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.

Shadowdark: The Kids Will Be Alright

The large American gaming convention (Gencon) just wrapped, including the annual Ennie Awards.  The game Shadowdark cleaned up a bunch of awards - best product of the year, best game, best rules, and best layout and design.  They ran a million dollar kickstarter last year, and now this thing has become a movement.  They achieved that critical escape velocity that let them leave the fantasy heartbreaker planet and reach the stars.

I haven't played it yet.  When our current LOTFP campaign wraps, I think we'll do a one-shot to see what all the hype is about - there's a free adventure in the free start rules called "Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur" that gives off a Cretan vibe and would fit the bill as an intro adventure.  Shadowdark looks like a rules light or minimalist OSR type game, with a heavy focus on exploration, dungeon crawling, resource management (torches and encumbrance), and XP for treasure, with a few modern design features (like advantage or luck points) while restoring some of the danger and mortality that 5E has eschewed.  The art and aesthetic gives off a Russ Nicholson Fiend Folio vibe - black, white, and a little grotty.

I don't know much about the fandom (yet), but it looks like they have a burgeoning 3rd party marketplace for the game, a reddit sub, Discord, and Facebook presence, and a positive helpful community.  I'm familiar with the author's earlier work (Kelsey Dionne) as I had picked up some of her 5E adventures well before the OGL-apocalypse, back when she was dabbling in 5E adventures with an Edgar Allan Poe influence.  I like how Shadowdark has completely broken from the OGL and is using a creative commons license to enable the 3rd party community.

Shadowdark feels like a bridge between the 5E and the OSR.  It's carrying forward some of the things we loved about 1st edition or BX, the dungeon-crawling and exploration, the class-based characters, the focus on resource management and treasure, and ported them into a game easily recognizable to 5E players. Even a cursory peek into some of Kelsey Dionne's interviews reveals someone deeply familiar with the roots of the hobby and wanting to perpetuate old school, exploration based play.  She said her first roleplaying experience was with The City State of the Invincible Overlord; how many readers of the blog today even remember 19070's Judges Guild, the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, or The City State of the Invincible Overlord?  Those names take me back.  Anyway it's really heartening to see younger designers bringing forward exploration-based OSR stylings and then mopping the floor at Gencon.  (The memes have been rich).

I'm looking forward to checking out the game, a little of change of pace in between our edgelord LOTFP games.  Maybe Shadowdark will even stick.  If you've played it, let me know what you thought about it - thanks!  I'll post more once we get some time behind the wheel.

Death Frost Doom and The Pillories - Part 1

 I like this adventure quite a lot - Death Frost Doom.  It showed how an adventure module could be game-breaking, campaign-breaking, in a way that wasn't really done before.  Sure, Tomb of Horrors could nuke a 14th level party, but it's not like the stakes included Acererak leaving the tomb and wrecking their home town.  I struggle to recall a TSR adventure, or even a WOTC-era adventure, that fundamentally altered the state of the campaign if the players pulled the wrong lever or opened the wrong door.  Since 2009 there have been quite a few LOTFP adventures that can wreck your game world, but this was the first, the OG.

Naturally I wanted to make it the capstone to the Pillories campaign, our York 1630 game.

How'd we get here?  The early adventures involved the characters collecting materials for a secretive patron, The Doctor, who was researching the story of a Roman Empire era military adventurer in Caledonia, who fought against a tribe of death cultists.  The Doctor betrayed the adventurers, they killed him and took his stuff, including his notes, and now they're trying to complete his quest - to find a path towards eternal life (and loot a really old place at the same time).

Their travels took them from York to Carlisle and across the river into Scotland, traveling through Langholm and then into the nearby mountains.  There were fisticuffs with Scottish brigands, some whiskey was tasted, a truce with Clan Armstrong forged, and the malign history of the place was recounted by a parish priest who asked them to leave sleeping horrors alone.

Death Frost Doom embraces many of the tropes of classic horror - dire warnings not to trespass from a crazed hermit, a foreboding locale with frozen graves and an ominous hanging tree, and unsettling haunting effects that make the players question their faculties and doubt their senses.

I ran Death Frost Doom a decade ago with a different group, using the original printing.  This time I'm using the 2014 update, primarily because the cartography is a higher quality and the new maps look better on a virtual table top.

Here's an aside to modern designers; please consider having sanitized or VTT friendly versions of your maps available for download.  There's an OSR design trend to load the maps with GM information and reminders right on the map, which is laudable, but it creates extra work when you're converting the map to a virtual table top and you don't want to immediately spoil the players.  Besides "fog of war" and other obfuscations, the referee needs to hide secret doors, traps, and similar concealed features, usually by editing the map image in a graphics program or hiding it somehow in the VTT.

The Pillories have been sufficiently impressed with the eerie qualities of Cold Mountain (the name of the mountain top in this game world).  An eerie humming sound suffused the peak, emanating from around and beneath the endless frozen cairns and graves surrounding the lonely cabin on the mountain top.  They found the body of a man who had fled the cabin in night clothes, having died of fright or exposure in the dark of night.  (They would return to the corpse later and discover it was beginning to reanimate, fingers twitching, faint zombie groans emanating from its lips, and one of the henchmen, Wood, beheaded it with his battle axe).

The cabin had plenty of its own weird effects, whether it was a haunted harpsichord, the ancient painting from hundreds of years ago that depicted the player characters perfectly, or the weird mirror that didn't reflect the magic user or elf (which our player/sketch artist captured here, where the halfling, Remi, can't see the mage Allister or the elf Yuri in the mirror, even though they are standing right behind him).

Eventually they went through the trap door that led down into the ancient dungeon beneath the cabin.  They encountered additional weird an unsettling things, such as the room of severed skeletal left hands, the chapel with it's haunting murals, cursed altar, and weird unholy basins full of human teeth in sickly black water.  There were moments where the players were a little dumbstruck and just said, "what the f*ck?"  It's a referee's dream to stop the players in their tracks and make them say "what the f*ck?"

Zeke, the crazed hermit, had warned the players not to sleep on the mountain, a warning they took to heart after finding the frozen corpse of the guy who ran out into the night after bedding down in the cabin.  As their first day on the mountain got late, they collected his gear and headed down the mountain.  They had also been transcribing all the Duvan Ku writing they encountered, and planned to use a Comprehend Languages the next day to translate it all; our group is a mix of level 3 and level 4 characters at this point, and Allister had researched that spell during their long months of in-game downtime between Strict Time Records Must Be Kept and the start of this one.

This ended our first foray into Death Frost Doom.  More to come.