Curse of Strahd - for Shadowdark

I started running a game with my neighborhood gang for Horror on the Hill, a classic module from the 1980's.  Meanwhile, my high school group voted to do Curse of Strahd.  The high school gang was formerly "The Pillories", the party that played Lamentations of the Flame Princess over the past year and recently wrapped their campaign.  Originally we were going to do a Call of Cthulhu next, but I wanted to get some more "drive time" with the Shadowdark rules set, and we talked about several different campaign ideas.  They ultimately picked Curse of Strahd.  Curse of Strahd (COS) was originally written for 5E, but don't hold that against it, and it seems like it will work fine using Shadowdark rules.  We're 3-4 sessions into the campaign, but this post is about the conversion process and getting the campaign set up.

There are a  few good 5E campaigns that lend themselves to a retro style of play and sandbox gaming - Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Tomb of Annihilation, and Rime of the Frostmaiden, for instance.  Curse of Strahd occupies a nearby place - it’s a little verbose and almost wants to be a plotted or scripted scene-based campaign, but it's also set up as a hex crawl in the valley of Barovia, with Castle Ravenloft and several dungeon sites.  There's a small cottage industry in the 5E crowd of converting Curse of Strahd into a full-blown scene-by-scene adventure path, but it seems easy enough to go in the other direction too, and bring to the foreground the sandbox elements and player agency.

As written, the campaign suggests gifting experience levels to the players as the players wander Barovia and do stuff - it's more exploration focused than the scene-based milestones that show up in adventure paths, but doesn't go all the way towards an "XP for Treasure" mode like I'd want in a retro sandbox.  The first thing I wanted to figure out was how much experience the campaign gives out naturally if you tried to run it as an XP for Treasure campaign.  It was a little tedious, but I tallied the treasure finds from the hex-crawl locations and dungeons.  I also assumed characters will get to go carousing several times, as XP for carousing seems to be a default assumption of Shadowdark, and fits one of the themes in Curse of Strahd - Barovia is dreary, and wines and spirits are one of the few things that bring joy to the dismal landscape.  The total XP in COS a little light - there's enough XP for a party to get to level 6 if they "collected most of it" which we don't necessarily want to encourage.  So the XP will need a little juicing - either adding treasure to locations where it's sparse or nonexistent, increasing the reward amounts, and/or adding some boon or quest rewards for major accomplishments.  Shadowdark doesn't use a 1gp = 1xp basis; the game uses an abstract system where treasure hordes are worth either 1xp or 3xp, and legendary items are worth 10xp. I've seen where referees use a 5xp category for major hordes and I think that change could be effective at increasing the campaign's overall XP.  One thing I'll mention - the actual gold piece counts found in a 5E adventure are right in line with Shadowdark's recommendations - which is somewhere around 1/10th the amount of treasure you'd see in an old school game.

Sly Flourish has been running Ravenloft as a Halloween one-shot the past couple years and uses 5th level PC's for Ravenloft (the original I6 was for characters levels 4-6) so I imagine 5th-7th level characters would be fine for the finale of COS.  It won't take much adjustment to the campaign's XP to ensure player characters can get into that range before they head to Castle Ravenloft for the final confrontation with Strahd and the brides.

If you're familiar with Curse of Strahd, you'll know there are several meaningful accomplishments the characters can do along the way that could represent XP moments:  lighting the holy beacon of Argynvostholt, discovering Strahd's secret at the Amber Temple, finding the lost Arabelle (Madame Eva's heir), restoring the Wizard of Wines Winery, and so on.  Shutting down Old Bonegrinder or rescuing children from the werewolf fighting pits in the western caves could fit as well.

Regarding monsters:  there are online guides on converting 5E monsters to Shadowdark, so that wasn't hard to do.  I think I ended up with about 40 converted monsters in the monster document I made.

The last piece to prepare for sandbox play was to have clear notes on plot hooks and connections between non-player characters, locations, and what the players can learn.  There are 14-15 places to explore in the valley, and varying amounts of NPCs to meet in each location.  In an adventure path, the author will dictate patrons or events that push the players from scene to scene; for the sandbox, the players have the agency, they're the ones doing the pushing, and the referee's job shifts to making sure they have the opportunity to get enough information to make meaningful plans.  The hardcover of Curse of Strahd is text-heavy and verbose; I found it helpful to make an outline for each location of which nuggets of information can picked up at each locale or NPC.  There's a natural flow to the campaign, with the opportunity to engage in side quests and detours depending on player preference.

