Nice review! I've been playing SoTDL for some time, and it really is the system that has all the things that were lacking in dnd for me. As for the 11 sessions per campaign, in the main book it only says about 11 adventures (which can have any lenght the players and GM want to have) not sessions, and in one of the supplement books there are paragon levels which are basically levels past level 10. As for the starting adventure I highly recommend "Darks Deeds In Last Hope" - everyone who has played it says that it's the best adventure written for SoTDL. If you are interested in a full 10 level campaing, there is the "Tales of the Demon Lord".
For those interested, I have a UA-cam series that focuses solely on Shadow of the Demon Lord and Schwalb Entertainment games. Here's a link: ua-cam.com/play/PL2ZvywQHD8vIWL2u4dXHlek6FqRl9akG0.html
Thank you for giving Shadow of the Demon Lord some much appreciated attention! SotDL is one of my favorite TTRPGs. I have run a full 11-session campaign as well as four one-shots besides, and it has never disappointed. My group includes players who have no intention of ever opening a rule book, as well as meticulous character builders and pedantic rules lawyers. SotDL satisfies ALL of them at the same time, which I have only experienced with on other TTRPG. Even at Level 10 (max), the pace of play was never compromised by options paralysis or rules references. My favorite Schwalb quote: "I wanted to make a game that I could run drunk for players who are also drunk, and everyone has a blast." Mission accomplished! yet a very satisfying campaign can be run using only the core rule book. If the myriad materials available on DriveThruRPG are used, this could very easily be your Forever RPG. As long as your group are all adults. For G, PG, or PG-13 groups, I highly recommend Shadow of the Weird Wizard, when it becomes available.
Demon Lord is so much fun. We really admire Schwalb's design. We are just getting to look at Weird Wizard and perhaps can take a look at it on the show in the future.
Great review. I would highly recommend reviewing the playtest of Weird Wizard during the Kickstarter in April. The WW playtest has really tightened up the Demon Lord system and is really more of a Demon Lord 2.0. Lots of changes, but the same mechanical underpinnings. I've been playtesting it and it's a joy to run.
I am immensely enjoying hearing you two dig into how the *mechanics support the fantasy*, and I’m hoping you take a look at some of Free League’s systems like Forbidden Lands that use attributes as resources, pushing rolls, etc. Teos, you were so right: there’s so much to be gained in expanding our knowledge so we can borrow pieces that add to our table.
Awesome to hear. Free League has some incredible design. We will have to see what we can cover over time. Teos had played Aliens, but not the other systems.
Awesome discussion on a TTRPG I’ve heard a lot about. I don’t think I’ll pick this one up, but I’m really interested in Rob’s less horrific remake of the material, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, coming soon! I’m hoping you’ll have an episode on 13th Age at some point. That’s one I really want to try. And though it’s not a super popular game that gets talked about much, I’d love to see you discuss Hero Kids, which was my first TTRPG. It’s basically D&D Jr., and the designer of the game made some interesting choices to make the game have a TTRPG feel while making it playable by really, really young kids (it has absolutely no math, for instance). Thanks as always for the excellent discussion!
Yeah get Rob on the podcast to support his Weird Wizard kickstarter coming up. WW is a low key spiritual successor of the Greyhawk setting and is extremely evocative of an AD&D style of play with modern mechanics. 13th Age 2e is also going to be released this year and I'm sure Rob Heinsoo would love to chat about his design goals and differentiation from 5e.
@@masteringdungeons one of the things about Hero Kids that I found so interesting was the designer’s decision to use opposed rolls for everything in order to keep the players (young kids) active during the monster’s turns. Because if they have to roll armor against each attack, they get to roll more dice. And I think he recognized that rolling dice is the fun part of the game :)
So happy to see this series! It’s way easier to get into new TTRPGs when you have an idea of what you’re getting into beforehand. Thanks for making this video and looking forward to more like this 😄
I really like a lot of SotDL's mechanics, and I cannot seem to stop tinkering with D&D systems. Adding Boons & Banes is easy though. I was surprised to see that Green Ronin's Freeport adventures were converted into SotDL, and it works well! I've run that setting with D&D 3.5, 5e, pathfinder, and want to try it with SotDL.
