Shadowdark Review - RIB05
Shadowdark Review
Disclaimer: I haven’t experienced the game as a player, but I’ve run it for my family and watched it be run on YouTube by the designer. Pictured above is the premium edition of the book, which is what I got from the Kickstarter, among other items.
TLDR: Shadowdark simplifies the RPG experience using very modern sensibilities, while dishing out the flavor of old-school fun. It does a superb job of providing a tense dungeon crawl experience, which helps create a real sense of accomplishment when the adventuring is done, and of onboarding both experienced and new TTRPG players.
Shadowdark is the subject of a relatively recent craze among the TTRPG sphere, advertised as a “nostalgic-but-new” system and raising over a million dollars in funding by over 13,000 backers on Kickstarter. Physical editions are currently sold out at time of writing, with one standard rulebook going for $125 on eBay, though a restock is planned. I’d be remiss not to point out the slight criticism it faced on forums for the plethora of promotion it used at the opening of its campaign, but overall people love the system and it makes sense why.
Shadowdark does a lot right, it’s tough for me to explain why without first asking you to imagine what comes to mind if you were to hear ‘shadowdark’ as an adjective. It’s not quite grimdark like Fear & Hunger or Malazan, nor do the horror elements elicit a laugh from absurdity and disbelief. I think the best way to put it would be to imagine the trappings of Darkest Dungeon but with old school D&D fantasy tropes instead of the body horror and eldritch influence, while being in monochrome (the art in Shadowdark is fantastic and probably an instant classic for the hobby sphere). Admittedly this is a piss poor evocative undertaking on my part but what I’m trying to say is that once you see the art and get a feel for the system, not only will you see why the name fits but also feel that it’s almost a genre in its own right.
I didn’t plan to say all that when I wanted to look at this system, the above paragraph is really some high praise if you think about it. It’s almost like I’m saying that Shadowdark sets a bar for NSR style games, and honestly it really does. There are very limited circumstances where I could imagine someone picking another NSR system over this one, but even in those cases there are enough sufficient and convenient workarounds that it wouldn’t be worth learning a new system in the first place. For the curious but hesitant, the quickstart is free and has everything you have to get going and the 3rd party license is very generous (partly in reaction to WotC’s OGL scandal) so you can look at lots of supplementary material on DTRPG or the wider web for something that catches your eye.
When you think of OSR style play and want some quality of life systems with a dash of added horror/suspense/tension, then Shadowdark really does seem to be best-in-class. To be fair, however, if you want any other sort of aesthetic then you would need another system. Want something more horror themed or gonzo? Well then you are better off looking elsewhere. In that way Shadowdark mirrors a lot of other “xSR” themed games with a lack of aesthetic flexibility (and subsequently modern systems get too much flak when one thinks of all the stories a GM could tell with them), but for what it wants to do, it does so superbly.
You might be confused with all of the abbreviations above so I’ll try to explain them simply, though as with everything I could write a hell of a lot more. The SR you see at the end of NSR and OSR stands for ‘School Renaissance’ or ‘School Revival’, the S could even be Style depending on who you ask but you get the gist. The N and O are for New and Old, respectively. OSR games are best explained by this primer but if you don’t want to read it just imagine something more sword & sorcery focused (as opposed to epic fantasy) where the world doesn’t care about you and if you don’t poke everything with a ten foot pole you’ll probably die (it’s fun, I promise). The NSR movement is an attempt to capture this feel of Basic or Advanced D&D but with QoL improvements and gimmicks that the author may feel adds to their system’s purpose or experience (we’ll get to what Shadowdark’s is soon enough, it’s actually pretty fun though some balk at the simplicity).
This system was created by The Arcane Library, which is spearheaded by Kelsey Dionne and was created in 2017. Dionne is no stranger to playing or designing TTRPG products, having created The Secrets of Skyhorn Lighthouse which is the highest rated adventure ever on DMs Guild. There’s some other stuff I could throw in here, like I remember a story about how Dionne has actually met Gygax, but let’s move on to the actual book and game.
As a backer I received the green leatherette, silver-foiled hardback copy pictured above along with a few oversized cards detailing additional monsters with accompanying artwork. The book itself is very large, clocking in at over 300 pages but it’s well made with sewn binding, a ribbon bookmark, chapter markers distinguishable on the side of the book, and quick reference points on the endsheets.
I’ll start off talking about the actual system with the mechanic that most people point to when speaking on what differentiates it and why this game succeeds. It is that torches expire in one hour of real world game time. The party has access to context clues, like with torch flickering and whatnot, but really only the GM knows for sure how much time is left for it. This is a simple but really fun mix up to the usual formula, it acts on the players’ psychology and makes them rush, but this game is inspired by the old-school formula, and so rushing is a very bad idea. The party can’t afford to waste time, they can’t dive deeper into a dungeon than they can manage (and they can’t accurately estimate how efficient they can be) and all the while the dark is encroaching upon the players and their low hit points and paltry equipment. It’s a blast, super fun, and really nails the tension of dungeon delving in a way that most systems simply do not.
There are lots of mechanics that further facilitate this primary convention, those being monster morale (monsters flee when their numbers are halved unless they succeed at a check), a complete lack of darkvision, and the way turn order works. Initiative is rolled for at the beginning of a session, this is the same as turn order and it is meant to stay relatively constant. For all intents and purposes it works a bit like a speed stat, although of course it does nothing except decide who or what goes when. This is meant to save time and is a QoL feature that eliminates something that would otherwise cut the tension when facing encounters in a dungeon with a dwindling torch, so I think it’s a good way of going about things.
This simplicity is mirrored in other mechanical aspects and again most of these play on either saving time in dungeon dwelling segments (it’s more than this, we’ll talk about what the in-game “Shadowdark” is in a little bit) or adding to tension without needless fussing over math (e.g. simple equipment slots, simplified distances, low HP, no skills), although as a system that takes heavy inspiration from early D&D, some things cannot be avoided (e.g. check modifiers, d20 roll over system, typical 3d6 stats). On the plus side you get race and class being different mechanical entities, alignment with deities, and only the four traditional class archetypes (fighter, priest, thief, and wizard) so it really does have an old school flavor when playing.
As we touched on above, the theme and presence of darkness is paramount with this system. As such it uses the idea that there is only total or no illumination, meaning that beyond your torchlight there is total darkness (this is the Shadowdark). Monsters will try to extinguish your torches, random encounter rolls are made every round in the dark, and you will have disadvantage on rolls. The dark is lethal, don’t get caught in it.
The game leans into this inherent lethality by giving players the option to start at level 0 or 1, this is essentially the death funnel mechanic from DCC, it adds a bit of flavor and essentially what it does is makes players generate and weed out random characters using an extra lethal adventure, referred to here as The Gauntlet. Shadowdark uses a treasure-for-XP system and retains the potential for lightheartedness found in so many old school adventures through the Carousing mechanic, where players pitch in with gold to throw a party and roll a dice to see what comes out of it. Lastly, the book is littered with random tables for all your adventuring needs, from scenario creation to NPCs and monster and encounter generation, the singular book has everything for players and GMs alike.
Overall, Shadowdark is a heap of fun, whether you’re a player trying to survive and accomplish your goals while the dark surrounds you, or a GM seeing how players get up to more shenanigans than usual due to their sense of limited time, all while maintaining that good old fashioned D&D spirit.
BONUS: I always mention this when talking about Shadowdark, Sly Flourish created a conversion for the original I6 Ravenloft module. It’s an absolutely fantastic time.
Nikhil Saxena
Founder, Destrier Studios
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