Blog: Adventures in Shadow of the Demon Lord

Adventures give me ulcers. It’s complicated, you see. Part of me feels like a published adventure is to a roleplaying game as gasoline (or an electric charge!) is to a car. The adventure is fuel for your game. It gets you started and it keeps you going. But for all the good adventures do, they also seem to go out of their way to be difficult to use, usually because they are too long and require too much preparation. For Shadow of the Demon Lord, I wanted to eliminate these barriers and offer adventures that are simple to run and give the GM tools to tell a great story.
Single-Session Stories
My gaming groups meet every other week. Given how busy we all are, people usually miss one session in four, sometimes one session in two. When running a long adventure, one that takes a few sessions to finish, odds are that someone who was present the last time will miss the game. We accept these absences because what other choice do we have? But it’s a frustrating problem since it strains the suspension of disbelief and forces changes to the story in order to accommodate the absence.
   Aside from the characters that rotate in and out of the story, there’s also the problem of sustaining the narrative. A two-week gap between sessions makes it harder for the players to remember their objectives and what has happened so far. Names of important NPCs, situations, and places fade, even if the players are meticulous about taking notes.
   To combat these problems, the game’s stories are all playable in a single session. I expect a session to last from three to five hours. You can stretch the stories so they run longer by inserting extra challenges, allowing more time for roleplaying, investigation, exploration, and so on, or you might compress the stories by carving out or collapsing scenes if you have less time to play.
Low Preparation
Keeping the stories short and focused reduces the amount of time you have to spend preparing for the game. There are few things worse in gaming than having an adventure on hand and not having had the time to read it in advance. Stories in Demon Lord are as long as they need to be and no longer. I have found it takes about an hour of play to get through a page of story. Since the typical session lasts three to five hours, the page count on these stories is about three to five pages. That’s it. You can read a story in the few minutes before people arrive and you’re ready to go.
Just the Facts
To keep the page count down, Demon Lord eschews clutter. You will not find exhaustive story backgrounds, needless exposition, detailed characters, lists of adventure hooks, guidance about what come next, read-aloud text, or any of the usual suspects that bloat adventures. The story provides you with a skeleton and leaves it to you and your players to put flesh on it during play. Too often, adventures are written to entertain the Game Master. In Demon Lord, the stories provide you, the GM, with the tools you need to entertain the game’s players.
Objective-Focused Stories
Adventures in Demon Lord are called stories. Each story presents its objective to the GM in the opening paragraph so it’s clear what the story is about and what the PCs need to do in order to complete it. Character advancement depends on completing these objectives. Whenever the group achieves a story goal, they increase their level by one. It doesn’t matter how the group accomplishes its goal. They might use roleplaying, stealth, brute force, magic, or a combination of all four or something else entirely.
   Here’s an example: Retrieve the Bones of Saint Absalom from the Seekers of the Void before they complete their unholy ritual to call forth Absalom’s soul from the Underworld.
   The PCs might achieve their objective by butchering all the cultists and taking the bones by brute force, by disguising themselves as cultists and infiltrating the organization, by pitting a rival cult against them, or by sneaking into their headquarters and stealing the bones out from under their noses, and so on. Getting the bones away from the cultists before the ritual is complete is all that matters.
  
Short Campaigns
The core game provides rules for eleven levels of play—from level 0 to level 10. If you play one story each session and the characters achieve their goal at the end of each story, it should be possible to play a complete a campaign in as few as eleven sessions. A short campaign offers numerous advantages. You could play just once a month and get almost a year’s worth of fun. Or, if you play more frequently, you could play several campaigns in a year. Multiple campaigns in a year lets players create and play a variety of characters, thus letting them explore more of the game than they otherwise might in longer campaigns. As well, short campaigns encourage groups to rotate Game Masters. Being on the hook to run a campaign that lasts 3 to 6 months is a far smaller investment than an open-ended campaign that typically sputters out after a few weeks and the obvious end-point encourages people who might not normally run games to give it a try.
Final Thoughts

