Thoughts on Shadowdark after 50 sessions
We recently concluded our extended campaign of the Gloaming from Cursed Scroll #1. We plugged a lot of classic OSR modules into the setting and had overall a fantastic time. For the curious here is the list of published modules in the order we played them. Between these we played also a bunch of smaller adventures I wrote myself.
- Hideous Halls of Mugdublub
- Winters Daughter
- Willowby Hall
- Wavestone Monolith
- Raiders of the Hidden Temple
- Stonehell
- I6 Ravenloft
- Shadowdark Adventure Anthology: Dwarven Keep
Shadowdark is a great game, and there is more that I love, than that I dislike, however I learned a few things that will lead me towards running a BX system next:
- Shadowdark is not ideal to run BX/OSE modules
- Luck is overpowered
- The Torch becomes annoying and interruptive
- The game is missing a good, complete online SRD
- The death mechanic is too finicky and forgiving
Going forward I will probably run Basic Fantasy or OSE. A few things come together for me that drive this decision, both push and pull factors. One of the pull factors is accessibility: I wouldn’t play a game without a good online SRD anymore with an open table game, there is only so many quick start booklets I can print and handout and those don’t even cover mid-level stuff. I want everyone to be able to check their spells or abilities themselves before their turn or have something they can carouse for inspiration. Basic Fantasy, OSE/Dolmenwood, Black Sword Hack etc all provide great online SRDs that work fantastically on a phone, which is infinitely more usable than scrolling through pdfs on a small screen. Also, the accessibility of physical copies plays a role and it is hard to beat Basic Fantasy on this front, especially outside the US. Another pull factor is the better compatibility with the vast pool of excellent BX-based material. Yes you can run all that using Shadowdark, but it gets finicky with things such as level recommendations: Shadowdark only goes to level 10, and a level 5 Shadowdark character is vastly more powerful than a level 5 BX character. Especially casters. Chaining fireballs anyone? This made for instance running Stonehell difficult, the lower levels were just too easy when they arrived at level 3-4. An aspect that plays into this is a push factor: Luck is too powerful and classes that focus on it become overpowered. Pair this with the rather forgiving death mechanic and the sense of risk evaporates from level 5 onwards. Also the torch thing just becomes a nuisance at some point: I don’t want anymore phone timers going off in the middle of great intense moments. I much rather track timers based on turns now. So the result for me is this: house rule some of these things out of Shadowdark, or switch bases to the 90 percent identical OSE or Basic Fantasy and house rule some things in that I do like? The game itself will be almost identical, but accessibility will be much better and I will have an easier time running modules from the vast pool of BX material.