GM Notes
Shadow of the Demon Lord: A Bag of Dyx

My Notes on Running Tales of the Demon Lord

These are going to be explicitly full of spoilers for the adventures in Tales of the Demon Lord, so proceed with caution. If you're looking for my notes on the game in general, they're over here.

Pregame and Setting

I like Crossings, full stop. It's maybe 6 pages of text and it hits all the key necessary points - neighborhoods, points of interest and a handfull of NPCs. It's compact, efficent, and entirely playable. If pressed, I can come up with only two concerns.

  1. Its connection to the plot seems kind of loose. That's not as bad as it sounds - the adventure had to take place somewhere, and Crossings is definitely somewhere, but it doesn't feel like there's any particular reason it's happening here.
  2. I wish the map was more readable. I have the same problem with the world map - I appreciate the rough aesthetic, but they really sacrificed legibility to acheive it.

In any other game, I would probably talk about throwing in a few other plot threads to help bring the city to life, but practically speaking, an 11 episode adventure path does not leave time to explore. For the time being, I'm ok leaving it as a veneer of a setting.

Havester in Shadow

I made a signifigant error before starting this episode. As I was inexperienced with 0 level material, I was expecting this to be kind of like the funnels I had read about - it would have some amount of lethality scattered along its length, but at least some characters would make it out alive.

Having now gotten most of the way through it, I realize that this adventure is structured more like the first 5 minutes of a horror movie, where a bunch of nameless characters die before the credits, and the movie picks up in the aftermath.

It should have been obvious, but it took my seeing combat in action, even briefly, to understand it. Consider that there are, at core, 4 beats to this adventure:

  1. Follow clues to go to the old Moore House
  2. Be confronted by gang members, who are dangerous. Notably, they do 2d6 damage on attacks, which is a lot on the scale of starting characters. However, they're not monsters, so presumably they won't fight to the death, so the encounter with them may be rough, but hopefully not brutal.
  3. Confront the Organ Filch. This will definitely brutal. +2 with 2 boons on attack means it's going to hit most low level defenses most of the time, and doing 2d6 per hit means some bodies are going to be dropping before this fight is done (esp since it has an ok defense and 30 health). Oh, and it might have some rats helping out.
  4. Confront the Ghoul, who is going to straight up murder anyone who does not abandon Father Gregory and run like hell.

I admit, the ghoul threw me for a loop at first. It's so much nastier than anything else that it seems like a mistake. In any other game, I'd take steps to tone it down, or try to give the players information or resources to give them at least a fighting chance, but I've committed to playing this straight. If they run, some of them might get away, but I will generally be shocked if the ghoul doesn't drop a PC every other round at the very least.

But realizing the horror movie comparison helps it make much more sense. See, beating the filcher feels like the climax. You defeat the monstrosity, getting really beat up in the process, then go down into its lair to rescue the victim - that's the heoric cadence. But in the horror movie version, there is of course and even nastier monster down there who is going to jump scare out and murder everyone.

Recognizing that lead me to realize there's a very good chance that session 2 is going to start with a mostly-to-entirely new group of characters, and I just need to be comfortable with that and - most critically - make sure my players are comfortable with it too. It also explained why the adventure doesn't really feel like its coneected to anything. It's a prelude. It doesn't have to connect, it just has to foreshadow.

I'll follow up when we finish up, but this does lead to the one piece of advice I wish I'd had - speed through the mystery. I went withmy usual instincts, and the msytery part of things was fodder for a lot of great character bits, setting exploration and scenery chewing. That's fun stuff, but now is not the time to start getting attached to these characters. You want to get the characters pointed at the Moore House sooner rather than later, especially if you also did first time chargen during this session.

Yeah, session 2 (well, 1.5) ended in a TPK.

So, the party shifted gears at the outset, and rather than pursue the filcher, they went into the "empty" house, which woudl have been a smart call in most other circumstance. In this case, I suspect that may have been what sealed their doom. If they had already fought the Filcher before they saw the ghoul, odds are good they would have run instantly. However, excepting a little bit of damage from the rats in the house, they were in good shape, and didn't realize how dangerous the ghoul was.

This changed when the Ghoul took down one PC in one shot on the first attack. And even then, they probably could have mostly gotten away, btu they made an effort to save Father Gregory, which was pretty much useless.

The ghoul did not quite kill one PC every round, but that was only because one of the Dwarves had enough health to take a single hit when the ghoul rolled middlingly. Between its accuracy (which frequently triggered its extra damage on 20+) and high defense, the only question was whether or not anyone would be able to run.

Now, that said, if I had been generous, there probably would have been one or two survivors. They abanadoned Father Gregory (who no longer had his holy symbol, so he was a tasty snack) to delay the ghoul, and it wouldn't have hunted too far after them. However, the decision to have the Organ Filcher come back (which was predicated on its very high perception meaning the party's sneaking had never fooled it) pretty much cemented things. I feel this was defintiely in the spirit of the game and adventure, but I take responsibility for the decision.

If I had been running this in any other game, I would have:

Actual session 2 went better in that it wasn't a TPK. Just getting one level in definitely improved survivability, but didn't really address the fact that the adventure is kind of designed to screw players over. Given that the hostage they're looking to rescue is more or less trying to get herself killed, there really isn't much of a way that I could see this going well for the players. All the moreso because failing means making a powerful enemy in the city. It worked out well enough to have the party flee the city for a while, since I otherwise have no idea why a city-based party would end up in the ass end of nowhere to deal with a Pig Farmer's problems, but it's going to make things complicated when they go back (which I believe adventure does.)

Session 3 has some fun elemenets, but it's almost a textbook example of an adventure without connective tissue. There's a dungeon, and the reason to go there is that...it's a dungeon. I can forgive a certain amount of this under the auspices of beer & pretzels, but I've had to cheat far too much to make this hang together.

That said, my players are good sports, and are going to at least attempt the dungeon, and given how it's set up, there's a decent chance we're looking at another TPK.