The approach to adventure-design for Demon Lord is a pragmatic one. Rather than delude myself and proceed with a design that expects people to devote hours to game preparation and get together once or even twice a week, I embraced the reality about how much time we actually have, which is not much. Keeping stories short and self-contained eases pressure on the GM and creates a sense of accomplishment in the players. If each game session ends with the story’s climax, it’s ok if you miss next week. You’ll start a new story with everyone else the next time you play. And if you have loads of time, the stories make excellent frameworks for you to use in constructing more elaborate and involved stories that take as many game sessions as you want to complete. Ultimately, how you play Shadow of the Demon Lord is up to you. But it’s my goal to make sure you can play in whatever manner you choose.
/by

Dice and Accessibility

Accessibility has been Shadow of the Demon Lord’s design goal from the start and for good reason. Over the last twenty years or so, I have watched the amount of free time available to my gaming groups shrink and shrink. Life has a way of intruding on our distractions—responsibilities of family and career rightly take precedence and when presented with a choice for how we spend time from the entertainment budget, we generally gravitate toward those distractions that demand the least from us. Gone are the days when we can spend hours and hours studying rulebooks, plotting complex campaigns, or plan out the various ways our characters will develop over time. Some of you may have the luxury of copious free time, but the people I know and with whom I game with have left those idle hours far behind. And as roleplaying games become more work, making greater and greater demands on our time to gain system mastery enough to even create a character let alone play, many gamers, once dedicated, have left the hobby behind or engage it vicariously by just reading the books rather than getting together with their friends.
     To make Shadow of the Demon Lord more accessible, I adopted a strategy in the design that relied on familiarity and simplicity. The combination of these things would allow players of varying experience levels and interest to engage the game with equal proficiency and be free to focus on portraying their characters, engage the story, and, above all, have a good time.  
     So let’s start with familiarity. Shadow of the Demon Lord embraces tradition in that there’s a Game Master who manages the story, interprets outcomes, and decides when to use the rules to determine what happens. Everyone else at the table is a player and they each have at least one character under their control.
     Most people who are passingly familiar with roleplaying games expect at least one funny-shaped die. The 20-sided die has permeated geek culture to the point that I think most people know rolling a 20 is a good thing. So Shadow of the Demon Lord uses a d20 for task resolution. When you want to know if your attack with a sword hits the demon, or if you can kick down the door, or climb the wall, or send the troll sprawling with your shockwave spell, or escape the blast of a fires from heaven spell, roll a d20. The widespread use of the d20 is a familiar element and it’s what most players expect to roll when they play fantasy RPGs.
     The game also uses 6-sided dice. While the game would be simpler just using a 20-sided die, having a second die adds a bit of texture to the play experience and, most important, makes other aspects of the game simpler as you’ll see below.
    
Attributes
Shadow of the Demon Lord uses a set of four attributes to describe a character’s most basic capabilities. The attributes are Strength, Agility, Intellect, and Willpower. The names pretty much tell you what they do. Each attribute has a score, which is a number ranging from 1 to 25, and a modifier, which is the score minus 10, ranging from –9 to +15. A typical human has a score of 10 (+0 modifier) for each attribute.
     Your score represents your passive use of the attribute. The GM may judge a task’s success or failure by just looking at your score or you might use it as a defense such as when a creature casts charm on you or tries to tear your bones from your body with a part bone from flesh spell.
     When you would actively use your attribute, such as when you swing a sword at a zombie, fire a pistol, climb a wall, discern an illusion isn’t real, or cling to your sanity in the face of some horrific monsters you roll a d20 and add your modifier to the number rolled. If you’re doing something directly to another creature—pushing, knocking down, using magic, you compare the total of your roll to the creature’s attribute score (or Armor Rating if you’re attacking with a weapon). If you’re doing anything else, you compare the total to 10. If the total equals or beats the target number, you succeed. Otherwise you fail.
     This should be familiar and simple.

