Famed game designer Robert J. Schwalb is hoping to raise $30,000 through Kickstarter to help fund the release of his “dark fantasy” RPG Shadow of the Demon Lord.
When it comes to fantasy worlds, the ones I like best are the one’s that I’d never want to actually visit in real life. You know the sort; they’re gross, dingy and infested with vicious monsters that would happily rip you limb from limb just for the fun of it. Put more shortly, I’m talking about the sort of world featured in Robert J. Schwalb’s new tabletop RPG Shadow of the Demon Lord. Set in a world “sliding toward oblivion,” it’s Scwalb’s desire to give gamers a new land of “dark fantasy” to inhabit and adventure in.
Toward that end, Schwalb has just recently launched a Kickstarter aimed at turning his new game into an actual product that gamers can purchase and play. The game itself will place a big focus on ease of use, giving GM’s heavy influence over the progress of events along with tools and systems that players can use to create characters fast, progress through quests quickly and advance their characters at a steady and dependable rate. “Your character develops with the story,” said the Kickstarter’s description. “Each time your group completes an adventure, the group’s level increases. Each increase adds cool stuff to your character. You might learn spells, a trick with a weapon, or some thing else that might help you survive.” Individual adventures are being designed to last between 3 and 5 hours.
Schwalb aims to release the game’s core rules as a 128-page soft-cover book alongside a PDF edition. To do this, he’s asking contributors to help him raise $30,000, a sum that shouldn’t prove to be much of a problem when you consider that generous gamers have already given more than $27,000. With 29 days left to go, we feel safe in saying Shadow of the Demon Lord is probably going to make it. The bigger question is how far past its initial goal the campaign will go. While Schwalb is waiting for full-funding to unveil his stretch goals, he’s already indicated that extra money would be funneled into things like paying famous game makers to craft additional adventure modules. Scwhalb himself, of course, is well-known in the tabletop community for his work on a variety of games including Dungeons & Dragons, A Song of Ice and Fire and Warhammer. Check out Shadow of the Demon Lord yourself and let us know what you think.
Source: Kickstarter