And voila - that's how I've turned Curse of Strahd into a retro style sandbox.  I'd be glad to post the quest outlines or monster conversions if there's interest.  Otherwise I'll get some game reports rolling on how we've done so far.

The Pillories Have Been Death Frost Doomed

Herein lies the tale of our abrupt and terrifying end to Death Frost Doom.  As if it could end any other way.

When we last met with The Pillories, their halfling, Remi Knotwise, had crawled through an air vent and landed in a hidden part of the dungeon, the tomb of an undead horror (the Exalted Inquisitor).  After realizing he was trapped in the tomb, and taking some horrendous internal and psychic damage from the Interrogator's questions-from-beyond-the-grave, he quaffed his potion of gaseous form and flew out of there (leaving all of his stuff in the room).

Over the course of a few game sessions, the players scrounged for clothing for Remi amongst the crypts.  Allister tried to use ESP on the jelly monster guarding the "well of souls" to find out its secrets, and went temporarily insane when he was assaulted by the anguished thoughts of all the souls trapped within the creature.  Instead of whacking the creature and continuing past it, they decided (once Allister recovered) they would follow Remi's path through the ceiling tunnel and go whack the Exalted Inquisitor instead.  The undead Inquisitor was whacked.  Remi collected his gear, the magic user "knocked" the door, and the players found themselves in a new part of the dungeon, the tombs of the "Greater Repugnances".  They made the fateful decision to go left.

Left brought them to the Tomb of the Blessed Afflictor, the undead commander of the legions buried within the mountain.  He appeared as a long-robed skeleton lord sitting on his throne, leering at them.  He showed off his freaky undead mind-powers by telekinetically slamming the door behind them so they were stuck in the room with them, horror-movie style.

Maximus, the name of the undead general, wanted them to swear an oath, first requesting him to raise his undead army, and then a promise from them to guide him to a large mortal city.  in return, he would swear not to harm any of them, directly or indirectly.  These oaths would break the powerful magic keeping him trapped within the mountain.

The priest, Father Blackburn, was first to speak - "We will never serve you, monster!"  His henchman, Geoff, drew his sword.  The undead lord hoisted Geoff into the air with a lift of his hand after Geoff failed a saving throw, and with a flick of the wrist, sent Geoff telekinetically smashing into the far wall with a sickening thud.  Geoff died instantly (he was only level 1, after all).

Initiative was formally rolled, and the monster went first - sucking Blackburn into his grasp via the telekinetic force pull, and telling the others it was not too late to stand down before he killed their priest.  The rest of the players froze!  Intimidated by the undead lord, they watched as Blackburn continued to squirm and resist, denying all the monster's overtures towards capitulation, until the thing grew tired of dialogue with the rebellious cleric and drained the life energy out of him!  It may not have been a glorious death but it was well-respected by the others, as Blackburn's player perished while staying strong for his ideals (knowing this was the campaign finale).  What a dramatic moment - this is why we play these games.  Remi, Yuri, and Allister each took a knee and agreed to help the undead lord escape the mountain.

Time seemed to distort as a nightmarish delirium descended on them... the monster escorted them to the Crypt of the Testifier, where supernatural oaths were spoken and sealed.  The jelly monster at the well of souls was ordered to dissolve, releasing the anguished souls of the dead.  Maximus's undead army was reformed.  The players reeled as if in a living nightmare when they beheld the legions vomiting out of the crypts.  The hungry dead from the frozen earth above them clawed their way out of the soil and rampaged down the mountain and into the high vales and valleys, overwhelming clan holds and besieging the village of Langholm.  These were the anguished victims of the cult, now turned into free-willed ghouls and hungry dead, desperate to eat the living.  There would be rumors for weeks to come, spread across Scotland and Northern England, of a strange plague across the northlands, causing its victims to waste away while infecting them with a horrible form of cannibalism.

Maximus ordered his army to fortify the mountain and close the passes, awaiting his return.  He needed to learn about this new world in the year 1630.  He collected the skin and clothing from Geoff back in the dungeon, consuming Geoff's likeness so he could pass as human once more.  The monster was pleased the characters would be taking him to York, a place he knew from Roman times when it was still called Eboracum.  He didn't mind that the characters claimed the campaign's "MacGuffin", a book of esoteric lore and knowledge that was on an altar by the Well of Souls.  Maximus had larger goals now.

