The purpose of this blog article is to state that Shadowdark represents a turning point in Folk RPG Gaming and the history of tabletop role-playing games, and to share our experience with it.
I'll share our experiments where we feel that the promise of Folk RPG Gaming was fulfilled amd I'll provide some of my opinions in defense of this being the case.
What is Shadowdark?
Shadowdark has an introduction in the beginning of the book which is very succinct and accurate.
It's a modern adventure game, in the spirit of games like “Basic and Expert Dungeons and Dragons” and many of the modern OSR games from that design school like “Knave” and “Lamentations of the Flame Princess”, however it uses modern mechanics including those familiar to players of the current edition of Dungeons and Dragons. It also borrows from other inspirations like “Dungeon Crawl Classics” and “Index Card RPG”.
It's ethos is: fast, dangerous, simple. It is compellingly those things in play. It's fun. It works right out of the book. In a single book someone has everything they need for endless role-playing adventures from character options and rules, to game procedures, to Gamemaster tools and advice. The advice in it is superb. It's one of the most “complete” RPGs I've ever seen.
Shadowdark RPG released in February 28, 2023. This year it swept the Ennie Awards, taking four titles including “Best Game.” The Kickstarter was immensely successful gathering $1.3 Million dollars and the game was even mentioned in Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/robwieland/2023/03/16/shadowdark-looks-back-at-dungeon-crawls-with-an-eye-to-the-future/
It's received praise and partnership from most of the online “D&Dtubers”, Old school gamers are playing Shadowdark, such as Erik Tenkar and JoetheLawyer. New school gamers and those who usually focus on modern RPGs such as “Sly Flourish” enjoy it too.
Best of all, families are playing Shadowdark together.
Word is spreading, people are buying it and playing it with friends and family. It has absolutely taken over at conventions and is played by just about everyone who has stepped a foot beyond brand D&D or Pathfinder.
The story of Shadowdark is likely known to you if you are reading this blog. In short, Shadowdark provides the game-play that 5e failed to. It's mechanics are old school in some ways, the game is fast, improvisational, and makes you feel like you are playing D&D.
I don't think it's possible to really explain what Shadowdark is all about, the impact it has had and will have, without talking about the phenomenon around it and it's creator. This phenomenon is not just about rules in a book. This is both something critics of Shadowdark don't understand, and some are reflexively opposed to.
When Shadowdark entered Kickstarter and the first draft of the completed rules were released to backers, we saw it's potential in the Mythic Mountains RPG play club and put it to the table.
I suspected this could provide the energy and character flavor modern gamers wanted with the simplicity and archetypal quality of B/X D&D. What's more, it's success was working in the way a Folk RPG game could, in the way we would hope it would.
With the help of my friends in the play club, we ran several experiments.
Can it fulfill the hopes of what 5e failed to do? Can it be the D&D of the Folk RPG Hobby for years to come? Can it be simultaneously what is fun in modern D&D and classical D&D?
The answer was “yes” to all of the above.
You can see our entire Shadowdark actual play playlist here:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3c4xRmyQ_SJlzBBDNh4cwSOhroOQfDCz&si=ZuJZnBExSjfiXZw0
The Five Shadowdark Experiments
We arranged four experiments: “as intended”, a “classic” adventure, a “modern” adventure and a home-brew campaign.
The “As Intended Experiment” - “Cursed Scroll 3 – Midnight Sun”
I read through the rules and used the module “Midnight Sun” by Arcane library. We pumped up some Nordic Folk Metal, put our terrible Viking accents on, and really went wild in the frozen north. The Vikings were cast from the mountains by ornery Dwerg, had riddle tests with ghosts and mystics, offered sacrifices to the gods, battled frost giants and spilled the blood of their foes in haunted caves.
I had so much fun. I think this is an ideal way to start with Shadowdark too. The Cursed Scrolls really reveal how this game can be used beyond the core rules, because they suggest different and unique classes and features which might not work in just any game or setting, and are different from the core book. In my opinion, the Cursed Scrolls really reveal the truth of Shadowdark. While Shadowdark from the book is great, it can be the D&D anyone needs it to be with very little work.
Some of the players were die hard OSR gamers, others were modern gamers coming from Pathfinder or 5th Edition. They seemed to sense that they weren't superheroes and would need to work together, and employ the use of their other vikings aboard their longship. The game pretty well worked for everyone, being familiar to both old school and new school RPG gamers.
