|
I have to say at first I thought this was just a SUPER GRIM DARK GRITTY FANTASY YOU WILL DIE BECAUSE YOU START AS A SHITFARMER AND MAYBE FIND A GOOD SWORD kinda thing and wasn't really into it. After reading good reviews (and this thread) I saw my first impression was wrong and this seems right up my group's alley. I just got the bundle and boy is this a solid world after all. I love the little world building snippets in things that they sprinkle around.
|
#
¿
May 26, 2017 05:01
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:27 |
|
|
Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Ok, I bought the Bundle of Holding offer and have been slowly working my way through the books, and honestly Hunger in the Void is probably mandatory if you're going to put any sort of horror aspect into your SotDL into your game. It takes the rather antiseptic "dark forces" vibe from the core book and makes it nice and visceral. Ugh. Yea that book really nails the cosmic horrors elements, the core book doesn't really do enough to drive in 'these are horrific alien beings that feed on misery' stuff
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2017 19:43
|
|
|
FunkMonkey posted:I started my campaign with rank 0 characters, and I actually think it's the opposite. When you don't have a class to frame your concept around, you're forced to distinguish your character by their personality and history - what motivates them as people. They then use their path choices to accentuate and develop the core character that's there. By forcing my players to put their identity before their role, I think they've developed in much more interesting ways that distinguish them. Same experience here, both I and a friend wanted to play kinda magicy characters but he wanted to be more a warmage and I was more straight up wiz-biz. We started at rank 0 and we were able to really have a lot of fun distinguishing ourselves. Like my dude saw magic as this all mighty scientific concept that must be respected and he was just all 'nah man this is a tool, if you wanna jerk off over magic that's cool but you don't see me going on rants about how cool swords or helmets are'. By the time we were able to actually go down our proper concept paths we had both had a lot of time establishing different worldviews even if there is metagame overlap in our characters. Level 0 can be deadly and a little annoying at times but I'd call it a worthwhile starting point for a proper campaign.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2017 19:35
|
|
|
yea Shadow has to be a love letter to classic Warhammer Fantasy RPG in a lot of ways. Replace the faiths with Warhammer stuff, prune a couple races, rejigger the magic schools and bam you're just Warhammerin it up.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2017 23:17
|
|
|
Yea Mists of Akuma isn't a great Nioh tabletop but if your group likes 5e it'll scratch that itch pretty drat well.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2017 20:38
|
|
|
Yea I'd argue one of Shadow's biggest strengths is that it absolutely allows you to be an 'evil' party while still keeping the line of 'but there's some evil that's just loving EVIL that we do not cross into'. Obviously this comes with the usual disclaimer of 'everyone is ok with it and understands the difference between 'evil heroes' and 'shock characters' so let's not be dicks ok?' But yea, if it seems like they'd like to be lesser evil forces in the world fighting against a greater evil...I say lean into it? Maybe the Harvesters reach out to them for 'help' in a way that escalates things. Give them the choice of following that path further or realizing they're on a bad track and stepping off and all.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2017 22:25
|
|
|
FunkMonkey posted:My party deliberately threw in with the primary villain of my campaign (a Death Lord in the Desolation) because dammit they had an undead apocalypse to halt and the Crusaders have been unreliable assholes the whole time they've come to this desert shithole. They're basically hoping that if they just help him put down his rivals trying to undermine him and the good guys in the way of his ambition he'll be sufficiently satisfied to stop. It's completely thrown my planned story out the window and I've had to compensate on the fly. My group wound up doing nearly exactly the same. They were dealing with a fae cult who were basically worshipping a small 'family' of elves as living gods and all and wound up teaming up with the head elf purely because as much of a creepy and evil piece of poo poo he was he was A) crystal clear in acknowledging the demons as the real danger and B) super honest and upfront about his view being 'yea I'll probably manipulate and torture you for my own jollies but at least it's in exchange for keeping you safer than most'. Shadow of the Demon Lord works best when it's a loose alliance of genuinely terrible people fighting an unknowable force of pure evil.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2017 05:16
|
|
|
did I completely miss an engineering class or is it in a book I didn't pick up because I need that in my life.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2017 21:08
|
|
|
Infinity Gaia posted:On the other hand, it seems like all my players are being mages or battlemages of some variety. It's making it really hard to design low level encounters that won't either insta-gib them or get insta-gibbed by them! yea this is what happened with my group in our campaign. Almost all of us are some kinda magicy path and I can feel the annoyance from the GM trying to get a combat that won't instantly shred us or has the risk of just exploding if we magic it too fast, so most of our stuff has been social/mystery encounters.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2017 21:12
|
|
|
yea the game is extremely good and very easy to just edit around the edgy poo poo to stick to more basic body horror and all. My group's a bunch of horror nerds so we have no issue ignoring/retooling 'your butt explodes in a bunch of roaches and they all have gross drippy eye holes for eyes and they fly directly into the nearest dick they can find' stuff into more general 'your back has grown a disgusting flesh-hive of clearly infernal gnats and beetles that fly in and out'. "A centipede crawls out your dick every time you piss" is maybe the funniest thing I've read in these books though. I can't even be mad that's just hilarious.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2018 04:35
|
|
|
Yea maybe they're grafting minotaur bits onto themselves, but it's like 90% the human bits so it's just a lady with one weirdly beefy arm
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2018 15:36
|
|
|
Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Couldn't they just tie him down? Why'd they have to cut the arms and legs off? It's still torturous because like, he's *really* tired. the real twist is the minotaur is into some DEEPLY hosed up stuff and the party is kinkshaming him.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2018 15:58
|
|
|
Just for the other side of things, let's talk about stuff we like in Shadow's setting, because I do think they do a good job when not being edgelords. The Hell book, for example, is solid. There's some dumb stuff (a literal ocean of blood cannot be invoked without the Metalocolypse joke coming to ming, I'm sorry), but they have some clever ideas. I really like them explicitly saying in SotDL world 'Angels' are absolutely demons who's job it is to prey on the overly pious and superior to tempt them to do evil for their faith. That's super on brand and makes for a good twist to pull in an adventure and all. They also did a good job making Hell properly tempting. Yea you lose your soul and probably will explode in maggots or whatever, but it's also the only actual reliable way for Johnny Peasant to get a lot of money/power quickly in a hosed up world. It lends itself to both crazy infernal enemies and fallen mortals who may have had good intents or just been victims of Hell's games. Also I like that The Devil is just kinda aloof and withdrawn in his crazy skull tower and most of the cults around him are just the other major players trying to get more power using his name and all.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2018 16:14
|
|
|
yea my group does the 'roll with veto power' set up and it's led to fun things. Random stuff can lead to unexpected and fun things but also sometimes you get a result that sucks and it'd be really weird to force someone to play a thing they dislike!
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2018 22:45
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:27 |
|
|
Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:This is actually a thought I had that makes me think twice before backing - it's already so unlikely you're going to use a given core book spell in your campaign that I don't feel a great desire for a book of even more spells that are effectively only given by DM fiat. The spells I saw during playtesting seemed awesome and thematic, but I doubt I'd end up using more than a few at the table. I was hoping he was going to make this the core book for levels 10-20. If it's just a list of optional, add-on items, exclusively for spellcasting paths, it seems a bit niche for the $20 cost. Yea I may not use it much since, thankfully unlike D&D no matter how many piles of spells they add magic has a very static state of being pretty rare and more designed for DM/player planning for what they want. I'll still probably back just to have the options and support the game.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 13, 2018 04:41
|
|