A great resource even now that the full rules are out. Much easier to send/hand this to players than a 300-page rulebook (and it avoids their greasy little goblin hands getting all over my lush premium hardbook!).

A great resource even now that the full rules are out. Much easier to send/hand this to players than a 300-page rulebook (and it avoids their greasy little goblin hands getting all over my lush premium hardbook!).

Love this game. I want to play it all the time. Everyone needs to take a break from 5e and get into the dark!

A superb distillation of 5e and OSR into a fast-flowing game. Easy to pick up and have game going in no time. Admirably abundant as a quickstart.

As a product, SD is a bit marred by its 5e roots. Why does it have to have Burning Hands, demons and devils, aboleths, and all these DnD lore staples? Why can't SD have ts own flavour in lore?

Matthew Colville once said OD&D was Survival Horror. So, welcome home, dear players and GMs! My new favorite system, Shadowdark takes what old D&D and modern D&D had best and improves on it.

Kelsey Dionne is an awesome game designer, who has proven time and time again her passion. As far as my vision can reach, this game has a bright future, in contrast to its name. :)

Shadowdark RPG is a fantastic, streamlined, exploration-oriented game! This quickstart gives you everything you need to play the first couple of levels, an adventure location, and tons of GM resources to keep you going until you upgrade to the full rulebook!

Take the plunge, you will love it!

Like most of the offerings from Arcane Library, these scenarios have excellent maps.

The scenarios currently used as framing devices for these maps are generally ok. They're professionally constructed. Also: careful work has been done to ensure that they're very usable in a game.

But for me the real value is in the maps.

The game is well thought and clearly presented. Simple rules, very accessible layout and great illustrations. I love that this elegant take on OSR is available as such a professional product!

It seems that this game is causing a major stir in the OSR community: probably the produuction quality of Shadowdark is a greater revolution than everyone would have expected. It's great to see some outdated preconceptions fall apart.

An RPG with a dark engine lodged deep in the dark dungeons of the late 70s/early 80s, with smart updates to make it all run smooth and fast. Clean, while being nasty in all the right ways, fun and cool.
Legit banger.

ShadowDark lifts conventions from classic old school D&D and mashes them up masterfully with newer conventions and mechancis, including the d20+modifier roll over universal resolution of most modern versions of D&D, but also some tricks from elsewhere like always in turns from ICRPG and spell casting from DCC. It reads like all of your favorite homerules prepared lovingly for you in a neat package, ready to go. Or, like your own heartbreaker you've been writing since the 90's but haven't gotten around to publishing yet, but with the craft and polish of a skilled creator like Kelsey Dionne of the Arcane Library. Worth noting: the quickstart materials are less complete the promised full edition which is still as of writing (2023-04-09) is still wrapping up. So, not totally complete, but at the price of free definitely worth a download.

This is the perfect set of rules for players that already know how to play D&D 5e, mostly like the core rules of that system, but want a much simpler game and deadlier game. There are some creative new twists on those rules like real time torches and rolling on a table when you level up. You may love those ideas. You may hate them. These rules aren't for me, but this is a really great system.

For me, this game has the feel of BECMI, but it plays faster. One way it's different is that BECMI D&D had a lot of cases where random things or attacks would require you to roll e.g. save vs. poison or die … that feels a little cheap. Shadowdark by contrast will still kill you early and often, but it feels more like you had choices which led to that outcome.

There's a lot of overlap between 5E and OSR/classic edition players. If you play both, you can just pick it up and go with no learning curve. If you don't … there will be a pretty shallow learning curve either way: Either learning some more modern mechanics for us grognards, or learning that the frontal assault is rarely the best option for modern players.

There's a lot here written briefly, and leaving a few questions open to your interpretation: When do you award experience and levels, for example? It doesn't really matter for the game's cohesiveness how you do it, so it's left up to you to decide. I'll award experience on the spot, and levels only when you're back to relative safety because it gives more meaning to the downtime between adventures. But Shadowdark itself is designed for a you do you experience with such finer details, which is something I approve of.

Shadowdark draws heavy inspiration from Index Card RPG by Runehammer, a thing you should totally check out next if you haven't, but while Hank's product is kind of a beautiful mess and mishmash of material and mechanics for a skilled GM to run a seat-of-the-pants game that's as dynamic and spontaneous as its creator, Shadowdark's got a bit more to grab onto if you're not a long-time forever GM. In fact, I'd say this is a great game for someone to try their hand behind the screen because there's a lot less to keep track of at once than 5E or Pathfinder, though it's perhaps not handholdy-enough to run if you're totally new to the hobby.

If you want to use premade content with Shadowdark I'd recommend content made for Basic D&D or some OSR game first and foremost. Modern modules will need rescaling because all the numbers are smaller in Shadowdark and healing magic is less available unless you start house-ruling that stuff back in.

Speaking of house ruling… Shadowdark is intended to make that easy. It'd take half a page of house rules to turn Shadowdark into a lean and fast modern-style heroic fantasy. I know that because my own homebrew game was well on its way to becoming Shadowdark's rules, and it was a heroic fantasy game. Yes, the numbers and complexity were all scaled down for speed, but otherwise it'd be hard to distinguish it from a 5E game in tone.

And that brings up the one criticism, if you can call it that: It feels like so much of Shadowdark is stuff that has been done before by someone. Including the real-time lighting timer, it turns out. If that's the criticism, though, it applies to a lot of OSR games as well. Shadowdark is a distillation of these elements in a single package, done well amd marketed extremely well at just the right time largely to the 5E crowd looking for something better than where they fear the D&D brand is going. That's not a bad thing IMO, because it brings that crowd into the wider world of OSR and independent games.

On the whole, there's a lot here!

Enough content in this guide to run a few sessions and really get an idea how the system works. Great guide!

There is so much about this game that resonates with the games I want to play.

• Easy character creation and emergent character developement through exploration and recovered loot
• Tension and the threat of the ever encroaching darkness through the real time torch timer
• Rules and GM tools that just feel intuitive and natural

You'll see nods to many elements of the great rule systems, new and old. All combining in wonderfully illustarted and consise player and GM guides

With the publisher's extensive catalog of wonderful 5e adventures, I'm really excited for what is to come See for yourself. Grab and copy, a beverage of choice and see if you feel the same way

Shadowdark RPG takes the best elements of the various editions of the games we love, cuts out the bloat, and adds fresh ideas.

Character creation is fast like popular retroclones. Gear slots are simple and easy to track. Rolling for checks, spells, and attacks is uniformly roll high with tight stat modifiers. Skills are open to player creativity rather than a constraining list of options on a character sheet. Casting spells is done with a straightforward roll to cast system, with support for ongoing spells and magical mishaps. Combat is lethal - but not cheap - thanks to a round-based death timer when characters drop to 0 HP.

It's obvious that the publisher has a lot of practical experience running games. The included systems are a "greatest hits" collection from roleplaying game history.

On top of the familiar, there's plenty of compelling new ideas on display. Experience points are simple to track and award based on treasure quality. Character advancement has random talent rolls for stat increases and other fun bonuses. My favourite new feature by far is the real-time torch mechanic - it adds a ton of tension and pacing to a session.

These factors all make for a game that is easy to pick up for new players and nostalgic for old-school players. I firmly believe the new ideas here will delight players and game masters alike, regardless of their experience level. I'm excited to make this the default system I run for my games.

P.S. Wow, this publisher even updates their free stuff. I came back to check out the quick start after some time and found some new tweaks were made from the results of ongoing playtesting.