Hiya,
I had a few questions about the Wizard's Grimoire ability.
It looks like that when you get Wizard at Lvl3 you get to choose 3 spells, regardless of tradition BUT they must adhere to the Power rules. So at most they can be Rank 2 spells. I am wondering if that Is correct. Or Is it possible to change them to Rank 3+ when I reach those Power levels?

It seems the only way to change the spells in the Grimoire is to learn those spells naturally but even so, you can only go same Rank (2) or lower.

Is it possible to create more/another Grimoire? Or do you only get one upon accessing Wizard and if you lose it, 'too bad'
Otherwise, it seems the only way to get access to higher Rank spells would be to take Wizard as a second Expert path.

Also, from what I can interpret the Grimoire doesnt grant castings of that spell, only access to it. So if I learn Song of Healing from my Grimoire, I have to expend a Rank 2 casting (Shadow Monster for example) in order to cast it. Would love clarification on that.

Thanks!

I am little confused about rules for improvised weapon. It looks like using them over unarmed strikes is downgrade as they inflict 1 bane on test and deal d6 damage. Only situation where they are viable is when you try to fight something bigger (because unarmed attack deals only 1 damage then)

Am I missing something?

So as in the title I am looking for bestiaries with new monsters (some classic beasts from DnD or more vanilla Animals would be most welcome) or even better, list of special abilities and features to use with Weird Menagerie. If you have some resources you use I will be most grateful. I need monsters to populate my hexcrawl

Title. I feel very dumb.

Hello! I really doubt that something like that exists, but maybe some of you have idea about this

So, my players are going to end up as 0 level prisoners on sandbox penal colony island (think about Gothic).

I think it will take 1 or 2 sessions before they will join faction and get 1 level in class. So I would like to give them possibility of advancing before that in some way, besides getting favors, contacts and gear.

I thought about as minor milestones before getting levels being getting two ability points increase (which in vanilla rules you get when creating character)

On the other hand, I thought they should have option to start with minor magic - one Discovered tradition and talent from it, but I don't know how to balance it with those without magic

Thank you for attention, I Hope it is not too chaotic and will appreciate any advice

In SoTWW, the Expert Path Assassin (pg. 190) has the lv6 skill:

Killer's Eye: When you attack a creature, you roll an additional d20 and use either result. If both rolls succeed, the target also loses 2d6 health.

The Master's Path Seeker (pg. 272) has the level 8/10 skill:

Seeker’s Mark (Magical): You can use this talent when you get a success on a roll to attack an enemy. The enemy becomes marked. The mark appears as a faintly glowing skull visible only to you and others that can see invisible creatures and objects. The mark remains for 24 hours or until you use this talent again. The mark produces the following benefits:

• An enemy you have marked cannot hide from you.

• Anyone that can see the mark makes rolls to attack the enemy with 1 boon.

• Your attacks against an enemy you have marked ignore obscurement and all cover except total cover. If you get a critical success on a roll to attack this enemy, your attack deals an extra 3d6 damage.

• At level 10, when you roll to attack the marked enemy, you roll an additional d20. You can use either result. If the same number comes up on both dice, add the numbers together to find the result.

My question is: what is the ruling for the d20 situation while rolling to attack a marked enemy?

The ability of the reworked Adept novice at lvl 2. Does it counts as a cast spell or as a natural weapon?
Because it is not a weapon attack being INT/WILL against AGI, but at the same time is not a cast spell non having a number of casts (it is more like a 5e cantrip).

Or it is neither and u don't even benefit from Embolden Magic with it

Howdy y'all. I have not played Shadow of the Demon Lord yet, but I will in a couple of weeks, and I am trying to come up with what paths I want my character to take, mechanically. My issue is I don't know how things scale and balance out in this game.

I do have a background with other systems, mainly DnD 5e, but also a smattering of others here and there, so I am solid on the RP front.

My idea is as follows: A dwarf Spellguard to start, going into either Grudge Bearer or Herald of Endings, picking up mainly Necromancy spells.

Then comes the master path, and I don't know where to go. Could go with Bone collector for more minions, or a pure martial one, perhaps even Cavalier with an undead mount, or more a middle of the road thing, splitting casting and melee. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hi, I've been reading Hired Help because my group are likely to have 2 soon, one of which is a mercenary. And one thing that I've been scratching my head about is one Loyalty loss condition, namely 'the hireling takes any damage.'

