I've continued to spend time with the Shadowdark rules and we're going to try this out in a few weeks after we've wrapped our current LOTFP game. Character creation and advancement, adventuring, combat, monsters, there are many things in Shadowdark that look like they will play great at the table. Shadowdark reminds me a lot of what I first loved when discovering the original Moldvay basic book back in the 1980s, and I see a similar sentiment again and again. Characters like Morgan, Silverleaf, and poor Black Dougal, would seem to be right at home in this game. One thing that tripped me up on the first read was the treasure system.
Shadowdark is a game that gives XP for treasure, but it's abstract, it's not 1gp = 1xp. A "normal" treasure horde is worth 1 XP, and a first level character needs 10XP to reach level 2 - so they need to find 10 normal treasure hordes. Above a "normal" horde, there are "extraordinary" treasure finds that are worth 3 XP, and a "legendary" horde would be worth 10 XP. For levels 1-3, there's a suggestion that a normal horde should be worth at least 20gp (minimum - it could be more). An extraordinary horde might include a permanent magic item, and a legendary horde would involve the campaign's unique items and quest items - unlikely at 1st level. This approach to treasure and XP looks simple to use in practice. If our 1st level party finds 200gp in a chest, it's 1 XP; if they find 30gp in a bag, it's also 1 XP - simple.
There are a few wrinkles to this approach. First, everyone in the party gets that 1 XP when finding a treasure horde - it's not tallied and divided at the end of the adventure. In an old school game like Moldvay/Cook BX, if 5 players found a meager 20gp cache, they'd divide it by 5 at the end of the adventure, they'd each pocket 4gp, and get 4xp (for a fighter, that's 4xp towards their 2,000 xp requirement for reaching level 2 - .2% of the way there!). For the 5 Shadowdark PC's, they each net 4gp at the end of the adventure as well, but since the find was a normal treasure horde for them, they each received 1 XP upon finding the cache, wich represents 10% of what they need for advancement. That's a big difference in outcomes, no?
I went ahead and built a "by-the-book" table to figure out how much gold a typical Shadowdark adventuring party would collect over their career, and I'll put it here:
Over the course of 10 levels, the Shadowdark party should collect at least 36,000gp if you only followed the book minimums, but it could be more. Furthermore, players could cash in things like mundane equipment they found in the dungeon which would count as money but not necessarily experience in game terms. For comparison, a 10th level 5E party (using by the book treasure hordes) would have collected 80-90,000 gp over their career, so I imagine a Shadowdark group would have a similar haul. Our Moldvay/Cook BX adventurers would have collected a million gold pieces by level 10. These figures also provide a simple conversion guide for a BX type adventure - since Shadowdark adventures gain about 1/10th the treasure of a BX character, you can convert BX adventures by scaling down those 800gp treasures to 80gp for Shadowdark.
One of the rationales for the scaled down gold may be there's not much to spend money on in the core rules. The equipment list is sparse. There are no spellbooks, no spell research, no gold needed for magic item creation. You're not saving up for a castle or stronghold. There are no retainer or hireling rules, and there are several good reasons why Shadowdark (much like 5E) eschews followers and breaks from old school conventions - see below*. The core rules are also not prescriptive about levying upkeep or living expenses.
The best armor for a fighter, plate mail, is probably not affordable until 3rd or 4th level. Mithril armor is a better option that's probably achievable in the mid-levels. Although silver weapons are alluded to in the monster descriptions, I couldn't find any rules on the costs for silver weapons. There aren't many obligations the players will have to spend money on; priests may have to pay penance (for recovering spells), and everyone else will have torches and consumable equipment to replace. The big swing factor in the rules is "carousing", which lets players convert extra cash into experience. In fact, the one watch out to making your world's hordes far richer than the default guidelines would be the unintended consequence it could have on carousing; if you juiced the wealth guidelines, carousing XP could get out of hand. I haven't analyzed the carousing rules in detail yet, but my sense is there might be diminishing returns as a group levels.
I've called Shadowdark a "beer and pretzels" dungeon crawler and these observations on the Shadowdark economy reinforce that view. It's not trying to be a simulation. The lower amount of gold, coupled with the carousing rules, ensures player characters will be frequently broke and willing to get back into the dungeon. Shadowdark hasn't embraced an end-game that involves domains, castles, or strongholds just yet, so the lower wealth isn't an issue. On the other hand, the referee doesn't have to deal with the ridiculous situations in older games where player characters have hundreds of thousands of gold pieces sitting around back in town by the mid-levels, and referees invent taxes, training costs, and other penalties to try and drain the coffers.
These are just observations, not judgments. I'm really looking forward to seeing this game in action, and now two of my gaming groups have both expressed an interest, so I'm sure we'll be firing it up in the near future. I think we're going to see Shadowdark continue to peel off 5E players and make inroads into the OSR crowd as well as the word continues to get out - it's quite good. More to come.
* Reasons Shadowdark eschews retainers: the encumbrance and light system is about forcing tough choices on the players for equipment, torches, and treasure, and extra "mules" in the form of retainers relaxes the resource pressure. Likewise, the 'action economy' of Shadowdark is meant to be 1 action per player per turn, so things move quickly around the table. Extra non-player characters on the player's side would slow the game the same as if the players were juggling multiple attacks and bonus actions and action surges and similar 5E-isms. Finally, the XP rules discussed here, where XP is immediately granted for finding a treasure horde, would also need an adjustment if retainers were put in the mix - perhaps they get half XP like in older editions.
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