The campaign ended when the group once again passed under the medieval gates of York.  The players felt the supernatural bonds of their oaths dissolve as they crossed the threshold to the city.  Maximus made to disappear amongst the busy streets, pausing briefly to look back at them over his shoulder and smiling from behind Geoff's stolen face and skin.  "Be seeing you."  He winked before flipping Geoff's hood over his head, and melted away into the crowd.

I'm not sure this is truly the end of The Pillories, but what a glorious and horrible way to part ways with our erstwhile heroes.  This group is going to undertake a gothic-themed Curse of Strahd campaign next (converted to Shadowdark), and that will keep us busy for some time.  Maybe I'll have The Great Virginia Disastrum read by then, and that could be our next LOTFP foray, a fun-filled trip to colonial Virginia.  But first, a nice vacation to Barovia.

 Be seeing you.

Horror on the Hill - New Maps and a Report

My youngest son's football team had a "bye" this weekend so I had some extra time Saturday and put together a few maps for our Horror on the Hill Shadowdark game.  ("Horror on the Hill" refers to the old TSR-era adventure module B5 The Horror on the Hill).

First up is Guido's Fort - a frontier stockade sitting across the river from the ominous "Horror on the Hill".  I put a small frontier settlement outside the fort, some fisherman, hunters, and loggers, along with a trading post, the Lion's Den Inn, and a stable master who supports also supports the fort.  I have some character sketches for them; since the stable master is a retired sailor (pirate), he could be a source for the rumor that leads a party to hunt for the Isle of Dread.  I'm thinking if this campaign sticks a little while, a classic Karameikan adventure like The Isle of Dread or Night's Dark Terror could be a nice follow-up to Horror on the Hill.

Guido's Fort for B5 Horror on the Hill

Here's the original wilderness map for Horror on the Hill - it might be one of my least favorite maps in the early B-series canon.  It needed something different.

Blech

At least for now, I've gone with a fun style reminiscent of a theme park map.  Maybe I'll do a Keep on the Borderlands map in this style at some point too.  I've lost some of the cliffs and elevation, so I may take another go but this made me chuckle and I had fun with it.

Horror on the Hill - theme-park style!

Here's the path the players have taken the first couple of games.  They cleared out a nest of killer bees (1), avoided a steamy geothermal cave (2), scouted an encampment of hobgoblins and avoided them (3), fought some ghouls in the graveyard (4), and then began exploring the ruined evil monastery on the top of the hill (5).

The trip to the top

We're enjoying Shadowdark so far - it feels like an OSR system, with a heavy focus on exploration, XP for treasure, and survival horror.  Player characters are very soft at level 1 and damage is flat, so the risk of TPK is ever-present.  Fighters are good, magic is powerful but unpredictable, and people drop to zero hit points a lot.  The "downed rules" do give the party a round or so to revive a dying character, which is both a little forgiving but creates a logistical challenge for the other players, so I'm enjoying the effects.

More to come on Shadowdark, but first I'll show how we wrapped our Death Frost Doom campaign.  Salut!

Making Karameikos Great Again

I started a second game a month or so back with one of my older gaming groups running Shadowdark.  We had all ended up at the same end-of-summer barbeque, started talking about games, and realized several folks in the old guard wanted to give Shadowdark a try.  I had recently become enamored of the rules as well, and so the idea for a new campaign was formed.  This is basically our first game report.

Shadowdark reminds me a lot of Moldvay BX.  Maybe because it's like what a BX version of 5E should have been?  The game embraces simple classes, simple action resolution, and dungeon crawling.  The Shadowdark community claims you can run classic BX style modules with the system mostly as is, only adjusting the treasure down a factor.  I was drawn to the idea of seeing how it handled classic modules from the 1980's that we haven't run before.  Thus germinated the idea of running B5 Horror on the Hill in my favorite setting from that era, the Grand Duchy of Karameikos*.

One other thing we talked about was running a "gauntlet".  Shadowdark borrows some ideas from Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), including starting with a pile of 0-level characters, putting them through a horrendous situation, and the survivors get to pick classes as level 1 characters.  In DCC it's called a funnel, in Shadowdark it's a gauntlet, but the concepts are similar.  One difference seems to be in DCC, each player will run all 4 of their zero-level characters at once, so a 5-person table will have 20 peasants trying to survive the funnel.  There aren't a lot of published Shadowdark gauntlets, but the mind-set seems to be each player runs a single character at a time, and the back-up zero level guys are off-camera in reserve (depending on the fiction of the gauntlet).