Thanks for featuring - the parts re: genesis and intention were especially great info. I've just started GMing SotDL without much background and was feeling a little guilty re: all the PC deaths. But all of the players are having a blast despite all the death (and parasite infestations, and rising levels of insanity, and and and) so highly recommend. In terms of level zero adventures, there are a bunch out there as you mentioned, and they are super cheap thanks to the magic of digital publishing. I considered running the level zero adventure in the Queen of Gold campaign, and standalones Dark Deeds in Last Hope and Dead by Dawn. All three seemed good, but I would recommend GMs ask players to bring two PCs to any level zero session because level zeros are super fragile (for good measure, the GM should also pack a few back-up pregens and bake them into the setting so players can take them over if their PCs die).
Thanks for the recommendations! And, agreed on character death. It's really different as players if we know that death is likely. We think back to Dark Sun and how the rules had us make a character tree so we could replace dead characters with another we were excited to play.
12:04 I know it’s a separate topic, but since you touched on the Orc/intelligence issue: what about NPC stat blocks for creatures like orcs? Is it okay for an NPC stat block for an orc to put their int at a 9 or 8, suggesting that orcs trend less intelligent overall? Should we move toward putting all stats at 10 by default and then moving them up or down based on the role they have? Do we imagine that an orc fighter should have the same Int, then, as a human fighter? In other words, the race is really irrelevant to the stats moving forward? What about weapon choices? How far do we go down this road? Should the new monster manual just provide a stat block for a fighter and say, “any race,” with no new orc or goblin stat block? My question doesn’t carry any judgment. It’s an honest question. I’m grappling with the complexity of this issue.
@@masteringdungeons I spent more time thinking about this today, and I wonder if the right answer is a modular humanoid NPC system. Like, “here are some stats for warriors, mages, spies, etc.” “And here are some (ancestries, lineages, species, whatever).” You simply apply the attributes of your given ancestry onto the archetype. So a warrior may have a 9 int and a 15 str, but a lineage doesn’t bring that judgement. A lineage may bring darkvision, or a swim speed, or the ability to live without eating or drinking. But that’s a big, big change for D&D. And it probably means a smaller monster manual. Or at least a fundamentally different one. I’m okay with that, but it requires some thought and probably careful playtesting.
@@wirelesstkd A system like that could work, and I don't know that it would even need much balancing. The problem I see is that you've got either (a) an orc warrior vs elf fighter play very different, but with lots of changes the DM would have to track or (b) it's very easy for the DM to make the changes because the only real difference is cosmetic. But, I also don't have any problem with "all orcs are less intelligent", or "all elves are more dexterous" *especially* if we aren't going to call orc a "race" any more. So for me, both the (a) and (b) solutions would be throwing a lot of effort at something that doesn't really need to be solved. Personally, and I've been saying this for quite a while now, if the problem is that all members of a given species have the same stats, then put a page in the beginning of the Monster Manual explaining how stats just represent an average member. Much like how you can change the HP based on the hit dice, there's nothing stopping you from making a clan of cleverer orcs who have a 12 Int instead (which, mechanically, makes little difference; only their tactics would change), or elves who do focus on strength training (so they do the same attack/damage, but with melee weapons instead of ranged).
Thank you for the review, since I was not familiar with this game. I do wonder why all of a sudden everyone has to tiptoe around certain subjects like horror, gore, slavery, torture etc. This is a fantasy game, nor real life. Just don't surprise your players with a horror scene if they thought they were watching a Disney movie! Real war is hell (from personal experience), but that does not mean I object to it my fantasy RPG. If someone has a particular sensitivity, ask them to speak up, because that can be worked around. But the wholesale removal of all these topics/themes from games, and the general outcry about them seems misplaced. Bad guys do bad things, which creates motivation for the players to stop them. Pick your flavor of RPG and wander around in different worlds from your own! Thanks again gents!
