Coming Shadowdark short-adventures! (Patreon)

Hi, Denizens of the Tower! It seems that our announcement to support Shadowdark RPG has been met with optimism and joy! Thank you to all the new subscribers and to the loyal followers who have been here for months and even years!

We already have two Shadowdark short adventures which you can find here and here. There are more to come in the following days. Also, around the 20th, there is a plan for a big announcement on KS and other social media where I'll prepare a "welcome package" of sorts with the aim to show our wares and entice more people to join us on this quest of creating Shadowdark RPG supplements.

-- About Party Level

All creations from now and up to mid-April will be geared toward levels 1-3 as those are the rules included in the Quickstart PDFs we all have access to. After that, we will slowly but surely explore the higher levels with more adventures and content. I expect that the higher tier of SDRPG, that is levels 8-10, will be more thoroughly explored than the higher levels in games like 5e.

-- About the Switch to Shadowdark

Some folks have inquired as to how difficult has it been to switch systems from the writing standpoint. Our answer would be that not much but only because the Shadowdark ruleset makes it so streamlined that it has been easy to find the parallels between it and other rulesets. For adventure writing, we mostly care only about checks, damage, monsters, and treasure. What has taken a little more work is to change the approach to our way to write adventures (see below).

-- Train-Rails or Toolkits

I have reviewed the introductory adventure in Shadowdark, Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur. As well as other OSR introductory adventures that are regarded as high-quality by the community at large. The main takeaway is that the adventure refuses to take you by the hand and guide you through a series of hoops and proverbial chambers until you reach the inevitable conclusion of it. Which is more the approach in modern adventures and one that we embraced somewhat in our publications in the last few months, or even years.

These adventures function more as a toolkit, they provide lots of info, rumors, random events, and NPCs with conflicting drives. And then the characters drop in and make a mess of all of it. A conclusion for these adventures is difficult to predict as the players are creative engines that may sway things in any direction. That is the approach we want to follow for Shadowdark RPG publications. Scenarios that, while small (3-4 pages is our page count roughly), contain a box of tools that the GM can use to spice up their games and give the characters an amazing opportunity to leave a mark upon the world. It is our goal with the short adventures and already I see it occur in the few we have written. We also welcome your feedback on the matter.

-- About Dangerous Magic

I like systems where magic is dangerous and strange. Shadowdark has some of it with the chance for wizards to utterly fail and roll on the Wizard Mishap tables. But I want more. As such we also plan on including interesting magic items or devices as part of our adventures. Our drive with these is to provide something interesting and powerful for the characters to use but that always incurs a terrible cost for using it or an unforeseen consequence for dabbling with this arcane power. Our third adventure, The Planar Gateway, includes a portal to other planes. Using it attracts the unwanted attention of demons. In addition, not returning to the open portal in time causes people to become stranded in another plane. Pretty risky to use.

Ok, I'm rambling now. Thanks for reading if you've gotten this far. Leave a comment below if you have suggestions or feedback. And thanks again for joining us on this quest. May your torch last longer than 1 hour!