Using “Midnight Sun” and casually approaching the rules I certainly made some mistakes, but they really didn't manage to break the game. The whole thing just worked dang well and was incredibly fun.
The “Classical Experiment” - “B3 – Palace of the Silver Princess”
The question is often asked if Shadowdark can run classic content. The simple answer is just “yes.” Divide the treasure by ten and you don't need to change much else.
We used the Jean Wells original “orange cover” version of “B3: Palace of the Silver Princess”. Most of the players were dedicated, hard core, old school gamers who favored classical systems and retro-clones. This version of the module doesn't just have the dungeon, but a massive sandbox. To really put things to the test, I made the players foreigners to the forsaken, monster-infested lands of Gulluvia and put them at the opposite side of the sandbox from the dungeon!
In the course of our adventures, the characters would struggle to find the Palace among the dark politics of the region and the deadly wilderness, try to steal a dragon's egg, find an ancient and mad Dwarf from the before times and finally lay to rest the secret of the Silver Princess (and unwittingly unleash it's curse probably on all of Mystara.)
I adored this short campaign as well. It stands in my mind as one of my favorite classic adventures I've ever ran and Shadowdark was part of that. However, here we started to run into some problems and while some were my mistakes, I can see how Shadowdark is limited to the degree it can be stretched to fit everything, and a few things confused me when I tried employing rules straight from the book.
Overland travel – The adventurers were nearly completely wiped out several times attempting to traverse a monster infested forest to find the dungeon. I'm glad we got to witness this difficulty as it really put the systems in Shadowdark to the test. Some of this was caused by my own mistakes, and it's worth noting the author released alternate wilderness exploration rules that would later resolve most of these difficulties. From the version of the book I had at the time, characters could only carry a certain number of torches and food. Characters would have around ten total slots and this included much of their items, then 3 rations would be one slot and 1 torch would be a slot.
Shadowdark is merciless when the lights go out. It was fitting for the setting of that module how I read it too, the wilderness and the dungeon were horrifying, and Shadowdark was a dangerous game! Therefore, I employed the rules for Shadowdark when the lights are out. Encounters are constant and deadly in those circumstances. I did not allow the benefits of rest if they didn't have a campfire or other safe arrangement for sleep. The rules actually suggest you can create a campfire with 3 torches but that's 3 inventory slots!
I eventually bent the rules to resemble something closer to what the author would create later with alternate hex-crawling. They could spend a full watch during the day that could have been spent traveling gathering food or firewood for the campfire. There was a chance they could fail at this however and it slowed them down.
The book doesn't have mounts, though they exist in some of the Cursed Scroll Zines. I had seen my game of OSE fall apart with mounts so I was hardly concerned about people needing to use their feet. The sandbox for the Orange Cover B3 could have probably used them though. It took something like 2 weeks to travel to make it to the dungeon from the nearest settlement they could find.
The players added to the high body count with a bit of bloodlust, which would eventually be tempered after a while when the body count rose high enough.
Either way traveling through wildernesses designed for B/X modules with weeks of travel was brutal. I also provided mules in the settlement (not included in Shadowdark) to help carry things, but that complicated the need to run away during encounters. One of the open world encounters when they were just trying to find their way back to a settlement after getting separated and lost was “5 velociraptors” which were faster than the players and I rolled a low reaction roll for (hostile). While you should usually be able to get away or even have positive encounters sometimes (we did during the Cursed Scroll campaign), sometimes the rules can come together to be really punishing.
This led them to return to a settlement multiple times which led to...
Carousing
Another of Shadowdark's core mechanics is something which keeps the focus on adventuring.
In Shadowdark, the suggested amount of gold is 1/10th that of B/X and items are more expensive. When you do find treasure, the game suggests you blow it in town, offering XP rewards and even things like magic items and trusted companions for lavishing your treasures on the wayfaring inn during partying and a riotous debauch.
This had an odd effect. The adventure eventually began to resemble multiple failed attempts at penetrate a monster infested forest, with the goal becoming returning to the Inn to brag and lie about it and blow money they found on monsters. I tried to generate treasure “by the book” which suggests a 50% chance of monsters dropping or having treasure nearby. It's simple, but it turned into a game of less scope on accident, and they began to “grind levels” through this strange two part loop. It wasn't quite like the game-play loop of classic D&D, which although it sounds similar, leads to adventure sites, treasure hoards and points of interest rather than a video game like cycle of hitting monsters enough to get coins and using the coins to get levels.