I decided to use the gauntlet as the lead-in to Horror on the Hill and make it part of the same nexus of events.  In B5 Horror on the Hill, a remote outpost (Guido's Fort) sits on the near side of the River Shrill; across the river sits an ominous fog-shrouded hill with the rising threat of the goblin king in the dungeons below.  I took a gauntlet called Cry of the Stingbat and hacked it up.  In my version, goblins are sneaking across the river at night to kidnap traders and homesteaders and throw them down a huge hole to feed a colony of "stingbats" (stirges) which assail the inhabitants of the fort at night.  The players start as a group of such victims, needing to escape a fairly linear dungeon before dawn when the flocks of stingbats return home and kill them.  They also found and killed a few goblins hiding out near the entrance; the goblins were carrying foul-smelling smudge sticks and stink bombs that immobilize the stingbats and let them manage the horde.

I can see the appeal of running a zero-level gauntlet.  Characters die left and right, which allows for some gallows humor, and story quickly emerges around the exploits of the plucky survivors.  We ran a strict time clock on the gauntlet night, and the added pressure kept things moving briskly.  Finally, there's a useful community generator at shadowdarklings.net that quickly makes a page of zero-level characters fully equipped for game night.  It's all very convenient.  My players had doubts, but now they're believers - I'm sure we'll do a gauntlet every chance we can when starting a Shadowdark campaign.

Ultimately, the zero-level traders, soldiers, and homesteaders returned to Fort Guido after their ordeal in the stingbat hole; they let the fort commander know about the stingbat horde and turned over the stink bombs and smudge sticks so the garrison could take care of the monsters in the daylight.  Having tasted dungeon adventuring, the group promised to reform back at the Fort as level 1 adventurers and take the fight over the river to the goblins - and hopefully get rich and powerful along the way.  Game 2 involved poking around the Fort, collecting rumors from the tavern and talking to the local "old timer", and finally hiring a boatman to ferry them across the river.  They agreed the boatman would return in two-days time at the agreed upon spot for a pick-up, so the players are carrying just enough food and water.  We honestly didn't get too far in their exploration of the hill after game 2.

I have a range of opinions on Shadowdark - I want to give it a few more game sessions (and maybe even try it with the other gamer group) before rendering official judgment.  It's definitely a vibes game that is laser focused on evoking an old school dungeon crawling vibe, while embracing a lot of modern mechanics from 5E and DCC.  I've had great fun; I don't know if it will displace BX (or even needs to).  I also signed up to run a few convention games as Shadowdark in a couple of months to get more drive time with the rules.  More to come on that front.

I still need to build a map for Guido's Fort, it's not provided in B5.  However, I did put together a new map for Karameikos.  This will sound a bit sacrilegious to fellow Mystarans (?), Mystara-philes(?), but the old 8-mile-per-hex style of the Trail Guides was leaving me a bit cold so I made a custom map (above).  Halloween is coming up, and Karameikos is described as a misty, wild land with dark forests, haunted moors, and foreboding mountains, like something out of Eastern Europe.  Maybe I could put the hidden valley of Barovia in the Black Peaks or Cruth Mountains in time for a Halloween one-shot?  It seems like it could work.

* Apologies for the lame title, when your country's politics are as ridiculous as ours, you've got to find a way to laugh about it.

The Pillories in Death Frost Doom - The Crypt isn't Empty

Our cast of characters continues to explore Death Frost Doom (DFD), but the ending of last game session was perhaps one of my favorites.  First - about Death Frost Doom.  In the early OSR period (pre-2010), this stood out to me as an adventure that took D&D style gaming in a new direction.  Once I started running a game with my old high school friends, I knew this was an adventure that we'd work into the campaign, especially because they like the horror genre. In DFD, the players explore an ominous dungeon full of catacombs and the creepy trappings of a long defunct death cult.  The tension builds as they continue to loot crypts but aren't finding any monsters - but they know something bad is going to happen at some point, they just don't know how and when.  Last game ended with the first bad thing.

The players were in a kitchen in an area of the dungeon dedicated to priest quarters.  They found a hidden air duct in the ceiling that led to a 3' square crawl-space.  The party's halfling, Remi, asked for a boost - he felt some cold air coming down the shaft and wanted to see where it went.  He lit a candle and crawled through the duct, discovering a long vertical shaft that seemed to go up and out - cold air was coming down the shaft from the surface.  But the duct kept going forward, so he kept going.  The other characters called for him to come back, but Remi said he'd be fine.  In the dim light of his candle, he could see the duct opened into the ceiling of another chamber, and it looked like some kind of crypt was down below.

