GM Diary: Shadow of the Demon Lord: The Beginning: Colons: Review Edition

Last night tied off the first adventure I ran for my Wednesday night group, which was established to test drive Shadow of the Demon Lord. Our group consisted of four players and one GM (myself), using Roll20 as our medium given the distance between all of us. The adventure took four three hour sessions to complete from start to finish.

The game intrigues me because, well, I kind of like grimdark worlds. In that way, the world of Urth* comes across like the Warhammer Fantasy setting without the heavy doses of self-parody inherent in the latter. You'll find most of the typical fantasy elements with a few tweaks, but it's all fairly familiar to RPG veterans.

*The one part of the setting that merits an immediate grimace.

Character creation is straightforward and takes all of a couple minutes if you know what you're doing, which is good -- it is really, really easy to die as a "level zero" character, which is how everyone starts out. The group ended up being comprised of an extremely hairy goblin who was obsessed with collecting spoons, a dwarf who was more beard than anything else, a clockwork that was approximately centaur-shaped and quite large, and a halfling (not a core race, interestingly enough, compared to the goblin and clockwork) conscript who was turned out of the army with exactly 1 copper piece to his name.

The group enjoyed a bit of consideration as to their origins during the session zero where creation took place, and then dove into the action. I set their game in a fictional (as far as the setting goes, anyway) city on the edge of the Bone Marsh, in the setting's "default" land, the Northern Reaches. That is to say, in the core rulebook, it is the region that receives the most detailed description, a la Faerun's Sword Coast.

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The game does a good job of giving groups an incentive to find work. There is a mechanic for living expenses, which are paid between adventures and are shorthand for how well you intend to live. For a group of down-on-their-luck misfits in a city at the ass-end of nowhere, halfway between a thriving but expensive port city and the Crusader States, it was easy to motivate them into taking a job.

After a courier job where they stole back a bottle of swamp-folk medicine from a mischievous buckawn who appropriated it as its own, the players were entangled in a family dilemma. This turned into a strange conspiracy where decadent nobles ended up being involved in as-yet-mysterious operation to distribute an elixir purportedly able to turn humans into wild and barbaric beastmen.

No, not that one.

The players seemed to have fun, and at the conclusion of the adventure they advanced to level one. In SotDL, this is the point where you select your novice career from among four basic options: magician, priest, rogue, warrior. This spread of fantasy archetypes should surprise you only if you've never heard of the fantasy genre before in your life. As mundane as this sounds, later levels let you earn more classes (or "paths" in SotDL vernacular), and the Expert paths in the core book alone number sixteen alone. The Master paths, selected at 7th level, number sixty-four in the same book.

My group fell into the four classic roles as they played, somewhat predictably if you happened to know the players and what they gravitate to (I have, for over a decade in three of the four cases). The clockwork became a warrior, the goblin a rogue, the dwarf a priest, and the halfling a magician.

In this game, conflict resolution is easy and keeps complexity to a bare minimum. SotDL uses a system of boons and banes that act as d6 modifiers to the result of d20 rolls, and boon/bane dice can cancel each other out. Multiple dice of the same kind apply only their highest result, not the total of all results (so your best result is generally going to be 26 before ability modifiers, no matter how many boons you have).

This is about as complicated as it gets, which I don't know is a good thing for groups accustomed to lots of crunch. SotDL is somewhat less crunchy than even D&D 5E, and I was frequently checking back for things I should be having the players do while scenes played out. Even spell resolutions are easy, in contrast to some fairly complex D&D ones. There are professions, but no weapon proficiencies, no armor proficiencies, and no saving throws. Everything pertinent to your character is derived from your three main attributes (Strength, Agility, Intellect), and every challenge roll is an attribute check of some kind using those three stats.

The game runs very smoothly, and most of your complexity comes in figuring out character builds and managing Corruption and Insanity (assuming you do things to accrue them). I worry a little that the relative lack of crunchiness is a turn-off to my more seasoned players, but so far that isn't the case.

If I were to cite a potential complaint, the small number of novice paths makes veterans not want to pursue similar careers even if they end up having different expert/master path plans. There's precious little that differentiates characters early on, so characters of the same path are nearly identical in all respects unless their ancestry is radically different (a goblin warrior would play differently than a Size 2 clockwork warrior, but not appreciably different than a human warrior). Later levels help out, as you get to pick some defining abilities and training within your path(s), but you might be waiting a while depending how long your early adventures take.

It's fortunate that this group went one each into the four novice paths, so this is probably the ideal scenario. All in all, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes, and playing more sessions of it. It's a fun system, if you don't like rolling dice very much and having a fairly high mortality rate if you do something dumb or make a bad roll.

And, you know. Being corrupted or going insane.