Tales of the Demon Lord - review

Review by ShyberKryst

Shadow of the Demon Lord is a new dark fantasy role-playing game created by Robert Schwalb as part of a successful Kickstarter campaign that launched in March 2015. As part of that same Kickstarter, Tales of the Demon Lord was given to all backers at the $48 level and above. If you missed out on the Kickstarter campaign, you can still purchase Tales of the Demon Lord as a 49-page PDF from Schwalb Entertainment for $10.00. In addition to the PDF, a softcover book can be purchased through DriveThruRPG for $19.99.

Tales of the Demon Lord is the first campaign written for the Shadow of the Demon Lord role-playing game. The campaign consists of a loosely connected series of 11 short adventures which take place in and around the city of Crossings in the Northern Reach. Tales of the Demon Lord is designed for the players to start with new characters who level up after each short adventure. The characters must gain power quickly in order to rise to the challenge of saving Urth from the world-devouring being known only as The Demon Lord.

Tales of the Demon Lord is a visually appealing work. There are 7 pieces of unique art attributed to Jack Kaiser which are evocative of the dark setting. The two-column layout is clean and the stat blocks are clear and concise. The choice of blood red and black as the primary colors is an obvious one, but the unique font for the chapter headings is a nice touch. You can see the same font on the cover shown above. The pages have a gray parchment appearance and the watermark behind the chapter and page numbers is a pentagram (gasp)!

A short introduction provides the gamemaster a synopsis of the main campaign plot and provides details of an evil artifact central to the story: the Eye of the Demon Lord. Chapter 1 describes the city of Crossings: its government, districts, and key NPCs. A small, half-page map of the city is provided with 19 keyed locations. This chapter provides a lot of detail and flavor to the city that is central to the campaign. Reading about the various personalities in Crossings and their motivations, one can envision plenty of political intrigue and opportunities for role-playing. This city could easily be dropped into any campaign, even if you are playing a completely different game system.

Chapters 2 through 12 contain the 11 short adventures that comprise the campaign.  The adventures are sufficiently dark in tone; some are even horrific. For example, one scenario involves saving an aristocratic damsel in distress, only to see her butchered by her cultist lover in order to free the demon inside of her! Another adventure tasks the players with exploring a hidden temple with the goal of stopping a plague that causes the dead to rise as demon-possessed zombies.

The adventures have plenty of variety to keep things interesting. There is a nice mix of role-playing, investigation, exploration, and combat. About half the scenarios take place in Crossings with the rest taking place in the surrounding lands. The adventures are only loosely connected, so a clever gamemaster could jumble the order, or even delete some adventures, and not affect the main campaign plot. However, the difficulty level does increase gradually throughout the campaign, so you have to keep that in mind if you play some of these scenarios out of order. 

Most of the adventures in Tales of the Demon Lord work well on their own without the over-arching metaplot. As a result, if you aren't interested in committing to the entire campaign, a gamemaster could pick out a favorite adventure or two and drop them into his existing campaign or run a scenario as a one-shot with a group of players new to the Shadow of the Demon Lord role-playing game.

My only disappointment with Tales of the Demon Lord is the brevity of the adventures. Four of the scenarios are only 2 pages in length and the rest are 4 pages, with the exception of the final adventure which is 5 pages long. Keep in mind these page counts include the artwork, maps, and stat blocks, so the shortest adventures often contain only a handful of encounters. Even the longer, 4-page scenarios may only have one location to explore with 9 to 16 keyed encounters. That being said, Tales is still a good value since purchasing the PDF will give you 11 mini-adventures for less than one dollar each. 

The scale of the scenarios in Tales of the Demon Lord is a clear design choice by Schwalb as evidenced by the product description:

"Plays Fast: Stories (adventures) are playable in one game session lasting from 3 to 5 hours. Stories are short, covering about one page per hour of expected play. You can also complete a typical campaign (a string of 11 connected adventures) in 11 game sessions. The core book has rules for playing characters up to level 10. This means that if you meet once a week for a 4-hour session each time, you can complete your campaign in about two months. That’s six campaigns a year!The benefit of short campaigns is that the game lets you tell more stories, create more characters, and experience more of the game's options. As a player, you’re not locked into one character for one year or longer. You can have several. And, as a Game Master, it is possible to run a complete campaign in a compressed time span. Best of all, the campaign brevity gives other interested members of the group a chance to become the Game Master.
Little Preparation: You can make a starting character in about 5 minutes. You make one big choice, note the information on your character sheet, and you’re ready to go. And a Game Master can prepare for a game in the time it takes to read a couple of pages of text."

Staying true to the vision stated above, this minimalist approach to adventure design is also featured in the other adventures that I have read for Shadow of the Demon Lord. You won't find large, multi-level dungeons or "read aloud" text boxes, but you will get random encounter tables in Tales. And if you like new creatures, you will find four variations of an excavating insectoid, an iron titan, and a mob of animated corpses described in the appendix.  The rest of the creature stats needed to run the campaign are detailed in Shadow of the Demon Lord core rules.

The maps in Tales of the Demon Lord are noteworthy. They are meticulously hand-drawn and hand-lettered by Cecil Howe with a rough, back-of-the-hide aesthetic. Unfortunately, the maps are often too small and sometimes difficult to read; most are just one quarter page or less. The interior maps don't include a scale or grid lines; however, these maps are works of art on their own and grid lines would definitely detract from their appearance. And where else can you get a published map with blood splatter?

In summary, Tales of the Demon Lord is well-crafted, cleverly written, and contains a variety of interesting, albeit short, adventures. The reasonable price ($10) of the PDF from Schwalb Entertainment makes it a good value for a short campaign. Tales is must-own if you play Shadow of the Demon Lord, and highly recommended if you're a fan of dark fantasy and are looking for some horror-themed story ideas to use in your campaign. With a little effort, these scenarios could easily be converted to your favorite game system.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.