We have seen folks at conventions play the game, and you can see the complete spectrum of reactions. It's good to know what something is up front, so you can make an informed choice.
I'd watch the Penny Arcade SotDL game with Rob to get a better feel of what the game can convey. I'm not sure if it is THE FULL SCHWALB, but it is a LOT OF SCHWALB and not to everyone's taste.
Are people more familiar with real life distances in feet rather than yards? I generally would reserve feet for somewhat smaller measurements like a table, or I guess a room. Anything outdoors I'm going strait to yards which I find far easier to visualize... Though that may have something to do with football fields. It's more or less arbitrary. They could have made up a unit of measurement and only given us a vague idea what it meant. I will say that I do like switching from 5 ft increments to 1 yard ones just because it's simpler. Granted it is easy enough to count by 5's, but it's even easier to count by 1's. And it simplifies things.
Actually I have always found it a little bit odd that the game uses real world units for distance and weight instead of using something lore specific, but kind of vaguely defined.
Teos finished the show and spent some decent amount of time pondering whether it is just him who doesn't grasp yards, having grown up in Colombia and played an entirely different kind of football.
I found the published adventures to be too lethal for my tastes. I tried running at the characters' tier and it was pretty brutal. I like the system, and I get that it's intentionally that hard but not my cuppa.
We appreciate the feedback! It was the strong leader in a recent poll, so we plan to do a few shows covering some other RPGs, and discussing them from the context of D&D, and then we will consider other options (perhaps the DMG, perhaps something else).
@@masteringdungeons If you do review the DMG, I hope you have suggestions for how it could be better organized, as opposed to pointing out how poorly organized it is.
I don't love Corperate branded D&D, I don't love it as a brand and I don't love it as a lifestyle.. WotC has murdered my passion through death by a thousand cuts and now Hasbro get nothing from me. 5e is not even the best D&D game on the market, I'd rather play a dozen OSR games over it or just B/X with a few revisions any day of the week.. Shadow of the Demon Lord is great, it shows how good a game can be when the design doesn't have to revolve around pleasing the sensibilities of every casual and pandering to the one size must fit all lowest common denominator of rpg customer base like WotC seems to think is its core audience is now. It's a much better game than D&D 5e and the setting is better than anything WotC produces. The mechanics are more interesting, the leveling is less broken and it has tighter rules and less rules book sprawl aside from light pdfs that can be added and printed as needed and the lore is really good so there's very little filler, I enjoyed reading the sotdl stuff. It's not for everyone but I find the stuff made to be palatable to everyone is usually pretty plastic and soulless like a Disney theme park ride.. D&D 5e is shallow, SotDl actually reads like it has a bit of a soul and was written with some passion and not being guided by Corperate priorities
Nice review! I've been playing SoTDL for some time, and it really is the system that has all the things that were lacking in dnd for me. As for the 11 sessions per campaign, in the main book it only says about 11 adventures (which can have any lenght the players and GM want to have) not sessions, and in one of the supplement books there are paragon levels which are basically levels past level 10.
As for the starting adventure I highly recommend "Darks Deeds In Last Hope" - everyone who has played it says that it's the best adventure written for SoTDL. If you are interested in a full 10 level campaing, there is the "Tales of the Demon Lord".
Thanks for sharing the insights, especially on the adventures!
For those interested, I have a UA-cam series that focuses solely on Shadow of the Demon Lord and Schwalb Entertainment games. Here's a link: ua-cam.com/play/PL2ZvywQHD8vIWL2u4dXHlek6FqRl9akG0.html
Thank you!
Thank you for giving Shadow of the Demon Lord some much appreciated attention!
