The classes have incredible customization and depth as you level. The game has a classless zero-level funnel-type experience, like Dungeon Crawl Classics. The game has professions, and you start as dark fantasy characters, like Zweihander.

Also, in the video, pay attention to some excellent game mastering - how every combat has a twist, and things that happen during the fight change everything and up the stakes. The use of dynamic environments and conditions. Enemies throwing characters around. Area attacks versus close-in party members. Multiple attack use. Special attacks. Triggered actions while wounded.

You only need to add some 4E concepts (triggered environmental hazards, map hazards, and forced movement) to have a master class on creating engaging encounters. You aren't sitting in a "bag of hit points" 5E slog, playing turn denial games, and burning down with this style of refereeing.

The rules are a d20 variant, but they run fast and are not the complex and vague mess that 5E has turned into. 5E is the game you start with, and Pathfinder 2 is the game you end up in after you tire of dealing with unclear rules and looking up answers online. A rules-light d20 framework solves those problems, too, especially with a few universal mechanics like boons/banes and the turn order system. The advantage/disadvantage system in 5E feels like a hammer to problems you need other tools for, and this system feels elegant, is stepped nicely, and works well.

Another game this reminds me of? The classic Arkham Horror board game. You have a choice of which apocalypse is happening. You are fighting to stop the end of the world and frantically running around the world, completing missions to try to stop the inevitable. Every end-of-the-world choice is flavorful, brings new challenges and boss monsters, and plays differently. You can play this game subtly and in the shadows, build slowly to a catastrophe like in Arkham, or go full-out Roland Emmerich at the start and turn the dial past 11 with every level the characters gain.

You leave the city, and it is destroyed behind you.

That is cool, epic stuff. Since the campaigns are supposed to be one-shots, you will start a new world next time, and different things will happen. Again, this is something that really doesn't happen in D&D; how dare you destroy Waterdeep, Ravenloft Castle, or the City of Greyhawk? You can't do that! Your campaign sucks now! You can't have the defeated Tomb of Horrors fall into Hell and create a bottomless 3-mile hole in the planet! You can't defeat Tiamat and have her explode, permanently tearing a hole into a nether realm and destroying a kingdom 300 miles wide! You are ruining the map! You can't turn Elminster and the good guys of the Realms into a secret society of spider demons and kill them! Those were my favorite characters from the books!

That happens here often. Like Arkham Horror, everything is paid for, and this world ends. Feel free to tear up your source material and start fresh next time. Arkham had events that closed off boards or shut locations, and the map changed during play. But every time you played, things went back to normal and were destroyed again - maybe.

And it is fantastic and the stuff that makes legends.

This is like D&D 5E meets Arkham Horror, minus the Cthulhu plus demons. There is a Warhammer FRP comparison in here, but I would pick Arkham over Warhammer because the player power scales more on 5E's epic-hero curve than it does the more realism-based Warhammer. With the right mix of artifacts and abilities, Arkham player power scales high too.

Nothing has plot armor. No place on the map, no NPC, no dungeon, no part of the setting, no monster, no villain, no good guy, no city, nothing on the map, no "favorite thing in the novel," no piece of product identity, no magic item, no spell in the rules, no kingdom, no way the world works, no assumption about cosmology, no cute thing, no ancestry, no god or demon, no PC - nothing.

You only know how good that feels when you try it.

And no PC is safe. Get your self-insert character out of your head; that is dangerous for your mental health (as we were told repeatedly in the 1990s by every game company). The industry pushes these "identity gaming" concepts to increase attachment for profits, but nobody seems to care about their players' health and well-being. Profits are being put ahead of the mental health of players.

If you watch the video, combats are fast, and they have a back-and-forth flow to them. Fights can also be deadly, which should be in a horror game. Advancement is one level per adventure, with a maximum of ten levels, so the game is suited to a shorter campaign and more campaigns played. A supplement has rules for levels ten and higher, so it could be played long-term, but again, the one-and-done campaign structure feels suitable for a horror game.

Again, watch the video and note how fast the combats play. This highly streamlined system feels like an OSR game where the combats play fast, but there is that 5E-style tactical depth and choice. Even a 4-on-4 battle was completed relatively quickly, and a two-hour video handled four battles (two of them boss battles), which is blazing fast at the mid-level of play (level 6) they were adventuring at. 

Significant-sized battles will always be something 5E is terrible at, and to be fair, many games could be better at. Cypher System does these relatively quickly, but asking players to wait 30 minutes for a turn is a non-starter and, honestly, something I am concerned about for all the 5E clones, even Tales of the Valiant.

Also, this game flips the D&D assumptions on their head. The "big bad" is the demons, and you could recast monsters as demon servants - or recast them as monsters realizing what is happening, and they throw in with the good guys to avoid the end of the world. In D&D, 99.9% of liches are evil. In this game, you could make a lich hate the Demon Lord, fear the end of the world, and give the characters' missions and assistance. This game casts a standard fantasy world in a "The Walking Dead" sort of apocalypse, and the story starts there. Good guys could be bad, bad guys could be good, and you take it from there.

The game does many things I look to other games for, but this has them all in one place. The zero-level funnels and deadly world of DCC? Check. The grim and gritty horror and professional progression of Zweihander? Check. The rules-light framework of Cypher System? Check. The freedom to multiclass and build interesting characters of 5E? Check. The deadliness, horror, fear, and insanity rules of Call of Cthulhu? Check.

The game's progression curve is also designed to teach the game. Seriously, why isn't 5E more like this?

Until Tales of the Valiant emerges, I will play this for d20 and 5E-like gaming.

Then again, this may be what I am looking for.