My Shadowdark Saga
How I overcame my hangups around Shadowdark
I want to take everyone back to a time that’s not so long ago, but feels like it happened in another lifetime. It was January of 2023. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition was the most commercially successful edition of the game ever released. Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast were riding high after a solid 4 years of massive growth and everyone in the RPG world was expecting something massive. 2024 would be the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons and also mark 10 years of 5th Edition. This is significant because 10 years is about the total life cycle of a D&D edition. The political environment of WotC had changed dramatically over the decade with their parent company looking to extract as much revenue as they could possible squeeze from the udders of their latest cash cow. There was a movie set to come out in two months too, although it already had something of the stench of death upon it. Still, WotC and Hasbro were set to make major announcements regarding a possible new edition of the game, the 50th anniversary celebration of D&D and so much more for 2024 just as 2023 was dawning. What happened though was io9 getting a leaked copy of WotC’s updated Open Gaming License (OGL) 1.1 and all hell broke loose.
I have a handful of readers who are casual observers of the RPG world or even total outsiders so I feel the need to explain what happened with OGL 1.1 and how it basically destroyed the D&D cultural moment. OGL 1.0 was established in 2000 with the creation of D&D 3rd Edition with the idea being that WotC would release a generic rule set that stripped away all of the copyrightable material leaving only the rules so that 3rd party companies could release supplemental material supported by and compatible with the current D&D edition. Basically, WotC could outsource product support for their game. Canny legal minds, most notably Matt Finch, figured out that, legally speaking, they could apply this not just to 3e, but to older editions which led to the first wave of OSR games. Over the preceding 20 years a cottage industry of rule supplements, adventures, adaptations, licensed games, and clones popped up. Green Ronin Games owes its entire existence to the OGL as one of the biggest beneficiaries of what came to be known as the D20 craze. With the popularity of 5e, many of these companies that created OGL content grew rapidly and WotC started to see the OGL as enabling their own competition. With OGL 1.1, WotC planned to extract a 25% royalty from any company that made $750k or more from OGL material and de-authorize anything made under OGL 1.0. OGL 1.1 also stipulated that WotC could use any material made under it at any time for any purpose without compensation. Basically, anything made under the OGL belonged to WotC and creators would pay them for the privilege of using it. Suddenly, everyone started looking for ways out of using the OGL. Then in February of 2023, a little Kickstarter campaign was launched from a little-known company called The Arcane Library for a game called Shadowdark. It funded in 12 minutes and would go on to raise over a million dollars. Overnight Kelsey Dionne, the creator of Shadowdark, became a lauded figure in RPGs and I was extremely skeptical.
Once again for my casual readers, I must explain another RPG term. Whenever a game is released that has one or two really cool new ideas but outside of those it’s just another iteration of D&D, it’s called a Heartbreaker. These games are a dime a dozen and rarely have legs beyond their initial release which is why they’re called Heartbreakers. They’ll let you down because there’s nothing to them beyond a few gimmicks. You might enjoy a one-shot or a couple sessions but then you’ll get back to D&D pretty quickly. When I saw the marketing for Shadowdark, I immediately heard the driving power chords of Neil Giraldo’s guitar, Pat Benatar was warming up for the first verse and I knew that this game was the right kind of sinner to release my inner fantasy. It was a hard pass from me for a number of reasons. I was moving away from rules lite gaming, especially the Mork Borg style over substance type of game. I had been pitched the very idea of “Old-School Gaming, Modernized” before by a number of influencers, all of whom immediately lined up to sing a whole-ass aria of praise for this game and its creator, both of whom seemed to just materialize out of nowhere just in time to collect a shit ton of Kickstarter money off of people who desperately wanted an alternative to D&D. Was this a scam? Probably not, but my intuition told me that this would be a mechanically threadbare game that was being thrown together last-minute. Then, of course, there was Kelsey Dionne. I had seen this hobby line up to praise every word from the mouth of Ginny Di and prop up Satine Phoenix, a former porn star who has a long list of scandals and backstabbings behind her. To say that gamers are far too credulous when a female influencer or creator comes on the scene would be an understatement. All of these things were working against Shadowdark in my mind. On top of all of that, I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything that I’m told I should like that doesn’t immediately appeal to me. If you tell me, “Hey Ryan, you should watch/read/check out [thing],” and I don’t readily see the appeal, you’ll have a fight on your hands if you try to push me harder. I didn’t go see Barbie, I don’t plan to watch it ever, and the only way to change that is to let me come around on my own. Is it a character flaw? Probably, but it’s my cross to bear. Now, how did I overcome all of these things that I held against Shadowdark unfairly?