SotDL is one of my favorite TTRPGs. I have run a full 11-session campaign as well as four one-shots besides, and it has never disappointed. My group includes players who have no intention of ever opening a rule book, as well as meticulous character builders and pedantic rules lawyers. SotDL satisfies ALL of them at the same time, which I have only experienced with on other TTRPG. Even at Level 10 (max), the pace of play was never compromised by options paralysis or rules references.
My favorite Schwalb quote: "I wanted to make a game that I could run drunk for players who are also drunk, and everyone has a blast." Mission accomplished! yet a very satisfying campaign can be run using only the core rule book. If the myriad materials available on DriveThruRPG are used, this could very easily be your Forever RPG. As long as your group are all adults. For G, PG, or PG-13 groups, I highly recommend Shadow of the Weird Wizard, when it becomes available.
Demon Lord is so much fun. We really admire Schwalb's design. We are just getting to look at Weird Wizard and perhaps can take a look at it on the show in the future.
Great review. I would highly recommend reviewing the playtest of Weird Wizard during the Kickstarter in April. The WW playtest has really tightened up the Demon Lord system and is really more of a Demon Lord 2.0. Lots of changes, but the same mechanical underpinnings. I've been playtesting it and it's a joy to run.
We can't wait to see Weird Wizard. Shawn and Teos both played an early demo and really enjoyed it.
I am immensely enjoying hearing you two dig into how the *mechanics support the fantasy*, and I’m hoping you take a look at some of Free League’s systems like Forbidden Lands that use attributes as resources, pushing rolls, etc. Teos, you were so right: there’s so much to be gained in expanding our knowledge so we can borrow pieces that add to our table.
Awesome to hear. Free League has some incredible design. We will have to see what we can cover over time. Teos had played Aliens, but not the other systems.
Yards are also useful for metric system users, since one yard is pretty close to a metre.
Teos was thinking of backyards, and apologizes for the mistake. Also, Scotland Yards.
Came here to say this. 😄
Awesome discussion on a TTRPG I’ve heard a lot about. I don’t think I’ll pick this one up, but I’m really interested in Rob’s less horrific remake of the material, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, coming soon!
I’m hoping you’ll have an episode on 13th Age at some point. That’s one I really want to try.
And though it’s not a super popular game that gets talked about much, I’d love to see you discuss Hero Kids, which was my first TTRPG. It’s basically D&D Jr., and the designer of the game made some interesting choices to make the game have a TTRPG feel while making it playable by really, really young kids (it has absolutely no math, for instance).
Thanks as always for the excellent discussion!
Yeah get Rob on the podcast to support his Weird Wizard kickstarter coming up. WW is a low key spiritual successor of the Greyhawk setting and is extremely evocative of an AD&D style of play with modern mechanics.
13th Age 2e is also going to be released this year and I'm sure Rob Heinsoo would love to chat about his design goals and differentiation from 5e.
Hero Kids is awesome! And 13th Age is superb. Rob Heinsoo and Rob Schwalb... two amazing Robs!
@@masteringdungeons one of the things about Hero Kids that I found so interesting was the designer’s decision to use opposed rolls for everything in order to keep the players (young kids) active during the monster’s turns. Because if they have to roll armor against each attack, they get to roll more dice. And I think he recognized that rolling dice is the fun part of the game :)
@@wirelesstkd Really smart! Kids sure need things to do. If they start building dice towers, time to engage them or take a break! :-)
So happy to see this series! It’s way easier to get into new TTRPGs when you have an idea of what you’re getting into beforehand. Thanks for making this video and looking forward to more like this 😄
Thanks so much for the feedback!
Do 13th age next! There's so little 13th age content on youtube, I'd love to see you cover it.
It's on our list. Such a great RPG!
I really like a lot of SotDL's mechanics, and I cannot seem to stop tinkering with D&D systems. Adding Boons & Banes is easy though.
I was surprised to see that Green Ronin's Freeport adventures were converted into SotDL, and it works well!