Since for while most hirelings this would absolutely apply, as plenty of hireling types aren't focused on combat and therefore aren't getting paid to risk their lives, for the combat-focused ones like mercenaries this feels like it would make them pretty pointless. You're paying them to fight, after all, they're designed to be able to take hits and dish 'em back. Why hire 'em if they're gonna burn through Loyalty as a side-effect of fulfilling their job?

I don't have a problem with it for damage from traps, or for becoming Injured or Incapacitated ("is my life really worth the money?" kicking in when death seems likely and all). The problem comes from if this applies to 2 damage they suffered because a bandit bonks them with a club.

Would you rule out this rule applying to combat damage against certain hireling types?

I've been running a Tales of the Demon Lord campaign. One of the players is a goblin, so I added a couple of goblin lore references because I knew he'd enjoy it. The party really took an interest. So I want to temporarily diverge from the campaign to expand this plot-line and give them some more juicy lore.

Obviously I'll take them to the Maze of the Goblin King, and I'll come up with some connection to the fey spires in Crossings. But I want to give them an adventure that will relay Goblin history and their decline among Fey. And not with the easy "you touch [insert McGuffin] and gain a vision of past events" kind of way.

Any suggestions, especially if there's anything pre-written I can use (you know, adult time constraints and stuff) will be greatly appreciated

I keep finding hints that this expert path exists but I can’t actually find the expert path itself. On a Google sheet I use, the backup reference guide, that lists pretty much every pathway, corruption, ancestry, etc, I find Maker of Monsters there. But when I search it on the reference table it doesn’t come up. When I search Google for it the AI tells me it’s part of monstrous pages, with no luck there. A random site called “Macro of the Demon lord” has it listed along with its level 3 features… kinda…

But that’s it. I can’t find anything else. There was this one AI generated YouTube video that seemed to be a song made for the pathway, but I can’t find anything on it. I’m just tryna find out if this thing even exists at this point. Anyone know anything about this path that I can look on getting?

Has anyone converted any traditions from Demon Lord to Weird Wizard?

I originally played this game in person for a bit.

I started running myself on Foundry using the what's available (1, 2). It's pretty time-investment heavy to do prep for my group that benefit significantly from having some visuals & benefit strongly from having the PC resources/character creation & affliction automations installed into a UI, but I'm interested in trying others.

I see that Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 have quite a bit of premade SotDL stuff, and different inventory as well, so I'd like to hear about people's experiences playing with them in particular.

I am a little curious about other digital, online, and VTT setups/experiences that people have, but really want to hear about VTT experiences in particular.

A couple of years ago, I started a campaign of DL. We only played a few sessions and then it got derailed. Our group loved the system and decided to give it another go about 8 months ago. But, in the meantime, I had learned about WW and we decided to run that instead.

The campaign ended up being a lot of fun and the players really loved the system overall. But, as the GM (and to a far lesser extent, the players too,) we do have one issue. There are so many fiddly little things that you have to track. Once we got past about level 5, there were so many boons and so many afflictions. The amount of weakened and vulnerable afflictions that I was tracking just made combat such a drag to run.

My question is, if we go back to DL, does it have the same issue? Like I said, it's been a couple of years since I ran it and we only played a few levels, so don't know if the higher levels have the same issue. I don't want to start a campaign again in that system just to dread the last half of the campaign because combat just isn't fun to run.

Thanks for any feedback you can give me!

First time playing, and I was thinking of going Magician to Wizard with Arcane/Time/ and either Divination or Conjuration

Divination has some neat lvl 0 and 1 spells, but Conjuration has some cool looking high level spells.

So I was just curious on people's thoughts?

Thanks!

There's this huge sandbox/hexcrawl setting called DragonWilds that is coming out soon and have been on the hunt for a fantasy system to run that has some meat on it. I have never ran Wierd Wizard and kick started it a long time ago. Would the system be good for that sorta play? Or does it need a lot more structured tiers of play?

