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mburnamfink 's review for:
Shadow of the Demon Lord
by Robert J. Schwalb
Shadow of the Demon Lord is a medium crunch horror fantasy RPG, set in a collapsing fantasy empire under threat from the reality devouring Shadow Lord. Your heroes battle against monsters coming from the hinterlands, seeping through cracks in reality, and summoned by insane cultists in order to survive another day, and maybe save a loved one or two.
The system was the first (I believe) to introduce the 1d20+k +/- nd6 system used by Lancer. Static bonus are relatively small, DCs are close to 10, and circumstances give you boons and banes, d6s which cancel each other out, with the highest one rolled. Combat is quick and simple, with strict limits on actions. One clever bit of game design is that characters can take a Fast Turn, with just an action or move, or delay to later in the round and take a Slow Turn to move and attack. Characters also get one Triggered action, by default an attack of opportunity when someone moves, but later abilities can give other options.
Characters are built from novice, expert, and advanced classes from level 0 to 12. You'll start as simple magician, priest, rogue, or warrior, and specialize from there (Cleric --> Paladin --> Templar, for example). Class choices are big ones, but after that you have relatively limited options to pick in terms of talents and spells. Another part of the character building minigame, magic items, is similarly sparse. Enchanted items are weird rather than powerful. Skills are handled by a profession system: you did something before you became an adventurer, and it's assumed that your good at whatever a professional could do.
The setting has some cool ideas. Souls are reincarnated, with decent people losing their identity as shades in the underworld before returning. Evil people have corruption stripped from their souls by devils, a type of faerie, before returning. Halflings and elves exist, but are not playable, with goblins, changelings, and clockworks standing in. Orcs recently overthrew the Emperor, though the political implications are mostly left implied.
There's a lot of good ideas, but also a few half-baked ones. There's an insanity system which seems to mostly make your characters go non-controllable at the worst possible time, which is a lazy port of old Call of Cthulhu mechanics rather than a reimagining of how adventuring, horror, and mental trauma should interact. Similarly, while this is a game of grim horror and gray morality, there's also objective evil in the form of Corruption, which your character can gain by committing vile acts and learning evil spells, and the Demon Lord and his threats. The setting, while eminently gamable, is better when it leans into sword and sorcery weirdness, and spends too much time in a Warhammer Fantasy mashup.
This is a tighter game than any edition of D&D or my favorite, 13th Age, but it's also more limited and at the end of the day, still a fantasy heartbreaker. I'm becoming one of those guys who says "why not just play Blades in the Dark?", or if I were seeking the new hotness, Massif's ICON.
The system was the first (I believe) to introduce the 1d20+k +/- nd6 system used by Lancer. Static bonus are relatively small, DCs are close to 10, and circumstances give you boons and banes, d6s which cancel each other out, with the highest one rolled. Combat is quick and simple, with strict limits on actions. One clever bit of game design is that characters can take a Fast Turn, with just an action or move, or delay to later in the round and take a Slow Turn to move and attack. Characters also get one Triggered action, by default an attack of opportunity when someone moves, but later abilities can give other options.
Characters are built from novice, expert, and advanced classes from level 0 to 12. You'll start as simple magician, priest, rogue, or warrior, and specialize from there (Cleric --> Paladin --> Templar, for example). Class choices are big ones, but after that you have relatively limited options to pick in terms of talents and spells. Another part of the character building minigame, magic items, is similarly sparse. Enchanted items are weird rather than powerful. Skills are handled by a profession system: you did something before you became an adventurer, and it's assumed that your good at whatever a professional could do.
The setting has some cool ideas. Souls are reincarnated, with decent people losing their identity as shades in the underworld before returning. Evil people have corruption stripped from their souls by devils, a type of faerie, before returning. Halflings and elves exist, but are not playable, with goblins, changelings, and clockworks standing in. Orcs recently overthrew the Emperor, though the political implications are mostly left implied.
There's a lot of good ideas, but also a few half-baked ones. There's an insanity system which seems to mostly make your characters go non-controllable at the worst possible time, which is a lazy port of old Call of Cthulhu mechanics rather than a reimagining of how adventuring, horror, and mental trauma should interact. Similarly, while this is a game of grim horror and gray morality, there's also objective evil in the form of Corruption, which your character can gain by committing vile acts and learning evil spells, and the Demon Lord and his threats. The setting, while eminently gamable, is better when it leans into sword and sorcery weirdness, and spends too much time in a Warhammer Fantasy mashup.
This is a tighter game than any edition of D&D or my favorite, 13th Age, but it's also more limited and at the end of the day, still a fantasy heartbreaker. I'm becoming one of those guys who says "why not just play Blades in the Dark?", or if I were seeking the new hotness, Massif's ICON.