RPG players love a good thick tome: easy to store and quick to reference, books are a great delivery format for core rules and campaign settings alike. But they’re not the only way, and older D&D fans will remember a glorious age when campaign settings were released in box sets packed with maps, player handouts, and pamphlets. Indie RPG designer Shane Walshe – aka the Lazy Litch – is bringing that classic format back with his new box set Demidirge: Frontiers of Fear, which gathers eight years of previous crowdfunded releases into one box and then expands on them.
Demidirge is a dark fantasy sandbox campaign setting designed for use with the Old School Essentials systems – a set of indie rules developed from ideas in older DnD editions with some modernizing touches. OSE has enough in common with modern D&D that you’ll be able to adapt it to your preferred edition without too much effort – but you can also get all the OSE rules for free online.
If you want to get involved, the Kickstarter campaign for Demidirge: Frontiers of Fear runs until November 26.
“The core of Demidirge is player-driven sandbox exploration”, according to the Kickstarter campaign. The set comes with an A3 hex map of the world and a gnarly sticker sheet – it looks like a flash in a tattoo shop that specializes in black metal art – so players can track their progress as they encounter major locations.
Most of the pamphlets in the box set were originally released as distinct adventure modules in individual crowdfunding campaigns, but a new campaign book links them into something more. “The world is a living system shaped by factions feuding for power”, but “an unknown force has begun to mutate it”. If the players want to survive they need to confront that mystery, “exploit and subvert the setting by gaining knowledge, studying anomalies, inventing spells, and building portals”.
I am so here for that. My favorite kind of Old School D&D is location based, challenging players to find solutions to seemingly insurmountable challenges through lateral thinking. These games focus less on heroism and scripted plots, more on emergent storytelling fuelled by the players’ mad ideas. Demidirge looks like my kind of party.
There are three main pledge tiers in the campaign. The basic box is $84 / €75, containing five zine adventure modules, a 92 page softcover book with a settlement the players may want to use as a home base, a “52+ page” campaign guide book, a map pack (with a setting map, stickers, and location maps), and five art prints.
For $100 / €99 the Deluxe box has ten art prints, but more importantly it’s got more new content: the spiral bound GM helper kit Spiral Schematic, and the 140 page hardcover ocean exploration toolkit Wind Wraith. Both sets come with PDFs of all their contents, and for $55 / €50 there’s a digital bundle with all the PDFs.
I’m currently hovering over the “pledge” button, which is a bad idea given I still have Doomspiral leering at me, unplayed. If you’ve played any of the Demidirge modules, let me know what you thought of them in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
