Final Age

FINAL AGE
 

A setting for Shadowdark RPG
Your party is in a battle and things are going badly. Your wizard can solve this. But it might kill everyone.

Cast a spell under open sky in the Final Age and you roll against the ghost storm. Fail, and you have ten rounds or less before green lightning comes down and something worse comes down with it.

Underground, though, nothing forms. Cast all you want in a barrow or a vault or a deep cave.

WHAT IS A GHOST STORM?
 

A tear in the world that arrives as weather.
Your players are never told a storm is coming. They're told this:
 

First. Metal tastes wrong. Flames lean toward the caster.
Then. The dead nearby shift. Old blood runs fresh.
Then. Hair lifts. Wounds ache. It feels like something is coming
Last. The green comes up in the cloud, from underneath.

The sky opens. A storm throws up to four strikes, and you roll for each one. Most of them raise the dead where they land. Some possess whatever is standing there, or growing there. A few tear a hole and let something through that was never in this world to begin with. One result on the table is a Death Knight, which walks off toward the nearest town.

WHY THE WORLD WORKS THE WAY IT DOES

The Church hunts casters because casters make those storms. Silver is worth ten times gold because silver works on the dead. A camp gets your spells back and does nothing for your wounds, because the road needs teeth and town needs to be worth walking to. The ruins are underground because underground is the only place magic is safe, and underground is where the money is.

WHAT'S IN IT

171 pages, 6x9, print and PDF. Fully compatible with Shadowdark core: same ability checks, same talent tables, same stat block format. If you've run a Shadowdark session you can run this one tonight.

• Ghost Storms, Fear and Horror, Scars, madness, mutation, possession, wards, travel roles, and hazards.
• 227 creatures, every one with something that makes it dangerous past its hit dice. The Bloat Toad swallows you and then bursts. The Death Knight walks toward the nearest town and does not stop.
• Two new classes. The Paladin, sworn to an order that may not deserve it. The Sorcerer, whose magic leaks whether they cast or not.
• Seven playable ancestries with d10 trait tables you roll on at every even level. Traits buy information, access, and relief. They never buy a +1.
• Kingsgate, a frontier town with 68 keyed locations and 62 named NPCs. Run it as a home base or run it as the adventure.
• 27 realms for when the party goes looking.

HOW IT GOT THIS WAY

Three hundred years ago the world fought a final battle and won. The Church came out of the war and pushed the darkness out of its own borders. The price is a Pontiff who blames magic-users and nonhumans for the whole thing and has never stopped trying to make them pay for it.

THE BOOK IS WRITTEN

The manuscript is finished, edited, and laid out at 171 pages. This campaign pays for art.

WHAT YOU GET

$20 The PDF. Final Age, complete, delivered on release.
$30 PDF plus print. The PDF, and an at-cost coupon for the print-on-demand edition at DriveThruRPG. You pay the printer what the printer charges, plus shipping. Nothing on top.

We are not marking up the print edition. Print-on-demand means no warehouse, no print run to gamble on, and no crate of unsold books in a garage. You get the PDF the day it releases and the coupon to order print whenever you want it.

Print cost and shipping are paid to DriveThruRPG when you order, and vary by territory.

STRETCH GOALS

Every stretch goal on this campaign is art, because art is the only thing this book still needs.

The interior has room for illustration in three places: the 14 chapter openers, 3 half-page spaces, and roughly 40 bestiary pages with space beneath the creature entries. Each goal fills more of it. Every backer gets every unlock, in both the PDF and the print edition.

[$X] Chapter openers. Illustration at the head of all 14 chapters.
[$X] The Kingsgate map. A proper keyed map of the town.
[$X] Art for the bestiary, part one. The creatures you'll meet first.
[$X] Art for the bestiary, part two. The rest of it.

RISKS AND CHALLENGES

The manuscript is complete and laid out, so the usual crowdfunding risk of an unfinished book does not apply here.

Print is on demand through DriveThruRPG, which means there is no print run to fund, no warehouse, and no shipping for us to get wrong. Backers order print copies themselves with an at-cost coupon, so the physical side of this campaign cannot fail the way physical rewards usually fail.

That leaves art. If art delivery slips, we will communicate. Every backer will get the non-art version in PDF form shortly after the campaign ends.

Backers get an update every two weeks] whether there's news or not.

The Realms lost. Kingsgate is still standing. The ruins are full and the sky is the problem. 

Bring a torch.