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Delving Into Shadowdark

by Mike on 29 July 2024

For the past few months, I've been running and enjoying the Shadowdark RPG by Kelsey Dionne of the Arcane Library. After a very successful Kickstarter, Kelsey delivered the book both digitally and physically within a year. The product quality is fantastic, as are its Cursed Scroll zines, its half-height GM screen, pre-generated character cards, and Shadowdark Quickstart booklets.

You can download the Shadowdark Quickstart PDF package for free. It's a great way to see if this RPG is for you.

Here are some key features of Shadowdark:

It uses common 5e conventions such as ascending AC, attack bonuses, the six core stats, advantage and disadvantage, and other familiar elements. If you and your group understand 5e, you'll pick Shadowdark up easily.
The math is very flat in Shadowdark. Ability scores are 3d6 down the line which means ability bonuses are often flat, slightly positive, and commonly negative. Hit points only add constitution modifiers at first level so hit points are very low. During the first couple of levels, characters can often drop after a single hit.
The core mechanics of Shadowdark are extremely simple. There's no skill list and no proficiency bonus. You can write a character down on a 3x5 card and roll one up in a couple of minutes.
Talents replace feats and subclasses. You roll to determine your talent at certain levels meaning even character progression is random.
The truly flat math of the game means a lot of weight is put on die rolls themselves. Damage dice really matter since you rarely add modifiers to them.
Gameplay focuses more on player decisions and questions than rolling checks. Where 5e might have a Wisdom (Perception) check to find a trap – in Shadowdark, characters find traps if they carefully look for them. This style of play is a fundamental drive of Shadowdark and other old-school games – you rely less on rolls and mechanics and more on player questions, choices, and decisions.
The writing is brief and focused. It's easy to pick up, read, and run.
Shadowdark focuses on two gameplay mechanics to reinforce the dark and gritty feel – limited equipment slots and torch timers. Characters can't see in the dark but monsters can so torchlight is critical and lasts only one real-world hour. It keeps the pace moving fast.
Likewise, characters have limited equipment slots so deciding what they can carry matters, including torches and rations.
There are no spell slots. Spell attack rolls and opposed saving throws are replaced with a spellcasting check. If you make it, the spell works. If you fail, the spell fails and you lose access to the spell for a day. Failure can be a drag if you burn your only use of a spell the first time you try to cast it.
There are no reactions, bonus actions, opportunity attacks, or multiple attacks on a turn. Combat is super speedy.
The game uses abstract distances like close, near, double-near (my favorite distance name), and far.
Monster design is simple. There are loose guidelines to compare monster power but you're not supposed to build "balanced" encounters. Let the world and the dice decide what the characters face.

Who Would Enjoy Shadowdark?

My Sunday group loves Shadowdark. They're all experienced GMs and very experienced with D&D and other RPGs. The mechanics are simple, straight forward, and focus on player experience and decisions instead of continual skill checks. If you look for a trap the right way, you find it.

Those folks who yearn for the old days of D&D should appreciate Shadowdark. "Old-school gaming, modernized" is the core motto of Shadowdark and it accomplishes this goal. There are no odd rules from the past like saving versus wands, weapon speeds, and descending armor class. There are enough ways to customize your character and watch them grow to keep experienced players interested mechanically.

You might expect a mechanically-simple RPG to not work well for long campaigns but our campaign just crossed 37 sessions and we all eagerly await it every week. You can watch my Shadowdark game prep videos to follow along and see how I prep each session of the game.

Shadowdark is super swingy in its early levels because hit points are very low. Even 2nd and 3rd level characters might get dropped by a single good damage roll. Only when you reach 5th and 6th level characters can the characters hold their own against several successful attacks. Players need to be on board with this swingy nature to enjoy the game.

If you're looking for fast, simple, classic dungeon delving that feels like the D&D of the 80s without all the weird rules, Shadowdark is a perfect choice.

Who Wouldn't Like Shadowdark?

If your players are into building heroic characters up with a lot of mechanical crunch, there's not much of that in Shadowdark. If your players are focused on their own hero's journey, that's not likely to work out for them too. In 36 sessions, we've had only one character who survived since the beginning and she died in session 37. We were all distraught but the player leapt into her new character within 30 seconds. Most players are on their fifth or sixth character. Characters can die a lot.

Shadowdark also seems to assume you already know a bit about running RPGs and you'll likely have to fill in some blanks. There are some oddities like both leaning in on detecting traps through logical discussion but then giving advantage on trap detection checks. Which is it? You'll have to decide. How exactly does surprise work? You'll need to work that out. What happens if a character at 0 hit points takes damage? Up to you. If you're looking for a tightly defined ruleset, Shadowdark isn't likely the game for you.

