Shadowdark Review: Dark Masters

​  Once more into the breach, dear readers. I’m on a self-appointed mission here to dive deep into the very successful Shadowdark system. Last time, I looked at the player side of the game through the lens Dave the Priest. This time, I’ll be covering the GM side of the game, which has some very odd organizational choices let me tell you. There’s some genuinely decent advice in here, mixed with what I can’t help but feel are filler charts. Which, for a semi-indie product like this where printer costs must be a consideration, feels…odd.
  When Shadowdark is advising the GM, it does a pretty good job; Game Masters are enjoined to make challenging, interesting, and scrupulously fair dungeons and adventures for their player characters, while rooting for their players to succeed. Light notes about setting a dark tone flow into dark tactics about attacking light sources very well. A single page offers up “modes” for different styles of game, which include stuff like death immediately at zero, XP-for-monsters, and a “pulp mode” that hands out whole handfuls of luck tokens. I’m at a loss for how well the hypothetical doe-eyed naif picking this up as Baby’s First RPG can run a game using this book, but for the actual target demographic, it’s solid.
  At this point, I have to pause and give a nod to who I think is embracing this game system with such wild enthusiasm. It’s been billed as an “old school game with new school mechanics”, but who Shadowdark most truly appeals to is dungeon masters who are suffering. I have no idea how consciously the game is designed for this, but it’s almost perfectly fit to address every complaint 5E DMs make. They complain about immortal, entitled player characters who quote from their 20-page backstories while theatrically indulging in puffy-inflated-sumo-suit combat with monsters designed to look scary but not actually raise stakes. These DMs hit reddit and comment threads waxing lyrically about how much of the rules burden has been passed off to them while players get countless goodies. Maybe that’s unfair, I don’t know, but that is the message I’ve heard from burned out 5E DMs. Shadowdark strips down a lot of the puffy cruft from 5E while maintaining a lot of the mechanical smoothness of “modern D&D” that players (and 5E DMs) seem to crave.
  On the other hand, there’s another complaint I hear from OSR-adjacent DMs who have issues recruiting. This isn’t nearly so loud or persistent a complaint as what I hear from the 5E side, but there are definitely some OSR guys who are having issues filling tables with their AD&D or B/X-lineage systems because of the perception by game-shop-goers or online casuals that TSR-era D&Ds are mechanically clunky or awkward. Once again, this isn’t my personal experience, but I’ll believe them that that’s their own experience. Shadowdark’s mechanics are designed to be more “modern friendly” than anything stained with the whiff of THAC0. The hype train is part of the offer package for these DMs, if you’re trying to recruit a table of players who don’t live and breathe this stuff, the money passed to your Questing Beasts and other such channels for exposure is only more helpful. Genius marketing and genuinely filling in a perceived need for these two demographics.
  All of this to say that Shadowdark isn’t hurt too terribly by having some gaps in its rules, those will be spackled over with the DM’s own previous system knowledge, either 5E or OSR. The semi-mythical complete newbie who’s bought this book to run with his four middle-school friends would be in a bit of a lurch at times, but that’s okay…he’s a myth anyway. Nonexistent customers can’t be hurt. The real customers will be very happy with the game mastery section.
  The dog not barking, of course, is overland travel/domain/hex/city/social adventuring. There are next to no rules for how to run a hexcrawl, or a political campaign. Poking my head out of the book for a minute, I expect the new Western Reaches Kickstarter is devoted almost entirely to making up this lack, at least for outdoorsy hex stuff.
  There’s an enormous amount of page space devoted to random encounter tables, each a d100 with 52 entries that go from “somewhat to concerning” at 01 to “random boon” at 100. The details aren’t enough to really spin out a great encounter, but they’re less minimalistic than the old school of “4d20 beastmen” so that’ll help comfort some DMs. Hope you got the PDF once you’ve made that roll though, because there’s no index in the bestiary. 

