Running a Demon Adventure

When you run this adventure or play RoC youmight want to keep the following parts in mindto give your players the best possible game experience.

Demons are designed to be powerful

This is intentional! As one will expect demons tobe powerful beings formed by hells’ chaossupernatural, eons old and hard to kill.To be able to give this feeling to your players youshouldn’t try to make encounters with peasants,merchants, guards, or even stronger foes, whoare unaware of the situation, harder than aneasy encounter.The difficulty in combat encounters lies in theirescalation. This means if demons go rampage ona village, a few patrols, peasants and/or theauthorities should start to act and try to protectthe village and its inhabitants. This will result inbigger guard groups, exit restrictions andsuchlike. If the demons continue it might evenescalate to guard mobs, holy warriors or evenadventurers roaming the streets to protect thepeople. Finally, even a holy intervention withangels is a possibility to give your demon playerthe gist when it is enough. Or that their cause ofaction (killing everything) won’t solve theadventure.Note also that those escalated encounters don’tnecessarily need to kill the players, but it mightas well be sufficient to pose a big enough threatto let them explore other ways to overcometheir challenge.

Demons and their cover

Being nightmare fuel for humans has also itsdownside. Humans will most likely run fromyour players, become catatonic or fight out ofpure fear if needed. Only the knowing, foolish,or desperate are likely to stay calm in thepresence of a demon.So, if your players are in need for someinformation, they either require a good disguiseand a charming attitude or terrifyingintimidation tactics to get what they want.Staying in cover keeps those escalations at bayand might lead to a more intrigue way of solvingproblems like manipulating humans to do theirbidding.

Desires

As your demon players get rewarded for gettingpeople to follow their desires here are some tipson how to handle it.The reward from desires is thought to rewardplayers for good roleplay. As a demon playermight only get rewarded if they do it withoutforcing the human to give in. Be it with a spell orbrute force. It should only count if the role playis fitting or if a skill check with an explanationon how they convince them to yield to the desireis provided.

Embrace Chaos

If players do something surprising orunplanned, it might throw you off or ruin all thegood and wonderful things you have planned.But restricting your players isn’t fun either. So,we’d like to encourage you to be openmindedwhen it comes to players doing stupid or funthings. Mostly those adventures are the mostfun ones.So, when it comes to Chaos Cards or yourplayers going in an unplanned direction think of“What would be the most interesting story?” or“How can this card make this encounter / plotmore interesting?”If you can answer that and explore that pathwith your players, you are probably going tohave an awesome adventure!

Have fun

Finally, have fun leading your players onotherworldly adventures where they canexperience the viewpoint of a close to immortalbeing that doesn’t need to comply to humanoidsociety standards, rules and expectations.TTRPGs main goal is always to be enjoyable andfun! Best of luck on your first adventure!