OR: SHADOW OF THE TOTALLY DERANGED DELUSIONAL BATSHIT INSANO BONKERS CRAZY NUTCASE CRACKHEAD PSYCHOTIC LUNATIC MANIAC WIZARD AND HIS CRAZED JIHAD AGAINST THE SANIST MACHINATIONS OF THE GANGSTER COMPUTER GOD (SotTDDBIBCNCPLMWaHCJAtSMotGCD)
Shadow of the Weird Wizard has made a lot of money before releasing and aspires to be the flavor of the month. Concept: “Making a sanitized version of [Shadow of the] Demon Lord” [1]
Family friendly is a fine concept for some things, but “sanitized” is clinical. Corporate. Sanitizing a creative work just doesn’t sound right. It sounds like an innuendo for castration and censorship. Imagine if Raggi made a sanitized version of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, I would assume he was murdered by an intelligence agency or something. I’m not as familiar with Shadow of the Demon Lord or Robert J. Schwalb, but this already sounds like a soulless cashgrab slopgame. Naturally I respect the hustle and honestly, if any game ever made should have been sanitized, it is Peepee of the Poopoo Lord.
Social media is too much of a disease for me to get an actual source but this game had the working title Shadow of the Mad Mage. There’s a rumored facebook post that states it was free will changed for sensitivity reasons but not because of any demands. I see it as a cynical move to avoid alienating the wide demographic of people so fucking batshit that they’re offended by the word “mad” and this reinforces my notions of Schwalb as some kind of greasy cartoon businessman. “I don’t care if it only offends two people and one of them has never heard of an RPG, I gotta move those pdfs.” Either he’s a big fat liar or there’s a person in the world who actually thinks like that.
This is where I start diving into the PDF of the player rules.
Part 1: Whose Weird is it anyway?
Fit and finish: Cool, someone has a pet dragon on the cover. The art is all colorful MTG type stuff, generic but inoffensive, they say it’s human made but if they didn’t say that I might have guessed otherwise. The uhh page borders are pretty? The PDF feels good in the hand? I like the shade of purple you used!
I s doctor strange missing fingers here? Are you sure you know how capes work? Do birds really look like a >? Be prepared to answer these questions, Human artists.
Foreword by Zeb Cook, storyman prime. He promises that this book is fresh, the gameplay will be heroic, dangerous, morally grey, continuing the tradition of fairy tales, continuing the tradition of weird tales, and continuing the tradition of China Mieville. That’s a lot to juggle.
The intro has neglected to include unhinged political rants about the fall of western civilization, and I question whether this wizard is actually weird at all. Instead you get miisinformation like what an RPG is, the game master is called a Sagetm. Here’s the setting: The Weird Wizard is a Mad Sorcerer and he caused problems on purpose then fucked off. Magic, technology, ancient proto-dieties buried underground, you know the deal. Here’s what a dice is.
Part 2 make a damn character
Your class is called a path and the gimmick is you start with one, grab another at mid level and grab a third at high level. There are 10 different tables full of professions, each profession gives you an item and I guess you use common sense/argue with the GM to decide what they give you. Lots of tables for character appearance and personality but usually people who play these games have plenty of ideas on their own.
There’s no rules for inhuman PCs, but elfs and tieflings and whatever are really humans too so describe your character however you want maaan. If you “need” more just spill more money for the GM book, I don’t know how many cynical moves to sell more books you have to make before people get suspicious but there it is.
To start out your paths are limited to fighter, mage, priest, rogue. But at level 3 you’re gaining levels in a new class like Berserker or Thief. Then for level 7+ you gain a new class that’s even cooler like the Giant Killer or Bearer of the Black Blade (literally Elric). And you get to keep all the cool stuff from before. We’re a long way from the OSR and I’m not huge on stuff like this, so I really appreciate that level 1 is simple. Then for session 2 let me just pick which of these 12 fighting styles I want and various other cures for insomnia. Like how you can follow a god like “ABRAXUS: The mysterious god of magic has associations with all forms of magic.” Did I just [🏴☠️REDACTED🏴☠️] a beta copy by mistake or is that a placeholder you missed?
Skimming the rules section a bit because my eyes are glazing over. Fuck you here’s all you get for travel rules in this “adventure” game, you can walk at 3-4 miles per hour.
Don’t worry though you get nine bullet points on what wind does. Did I mention that every roll is a d20 plus or minus a d6 or two? I count 17 different actions you can think about I’m sure that’s the happy zone for analysis paralysis or something. But you can also do six different kinds of special atatck.
There’s a chase procedure, that’s a nice thing to have.
Part 3 equipment
By default everyone picks from a very basic equipment list. One nice thing about D&D 5e is that you’re normally forced to start with a rope and some random dungeoneering gear like ball bearings or candles or iron spikes. Not here, your default starting sets are LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE because you might get one piece of misc gear from your profession. So if you end up playing this game use the 2gp start and shop from there. And why yes, this game does use the copper standard.
The actual gear list is good, mostly basic but you can buy bags of lime which I’ve never seen before (maybe that’s from Demonlord). Armor looks like modern D&D, your defense score goes from 10 to 20 I think. Hard caps at 25. You can carry a “body shield,” basically a pavise. More games need pavises.