Kelsey Dionne and her approach to marketing her game is the thing that made me give Shadowdark a serious look. Firstly, Kelsey has never wandered into drama, politics, or other similar nonsense. She’s consistently been a champion of just focusing on the game and not letting other things get in the way. She’s also a very nice and genuine person, or at least she was to me the one time we interacted at North Texas RPG Convention. There are two things that really convinced me to give it a try though. The first was that Kelsey was extremely supportive of friends of mine who made supplemental content for Shadowdark. In particular, she has been supportive of Viktor Gorchev’s Blacklight campaign and AlchemicRaker’s Hellmarch. The support of Hellmarch in particular is interesting to me as one of the issues I had with Shadowdark was my perception that this was another dungeon crawler and that any additions such as domain play would have to come from me or someone else and that they would be met with indifference or derision by the creator. My conversation about city adventures with Greg Gillespie is still fresh in my mind and I attributed much of his attitude to Kelsey as well. To see her enthusiastically support one of my friends adapting Chainmail to work with Shadowdark was refreshing. This also gets into the second thing that made me reconsider my stance on Shadowdark; Kelsey’s recent comments about Braunsteins and the BrOSR. It seems that Kelsey is interested in moving in that direction, especially with her recent appearance on Random Table with my friends Dundermoose and Harmony Ginger as well as Rollin’ Bones alumnus Night Danger and my treasured mutual Scutifer Mike. I love these people dearly and the fact that Kelsey, who has not lost any of her momentum, is willing to listen to them and have conversations makes me want to give her work a shot.
This is where I am at with Shadowdark now. I cannot give my honest assessment of the game because I just got a copy last week and have not had the chance to read it. I will be reading it though and, if I find it to be a good system, I’ll probably use it. Will I stop working on Project Skeleton? No, I have an idea and I want to implement it. Will I make Nighthaven specifically for Shadowdark? That’s a definite possibility. We’ll see how things go. It’s not a very long book, so I’ll probably make that decision sooner rather than later. I’ll end by saying that Kelsey’s behavior as a creator should be the model for all creators moving forward. Her attitude and willingness to entertain ideas she finds interesting, regardless of the potential optics, has made me willing to look at something I had written off as not for me. I will follow up on this in a future article once I have more to say about the game itself. Until then, I want to thank Kelsey for being kind to me and kind to some very good friends of mine. It’s high time I gave your game a fair shake.
Like you, I also passed up the Shadowdark kickstarter for largely three reasons. First, I'm tired of edgy for edgy sake stuff. Maybe im "old man yells at clouds" but growing up in the 00/10s it was everywhere. Second, Id been burned by rules-lite games like Deathbringer, EZD6, and ICRPG shortly before the ks came out. Third, I read through the frew rules and it seemed like "not 5e, not OSR" mudcore-lite gameplay.
Since then, I've had the chance to play an adventure length campaign for the Shucked Oyster beta test and Im still not sold on the system. I think Kelsey has some truly great ideas and the start of a great system, but it is held back by its rules-lite approach. Not every game needs to be 1e/ACKS level rules-heavy, but this goes to far the opposite direction.
Pros:
- the light system is cool (at first)
- nailed the "roll-to-cast" mechanic
- carousinf gives you a reason, and rewards/drawbacks, to spending money
- dead simple character creation with enough detail to flesh out different charcters
- deadly, but not full-on mudcore
Cons:
- two page spread layout for rules is *very* limiting for rules explanation
- torch/darkness system is easily circumvented if players are prepared and pay attention to time
- low character level cap and no high-level play baked in
- overly simple spells that aren't fully explained
- related rules aren't always put beside each other or are explained inside other rules
Overall, I had fun with the game but could not see it becoming my main game. It just doesn't have enough meat to it without buying supplements or building entire subsystems myself. I liken it to 0D&D: it has enough to get you going and leaves the rest to you. If Kelsey created an "Advanced" Shadowdark that expanded the system into something more rules-medium, I could see myself picking it up.
I hope you enjoy end up enjoying Shadowdark All I ask, for what it's worth, is that you dont go all in on Nighthaven in Shadowdark and then dont end up making it for your own system. I loved your breakdown on how you want to handle magic and Im excited to see how Nighthaven works in your system.
My main issue with it isn't the game itself, it's with all the 5e players and shills who act like it's the first OSR game ever made and invented all the ideas in it. The idea of mixing 5e and B/X isn't new, the roll to cast and funnel stuff is from DCC, hexcrawls and inventory slots are in a dozen other games and blogs, etc.
If you bring this up you get a motte and bailey argument about how the innovation is that it was combined well and the layout is so nice and streamlined. Which is true, but then they'll go straight back to the marketing talking points.
The tagline is "old school gaming, modernized," which is misleading. It's not actually derived from OD&D, Basic, or AD&D, it's derived from 5e and other OSR games from the last ten years. For people who were paying attention it's modernized gaming, modernized again.