Weight of the Underworld by Steve Dee is a role playing game supplement published by Schwalb Entertainment for use with Shadow of the Demon Lord. The supplement is part of the Lands in Shadow series that further details parts of the official Urth setting.
This is a six page PDF that is available from RPGNow for $1.69 but was purchased price of $1.17 during a sale. Half of the front page is an illustration and around a quarter is the Credits. The rest of the supplement is content.
It starts with a typical overview but states that this is a bit different from other supplements in the Lands in Shadow series as it covers the Underworld, a place no-one really wants to go but where almost everyone ends up.
Beginning of the End is how the Underworld came into being. The Fey are immortal unless killed by violence but only live once. Mortals have shorter lives but are repeatedly reborn. In the beginning, every time that mortals were reborn they retained the memories of their prior existences.
The Fey were disturbed by this and the Fey Thanatos proposed to build a realm where he and his wife would strip mortal souls of their memories and send them back into the world to be reborn as new. The plan worked, mortal souls were funnelled into the newly-created realm and Thanatos became Father Death. What wasn’t expected was the effect mortal belief would have; Thanatos was transformed into a living skeleton and his realm into something resembling the Cathedral of Death outside Caecras. Thanatos is fighting against this change but as the Underworld dies as a result the Void is coming in.
Paths of the Dead is the route souls follow after death, and the effects travelling the route have on the living, for the Underworld can be visited by those still alive. The original process of stripping mortal souls of memories was quite elegant, but now it has degenerated and some souls escape. Thanatos himself is fighting against the changes to his realm and, as a result, it is crumbling. Dead are rising from their graves in the living world as a result and the Desolation is the most visible result.
This is followed by a d20 table of Underworld events.
The Midden of Memory is where Thanatos’ wife now sites, in the subterranean workings where all the memories of souls, manifested as flesh and blood, settles in order to enter the River Lethe. However, this part of the realm is also decaying, with the result that it seems choked with fleshy remains.
Entrances and Exits has how to enter and leave the Underworld. The most obvious entrance is by dying but in the Freeholds of Nar is a portal to the Underworld. Mirrors and reflective surfaces can also lead to the Underworld. One major way out, although perhaps not a good one, is by the river that leads to Hell. Magic can remove a soul from the Underworld but the Demon Lord tends to interfere with such.
Fire and Forget has a consequence of being in the Underworld, where characters can lose languages and professions, with a Tonguetied story complication as a possible outcome. This complication is from Demon Lord’s Companion but is reproduced here.
New Creatures has two new monsters, the Dirge, a mortal soul who tried to resist death and Grim Reapers, the servants of Thanatos who were once elves.
Weight of the Underworld in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and is short enough that it doesn’t really need them, although they would have been useful. Navigation is poor. The text maintains a two column full colour format and appeared free of errors. There are a couple of colour illustrations, both custom. Presentation is good.
The Underworld is a place that can be visited when alive but, as it is a place designed for the dead, it is a very dangerous place to visit. Those who do visit it who aren’t dead can quite quickly end up that way.
No adventure hooks as such are provided but there is the traditional one of visiting the Underworld in order to rescue a soul. Such might be the main reason to travel there. Another alternative would be to get to, or possibly, with great difficulty, from Hell. The most interesting bit is that the Underworld is decaying and falling prey to the Void. Quite what effect this will have for the long term isn’t properly gone into, although the increase in undead and the creation of places like the Desolation are mentioned. Still, it feels like more could be done to develop this.
Weight of the Underworld provides a brief description of a potentially deadly place to visit, but one that is also important, and it can be found by clicking here.
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