My Shadowdark Saga Pt 2- Who Ordered The Crow?

My reaction to a readthrough of Shadowdark

Every now and then, a piece of media comes along and surprises you. Being a particularly stubborn individual, I seem to have a lot of these. I have trust issues stemming from friends trying to get me to watch anime when I was 16. When you get a couple of passionate turbo weebs together to tag-team sperg at someone until they like something, don’t be surprised if they remain resistant and only become more resistant. If those two turbo weebs decide to make you play a visual novel at 1 AM between days at a convention in some sort of Off-Broadway rendition of MK Ultra, the results may become worse. My highschool girlfriend at least recommended shows that fit my interests and there was the fact that she was a lot prettier and less intense than my turbo weeb friends. Not that her tactics would work if they performed them either, but I’m all the way down a rabbit hole of my teenage years at this point. Suffice it to say that I don’t particularly care for Full Metal Panic, I don’t have fond memories of My Girlfriend is the President and I have developed a particularly virulent contrarian streak that burns hot within me to this day. If you read my first Shadowdark article, you’ll know that my contrarianism was tripped by the hype train behind The Arcane Library’s breakout RPG but that I have recently been convinced to give Shadowdark a real shot. The result? Well, I have to admit that I truly admire the finished product here. Is it everything I wanted and more? No, but it’s got merit and I’m left with the desire to take the game to the table. I don’t normally do reviews, but that’s what we’re doing here today. This is my review of Shadowdark.

Normally, reviews start with the good. I actually want to start with the bad today though because I don’t want to give the wrong impression of this game. One of my hangups about Shadowdark was that it’s a rules-lite, minimalist system. It most certainly is that. The mechanics here are not complicated and you can easily teach them to someone in one session. Mostly, they come down to “Assign difficulty class, roll a D20, add appropriate modifiers, matching or beating the difficulty class is a success.” You have a small number of classes, Fighter, Priest, Thief, and Wizard, and each class is capped at level 10. The default assumption is that players will be participating in dungeon crawls with no domain play or high-level content. It is a lightweight, lean system that creates low-powered characters who are going to be largely participating in dungeon crawls. There are few options for gear, especially weapons and armor, and few of these weapons have much of a mechanical difference besides higher damage numbers. All in all, it is a rules lite system that creates a relatively low-resolution simulation of combat and exploration. Additionally, there are some compromises made in the writing that I’m not a particular fan of. In particular, the section where Kelsey felt the need to say “These rules don’t matter, do what works best for you,” is particularly irksome. The sooner we expunge rule zero from this hobby, the better. All in all though, my issues with Shadowdark are minor, but it’s important to reiterate that this game is, as advertised, a rules-lite game.

For anyone who hasn’t ever encountered my opinions on rules and why I tend to shy away from self-described “rules-lite” games, the basic summary of my thoughts is that having fewer rules is not meritorious in and of itself. The content of your rules should be dictated by the complexity of your simulation and some simulations only work if they have a degree of complexity. If a game is going to have a lightweight system then the simulation cannot be too complex or the system won’t be able to hold it up. A basic ruleset needs to be rock solid if that’s all you’re relying on. I can say that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Shadowdark is a solid foundation. Not only is it solid, but it provides enough openings for true modularity. The best way to illustrate this is in contrast to other similar systems. The problem with Index Card RPG, Mork Borg and others is that they’re unplayable. No bones about it, they just don’t work without serious heavy lifting from the GM. When I described this phenomenon to my friend Scott AKA Orcusdorkus, his reaction was “Well, I know a group that plays Mork Borg fused with…” and that’s basically as far as the Mork Borg apologia got. You can’t run it rules-as-written (RAW), it’s not built for that. That would require actual rules to be written. It’s built to be looked at. Similarly, Hankerin Ferinale himself told me that ICRPG was more of a philosophy than a game system, meaning that you would need an actual engine to make the thing run. In contrast, Sahdowdark seems to work wonderfully all by itself. It is, at heart, 5th Edition D&D scaled back to a B/X level of complexity. There are no skills, no feats, no subclasses. Each class has a handful of abilities and a list of randomly-rolled talents that either augment those abilities, boost stats, or add new abilities as you level. Difficulty class is standardized with a range from 9-18 depending on the difficulty of a given task and the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic makes it over from 5e. It’s a system that people are familiar with but without all of the bloat that comes from inflated hitpoints, bonus actions, and complicated effects.

The mechanics are just the beginning though. Unlike other rules-lite games, Kelsey actually bothered to fill the book with other things. Most of these books are lucky to be 100 pages long (digest size) including rules, monsters, treasure and whatever passes for a sample adventure. Kelsey delivered a full 320+ page book at A5 digest size which includes all of the aforementioned stuff plus multiple encounter tables. Her exploration rules feel like they have more flesh on them than the usual phoned-in hex crawling rules you get from the precious few who even bother to include them. Hell, she even includes random encounter tables for various types of terrain including multiple different urban districts. I am something of a table enthusiast and it looks like Kelsey might share my affinity for the tabular arts. Of particular interest is the carousing table which is the mechanic through which gold is converted to XP. I personally prefer training, but the carousing mechanics are fun and the results are great for emergent storytelling. It’s good stuff and it would be relatively simple to adapt the overall principle into a table of random training results based on the amount of gold put into training.

It’s evident to me that I should be working within this system while I workshop my own. My assumption that Nighthaven wouldn’t work in this sandbox was wrong and I was wrong for jumping to that conclusion. I’ll be rectifying this mistake soon though. Nighthaven for Shadowdark is definitely going to happen. I’m already working on it. I’m also gonna be running my home game in Shadowdark now that I’m moved and ready to spin something up. Needless to say, I got this one completely wrong and I’m ready to turn this thing around. With Arcane Library putting out more material, including a city crawl zine, I think the time is ripe for Shadowdark to expand into the faction wars and plots of the city of Nighthaven.