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  There are only 4 core classes, and the term race has been replaced by the term ancestry, which sounds so much better than "species".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.