Shadowdark General Thread [+]

[Wade Kemper]

With a tip of the cap to Mork Borg, I think I have a dungeon page layout I'm happy with. I'm straying away from what the 'standard' SD dungeon looks like a little as I have some (I suppose) slightly different design goals. I'm trying to achieve a less cluttered and more accessible page layout. So all the fonts are 12 and 14 pt and I'm trying to leave lots of white space.

View attachment 408231

 

[aiouh]

Witness everyone on the Shadowdark Facebook group who want to play Dark Sun, Spelljammer and Gamma World with this new ruleset they've encountered, which has the benefit of three decades of better design that it's built on.

Okay so the thing is, while potentially flexible, Shadowdark is a very focused game. The way the rules are laid out is for a specific type of experience. Light character creation, involved real time crawling/exploration with round robin intiative and random encounters that play out quickly. Inventory Management, Survival Rules and Downtime is very light, streamlined.

I think it would be very imprecise to claim that Shadowdark is basically just a better version of TSR anything, it is very much its own thing that innovates upon TSR/WotC design.

Also I have to concur with Bae'zel, just because Dionne has not written it, doesn't mean people aren't free to build upon it, swap out statblocks or set it within a different setting. But as is, the rules the way they are now are written to specifically support the bread and butter dnd fantasy

 

[NN]

Rules Schmules.

Im using Shadowdark as a rules-light os d&d, and in fact the main reason im using it rather than b/x or a clone is thats Im hoping its novelty will short-circuit my overthinking.

 

[Reynard]

Okay so the thing is, while potentially flexible, Shadowdark is a very focused game. The way the rules are laid out is for a specific type of experience. Light character creation, involved real time crawling/exploration with round robin intiative and random encounters that play out quickly. Inventory Management, Survival Rules and Downtime is very light, streamlined.

I think it would be very imprecise to claim that Shadowdark is basically just a better version of TSR anything, it is very much its own thing that innovates upon TSR/WotC design.

Also I have to concur with Bae'zel, just because Dionne has not written it, doesn't mean people aren't free to build upon it, swap out statblocks or set it within a different setting. But as is, the rules the way they are now are written to specifically support the bread and butter dnd fantasy

Core Shadowdark is already weirder than the same old Keep on the Borderlands stuff most people seem happy to use it for.

People should, of course, do what they want. I just don't see the appeal in yet another cellar full of rats.

 

[Scribe]

13 Days on https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/toweringtales/the-devouring-labyrinth/description which I needed to back for reasons.

The reasons being, its an A5 book of mini dungeons with a black over to fit with the other books...

Anyway!

 

[Bill Zebub]

I just don't see the appeal in yet another cellar full of rats.

Which is a perfectly valid aesthetic preference.

I think creativity/innovation falls roughly into two buckets:

1. Aesthetic details that evoke a novel setting
2. Structure/plot that assembles novel challenges out of common elements

To illustrate, an adventure involving battling through Goolings on the Demi-plane of Goo to finally defeat the Great Goo might be logically identical to a cellar full of rats. Type #1.

Alternately, you could have a cellar full of rats that turns out to be all those missing children, polymorphed into rats by an angry witch. Type #2. ("Um, guys...I think we've made a terrible mistake...")

(You could, of course, combine both categories; I'm just trying to distinguish between them.)

I tend to lean toward the latter type: I don't mind the same monsters and settings and tropes being recycled, as long as they are assembled in a way that is unpredictable to the players.

 

[NN]

Regarding rats in cellars, I keep circling back to “conceptual density”

Conceptual density (or 'What are RPG books *for*, anyway?')

I recently picked up Shadows Over Vathak for free in an online sale (summary: a perfectly good two-page setting document mercilessly stretch...

udan-adan.blogspot.com

(Not my blog)

The rats could be a detail in a conceptually dense adventure. And Goolings could be a meaningless reskin in a conceptually vapid one

 

[Bill Zebub]

The rats could be a detail in a conceptually dense adventure. And Goolings could be a meaningless reskin in a conceptually vapid one

Yes! Well put.

EDIT: And that blog post was good, too. I 100% agree with it.

 

[Fenris-77]

Anyone who wants to design their own SD stuff should look at Creating and Adapting Monsters for Use in Shadowdark RPG by Noon Knight Games.