He yelled back at everyone to hang tight while he dropped down to check out the room.  (Mind you, he had no rope or similar gear - once he dropped himself down into the next room, he had no way to get back into the duct).  "It'll be fine", he said, "I'll find my way back one way or another".

The lid of the stone crypt was carved with a relief of a gruesome tyrant standing on the skulls of victims; he passed by the sarcophagus to see if there was a way out of the room before looking into it any further.  Yes!  There was a door out.  Unfortunately, it was barred from the outside.  Why would someone put a bar on the outside of a crypt, as if to keep something in?  That's when he heard the grinding of stone behind him, as something with a grip of iron slid aside the lid of the sarcophagus from the inside and sat upright.  That was the cliffhanger ending of the game night, with the mummified remains of the cult's "grand inquisitor" jerkily lurching towards the trapped halfling and his little candle.  The mummified inquisitor began to interrogate him with a sepulchral voice from beyond the grave, while the other players watched on in horror.

It turns out Remi has been carrying a potion of gaseous form with him since very early in the campaign, so he's confident he'll escape the crypt of the undead horror if he wins initiative, and that's why he was so nonchalant about the risks.  The tension at the table eased a little in anticipation of next game.  But the players are now boggled with the idea that the sprawling dungeon is not entirely quiescent, and there are dark horrors waiting for them, lurking in undiscovered tombs.

By way of reminder, here is our cast of characters, The Pillories:

• Reverend Blackburn - L4 cleric
• Remi Knotwise - L4 halfling
• Allister - L3 magic-user
• Yuri - L3 elf
• Henchmen - Wood (fighter), Toby (specialist), Geoff (fighter)

Other events since last game report included discovery of endless catacombs, filled with thousands of mummified cult members - warriors, priests, commoners, and even children.  There have been traps and curses, including the cleric, who fell victim to a spell that saw him inscribing a tattoo of the death cult on his own forearm while caught in a mindless frenzy; he learned to his horror that he can longer receive the benefits of his own healing magic.  They also discovered the source of the ominous susurrus sound that permeates the dungeon, but quickly retreated when an ooze-like monster crawled out of a well to defend the spikey plant growth that was producing the sound.  They know they'll need to defeat the ooze monster and hack through the spike growth to reach their goal, but decided to double back and finish exploring some other areas and confirm there wasn't another way around it first.  This is how Remi ended up crawling through an air duct to the tomb of the inquisitor.

I had great fun running it, and I'm looking forward to the next installment.

Understanding Shadowdark Treasure XP and Gold

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.

Reading the Shadowdark Rules

I've studied the Shadowdark rules.  I love them.  We're certainly going to run a dungeon crawl using Shadowdark once the York 1630 campaign reaches a good resting spot.  After that, who knows?  One player is clamoring for a Call of Cthulhu campaign;  this group has never experienced the glory that is Dwimmermount; I also want to take a look at the recent Lamentations campaign, A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum 1633, because it sounds interesting and I love the historical setting.  But first, let's talk about Shadowdark RPG.

As an OSR game (or OSR adjacent), it uses 3d6 (in order) to generate statistics - the way Crom intended.  There are only 4 core classes, and the term race has been replaced by the term ancestry, which sounds so much better than "species".  ("Species" is what that outfit in Seattle was adopting, last I checked).  The game has a lower power curve than traditional BX, covering levels 1-10 and squishing nine levels of spells into 5 "tiers".  Hit points and damage are lower, and so is spell damage, and there is no longer a Raise Dead type effect, so death is going to stick.  No player characters have any dark vision, whatsoever - darkness matters.  There's a simple encumbrance tracking system, and resource management (especially light and torches)matters.  There's no skill system, and the DM is encouraged to rely heavily on player skill and only use ability checks for situations where failure is important.  Ability checks have also replaceded saving throws.  Combat has been streamlined to move quickly, including eschewing detailed ranges for "zones" like close, near, and far, encouraging theater of the mind play and getting away from having to measure everything on a grid with a ruler and counting squares.  It's like the author played one-too-many 3-hour-long 5E combat calculating 5' steps and opportunity attacks and declared "Nevermore".

Some other old school things I really liked is putting reaction rolls and morale back into the game (well, obviously they never left our OSR games, but they were minimized in the fifth).  The game uses XP for treasure, going so far as to completely eliminate XP for combat, but added a carousing rule to spend money for XP.  The rule book include several hundred compact monsters, and tons of random tables, covering everything from creating random player characters, to random monsters, encounter tables, NPC parties, spell mishaps, and tons of useful names and tidbits.  I see all you table-enthusiasts.