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​The Manual Monstrous
  Monsters in Shadowdark are mostly old standbys, sometimes renamed to avoid licensed IP. Their statblocks are generally simple, showing AC/HP/Attack(s)/Movement/Stats/Alignment/Level (which is hit dice, the HP is the average roll but game masters are invited to roll their own should the fancy strike them). Wonky little monster illustrations aren’t common but will be inspiring/useful when they do come up.
  Occasionally, a special high-level “boss monster” will be given a full-page spread. They’re nice and impressive specimens with very high hit dice and nasty abilities, accompanied by a large illustration. The blinded Beholder on the Shadowdark cover is one of the nastiest customers, with no rules for henchmen/hirelings it’s going to be a nasty 4v1 fight even at level 10. Monsters don’t use the precise set of PC spells, but rather have custom spells...up to ten of them in the case of the Legally Distinct From A Beholder Eyeball Boss Monster.
  Building new monsters is a little handwavy but there’s enough guidance for a confident and experienced GM to make something, and the book enjoins us to compare to something like an elephant to make sure power is in the right ballpark. Rival NPC parties aren’t precluded by anything in the system, but neither is there any guidance provided for making them using player class chassis.

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  As is my wont, I scrolled down until I found the ogre entry for my baseline. A Shadowdark ogre isn’t given much of a description, but because the customer base comes with their own trope baggage, that’s fine. It’s a level 6 bruiser with low armor but 30 hit points and a pair of massive 2d6 greatclub attacks, I definitely wouldn’t want to tackle it at level 1 on anything like a level playing field, but a dedicated archer in a good position would certainly be able to defeat it, so that’s pretty standard. Given character hit points and the low AC improvement rate, even level 3s would probably find the ogre a real threat. It’s a standard-issue ogre, in other words, but one that makes me a little suspicious about the underlying math assumptions of the system (it’s assuming four PCs as normal, and says the ogre thus should be an average threat for an APL 2 party).

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​Real Treasure is the Loot We Stole Along the Way
  All those monsters, by default, gain us nothing for being defeated. Character progression is from accruing treasures and boons, per the chart…and so the back fifth of the book is devoted to loot. We have massive d100 tables divided out into four tiers. We have detailed tables for magic items, along with special properties and quirks. We have item creation rules. We have consumables tables. We have an extremely brief thumbnail about blessings and boons. We have absolutely nothing nowhere that helps us narrow down the vague gold-XP connection beyond that tiny chart. I’m trying not to be annoyed by this, because this is almost just milestone leveling with extra obscuring steps.
  That’s not the only progress in a D&D game though, the other way characters gain power is through the items themselves, and those are actually really good. There’s a whole custom/named magic item “bestiary” that’s formatted almost exactly like the monster section. The items are varied and the first part of this book where I’d really endorse the product for use even if you’re not going to play the system itself. Obviously there are plenty of old standbys like a cloak of elvenkind or a flying carpet, but there are also fun things like a three-item regalia dedicated to Memnon, the god of chaos that all get boosts if worn together.  Good design there, I just wish I knew how much XP each bit was worth. 

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Putting It All Together
  I’m not going to become a proselyte for the Shadowdark system. I’m happy with what I already run, and I think I’d feel a lack of crunch. However, I’m not the target audience for this system. Do I think it’s good for the target audience? I think it’s perfect. So good for Arcane Library there.
  A note on hype: As with any time when there’s a huge new Popular Thing, an answering backlash rises on social media from highly opinionated grognards that boils down to “Popular Thing sucks”. As a fellow highly opinionated grognard, I get it, trust me. In my weekly trawl of the freebies offered up by itch.io, it gets a little overwhelming to see every other adventure written for Shadowdark. But I don’t think you should worry about the system; it’s not competing with your Old Thing. Shadowdark is ideal for either a suffering 5E DM sick and tired of the system’s abusive players, or else an old-schooler who wants something a little more streamlined, with mechanics designed in this current millennium. Arcane Library’s delivered something pitch-perfect for those two large demographics. For them, the system feels like a tremendous breath of fresh air. The largest gaps in the core system needed to make it a truly complete TTRPG, namely outdoor hexcrawling, downtimes, and the domain game, are hopefully all being added in the new Kickstarter. I wish them all the best of luck.
  By all means, disagree with me, talk to me about it. How's your own experience with the Newest Hotness of Two Years ago treated you? I'm here or on Twitter to yell at.