In August 2023 we resurrected two offers featuring Shadow of the Demon Lord, Robert J. Schwalb‘s FRPG of grim heroism against a cosmic destroyer. We revived (for a fourth time!) the May 2017 Shadow of the Demon Lord Bundle. And, from October 2020, Demon Lord Legacies once again added dozens of supplements and rules expansions.
These two revivals promoted the launch of Rob Schwalb’s long-awaited Shadow of the Weird Wizard Kickstarter campaign, which funded a standalone FRPG of exotic fantasy using a new version of the Demon Lord rules. The Weird Wizard campaign launched the day after these revivals, reached its US$30,000 goal in 16 minutes, and wound up around $400K.
In the fast-playing, low-prep Shadow of the Demon Lord, desperate heroes battle strange magic, unhinged cultists, and roaming mobs of undead while humanity’s last great empire slides toward oblivion. If you love Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the Ravenloft and Midnight settings, Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law novels, or heavy metal music, get this revived bundle of DRM-free .PDF ebooks and confront the Void That Hungers – or, as star designer Kenneth Hite describes it, “Pure Spikey Caustic Red-Hot Squirming Deliquescing Rugose Gonna-Bite-Your-Fingers-Off Horned Fetid Monstrous EVIL.”
Shadow designer Rob Schwalb’s long experience on the Wizards of the Coast Dungeons & Dragons design team (both Third and Fifth Editions), as well as his work on A Song of Ice and Fire, Dark Heresy, Numenera, Star Wars Saga Edition, and many other games, shows well in Shadow of the Demon Lord. The game removes time-consuming front-end obstacles to an intense experience. The Gamemaster decides your characters’ starting level; character creation is streamlined and fast (and you can add or change character paths organically during play); an elegant bonus system of Boons and Banes, and a combat round with “fast turns” and “slow turns,” both streamline play. But most important is the inbuilt front-loaded Demon Lord campaign structure.
As Rob explained in a March 2017 YouTube interview with The Brewery, “You know the best part of your fantasy campaign – the one where Orcus is clawing his way out of the Abyss to wreak havoc on the world? Or Asmodeus has finally hatched his nefarious plan, or Tiamat has just hatched all her baby dragons and the world is about to end, and it’s down to your heroes to stop that from happening? You know that really cool part you never get to see because you set it up for level 20, and it’s so far off on the horizon that your group breaks up after two and a half months, and you never ever get there? Demon Lord is the best part of the campaign, dragged kicking and screaming toward the front of the game. So you’re only playing in the coolest parts of your fantasy world. The ‘Demon Lord’ is this umbrella term for whatever awful thing is about to visit your particular setting. So it lets you experience all the horror and wonder that comes from big cosmic devourers, and rains of frogs, and organs coming from the sky, or the sun turning black and poisoning the land.”
1. SHADOW OF THE DEMON LORD
[from May 2017]
Back for a fifth invasion, the May 2017 Shadow of the Demon Lord Bundle had the core rulebook and essential early supplements. If you’re new to the game, start here. There were five titles in this revived offer’s Starter Collection (retail value $41) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete 278-page Shadow of the Demon Lord corebook, the Demon Lord’s Companion, the Uncertain Faith sourcebook of divine magic, and the fine introductory adventure Dark Deeds in Last Hope.
Those who paid more than this revival’s threshold (average) price also got this offer’s entire Bonus Collection with six more delicious gobbets of evil worth an additional $51. What’s in these sourcebooks? The titles speak for themselves: Hunger in the Void, Tombs of the Desolation, A Glorious Death, Terrible Beauty, and Exquisite Agony. Plus, Tales of the Demon Lord is a collection of 11 low-prep adventures across the Northern Reach, and the Demon Lord Screen gives you all the charts you need.
2. DEMON LORD LEGACIES [Oct 2020]
This revived October 2020 Demon Lord Legacies offer added the major expansion Occult Philsophy plus path supplements, new foes, and an unspeakable horde of smaller Monstrous and Poisoned Pages. There were no less than twenty-six titles in this revived offer’s Starter Collection (retail value $41):
- Five Legacies of Shadow that reveal forgotten terrors back to wreak havoc in the land of Rûl: Black Sun Dawn, Curse of the Spider Wood, In the Emperor’s Secret Service, Men of Gog, and Scions of the Betrayer
- Four Paths of Shadow character supplements for warrior, priest, magician, and rogue: Bred for Battle, Called to Serve, In Pursuit of Power, and Natural Born Scoundrels
- 17 Poisoned Pages rules expansions that let you play gnomes, werewolves, centaurs, and fungus-people, and teach you new ways to get corrupted or go insane
This offer’s Bonus Collection added twenty-three more titles worth an additional $73, including the 200-page magic expansion Occult Philosophy, the complete campaign Queen of Gold: Tales of the Pirate Isles, and nearly two dozen Monstrous Pages, a bestiary series with indicative titles like Wretched and Unclean, Foulest Reptiles, Noisome Beasts, and Horrific Parasites. Yum!
Ten percent of each purchase (after gateway fees) of these two Shadow of the Demon Lord revivals went to the charity designated by Demon Lord designer Rob Schwalb, the Wildlife Conservation Society. The goal of WCS is to conserve the world’s largest wild places in 15 priority regions, home to more than 50% of the world’s biodiversity. WCS saves wildlife and wild places worldwide through science, conservation action, education, and inspiring people to value nature.
