Now with actual Steampunk

Although there is no scenario in the rulebook for Shadow of the Demon Lord, the first RPG released by Schwalb Entertainment following a successful Kickstarter campaign, one of the excellent decisions upon the part of the designer has been to release support—and release it early—in the form of scenarios for the game. This way a gaming group can get playing quickly, even if they are just using the core rules presented in Victims of the Demon Lord: Starter Guide plus the adventure. In addition, the publisher has also released Tales of the Demon Lord, a complete mini-campaign that takes a party of characters from Zero Level up to Eleventh Level. In the meantime, the seventeenth adventure is The Last Train to Darksville.

The Last Train to Darksville is written by Matt Forbeck, the designer of the Brave New World RPG and co-author to numerous other sourcebooks. It is the sixth adventure written for characters who have entered the Master Path, that is of Seventh Level or higher, and comes as a five page, 11.3 MB PDF. Notably the adventure is the first to make use of content from the Demon Lord’s Companion and the first to make real use of the RPG’s steampunk elements, something that previous scenarios have overlooked in favour of its dark fantasy and despite being a relatively simple, straightforward affair, The Last Train to Darksville is a tough, almost epic adventure with a silly pun of a title.

Ideally, the scenario takes place between Sixton and Foundry in the Northern Reach where the Darksville Railway runs between Darksville and Devil’s Breach, although it can be set anywhere to suit the Game Master’s campaign. Wherever the adventure is set, the Darksville Railway has a problem—missing trains! The player characters are hired to ride the rails and ensure that the last train gets through. Of course they get to find out what happened to the previous trains and then they face the cause in an epic battle! The problem is that trains have become the target of a dragon and any scenario that involves a dragon versus train battle with the adventurers aboard has to be epic—not to say fun!

The Last Train to Darksville is short and to the point, though there is the possibility of further adventures. Once battle is joined, the Game Master should ramp up the action as much as possible as it is not every day that the adventurers get to fight a dragon and certainly not aboard a train.