Many people in the Shadowdark community, including Kelsey herself, were helpful in guiding me to understanding how the carousing system and wilderness travel should be used. But I present these mistakes here to note something that naturally arose from someone just reading the book and trying to employ them.
It isn't game breaking, but to avoid the less interesting adventure loop our players found themselves in, there are some things that aren't apparent from the book that seem important for wilderness travel. For one, I'd recommend the new “alternate hex crawling” rules or the rules coming in the new Cursed Scroll Zine 4.
Those rules are balanced and have been play tested to account for things like needing a campfire and food while having limited inventory slots. Next, I'd recommend more complex options than those presented in the book for items and rules covering large hex-crawls, such as mounts and beasts of burden, which are included in Cursed Scroll Zine 2, and are easily added to the game from classical and modern OSR materials which are compatible.
Lastly I'd note that it seems to me that modern OSR adventure games simply have a different approach to wilderness exploration than classic games.
I observed this somewhat in our “two sandbox” experiment of long-form classic D&D campaigns. Classic games will often have long tracks of land, impassable features going across whole hexes and the majority of hexes have no contents. My observation is this is because classic games like Original D&D and B/X depend on the game procedures to produce the game, rather than the adventure design and content. Modern OSR adventures seem to work to include interesting things and to make choices with in as many hexes as it can fit.
And this leads to…
Dungeons
I found this also to be the case with dungeons. We noticed when running “B4: The Lost City” using OSE as well as “B1: In Search of the Unknown” and other classic dungeon modules, that there are several long passages, sometimes more than 100 feet, that simply terminate at a dead end or no meaningful choice to make.
In modern OSR dungeons this seems to be bad design. Every turn and corridor is kept tighter and shorter, and rooms either pace or lead to the next choice or feature. In my blog articles I often talk about “character facing” vs. “world facing” design, and how classical games are “world facing” while modern games are “character facing.” Modern OSR games sometimes seem to me “adventure facing” relying on level design and adventure content for the fun of the game.
This focus on actionable and interesting content is sometimes mistakenly thought of as an objective improvement by those who misunderstand classic content, when in truth, they are simply different. Long corridors terminating in dead ends, multiple intersections with only the choice of “do we go left or right” and the majority of rooms simply being empty was nail-biting when we employed retro-clones of the classic games, which required encumbrance tracking and measuring distance and time. This lead to moments where players were able to see the entire dungeon as a battlefield or chess board they were playing against a foe, rather than a theme park of points of interest and conversational choices. There were moments where they had fled back onto their previous position and into monsters exhausted and nearly out of light because they failed to map well and even a moment where they made it to the end of a long corridor only to have their torchlight go out and hear the sounds of monsters slavering for them in the darkness.
Where the modern OSR can sometimes feel like a conversation game of interesting choices and consequences, the classic game is more like a wargame with pieces on a board and rules where one can win or lose.
Here I made perhaps my biggest mistake with Shadowdark, and it amounts to not trusting the system. Initially when they made it to the Palace of the Silver Princess I used time as in B/X instead of allowing the Crawling Rounds to take place. We found this didn't work, but when we switched to how the rules describe a Crawling Round, which is abstracted and simply based on everyone getting to act, things in Shadowdark worked as advertised, that is it was fast. Much faster than B/X.
Shadowdark made very clear that this classical dungeon design was an odd fit. Because turns were abstracted and distances weren't measured, long corridors terminating in dead ends, empty rooms and lots of branching paths not leading to major checkpoints from this classic module made for dungeon content with no game-play. This didn't make it impossible to run this classic dungeon, but there were aspects of the dungeon design that Shadowdark couldn't access and felt vestigial.
Many people run classic dungeons in this way even when using classic systems anyway, essentially ignoring encumbrance and time to focus on the next event or choice in the dungeon.
In most ways, things that might seem very different from a Classic D&D game to Shadowdark didn't yield differences for us in game-play. The swinginess of combat comes out to be about the same as B/X actually in lethality, but is entertaining and wild and gives players more “buttons” to push. Many spells can be cast, but they can be easily lost for the day. HP can be restored with rest, but a character can be easily slain. The game-play felt like old school D&D for players that loved old school D&D.
