If you're talking about the 3e Necromancer Games Wilderlands of High Fantasy, yes there is a lot, but you certainly don't need to read all of it. Choose or randomly determine a start hex, you only need to read up on the few surrounding hexes. The 3e Players Guide gives a nice setting overview, but the whole point of Wilderlands is it is bottom-up and built to facilitate GMing. Eg when one PC decided to fly hundreds of miles to sell an artifact to the Green Empress, the book gave me a ton of hex location material for the journey.
Shadowdark looks so good!
- Thread starter Jahydin
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If you're talking about the 3e Necromancer Games Wilderlands of High Fantasy, yes there is a lot, but you certainly don't need to read all of it. Choose or randomly determine a start hex, you only need to read up on the few surrounding hexes. The 3e Players Guide gives a nice setting overview, but the whole point of Wilderlands is it is bottom-up and built to facilitate GMing. Eg when one PC decided to fly hundreds of miles to sell an artifact to the Green Empress, the book gave me a ton of hex location material for the journey.
There is a sad tale where the son of the creator, now the IP owner, made some public very racist statements, doubled down, and as a result Drivethrurpg withdrew all Judges Guild material from sale. And I don't think the Judges Guild site even sells the PDFs, so you basically cannot buy legal PDF copies any more.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
It honestly feels like a waiting game now. Either their IP owner will die and the estate will be selling it off for a song or the owner will realize how quickly the value of the remaining Judges Guild properties (the late Jennell Jaquays had the rights to Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia herself and sold them to Goodman Games) are depreciating and will sell them at some point to someone else -- probably Goodman or Necromancer.
Bill Zebub
“It’s probably Matt Mercer’s fault.”
On a related note, I bought the Goodman Games boxed set of Dark Tower, but (as I noted above) I really struggle to find the patience I used to possess for reading through old school verbosity and layouts. I've been daydreaming about a full Shadowdark conversion, not just in in NPC stats and treasure quantities, but in format and layout.
Same with Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's "Moria" that Free League recently published for TOR.
Same with Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's "Moria" that Free League recently published for TOR.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I recently picked up Deep Delve (my first purchase using proceeds from adventure sales on itch.io!), because I love Gardens of Ynn/Stygian Library-style adventures and I thought applying that to a Moria-type setting would be neat. It's almost too lean and I'll probably want to rewrite it a bit before I use it at my table. But worth a look, I think.
Bill Zebub
“It’s probably Matt Mercer’s fault.”
Oh, that's interesting. I just looked at it. I could see combining something like that with FL's Moria, which has a large number of "Landmark" areas described in detail. I do really like the Landmark approach in general, but what I think Moria is missing is a good system for exploring between those landmarks. Largely because I don't find TOR's system for abstracted journeying very satisfying. Especially the way you don't really have any agency during Journeys. You roll dice to find out what happens to you, and the results are affected by the numbers on your character sheet, but there are no difficult decisions or trade-offs for the player to make.
What I love about Shadowdark is, of course, the opposite: what happens to you is less about what's on your character sheet, and more about the decisions you make.
In more sandbox campaigns I think it's long when it goes over about 130 sessions.
I've added rules for level 11+; only 11 sessions in but the system seems extremely robust and I happily anticipate a really epic long term sandbox campaign. The shallower power gradient is perfect for not outgrowing the local environment and with so much good OSR material out there I have stuff to run it for many years already.
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