Damage dice for weapons are 1-6 6 sided dice, and at level 1 you have like 12-16 health and only gain a d6 per level so those big weapons are going to hit hard, but it will probably be better for a the tactical story conversation game audience that there’s a curve to it. And there’s three different ammo tracking rules, ditch the first two and count every shot like a man. The weapon list is not creative but you can buy bombs and if you can find a gunsmith, muskets or pistols. Slot encumbrance.
I know what you’re all thinking. Is there a combat wheelchair? Yes.
Is this a joke? The wheelchair doesn’t even fly unless you’re interpreting the phrase “free movement” like an asshole. Its move speed is 1+ Strength modifier speed. Your strength modifier ranges from -10 to 10 but to start out it’s +3 at most. Prosthetics are much cheaper and the downside is you can’t run. And instead of a 5gp wheelchair you can be clockwork Adam Jensen for a mere 5-10gp per limb. To be fair, dismemberment is a common hazard of heroism in this game so at some point someone will naturally need a prosthetic
Sorry, I’m fixating on the first thing I’ve seen that isn’t generic as a wal-mart brand lunchbox.
Hirelings rules are a good inclusion. You can buy potions in town for a gp each Inscriptions are single use spells so exactly like scrolls but they have a mishap table, no effect reversal is a missed opportunity.
The 25ish non-consumable magic items are mostly the boring kind that give you cachunk cachunk keywords and bonuses or they’re already present in D&D. So many keywords. There’s standouts like Mask of Tongues, as in the D&D spell tongues, a Skeleton Key that opens any lock but has a chance of breaking, it feels like a short and limited list but at least there’s something.
Part 4 MAGICK
When you gut all the horror out of your horror game you should probably put something in the gaping soulless void it leaves behind, right? The different paths are all cool new kinds of guys but we’ve seen games with a million subclasses before. I don’t know where Zeb saw anything fresh or Weird Tales but I thought it must be in the GM book…
Until I saw the magic section. The names are good, the effects are good, the prose is nothing to write home about but they’re still fun. BANG OR WHIMPER! BEHOLD THE IMPOSSIBLE! GNASHING OF TEETH! DETONATE! PRONOUNCE DOOM! RobSchwalb knows why people are playing this style of RPG – they secretly never grew out of pretending to be superheroes, and you have to admit it is fun to say “I cast OSSEUS BLADE!” and mean it.
Per tradition the magic section is a huge chunk of the book. They’re divided into small, focused domains, there’s three power levels, and you can memorize at least a couple even at level 1. The descriptions are pretty WotC style but at least you can cast RATS IN THE WALLS to drive your victims insane. And the spells aren’t just copied from Shadow of the Demon Lord, at least not the core book. As far as I bothered to check it’s new or at least partly new. Even the art in this section is better (if you ignore the one at the beginning, which is one of the worst pieces of RPG art I’ve ever seen). This and the class features are the parts where you can see their hearts are really in the writing, and the artists are probably getting better direction and this is really where the book is strongest. They still aren’t all winners, but it’s better.
Now I know what you’re thinking, and there are no spells that make you shit yourself. Some of them do nasty violence and diseases though.
Wrap it up
I forgot to explain how this game is structured, because unless I missed it it isn’t included. That’s a problem. Saying what something is doesn’t tell you how to do it, do you think if you told a pre-Einstein physicist “Energy is equal to your mass times your acceleration score” he would be able to do anything with that? You have to support things, not just say that they’re there. The procedure is not just for a GM it’s also for the players and I question if GMs will have anything of value until I see it. Do you know how you level up? The Sage tells you. You get nothing.
“Shadow of the Weird Wizard relies much on the efforts of the Sage and the players to determine what happens in the story. You all engage in a conversational approach to advance the plot, make discoveries, and gather information you need about the sinister forces at work in your community.”
In other words, you know all those things we told you the game is about? Do it yourself. Here’s the rules for combat, here’s spells to use in combat, here’s class features to use in combat. Oh no, it’s not a skirmish wargame it’s a Storytelling game it’s just that we literally provide nothing related to stories in the rulebook. Listen here, storyteller. A roleplaying game is not a conversation.
Compare this to the pitch for the game:
You explore the borderlands*, fight strange monsters**, solve mysteries***, uncover secrets***, and interact with others*** to gain aid[to what?], information[on what?], and access[to what?], all while portraying the imaginary character you create using the rules in this book.
* no rules aside from travel speed
**monsters not included in this book
***roll d20 + modifier once
Not every game has to be what I think every game should be but come on. What do you do that supports your pitch? Fighting is well covered. Everything else is so empty and even if the GM side delivers missing pieces the players will just be mystified and knowledge will just not be passed on. What can I do to review these games? What makes one topic of conversation better than another? I’m sure that the point of the game, to make characters to fanboy over and to have action figure battles with them all works fine. And so I end up flinging shit at your playstyle, and it’s your fault for not giving me a different target.
Final verdict: Evocative spells and everything else is boring. Guaranteed to play exactly the same as every RPG released since the mid 90s. I didn’t look remotely close enough to know how well it works or is balanced. Buy this instead of another WotC product and it might do the job.
Cited Worktations
Archives of Mu 
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