Poisoned Pages
Find new ways to expand the game!
The Poisoned Pages series finds new ways to expand the game by adding ancestries, paths, optional rules, and more to Shadow of the Demon Lord!
Battle Scars
Battle Scars provides a set of optional rules that amplify the existing damage rules to present a grittier game, where injuries sustained in the course of an adventure can have lasting consequences. The rules do not simplify the game or make it any easier to survive. In fact, they turn what is arguably a challenging game for characters to survive into a potentially lethal one. However, they act as a wellspring of ideas for building and developing the characters’ stories as the venture through a dangerous and dying land.
Between Life and Death
Between Life and Death presents new options for player characters who have met an untimely death in an adventure. When the cause is just, the responsibility too great to set aside, the character’s spirit can emerge from the remains and continue the struggle to right wrongs, dispense justice, and see the quest to its conclusion.
Brood of the Mother Spore
Brood of the Mother Spore introduces a new ancestry for use in Shadow of the Demon Lord, offering you an opportunity to take on the role of fungus folk. This supplement gives you everything you need to create and play a saprophican character. For the Game Master, a number of sample creatures appear at the end to help introduce these peoples into the world in an organic fashion. To combat the Shadow, it takes peoples of all kinds, and the saprophicans are just the latest to join the struggle to save Urth.
Children of the Restless Earth
Children of the Restless Earth, reveals second of the elemental ancestries–gnomes– for play in Shadow of the Demon Lord. The spread of the Demon Lord’s shadow has triggered calamities and catastrophes that have upset the natural order of things, such that havens have become tombs, cities are awash with blood, and monsters run loose in the countryside. No longer can people huddle in the dark; the time for hiding has come to an end, for the Demon Lord will devour all as it destroys the world. So, as the salamanders have begun to descend from their fiery peaks, so have the gnomes been dislodged from their cavernous homes to emerge blinking into the world they abandoned long ago.
Dark Passages
Dark Passages is here to lend a hand for those times when a library might appear in your games. Use it to tickle the little gray cells lurking inside the skull-shaped attic at the top of your neck It’s your arsenal to combat the burst of fear and loathing you might experience when some well-intentioned, invested player asks the dreaded question, “What kinds of books do I find?”
Do We Not Die?
Do We Not Die? explores the sordid trade in poison in the black markets and seedy underworld of the Empire, offering an assortment of diabolical substances of mundane and magical origin, along with new spells that create and employ poison. Whether you are looking for an edge against a powerful enemy or for new options for your alchemist, assassin, or poisoner, this installment of Poisoned Pages makes the world of the Demon Lord a much more dangerous place.
Fever Dreams
Fever Dreams presents nastier options for Shadow of the Demon Lord, disgusting, demoralizing diseases suited to a world on the brink of ending. The collection of plagues, sicknesses, infections, and parasites presented here give diseases in Shadow of the Demon Lord a “shot in the arm.” Each builds on the basic diseases described in the main rulebook to make them more varied and complex.
Frayed Ends
Frayed Ends offers a new way to show the cost of gaining Insanity in Shadow of the Demon Lord. Normally, player characters can rid themselves of Insanity by gaining quirks, odd, compulsive behaviors that sometimes reflect the sources of Insanity characters acquire. The supplement goes beyond the rules in Shadow and the Unhinge the Mind Poisoned Pages expansion by presenting six tables of quirks you can use to relieve your mind of the madness you have endured.
Hired Help
Hired Help takes the basic hireling rules presented in Shadow of the Demon Lord and develops them further to provide groups with interesting, compelling, and useful companions. This supplement introduces guidelines for hiring and loyalty, and new hireling options to provide clear benefits to the groups who employ them. As with all supplements in the Poisoned Pages series, everything here is considered optional and before you put these rules into play, you should discuss the material with your group to determine if it’s appropriate for your campaigns
Insupposable Instruments
Insupposable Instruments catalogs a host of new items to add to your Shadow of the Demon Lord game. These peripherals can be found in dusty street markets or shady back alley deals, by grave digging or dungeon delving. For ease of use, each listing is separated into a category of item type.
Oddities, Artifacts, and Esoterica
Every interesting thing aims to provide your character with an object, experience, or situation to help make him or her unique. When you would gain an interesting thing, you can use the tables presented in Oddities, Artifacts, and Esoterica in place of those found in Shadow of the Demon Lord. If so, first roll a d20 to determine the type of interesting thing, which then directs you to the table or tables you use to determine the form your interesting thing takes.
Power in a Name
Power in a Name: although well hidden, the existence and power of true names have not been forgotten, and no small eff ort has been made to uncover them as a result. Discovering a true name is no small feat. Researchers might work their whole lives scouring ancient texts, exploring the vaults of forgotten cities, and communing with dark and alien For most, the challenge of tracking down true names proves too great and their eff orts prove fruitless. Player characters, however, venture into places others do not dare, confront horrors beyond the ken of most mortal creatures, and, for their efforts, come across all manner of strange and powerful treasures. Every once in a while, they might stumble upon a true name. Will they dare to speak it aloud?
The Price of Evil
The Price of Evil explores the costs and consequences of characters’ evil actions by expanding on the Corruption rules as presented in Shadow of the Demon Lord. Using the variant rules in this supplement will strengthen the effect of Corruption in the game, building upon the horror of transformation and subversion by demonic influence until the characters become the very monstrosities they fight against.
Riders of the Wind
Riders of the Wind makes it possible to play centaurs in Shadow of the Demon Lord. A more powerful ancestry than those presented in the main rulebook, centaurs use special rules to make them compatible with other characters in the group.
Tooth and Claw
Skinchangers in Shadow of the Demon Lord encompass a variety of shapeshifting creatures,from werewolves to ratmen and everything in between. The animal form a skinchanger adopts can be anything you need it to be without having to alter anything other than how it’s described.
For Game Masters, this approach provides a great deal of freedom, but from the perspective of players, especially those who contract the Skinchanger Curse, a bit more information can be helpful. This entry into the Poisoned Pages series takes a closer look at skinchangers, revealing their secret origins, how they spread their curse, and everything else you need to know to play a skinchanger character. Unleash the beast inside you and bark at the moon!
Uncanny Arcana
In the following pages, you’ll find an optional rule for determining your Power score, which makes it more rewarding to pick up magic use at the expert and master tiers. You’ll also find over 160 all-new talents across dozens of traditions of magic. What better way to reward those who explore arcane secrets than with options to give them even more depth and flexibility?
Unhinge the Mind
Unhinge the Mind expands the existing Insanity and madness rules so they become a considerable part of the game, with far-reaching consequences for those who would confront the monstrous and grotesque. The optional rules presented here increase the amount of Insanity gained, make getting rid of Insanity more difficult, and provide a wide range of new consequences for going mad, including short-term and long-term madness. Using the rules in this Poisoned Pages entry will drive your player characters crazy!
Unwelcome Guests
Unwelcome Guests introduces new parasites for use in your Shadow of the Demon Lord games. The most obvious use of the material contained in this supplement is to infest the player characters with a delightful assortment of disgusting ailments, but you can also use these parasites as weaknesses for foes, hooks for adventures you create, or as set dressing for the places your groups explore.
Vine and Willow
Vine and Willow have lost track of just how old they are; their creator built them during the Empire’s heyday and set them to work in Rûl’s forests, cutting timber and clearing land for settlement. After a century or so, the area where the pair labored became fully settled leaving Vine and Willow to fend for themselves. Both took up magic, and neither forgot their original attachments to the land and to wild places.