On Shadowdark

 I recently started a Shadowdark campaign. We're three sessions in, with one fatality and one character who was taken by enemies, whose fate is presently unknown. 

 

The short version: Shadowdark slaps like I owe it money. 

 

The longer version: A simple, intuitive, tightly designed little game that does exploration well. Experience comes from finding treasure and carousing. If this is your jam, Shadowdark is your huckleberry. If you want a game where combat has rewards (other than, you know, not dying) then you should probably look elsewhere. 

 

The best part: nobody can see in the dark and torches burn in real time. This creates an inherent time pressure reminiscent of the NES game Shadowgate, where the music becomes very stress-inducing when your light burns low. There are light spells, but they are not guaranteed and are extremely fragile. They mitigate the time pressure, but they do not remove it. Darkness is a very Zork You-Will-Be-Eaten-By-a-Grue situation. In practice, this keeps the group laser focused, off their phones, and not faffing about in every room for an hour and a half or getting hung up on sidebar conversations. Dungeons seem much more threatening to my players, rather than a place to romp through while dispatching perfectly balanced encounters. 

 The second best part: Finding secret doors, traps, and other hidden things are based mostly on narrative description of searching rather than just everyone rolling Perception.  

I had a discussion with a friend of mine who runs mostly 5E, and he's very invested in telling a story with it. He and I have very different views on D&D's narrative potential. For him, Shadowdark being tightly focused on crawling (be it dungeon or wilderness) is a bug, not a feature. He's going to try to run it once, I just told him to manage his expectations and to remind his players that fighting everything is a Bad Idea. 

I think SD is my fantasy jam for the time being. I'll admit I'm curious about OSRIC3, but I want my Shadowdark game to play out first, and then I think I want a break from fantasy. I've kind of lost my sci-fi yarn and have been feeling some Deadlands lately. That's going to go on the back, back burner until I finish my SD mini-hexcrawl.