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The Demon Lord’s Companion: A Sourcebook

Demon Lord’s Companion: A Sourcebook for Shadow of the Demon Lord RPG

Demon Lord's Companion for Shadow of the Demon LordAs the Demon Lord’s influence creeps across the land, it touches more people, awakening in them crippling dread, tempting them to commit unspeakable acts, or to rise up and take a stand and fight back against the spreading darkness. In the end times, all must choose a side, to save the world or watch it burn.

The Demon Lord’s Companion reveals new options for players and Game Masters alike, providing a host of new options such as:

  • Faun and Halfling ancestries
  • Six expert paths including the psychic and mountebank
  • A dozen master paths such as the blackguard, martial artist, and Alchemical Items, Forbidden Items, Marvels of Engineering, and new Potions
  • New rules for creating gear and using vehicles
  • Alchemy, Demonology, Telekinesis, and more new traditions of magic
  • Magical places, relics, new creatures, and more!

An essential addition to the Shadow of the Demon Lord line of products, the Demon Lord’s Companion is bound to take your games into darker and stranger places!

A Deeper Look into the Demon Lord’s Companion

Content for Shadow of the Demon Lord was never a problem. I spent the time leading up to the Kickstarter campaign designing, testing, redesigning, massaging, and doing all the work I needed to do to get the game as close to editing-ready as I could so I wouldn’t have to spend time during production to fill out the book—the last thing I needed was pressure to create on top of everything else. I wound up with enough material to fill another hundred pages beyond the 272 that made it into the book. (And, by the way, 272 was never the plan. I set 256 as a hard limit but we discovered during layout that we needed the extra pages to include all the content, despite my meticulous estimations and we still had to leave out a few pieces of art that I’m sure will make their way to you in future products.)

Sketch by Jack Kaiser, (c) 2015 Schwalb Entertainment, LLC

Sketch by Jack Kaiser, (c) 2015 Schwalb Entertainment, LLC

Since I had a bunch of extra content, and good content too, I decided  I would reward backers with a companion book to deliver some of the extra fun stuff as a reward for funding my campaign in just over six hours. This extra content became the Demon Lord’s Companion, and I expect it to go out to backers and up for sale when the core rulebook makes starts creeping into game stores all over the planet in December.

Design for the Companion was done a while back, as with design for Tales. To prevent bottlenecks in production, I staggered the various supplements, so I’ve sat on this product, releasing it into the custody of Chris Sims of Wizards of the Coast fame to squash bugs and clean up my mad ravings into readable text. Last week, I ordered art for the book and as I write this post, Ivan Dixon and Jack Kaiser are hard at work making magic with their art.

Over the next month or so, I’ll be revealing bits and pieces from the book to whet you appetites and to give you a chance to take some of the new rules out for a spin. For now, let’s start by giving you an overview of what the book contains.

Demon Lord’s Companion has an introduction and five chapters.

Chapter 1 introduces two more ancestries, the faun and the halfling, plus a set of benefits/drawbacks to customize your character further.

Sketch by Jack Kaiser, (c) 2015 Schwalb Entertainment, LLC

Sketch by Jack Kaiser, (c) 2015 Schwalb Entertainment, LLC

Chapter 2 presents eight expert paths and twelve master paths.

Chapter 3 expands on the equipment chapter, covering Alchemical Items, Forbidden Items, Marvels of Engineering, more Potions, Property, and Vehicle rules.

Chapter 4 adds six more traditions to the thirty found in the core rulebook and includes two psychic traditions.

Finally, chapter 5 gives Game Masters more tools for adventure building such as additional relics, optional rules for enchanted objects, magical places, and nine more creatures.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading, thanks for playing, and thanks for supporting my game!

Don’t yet have Shadow of the Demon Lord? Why the heck not? Download your copy today from The Demon Lord’s Workshop.