I've run that setting with D&D 3.5, 5e, pathfinder, and want to try it with SotDL.
Demon Lord is an awesome system to borrow ideas from, for sure!
Thanks for featuring - the parts re: genesis and intention were especially great info. I've just started GMing SotDL without much background and was feeling a little guilty re: all the PC deaths. But all of the players are having a blast despite all the death (and parasite infestations, and rising levels of insanity, and and and) so highly recommend.
In terms of level zero adventures, there are a bunch out there as you mentioned, and they are super cheap thanks to the magic of digital publishing. I considered running the level zero adventure in the Queen of Gold campaign, and standalones Dark Deeds in Last Hope and Dead by Dawn. All three seemed good, but I would recommend GMs ask players to bring two PCs to any level zero session because level zeros are super fragile (for good measure, the GM should also pack a few back-up pregens and bake them into the setting so players can take them over if their PCs die).
Thanks for the recommendations! And, agreed on character death. It's really different as players if we know that death is likely. We think back to Dark Sun and how the rules had us make a character tree so we could replace dead characters with another we were excited to play.
"The average campaign is something like 7 sessions"
> Looks with trepidation at current campaign which is about to have Session 7 this week
Please enjoy your final session. You are welcome. ;-)
@@masteringdungeons Thanks. Maybe the next campaign should be SoTDL...
12:04 I know it’s a separate topic, but since you touched on the Orc/intelligence issue: what about NPC stat blocks for creatures like orcs? Is it okay for an NPC stat block for an orc to put their int at a 9 or 8, suggesting that orcs trend less intelligent overall?
Should we move toward putting all stats at 10 by default and then moving them up or down based on the role they have? Do we imagine that an orc fighter should have the same Int, then, as a human fighter? In other words, the race is really irrelevant to the stats moving forward?
What about weapon choices? How far do we go down this road? Should the new monster manual just provide a stat block for a fighter and say, “any race,” with no new orc or goblin stat block?
My question doesn’t carry any judgment. It’s an honest question. I’m grappling with the complexity of this issue.
It's a great question. Thinking through the topic has been helpful for us, and our opinions continue to evolve over time.
@@masteringdungeons I spent more time thinking about this today, and I wonder if the right answer is a modular humanoid NPC system. Like, “here are some stats for warriors, mages, spies, etc.”
“And here are some (ancestries, lineages, species, whatever).”
You simply apply the attributes of your given ancestry onto the archetype. So a warrior may have a 9 int and a 15 str, but a lineage doesn’t bring that judgement. A lineage may bring darkvision, or a swim speed, or the ability to live without eating or drinking.
But that’s a big, big change for D&D. And it probably means a smaller monster manual. Or at least a fundamentally different one.
I’m okay with that, but it requires some thought and probably careful playtesting.
@@wirelesstkd A system like that could work, and I don't know that it would even need much balancing. The problem I see is that you've got either (a) an orc warrior vs elf fighter play very different, but with lots of changes the DM would have to track or (b) it's very easy for the DM to make the changes because the only real difference is cosmetic.
But, I also don't have any problem with "all orcs are less intelligent", or "all elves are more dexterous" *especially* if we aren't going to call orc a "race" any more. So for me, both the (a) and (b) solutions would be throwing a lot of effort at something that doesn't really need to be solved.
Personally, and I've been saying this for quite a while now, if the problem is that all members of a given species have the same stats, then put a page in the beginning of the Monster Manual explaining how stats just represent an average member. Much like how you can change the HP based on the hit dice, there's nothing stopping you from making a clan of cleverer orcs who have a 12 Int instead (which, mechanically, makes little difference; only their tactics would change), or elves who do focus on strength training (so they do the same attack/damage, but with melee weapons instead of ranged).
Thanks for the discussion.
You are welcome!
I'm looking forward to Shadow of the Weird Wizard. I'd love a version of this game that isn't quite so grimdark where the world isn't ending.