There are some distinct novelties here that either borrow from modern designs or represent the author's idiosyncratic musings.  For example, character advancement is random.  There's no progression table specifying all 3rd level fighters get X and all 3rd level wizards get Y, for instance.  You roll on a table instead.  Again, it's as if the author played one too many 5E sessions that was all about character optimization instead of emergent play in the dungeon, and finally said, "I've got your CharOps right here, you sub-class junkies... from now on everybody's advancement is random!"  I kind of love it.  I mentioned how spell levels are collapsed into tiers but didn't mention the biggest change - no Vancian magic or spell memorization.  Wizards and Priests roll to cast, and get to keep reusing their spells throughout the day until they hit a spell failure - you could have Cure Wounds for days or lose your healing on the first failed roll.  There are 1's and 20's for catastrophic failures and successes, too.  Shadowdark also suggests the use of a gauntlet for zero-level characters, another nod toward Dungeon Crawl Classics.  I'm interested in seeing how this works out in play - my sense is it will make low level Wizards and Priests a lot more interesting, while also keeping magic unreliable and less formulaic and predictable than the OG style.  Let's go, Lady Luck.

Perhaps one of the more controversial rules I've seen is the "torch timer".  I don't mean using the old BX procedure of tracking turns, where a torch lasts 6 turns, and every 6 turns the players just have to mark off another torch used.  In rules-as-written, Shadowdark expects the DM to start an actual clock and declare the torch is out after an hour of game play.  It sounds a little weird, but as they say, "hear me out".  Your players could cover a lot more than 6 turns with a single torch during exploration mode, so on the one hand this could let them stretch their light source; on the other hand, if the 1 hour mark comes up during combat rounds, it means the torch goes out right in the middle of a fight, putting the characters into pitch black, and the darkness rules in this game are unforgiving.  It's an interesting stressor.  I need to think about that one further and make sure I've grokked all the in's and out's.

The core mechanics will be very comfortable to 5E players - the ability score modifiers are similar to 5E, as is the concept of difficulty class and ability checks and ascending rolls.  Rolling with advantage and disadvantage is here, and that makes a lot of sense as a modern invention, and so is the concept of a luck point (similar to 5E's inspiration, although I think Shadowdark's "luck" might be a little stronger expression of the idea).

The author of Shadowdark is Kelsey Dionne.  I came into contact with her work through 5E, she was an independent designer who was doing horror-themed 5E adventures.  Some of them were homages to Edgar Allan Poe, which I quite enjoyed.  I've seen a few of her interviews on the YouTube and she talks about her influences - she grew up in the Lake Geneva area/southern Wisconsin playing Judges Guild and old school styles, played modern D&D and became a game designer, but never lost that itch for OSR-style exploration gaming, and voila - Shadowdark.  From everything I can tell, Shadowdark looks like a smashing success as a system - not revolutionary, but a smartly designed game that distills and synthesizes a number of influences to make a game that looks fun, plays fast, and delivers a classic adventure gaming experience, in a book that offers modern layout and design, succinct but evocative writing, and a compact one-book volume that hearkens back to the rules cyclopedia.  Seriously, how may games these days have a single "all-in-one" book for the entire game system?  

So yes, I'm super excited to take these rules out for a spin sometime in the next few weeks, then circle back with post-play observations.  But here's a question I've been pondering - there are a lot of OSR rules sets out there, so how and why would Shadowdark earn it's place on my game shelf?  I've got Lamentations of the Flame Princess, of course, because I like horror gaming and no one does the "weird twist adventure" better than that publisher.  Then there is Adventurer Conqueror King - ACKS - a game that takes the promise of BECMI, with domain play and economics, and dials it into Accountants and Aboleths.  I truly love ACKS, but my groups usually don't want to be building spreadsheets in between game sessions. Sigh,  It's tragic, I know.  I've mostly skipped playing OSE, Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, etc - I own most of those original games, and still have all the BX and BECMI and 1E AD&D books on the game shelves, so I don't need the clones.  I look for innovations in new rules sets.  Shadowdark looks like it perfectly fits the niche of a BX style game, a beer and pretzels dungeon crawler, with lessons learned and innovations from modern fantasy games and design.  I think it will bring quality of life improvements to my OSR friends and may lure back some of the 5E players with the familiar mechanics.

There's a free version of the game available that would likely support levels 1-3, and there's an introductory adventure as well:  Shadowdark Preview.  Check it out.