New to Sly Flourish? Start Here or subscribe to the newsletter.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Subscribe to the weekly Sly Flourish newsletter and receive a free adventure generator PDF!