Things changed for the town of Aurun after the world cracked open.
An immense chasm of unknowable depth, the rift appeared one night with a thunderous clamor that could be herd for miles, and yet nobody had seen the event itself.
The first to venture into the rift was Edmund, a miner by profession like many of the town’s residents When Edmund returned from the rift, he arrived with artifacts of sublime quality, and with stories of a beautiful new land beneath the earth.
More ventured into the rift to extract its riches. The small town of Aurun was soon a hub for the trade of artifacts in the country. Even if they tried to contain it, knowledge of the rift would soon spread.
Without a doubt in their mind, they thought this event was a blessing for the city of Aurun, which grew and grew as word of the chasm spread. Pilgrims, entrepreneurs, adventurers—all would come through the city to extract value from the Rift.
But of greatest value was no object—in fact it might not even exist. From what was once thought to be the ravings of madmen came the legend of “salvation” within the chasm. What exactly this means depends on who you ask: it could be a golden city, a place of endless splendor and joy, a wish-granting artifact, or a way out of this world and into a better one.
What started as rumors becomes a bastion of hope when the shadow of the demon lord falls upon the land.

This campaign is what I consider an exploration of what I enjoy most out of interactive fiction: the ability to explore and discover tremendous environments not limited by reality, and the ability of the player to make choices that will leave an impact on the world, its future, and themselves. If I were to summarize the theme of this campaign in one word, it would be “value”.

Sources of inspiration include Made in Abyss, Dante’s Inferno, Alice in Wonderland, DARK SOULS, and more.
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Character creation “guidelines”

The game technically takes place on its own original continent in the default setting of SotDL, Urth. However, 90%+ of the game will take place in the city of Aurun and the Rift. As such, details outside these two areas can simply be come up during character creation. The only important detail necessary is that your characters are part of a caravan headed to Aurun with some reason for wanting to go there. This means pretty much anything is open.
However, since there is such a vast amount of options for paths and magical traditions, I strongly encourage there to be as little overlap as possible.
Lastly, some races are not a good fit for this game and thus not an option, including centaur, ghoul, incarnation, and vampire.
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Since there’s a lot of content scattered throughout many PDFs, Schwalb Entertainment has a reference table for all the ancestries, paths, and spells available.

https://schwalbentertainment.com/play-aids/shadow-of-the-demon-lord-reference-tables/

House Rules:

Selling/Reflavoring Gear: Any gear that you receive during character creation may be sold for half price if you do not wish to keep it. Reflavoring gear is also an option such as calling a dagger a knife or refering to fancy clothes as witchly raiments.

Sling with 20 Stones: At character creation specifically, a Sling with 20 stones sells for 2cp and 5bits total. This is so all starting weapon options provide the same amount of profit if sold rather than incentivizing everyone who doesn’t need a weapon to just grab the most expensive option and sell it.

We’ll be using bell curve rolls for levels 0-2 to offset the randomness of the first few levels. After that we’ll switch to d20.

We’re using the extra combat actions from Forbidden Rules, minus “Step” – check page 14.

The Adept from Forbidden Rules is a valid choice, but with the following changes:
3 Health per level
New level 1 talent: Catalyst – you do not need an implement to cast spells
Replace the rules for spell fighting with this: When you use an action to cast a spell, you can also make an attack with a weapon, or use a triggered action to cast a spell that normally requires the use of an action to cast.

We’ll be using the alternate rules for Corruption and Insanity provided in The Price of Evil and Unhinge the Mind, respectively. The rules for Unhinge the Mind will be slightly softened.

We’ll be using the “surrounding” (flanking) rule on page 191 of core.

We’ll be using the original effects of the frightened condition instead of the one in the revised core book. For everything else, please refer to the revised core.

A note on resting: Generally, you will have 1 or more rests between each adventure, and never during an adventure, unless otherwise noted.