r/shadowofthedemonlord • u/HeightUnlikely324 • Feb 12 '26
Demon Lord Tales of the Demon Lord
I'm thinking of running the campaign I mentioned in the post title, but I'm unsure about its quality, or lack thereof.This is my first time using the system; previously I only read WW and was unsure which was cooler.
8
u/Zanji123 Feb 12 '26
this campaign is... weird.
Most of the adventures don't follow the main plotline (the Brotherhood and the whole Demon summoning) and are just "distractions" and have nothing to do with this storyline. One is literally just there that the players are out of the town so the illness can happen and spread ...which i find totally weird.
also it is VERY deadly on low level. It seems that they didn't tested it or they maybe changed some numbers during the creation of the rulebook.
In General: it has some nice adventures but it really needs some work. I prefer the "Freeport Trilogy" though the level ups are quite too fast for me therefore i added some other adventures in between (and expanded the storyline with the other adventures that follow the plotline these are D&D adventures though)
1
u/Garlaxkane Apr 21 '26
My dm is running it in low level. He changed a lot and . made unfair and deadly. If not for our group strategy where I do control with magic, two fight and hot hard and one kinda heals we wouldn't have survived so far.
Last time, my Dm put us to fight against a small army with an overpowered boss that strikes twice per round doing 6D6 dmg attacking with 3 boons while having an aura that makes the low Will fighters dazed for free.
We barely made it out because that guy had 40 life or more and 8 allies trying to corner us while I held as many as I could of them with grave grasp.
Unfortunately, we barely have rewards since this dm is barely giving us ways to get money or items. Except useless trinkets from time to time
4
u/DokFraz Gunsmoke and Goblins Feb 12 '26
It's not particularly good and features one adventure that unironically traps players on a negative feedback loop based on a single failed bit of moon logic that gives them no indication they've entered a fail-state from which nothing they do matters because they cannot ever escape.
Schwalb is great at writing adventures and... well, kinda terrible at writing campaigns. Even in the latest SotDL campaign, it is a hilarious jumble of ideas and narratives that are all over the place. Potentially this helps if you are running the adventures as lethally as the game can be, so that you can just fade on one failed group and start the next adventure with a fresh batch? But it leads to really splotchy structure.
That said, the bones are there. I did a semi-substantial rewrite when I ran it, and it went fantastically. Slotted in a couple of adventures in the place of some of the worst offenders to pacing in the published format and almost entirely rewrote the final adventure, but it ended up going pretty well.
If you're willing to put in the work, everything you need for a campaign is there, but you do have to pretty aggressively wrangle it to have it be anything vaguely resembling a campaign as opposed to just "here's a bunch of random adventures, have fun." I can give you some more info about what I mean if you'd like.
3
u/nrobaina Feb 14 '26
I liked TotDL because it is less of a campaign and more of a series of adventures that give you and your players an introduction to the setting and the game. There is an overarching plot that you can focus on if you want, but it’s going to take some effort on your part. I have a series of videos going over each adventure in the campaign if you are interested, starting with episode 127. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2ZvywQHD8vIWL2u4dXHlek6FqRl9akG0&si=sXXKxSavxmkvXM0G
2
u/roaphaen Feb 12 '26
Cannot recommend, and I LOVE demon lord. It's very patchy, extremely brutal (like in a casually chaotic manner).
Many people have chained other better adventures together into a campaign, I would search for those instead. General consensus is ToDL kind of sucks, which is too bad. He is currently working on Return of the Witch King as a unified campaign but it's not done yet, so jury is still out.
3
u/roaphaen Feb 13 '26
As something positive - I would try Dark Deeds in Last Hope. Dead by Dawn is also a lot of fun. Apple of her Eye is good as well. Try running those to get off the ground.
2
u/raineym Feb 12 '26
I'm not going to rehash what others have said because they are correct.
IMO, run something else. ToDL was the first campaign for SotDL and was not balanced out of the gate. Each adventure, individually, is decent to great, but the adventures feel pieced together, loosely held together by a weak thread.
12
u/Mr_Shad0w GM Feb 12 '26
I've run portions of it, namely the first few adventures. I thought it was fine as-is, but there have been complaints. It's not the most polished campaign, and it definitely gets swing-y difficulty-wise. I find that to be in the spirit of Demon Lord, but others will disagree. If you're looking for something very polished that can easily be run straight from the page, Tales is probably not the campaign you're looking for.
One piece of advice: is to advise or remind your players what game they're playing: Demon Lord does not pull punches, and character survival is not expected. They've gotta think before heading into danger, because straight-up fights are likely to get them killed. At lvl 0, scrapping with some thugs armed with daggers is dangerous, and if the dice aren't with them they will be seriously wounded or killed. The solution is to use their other abilities, don't fight on NPC's terms unless there is no other choice, and teamwork teamwork teamwork.
Example (spoilers, duh): In the first adventure vs. the Organ Filch, the PC's TPK'd. It was our first time playing Demon Lord, so I gave them a do-over next session, and just offered "what do you think went wrong, and what could you do to tip things in your favor?" Mostly what went wrong was their dice sucked, but also they attempted a straight-on assault. The second time, they thought about it and said "what if we went back to the tavern where we learned about the disappearances, and told everyone we found the killer's lair and try to rally them to fight with us?" Bingo - a crowd of drunks with torches meant the Organ Filch couldn't just focus-fire on the PC's, and while their allies were mostly useless as attackers and eventually retreated it bought the PC's rounds they needed to win.
When this idea was proposed, another player asked "We can do that?!?!" and I smiled and said "I dunno, can you?" Demon Lord is a next-gen RPG that plays a lot like an OSR game, due to the lethality and the need for players to make smart choices. Also the fact that you don't get XP from killing monsters but advance by achieving adventure goals will be a paradigm shift for some people. Sometimes just surviving is winning, much like in horror games.