However, Shadowdark is not a classic RPG. It's a modern one. Important aspects of game-play change when they are abstracted in favor of speed and simplicity. Shadowdark is simply not a substitute for your favorite game if you are already happy, though it may have amalgamated some of its elements. It’s not intended to be classic D&D and it won’t replace it. This is one of the things that critics of Shadowdark don't understand, the game and it's designer, never intended to make the next best version of B/X. If you prefer Old School Essentials, Basic Fantasy or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, it's not likely that Shadowdark will offer you something better than what you already like.
At the same time, if you are the sort of person that uses either a Classic D&D game, retro-clone or a modern game with classical elements in a looser and abstracted fashion and would prefer the more concrete and specific elements that can make the game slower and more deliberative get out of the way in favor of speed, and just want to get to the next cool thing in the dungeon to present to players, Shadowdark runs classic content with aplomb.
The “Heroic” experiment
I had not ran Dungeons and Dragons 5e or any sort of modern D&D for about a year and a half. I suspected that while Shadowdark wasn't intended for this purpose, that it would fulfill what people wanted from modern D&D better with very few changes.
I created a single page of tweaks which aren't much different than what people are used to. In hindsight you could probably have a heroic game of Shadowdark just if you use pulp mode. (An optional mode given in the Shadowdark text to tweak the game experience. Pulp mode awards an advantage token to players which can make the game more heroic.)
We used a modern module from Troll Lord Games called “The Flame of Lornedain” from the adventure tome “City of Brass” which sees the heroes rescuing townspeople and facing an evil villain in a story rather than simply extracting gold.
This worked flawlessly in my opinion. In every sense the game provided the heroism of 5e. Additionally, by using the https://shadowdarklings.net/ website and allowing all of the character options, it put the number of character options in 5e to shame. We had a lizard wizard, a kobold ranger, a towering half-orc brute warrior, an actual tree witch called “Log” with a pet bird. If you want to have a wild panoply, character extravaganza as in 5e culture in Shadowdark, you absolutely can with the current professionally designed third party materials. Shadowdarklings.net is like a simplified D&D Beyond also.
Not only did the play experience feel cinematic, heroic and story oriented, but it was fast. For a game that seeks to be heroic and cinematic, 5e utterly fails due to the combat system. Shadowdark was lightning fast even when tested at level 10 with powerful abilities and large pools of dice between characters and opponents.
When pulp mode is employed and the characters have some hit points, it provides the tension of 5e characters around level 3 or so, something I have always considered “the goldilocks zone” of 5e. They don't believe their characters will be slain in a meaningless way and modern players invest in the character's development, and yet it still felt dangerous and thrilling.
Shadowdark solves all of 5e's mechanical combat problems without stripping interesting options for characters when using the current range of expanded content from Cursed Scroll zines and third party designers. It takes some bold moves from a modern perspective by creating restrictions and pushing back on endless options, and it is true that you can't “build” your character in Shadowdark. Progression is determined randomly and initial features have a greater impact on the character's power than stats. Shadowdark refuses to allow for min-maxing, or anything that slows the game down. You can only take one action and move once. Numbers have a tighter bounded accuracy than in 5e, and should usually never be above a +4.
Having read through “Worlds without number” and ran “Five Torches Deep”, as well as many other “O5R” hybrid type games, I feel I can say that Shadowdark has done the best job of capturing the desires of 5e players and OSR referees in the same game.
Shadowdark was never intended to replace 5e or act as a surrogate for simpler, faster, epic fantasy gaming. But it can. I believe it can replace the social phenomenon that was 5e, but mechanically it’s not that game from the book. It will never satisfy those who enjoy the system mastery of Pathfinder or 5e and doesn't seek to. It does require the use of the optional “pulp” mode, and some beefier characters.
Additionally, Gamemasters that wish to run a “modern” or “heroic” style of Shadowdark will need to make an adventure game into a modern RPG by looking at the carousing and progression systems and tweaking them in some way.
I found this could be done on a single sheet of paper however and it worked with no problems.
For those interested here are the rules I used to make Shadowdark heroic:
https://mythicm.itch.io/herodark
The “Modern” Experiment
I suspect that most of the D&D played in the world still resides in the basement. Local friends and family who come up with their own worlds and ideas and who loosely interpret rules to have a good time. Every table is wildly different and the online internet conversation, and certainly the brand hobby culture, cannot show what D&D is really like from table to table, or really any table because the game actually happens at the table, not in brands or blogs.
Our final experiment was a group of longtime friends who have played D&D together for years, and a Dungeon Master with a wildly creative homebrew world.