I wouldn't call Shadowdark a "heroic" fantasy RPG. I'd put it in the category of a dark fantasy or fantasy survival RPG.

Tips From Over Thirty Sessions

I've run a bunch of Shadowdark and my group is made up entirely of other gamemasters so we talk about it a lot. All of us love it but all of us recognize things about how it plays that we either need to more deeply understand or just plain want to change. Here are a few of these observations:

With such a focus on the results of the dice, the game offers alternative rules that focus on luck points – re-rolling a d20 on a failed check. These range from super-hard-core "die at zero hit points" rules to pulp mode which gives players 1d4 luck points they can use for all sorts of things they typically can't be used for. Luck points might be more valuable than hit points which is why the game focuses on them for the feeling of the game. I've decided to give out one luck point at the beginning of a session and determined that luck points cannot be spent to change a monster's roll but can change any player's roll. It's often best used on a failed spell which is often a double-whammy of missing the spell and losing the spell.
With characters dying often, you might start a quest with one character and then lose the quest when that character dies. Consider including a core faction the characters all belong to so that when they die, their new character joins in already tied to the same faction and is following the same quest.
You'll have to decide how much treasure to give out and how often. The game has guidelines but you may want to speed it up or slow it down depending on how fast you want to level. The amount and quality of treasure characters need to level up continually increases so you need to consider how often you increase it as well.
The game doesn't offer guidance for what level to introduce new characters. We decided to introduce new characters at the same level as their previous character with experience points reset to zero. There was definitely some gamification of putting characters up front who had just crossed a level and had few experience points to share but whatever. It was a small price to prevent characters from always starting at 1st level.
Exactly how characters die when they're down to zero hit points also wasn't clear. You roll 1d4 when the character's turn comes up but what if they're hit in the meantime? We house ruled that if it was some type of passive damage, the number of rounds until you die goes down by one. If, however, a monster wants to kill you and succeeds on their attack – they kill you.
Dyson maps are awesome for Shadowdark dungeons.

GM Experiences

I found Shadowdark to be great fun to run. I didn't find it easier or harder to run than 5e, but prepping and running 5e is really streamlined for me after running close to a thousand games and writing a whole book about game prep. I probably spent too much time worrying about whether I was running Shadowdark right when I sometimes fell back to my 5e ways. I sometimes found myself getting hung up on trying to maintain turn order all the time and tracking rounds all the time. Sometimes I just like to roll with whatever the group wants to do and lose track of in-world time. So I just grabbed a die and rolled for random monsters when it felt right.

My best way of tracking always-on turn order was by writing all the character names in front of me on my dry-erase map and using a little token to keep track of whose turn it was so I know who went next.

The Best Intro to D&D?

Given Shadowdark's simple mechanics, I think Shadowdark may be an excellent introduction to D&D and RPGs overall. The math is very straightforward. Character sheets are super simple. I might give new players a break and start their characters off with max hit points and I'd still warn them their character can drop often but it's no worry to try another character. The Shadowdark Quickstart Set is awesome and affordable, reminding me of the original D&D white box. It's also available to download for free. If you're a fan of Shadowdark, consider using the Quickstart Set to teach people how much fun these games can be.

Recapturing the Purity of D&D

I love 5e. I also love Shadowdark. When I ran my yearly I6 Ravenloft game for Halloween, I ran it with Shadowdark and it fit like a glove. Ravenloft was scary again. Rounds moved fast. Characters explored and avoided dangers. Characters died. The 1st edition D&D math for monsters fit almost perfectly to that of Shadowdark. Not everyone loved it – some missed their more heroic 5e characters – but as a GM, I thought it fit perfectly and many of my players enjoyed it too.

Shadowdark isn't for everyone. The GM and players need to all accept the type of game Shadowdark is. If one is expecting more than the core mechanics of 5e – particularly crunchy heroic characters who have to take a good pounding to drop to zero – Shadowdark may disappoint them.

If one wants to recapture the feeling of the way D&D felt, or we imagine it felt, back in the 80s – Shadowdark is an awesome RPG.

I highly recommend it.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

I was away at a gaming convention so there was no Lazy RPG Talk Show or game prep video. I did post a video on Being Good Stewards of the Hobby.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Give enemies a story they can share during combat.
Expose secrets and lore through ghosts, visions, mosaics, carvings, inscriptions, lost tomes, and the characters' own knowledge of history.
Give bosses a finite number of "dark blessings" that let them break the rules but only a couple of times per battle – like super-legendary-resistances.
Let bosses pull their underlings into attacks.
Give bosses abilities to threaten all the characters in a fight.
Run fights with multiple bosses at the same time.
Notify players of upcoming downtime scenes.