Assets and Complications
Rather than use a scaling set of numbers to model easier and harder tasks, the game uses assets and complications. For each different positive circumstance that could help you succeed, you have an asset. For each different negative circumstance that might prevent your success, you have a complication. Assets and complications cancel each other out. So if you have two assets and one complication, you’d have one asset. If you have six complications and two assets, you’d have four complications. If you have two assets and two complications, you would neither assets nor complications since they cancel out.
     For each asset or complication, you roll a d6 with your d20. Of the numbers rolled for assets, you add the highest number rolled to the number you rolled on the d20. Conversely, of all the numbers rolled for complications, you subtract the highest number rolled from the number rolled on your d20.
     For example, lets say Mindy is trying to climb a wall in a cave in a ledge. She uses a rope and grappling hook, so she has one asset. The Game Master also tells Mindy that there are plenty of handholds and footholds to make the climb easier, which gives her another asset. Mindy rolls Strength with two assets. She rolls a d20, and gets a 5. Her Strength is 12 (+2), which brings her total up to 7. Normally this would be a failure as the target number is always 10. However, she also has two assets. She rolls a d6 for each asset and gets a 5 and a 3. The 5 is the highest number, so she adds it to her total, giving her a 12. Mindy’s gets a success and her character climbs up the wall.
     The function of assets and complications is to scoop up all the tiny bonuses and penalties one expects to gain from circumstances into an extra die roll. Multiple assets or complications have increased chances of rolling a 6, but since you’re only adding the highest, they control bonus and penalty inflation without having to introduce flag bonuses or penalties with different types. Best of all, assets allow characters to reach beyond their normal limits, when fighting powerful opponents, and complications never take away from the thrill of rolling a 20.
     You might sense that there’s little point in having Mindy roll at all since she has two assets. After all, she starts with a +2 bonus and the asset should add 3 or 4 (on average) to her roll. This means she will fail if she rolls a 3 or less on the d20. Chances are, she’s going to get up to the ledge, so why bother rolling? Exactly. Assets and complications, combined with a fixed target number of 10, quickly communicate to the GM when to call for a roll and when to just grant a success. This keeps the game moving forward. Having a couple of assets for an activity serves to eliminate pointless rolls, whereas complications may indicate times when rolling might have an interesting outcome.
Damage
Whenever I run a game of D&D for new players, one of the big play challenges experienced is figuring which die is which. Even experienced gamers sometimes grab a d8 when they meant to grab a d10. To keep the game simpler, Shadow of the Demon Lord uses the d6 for all damage rolls. When you cast flame blast, creatures in the area take 3d6 damage. When you get a success for a roll to attack with your sword, the target takes 1d6 + 2 damage. When you fall 5 yards and land on the bottom of a pit, you take 2d6 damage. The game rarely has you roll more than six dice. For powerful spells, you roll a small number of dice and add them to a bigger number, such as 6d6 +20 or 3d6 + 10.
Final Thoughts

The approach I took for the core system design has many advantages. It is familiar to veterans who enjoy other fantasy games and eases the transition from one game system to Shadow of the Demon Lord. It also has the advantage of simplicity for new players. It just makes sense that when my character attempts to beat your character in an arm-wrestling contest, I roll Strength against your Strength. A constant target number of 10, for tasks other than attacks or attack-like activities, reduces calculations at the table since you’re just looking for 10 or higher. Ultimately, this simple and straightforward game system allows for rapid system mastery and permits a range of exceptions gained from character develop without slowing or otherwise taking anything away from the game play experience.
/by

Introducing Shadow of the Demon Lord

Introducing Shadow of the Demon Lord

This month I revealed what has been occupying my attention for the last 10 months at Nashville’s Geek Media Expo, a fun little show that celebrates all things geek. By now, you have seen the website and the awesome cover by Svetoslav Petrov, seen the various updates on here, Twitter, and Facebook. I am, however, certain you have some questions. This is the first installment of several updates about my new game, Shadow of the Demon Lord, and what you can expect from it.

Why a new game?