Initially this experiment did poorly because the group was not used to old school mechanics. A TPK, then nearly another TPK. We adjusted the hit points, but then play settled into role-playing, exploration and investigation. The group knew combat could be deadly and learned. Really, this was the game-play that we had sought when we played together for years anyway trying to use 5e, it was never a combat heavy group and the bolting on of a crunchy, mechanics heavy skirmish game to our story always felt strange. While getting out of the way, Shadowdark still felt like D&D and eventually we felt powerful enough to feel cool and do cool stuff.
This to me reveals another important thing about ShadowDark: there is a learning barrier for people coming from modern RPGs, similar to other OSR games. This barrier can easily be overcome, but I see these experiences quite often on Facebook, Reddit and Discord where new ShadowDark GMs find the experience of losing characters and having no apparent story to not be fun.
I asked Jake to change the game in this case because the setting and game-play expectations were more about role-play and investigation than danger and combat. I asked him to do a couple of things similar to our heroic game, start with max hit points, and allow us to flee if combat was lethal, as well as to always use the reaction roll and distance mechanics for encounters.
This worked. Jake used the reaction system for strange, homebrew and handcrafted monsters balanced from the ShadowDark book and encounters were still lethal and scary, but we could run. If we perished, it was really our own fault. We did flee several times, sometimes we pushed our luck and got close to death, at all times when exploring the Jake's world I was scared and thrilled.
Once we got past the initial hump of getting used to OSR mechanics, the game really sang. It mainly did this in two ways. For one, the mechanics were abstract and concept based enough to be so fast and minimal as a player that they faded into the background. There was nothing on the character sheet to stare at or use mostly, and we found ourselves much more immersed in Jake’s handcrafted, weird and creative world.
At the same time however, the mechanics that did exist were fun to use and at the discretion of the player, unlike the OSR games we play where you sometimes have to wonder why you even have a character sheet.
One of the players who was primarily a 5e player who enjoyed class features in 5e was a goblin wizard who could cast magic missile with advantage, and had a background as a wolf cultist. The character had enough details to fit on an index card and yet at the same time the former 5e player constantly had interesting things about their character to explore or use. A major feature of the campaign for us became exploring the characters connection to a lost cult and seeking magical knowledge.
Both the Gamemaster and this player deepened the interesting features of the character by things arising in the world, particularly magic items and objects, and relationships with NPCs. The world had became the player's character sheet naturally without the brutal and dizzying starting point of a level 1 B/X character with almost nothing to begin with. Using magic missile with advantage did not make the character powerful in every respect, and they knew well their hit points were low, and yet using that ability was fun and satisfying.
To have a mechancally interesting character with reliable abilities is something absent in the mechanics of B/X D&D. While interesting characters can exist in the shared fiction the group comes up with in those classical games, ShadowDark captures this excitement about characters without making them invincible in the buttons players can push in the game, especially if your table allows third party content as mentioned in the heroic experiment.
Grand scope – Adventurer Conqueror King.
The last two experiments mentioned above are not “intended” game-play for Shadowdark, but I don't think that matters. I think people will take Shadowdark and make it what 5e should have been, and it will work great.
In the spirit of that, I imagine a 5th experiment. Can Shadowdark house a grand campaign?
The creator of Shadowdark has several time and explicitly stated this is not the goal of Shadowdark. The play test of Shadowdark campaigns went from level 1 to 10 (max level) and lasted a year. This is much more ambitious than most 5e campaigns which, in my experience, struggle to not fall apart by level 5 or so around month 4.
But what if we want more? What if we run an open table of Shadowdark the way the progenitors of the hobby ran the game.
You can see that magic of this style of game I discovered in my previous article. It is a game like no other and I simply suggest reading that article to discover why.
But did you know that Shadowdark itself was forged in just this fashion?
It seems the creator of Shadowdark discovered this truth as she was creating this game. But what happens when you have characters that have made it to 10th level but you have one of these permanent, decades long lasting worlds?
And here, I have no answers. I was not able to complete or test the fifth experiment due to other projects. Of course, groups could simply enjoy years of adventuring and retire adventurers when they get to level 10 with near endless fun.