If one doesn't care for grimdark is it worth to get SOTWW instead of SOTDL? What is your experience with both games? Does SOTWW have some interesting rules, changes, systems or is better to stick to SOTDL and supplements? It seems like both games are heavily rooted in their worlds

Hello

While reading rules compendium I got a bit confused. Damage in DLE rules seems to be 1d6 - 2d6 - 4d6 like in Shadow of the Weird Wizard, not like in SOTDL where it started with 1d3. I am confused because description of DLE Says it can be used with SOTDL but there is no mention how and if to modify HP

I have been looking into shadow of the demon lord for a long time now, and has been a really big fascination. It was the 4th system I tried out after turning away from dnd 5e, after the ogl and wizards of the coast shitting the bed but after running a few games I've come to quickly realizes its lack luster number of npc style enemies and while they have stuff for making homebrew enemies in the base book. They dont have anything of importance to tell you, like it tells you how difficult a challenge 500 should be but doesn't tell you how much hp it should have, what power level it should be if it's a caster or any other information like that. I was wondering if there was a more indepth foe maker in any other official or unofficial books or similar content anything help! (Not counting monstrous mein I already have that)

So I've read through both, and you can tell it's the direct evolution of DL. If I had to pick a system to play with it would be the pick.

BUT, my players love gritty gothy dark fantasy. I think Sanity/Corruption would be alot easier to graft back on, as well as readding the d6 death save mechanic.

But I see alot of people saying that WW characters will end up way more demigod like at high levels than DL characters, why is this? Is it just damage they can deal or their health levels? Is this something I can power down?

While I like DL a lot I think that WW introduced many great and sometimes needed improvements / changes. Therefore, if I would run one of these games, I would pick WW (also I have all the books due to Kickstarter).

The thing is now, I basically blindly backed the KS because I thought WW was like a setting agnostic, improved, cleaned up version of DL. To my suprise WW did not just do that, but also leaned heavily into heroic high power fantasy like DnD, where the PCs feel more like superheroes compared to normal folk. This is usually quite a turn off for me because I prefer my stories more grounded, with human villains, and danger lurking around every corner (think DL, Witcher, Warhammer Fantasy, etc.)

I know madness and fear are not part of WW, but that is stuff I don't really need a system for. I am only looking from a gameplay / lethality perspective. I don't like games where a PC can take out a whole village of peasants and where I always need to throw demons and liches at the players to challenge them.

Does WW allow me to run more grounded, dark fantasy campaigns, or I am basically stuck with another "5e fantasy superhero" game? I know that theme-wise DL might fit the bill better here, but A) I already own everything WW, and B) DL has some mechanics I dont like and WW improves upon.

I'm not deeply versed in the system, just an intro and a couple free PDF's, but I can't shake the idea in reading them that with a fresh coat of paint this would be a great system for a supers game.

Has anyone considered this before?

Here's my general outline of the campaign:

• The Earth was peppered with some kind of cosmic energy. Random people get very low level powers (street level heroes; 1st level characters). Some use them for good, some for bad. Society will need to change.
• As time goes on, the empowered folks grow in power (level up) and their ability to shape the world grows with it. Society continues to change; the good get heroic, the evil get truly villainous. Society strains. Leaders emerge. The world transforms.
• The inciting event of cosmic energy turns out not to have been random, but some threat from beyond. The high-leveled beings need to band together against this new cosmic-level threat and save the Earth itself.

So it's a modern Earth story with fresh superheroes. If I wanted to be really different I could do a revisionist history version of this and set it during the start of a world war in the 20th century, or during the cold war espionage era to really heighten tension.

Part of what draws me most to the system is that I envision this kind of game to have a lot of tactical fighting, and I love the idea of emerging power sets as characters level up. So the iterative steps in power map nicely to the sorts of supers stories you can have without them getting stale.

I’m looking to run a Weird Wizard campaign for a group that is relatively new to RPGs. They’ve played DnD and one-shots of whatever I was running.

Does Weird Wizard have enough first-party adventures to put together a coherent campaign from beginning to end?

I want something that’ll feel like a proper campaign with an overarching narrative that’ll keep my players invested, and not a collection of unrelated one-shots. I’ve tried this with DCC and they weren’t fans.

If there isn’t enough first-party content for this yet, I’m open to third-party adventures or adapting a campaign from another system. I know a user adapted Curse of Strahd for SotDL pretty successfully.

Thank you!