Over my decade-plus career, I have had the privilege of designing or developing over 200 products, from transmuting the fantastic novels of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire into a stand-alone RPG to working with and updating older games in my role as Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay developer and member of the design team for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. I have worked on several established game systems and in several established worlds, from the gloom of Midnight to the grittiness of the Glen Cook’s Black Company novels. Over all this time, I have been thinking about what I would do given the chance to spawn a roleplaying game from the birth canal of my imagination, both in terms of system design and story design. So when design needs for D&D began to wind down at the end of 2013 and with my contract with Wizards of the Coast expiring, I decided to take all those thoughts and put them on paper.

So What’s Shadow of the Demon Lord All About?

One thing that seems largely common to fantasy campaigns is the apocalyptic event that marks the end of the campaign—the dark lord attacks with his armies, some fool opens the gate to Hell, a death world drifts too close to the planet after drifting out from some remote corner of space, the undead wizard seals the gates to the Underworld, and so on. These events almost always occur at the campaign’s end and the stories and adventures through which the players play lead to this epic conclusion. For me, this “epic conclusion” is the most interesting part. It’s the time and place when the story is most exciting. Shadow of the Demon Lord embraces the cataclysm and makes it the backdrop against which the characters’ lives unfold.

The core idea is that the world is one of many realities, each of which is separated by a yawning gulf of darkness called the Void. In the murky depths of this infinite expanse lurk entities of malevolent will, formless, inscrutable beings that have no physical form until called forth into a world, where they become demons. The greatest of these entities is the Demon Lord, a being of vast and incalculable power. The Demon Lord hungers. It craves destruction, to feast on mortal souls, to unravel creation. And over the march of eons, the Demon Lord has broken free from the Void to drag one of many realities screaming into its darkness. In the game, the Demon Lord has drawn near to the world and its shadow creeps across the landscape like ink spilled on a map.

The Demon Lord’s shadow instigates cataclysmic events as it spreads across the world. Wherever it falls, it foments discord and upheaval, altering the fundamental laws of reality through the individuals it corrupts. When the game starts, the shadow has fallen upon the Orc King, a former subject of the Empire who had been sworn to serve the Alabaster Throne through ancient and magical compacts set down in another age. The shadow has contaminated these peoples, turning them into savage killers, brutes without compassion and driven by their most basic impulses. As a result, they have risen up across the Empire they were bound to protect sparking upheaval and war everywhere. Travelers whisper the capital is in flames, the emperor dead, strangled by the Orc King who now sits upon the throne and gathers his armies to march against the imperial provinces that have declared their independence in the wake of this event.

While this is the assumed catalyst for the story’s start, the rules include other calamities that might befall the world from the Demon Lord’s fell influence. The shadow may fall upon the Dark Lady, the greatest of all the necromancers to have ever lived and, if so, she might be compelled to seal the gates to the Underworld. This act would upset the cycle of life-death-rebirth. Souls would be trapped in their corpses and rise up as undead. Or, the shadow could fall upon the Archmage and warp magic, causing all spells cast to have wild and unpredictable effects. Organizations, such the Inquisition, House of Healing, or Hierarchy of the Old Faith, could all come under the shadow, sparking terrible crusades, loosing virulent plagues to decimate populations, or a spark a series of natural disasters to topple the pillars of civilization.

Where the shadow falls is entirely up to the Game Master and may change based on the actions of the players or developments in the story so that the PCs might face war, terrifying plagues, a zombie apocalypse, and the awakening of some titanic monstrosity all in the same campaign or as the basis of several different campaigns. Most important, the degree to which these global events intrude on the story is up to the gaming group. The orc uprising might be a distant threat, as the game suggests for the start, or it could be the setting in which the characters find themselves, trapped in the ruins of the imperial capital and struggling to escape the mobs of bloodthirsty orcs for safer lands beyond their control.

So that’s the idea behind Shadow of the Demon Lord, and it’s one–I believe–that sets this game apart from other fantasy roleplaying games. I’ve mentioned plagues, wars, natural disasters, cosmic threats, and magical distortions. What other ways would you destroy your world?

/by