I do have a theory however. I suspect that the answer to Old School Essentials, Knave, B/X, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and other games that share the “B/X strand of DNA” as I call it, all achieving grand scope with decades of play will be thanks to Adventurer Conqueror King, especially the new Imperial Reprint which collects and codifies many rules which are largely B/X compatible in terms of things like economics and scale of adventuring for high level play beyond dungeon delving. Things like sailing voyages, establishing a new government, securing and building a stronghold, leading an army to war, and the vagaries of establishing a Thieves Guild and what activities it might get up to:
The point isn’t to advertise ACKS, and this “fifth experiment” sits firmly in theory for me, but I think it’s the next step for these “B/X” DNA strand games we love. Have you, reader, had a “grand scope” Shadowdark campaign lasting years of play and including elements beyond just the scope of adventuring that is sanctuaries, wilderness exploration and dungeons? What did you use? Something large like RuneQuest, Harnworld or ACKs? Or something of your own design? Let me know in the comments.
In summary
One woman managed to undo the hegemony of the brand. With help of course, built upon the work before of course, but more than any game so far.
Kelsey did something you weren't supposed to do as an indie designer; she was endlessly kind and focused on gaming, with everyone, without exception. Kelsey managed to unite the old and the new not just in a game, but to make a safe gaming community for both grognards and young people. Sure, grognards played with young people and vice versa before, but never like this.
Kelsey managed to heal the rift between old and new. WOTC could have done this a decade ago, but at the crucial moment, they decided not to, and that curse would fester in that corporation to become the monster we know it is today. It's not just about mechanics. Shadowdark possesses the energy that has made younger people excited about 5e with the design principles that makes the OSR full of tinkerers and Game Masters.
Grassroots community building, built on a welcoming and universal focus on gaming can and does prevail. Gaming brings together, heals, unites. A darkness, I think, is passing.
It's true that there's really nothing new in Shadowdark, though it's a finely crafted amalgam of many things. If this weren't the case and it had some kind of central, exotic gimmick (the torch timer was not central to the game in my experience), it wouldn't have been able to accomplish what it did.
It doesn't matter what happens with the Shadowdark community etc. beyond this point because the cat is out of the bag. Anyone can make D&D, it belongs to everyone.
No one needs to pay for D&D, it's a folk art. But if you make something cool, people will buy cool stuff from you.
The Folk RPG Hobby has won.
References and links
“Shadowdark RPG” and the “Cursed Scroll Zines” are owned by The Arcane Library, LLC. Purchase them here!
https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/pages/shadowdark?srsltid=AfmBOopUnh-ezY8YG-U6m0xpP--1iKtUSxqyAfzwq6e_hLf1jno09k-U
"City of Brass” by Frog God Games
https://www.froggodgames.com/products/18135?srsltid=AfmBOoodzQtx11MzJ09-F8lYamCK1bhaZwearfVHLEbiNoda8UU7Pka0
Classic TSR Modules such as “B4: Palace of the Silver Princess” may be purchased used on eBay or at Noble Knight Games:
https://www.nobleknight.com/
The Evils of Illmire - by Spellsword
https://www.spellsword.net/posts/the-evils-of-illmire-mini-mega-hex-crawl-adventure
The Incandescent Grottoes - by Necrotic Gnome
https://necroticgnome.com/products/the-incandescent-grottoes
This blog and the linked actual play videos are independent and owned by Mythic Mountains RPG, any references or use of Shadowdark RPG are used under the Shadowdark RPG Third Party License and are not affiliated with The Arcane Library LLC. Shadowdark RPG © 2023 The Arcane Library, LLC.
I've been running an online Shadowdark campaign for nearly a year and I like it very much. I really enjoyed reading this post and seeing your observations regarding the different environments and styles in which you tested Shadowdark.
I have been looking for a "hero mode" type of RPG to run a particular setting in. I love how quick Shadowdark is, and how easy it is to run, and I have now downloaded your "HeroDark" supplement. I'm a little confused about the action section but I'm willing to try the rest of it to eventually run this setting that I had originally created for 5e (I currently have no interest in running 5e).
Thanks.
Thank you for this article. I do not own (nor have I ever played) Shadowdark, but I keep hearing that it is "awesome" and "the best" so I am of course interested. Granted, OSE was "awesome" and "the best" a couple years ago, and that was definitely not my jam, so I was leery about investing in yet another OSE book that likely wouldn't ever get used. This article has helped me determine that Shadowdark is not for me, as what it does best as you describe isn't quite what I want. I have used Basic Fantasy (with a little bit of Labyrinth Lord 3rd party stuff added in) since ~2007 and it gives me what I want when I want an "old school" game, which is a bit different than what Shadowdark appears to be doing.