Eat the Reich vs Shadow of the Demon Lord
Compare Eat the Reich and Shadow of the Demon Lord side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Eat the Reich | Shadow of the Demon Lord | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Historical, Horror | Fantasy, Horror |
| Play Style | Cinematic, Pulp Action, Combat-Heavy, Fast-Paced, Mission-Based, Heroic, High-Power, One-Shot Friendly, Theater of the Mind, Fiction-First, Playbook-Driven, Rules-Light | Dark Fantasy, Grimdark, Fast Sessions, Beginner-Friendly, GM-Friendly |
| Core Mechanic | Roll a pool of d6s equal to your stat plus one die per piece of equipment or ability you activate; discard any die showing 3 or less, count 4–5 as a success, and 6 as a critical. The GM builds a separate Attack pool equal to the engaged Threat's rating and rolls it. You then allocate each remaining die to one of five slots — advance an Objective, eliminate a Threat, defend against the GM's Attack dice, feed for Blood, or trigger a SPECIAL (criticals only) — narrating one scene detail per die as you place it. Any GM Attack dice you don't cancel with defence dice inflict Injuries. | Roll d20 + modifier vs. target number 10. Boons and banes (d6s) add or subtract from the roll, canceling each other out. |
| Dice | d6 dice pool | d20 |
| Complexity | Low | Low |
| Accessibility | Medium | High |
| Runnability | High | High |
| License | Proprietary | Forbidden Rules SRD |
| Cost | $$ | $$ |
| Publisher | Rowan, Rook and Decard | Schwalb Entertainment |
| Year | 2023 | 2015 |
| Best For | Groups who want a self-contained, ultraviolent anti-fascist action romp playable in two or three short sessions with pregenerated characters and zero campaign overhead. | Groups who want fast, dark fantasy with streamlined d20 mechanics and a sense of impending doom. |
| Highlights | Every die spent on attack is a die not spent defending or feeding for Blood, so each turn forces an explicit tradeoff between killing nazis, staying alive, and refueling the abilities that make you dangerous. Reinforcement rules ratchet pressure up each round — defeated Threats roll d6 to restore rating and every active Threat's Attack rating ticks up by one — so lingering in a scene gets steadily more lethal. Six pregenerated vampires with fixed mechanics but explicitly malleable backgrounds let the table skip session zero entirely and be drop-coffin-deployed into Paris within minutes of opening the book. | Fast character creation, quick sessions, single boon/bane mechanic replaces most modifiers, 11 levels keep campaigns short |
| Considerations | Built around a single fixed scenario — the assault on Hitler's Paris stronghold — with no support for other premises, settings, or open-ended campaign play. Character creation is reskin or hack-from-the-pregens only; the book offers no point-buy or formal chargen system. Splatter-violence tone and nazi subject matter are confrontational by design; the rulebook opens with content warnings, lines-and-veils guidance, and an evil-calibration checklist the table is expected to work through before play. | Dark horror tone limits genre range, setting tightly coupled to core rules |