It's nice to have that alternative. And we are curious if that version will have any design innovations!
Thank you for the review, since I was not familiar with this game. I do wonder why all of a sudden everyone has to tiptoe around certain subjects like horror, gore, slavery, torture etc. This is a fantasy game, nor real life. Just don't surprise your players with a horror scene if they thought they were watching a Disney movie! Real war is hell (from personal experience), but that does not mean I object to it my fantasy RPG. If someone has a particular sensitivity, ask them to speak up, because that can be worked around. But the wholesale removal of all these topics/themes from games, and the general outcry about them seems misplaced. Bad guys do bad things, which creates motivation for the players to stop them. Pick your flavor of RPG and wander around in different worlds from your own! Thanks again gents!
We have seen folks at conventions play the game, and you can see the complete spectrum of reactions. It's good to know what something is up front, so you can make an informed choice.
I'd watch the Penny Arcade SotDL game with Rob to get a better feel of what the game can convey. I'm not sure if it is THE FULL SCHWALB, but it is a LOT OF SCHWALB and not to everyone's taste.
Are people more familiar with real life distances in feet rather than yards? I generally would reserve feet for somewhat smaller measurements like a table, or I guess a room. Anything outdoors I'm going strait to yards which I find far easier to visualize... Though that may have something to do with football fields.
It's more or less arbitrary. They could have made up a unit of measurement and only given us a vague idea what it meant. I will say that I do like switching from 5 ft increments to 1 yard ones just because it's simpler. Granted it is easy enough to count by 5's, but it's even easier to count by 1's. And it simplifies things.
Actually I have always found it a little bit odd that the game uses real world units for distance and weight instead of using something lore specific, but kind of vaguely defined.
Teos finished the show and spent some decent amount of time pondering whether it is just him who doesn't grasp yards, having grown up in Colombia and played an entirely different kind of football.
I found the published adventures to be too lethal for my tastes. I tried running at the characters' tier and it was pretty brutal. I like the system, and I get that it's intentionally that hard but not my cuppa.
They do have high lethality! We would likely dial it down a bit. We suspect Weird Wizard will do that as well.
Good show, but I hope reviewing other game systems isn't going to be an every week thing. Once a month would be great.
We appreciate the feedback! It was the strong leader in a recent poll, so we plan to do a few shows covering some other RPGs, and discussing them from the context of D&D, and then we will consider other options (perhaps the DMG, perhaps something else).
@@masteringdungeons Hopefully there will be enough One DnD playtest material to break this up.
@@masteringdungeons If you do review the DMG, I hope you have suggestions for how it could be better organized, as opposed to pointing out how poorly organized it is.
Not a single "HAIL SATAN!" or "HAIL" in this podcast.... I am dissapoint...
We were thinking it the entire time!
I don't love Corperate branded D&D, I don't love it as a brand and I don't love it as a lifestyle.. WotC has murdered my passion through death by a thousand cuts and now Hasbro get nothing from me. 5e is not even the best D&D game on the market, I'd rather play a dozen OSR games over it or just B/X with a few revisions any day of the week.. Shadow of the Demon Lord is great, it shows how good a game can be when the design doesn't have to revolve around pleasing the sensibilities of every casual and pandering to the one size must fit all lowest common denominator of rpg customer base like WotC seems to think is its core audience is now. It's a much better game than D&D 5e and the setting is better than anything WotC produces. The mechanics are more interesting, the leveling is less broken and it has tighter rules and less rules book sprawl aside from light pdfs that can be added and printed as needed and the lore is really good so there's very little filler, I enjoyed reading the sotdl stuff. It's not for everyone but I find the stuff made to be palatable to everyone is usually pretty plastic and soulless like a Disney theme park ride.. D&D 5e is shallow, SotDl actually reads like it has a bit of a soul and was written with some passion and not being guided by Corperate priorities
We obviously like 5E's design, but we are very glad you enjoy Shadow of the Demon Lord!