As many of you probably know, we took Shadow of the Demon Lord back to print and used the chance to hammer down a few nails that had gotten loose. While you can enjoy the game without updated the book, many of you have asked for a list of changes so they can be current on the rules. Well, here you go. Thanks so much for your continued support and keep on fighting the Demon Lord!
If you haven’t yet heard, I’m launching a Kickstarter campaign in November (the 12th) to crowdsource the production for a new and sexy supplement for Shadow of the Demon Lord. So far, I’ve been able to produce a slew of high-quality digital products that shine lights on various ancestries and spots on the map, reveal details about terrifying creatures, to say nothing of the many adventures available for the game. However, Occult Philosophy is a different sort of beast.
Clocking in at around 192 pages with about 800 spells, a dozen or so critters, plus twenty to thirty paths, it’s the biggest release for the game since Shadowcame out around three years ago. A book of this size has a pile of expenses, including art, editing, proofing, layout, and graphic design. And, if the campaign does well enough, we’ll do an off-set print run too.
I’m going to make up a few general questions and answer them. In future installments, I’ll get into the nuts and bolts of the book.
Yes. I ran a limited playtest with tons of respondents who took the spells out for a spin in their games. From the feedback along with the testers’ insights, I adjusted the design to ensure that they fit the game and work well alongside other spells.
Yep! One of my earliest goals for this book was to reveal magic’s true extent in the setting. Each tradition receives expansions to the basic rank 0 to 5 spells, but also includes a pair of rank 6 spells along with one of each for ranks 7 through 10.
For sure. I included one new tradition to bring the tradition count up to 42 (the most important number of all). Madness joins the other traditions, offering ways for you to harness your Insanity and weave it into magic to produce spectacular effects. There’s an Elder Gods vibe to these spells too, and, as a result, raises a few new questions about the game’s cosmology.
Of course! We’re including some guidance for playing characters beyond level 10 (building on the method described in Forbidden Rules). I’m also including a slew of expert and master paths. Expert paths, as usual, ground characters in the setting but also speak to specific traditions or pairs of traditions. Master paths offer alternative takes to mastering the various forms of magic, while also offering options to players who concern themselves with the methods of casting—implements for example.
I had planned to include a chapter on each, but I ran out of room. I have a product in mind called The Vault of the Demon Lord, which includes new options for enchanted objects, relics, and trinkets. This book gets unlocked as a stretch goal.
Hmm. That’s a tough one. I’m pretty partial to them all. Here’s a cool one from the Battle tradition.
Duration 8 hours
Magical power flows into you, transforming you into a god of war. You become bigger, stronger, and far more menacing. Your eyes glow with malice and blood paints your body. Any creature that can see you when you transform must get a success on a Will challenge roll with 3 banes or gain 1d3 Insanity. Until the spell ends, gain the following benefits:
Aftereffect You must make a Will challenge roll with 5 banes. On a failure, you gain 3d6 Insanity and take a –1d6 penalty to Power that lasts for 1 week and 1 day. If you would go mad as a result of this Insanity gain, you suffer Battle Madness (see Shadow, page 118) as normal, but the madness ends only on a roll of a 6 and you take 2d6 damage at the end of each round until the madness ends.
Sometimes the world needs heroes, but sometimes, the world takes anyone it can get. Whether you’re playing an unhinged wizard armed with dark magic or a valiant champion fighting in the name of the New God, a shifty-eyed changeling, or a malicious goblin, in these dark times, all must come together if the Demon Lord would be stopped. Now is your time to make a difference, to take a stand against the demon, the cultist, the monster, and the chaos. It falls to you and a group of mismatched others to do your part to save the world.
Drawn from the pages of Shadow of the Demon Lord, the Player’s Guide includes everything you need to create and play a character in a world gone mad. Inside you’ll find:
The Demon Lord’s shadow creeps across the world, sparking war, upheaval, and chaos. Now is the time for heroes to seize their destinies, villains to accomplish their despicable goals, and everyone else to fight for their survival. In this game, you and your friends can tells stories about thwarting the plots of insane cultists, hunting down and destroying bizarre demons, uncovering lost lands, investigation weird mysteries, and more. You just need your imagination!
You can buy the Player’s Guide in Print or PDF from DriveThruRPG!
Beyond the World’s Edge: A Sourcebook to explore Freeport in Shadow of the Demon Lord RPG
When compiling Demon Lord’s Companion, I relied mainly on concepts and mechanics left over from the Shadow of the Demon Lord original design. When I ended up with an overabundance of content, it became difficult to decide what would stay in Shadow and what would be held back for future supplements. A great deal of that material went into DLC, while other pieces wound up in Poisoned Pages supplements and sourcebooks such as Exquisite Agony, A Glorious Death, and Terrible Beauty.
Now, a bit over two years and over one hundred products later, my folders containing notes and bits left over from previous designs have grown empty. Rather than despair at such a situation, I took the opportunity to push the game in new directions. I looked for gaps in what we’ve released so far, scoured my shelves for inspiration, and hatched all kinds of oddities while holing up in my favorite bar to come up with an exciting selection of options for players.
One of the best ways to expand the game is through ancestries, since these options can mesh with just about everything else. Therefore, this book gives you six, each a hidden people who have largely steered clear of the major events unfolding in the world. Their scarcity and unusual nature make them quite exotic, and playing these ancestries can reward you with awesome options while challenging your roleplaying abilities.
Supporting the ancestries is a group theme mechanic to reflect the circumstances that hold a group of player characters together and rules to differentiate each group from the others.
As you might expect, this book also provides a selection of paths to cover some underused areas of character creation and development, while also supporting the new spells at the end of this book—all associated with the new traditions of Invocation, Metal, Order, and Soul. So, from invokers to sleuths, fencers to auspexes, your characters have an awesome set of new options to explore.
Demon Lord’s Companion 2 aims to help you tell stories by highlighting peoples of all kinds who find themselves engaged in the struggle to save the world from annihilation. With this book, you can create unique characters, pursue mastery of new and esoteric forms of magic, or hone your talents in new and awesome ways. This book ensures that you never run out of interesting choices to make as you battle the darkness of the Void.
Buy Demon Lord’s Companion 2 on DriveThruRPG!