Shadowdark looks at the basics of dungeon adventure with a fresh eye and evocative black and white ... [+]
The most famous mode of playing Dungeons & Dragons is the “dungeon crawl”. This style of play is known for players exploring a location, encountering traps and characters often dying unexpectedly. Shadowdark, a game currently on Kickstarter having raised nearly a million dollars, looks to deliver the classic crawling experience with a rules set that’s been informed by design ideas in the nearly five decades since D&D began.
“I think [dungeon crawling] brings the game back to the things that we, as players, really understand,” said Kelsey Dionne, designer of Shadowdark. “There is a lot of gritty humanity to being a dungeon crawler with a sword and a torch who's only one mistake away from disaster. Unseen monsters, fading resources, the quest for treasure and glory... we understand these struggles implicitly because they are reflections of our daily lives. Bringing the game back to the dungeon makes it more real, in a way. Dungeon crawlers aren't super heroes; they're scrappy, imperfect people who, despite their flaws, are still trying to do something larger-than-life.”
The game scrubs away a lot of the rules that can make getting into role-playing games a challenge. While its look and feel is inspired by early editions of D&D, Dionne uses elements from players who have come into the game through the most recent edition. That Shadowdark is coming out during a time when many D&D players are looking to explore other games is the kind of luck an anventurer could only dream about.
“I've been working on Shadowdark for about three years,” said Dionne, “four if you include the time from when I first commissioned the art that helped inspire it. I grew up playing old-school style D&D, and by the time I became a professional in the industry, 5E was the system of the day. I had a lot of fun designing and publishing for 5E, but I also missed some of the gameplay elements that emphasized the dangerous dungeon crawling I so fondly remembered as a kid. I started to wonder why we only looked to the past for dungeon crawling systems, and what the original versions of D&D would look like if they had been designed in this day and age with modernized updates. The idea really stuck and, over time, blossomed into Shadowdark!”
One of the big throwbacks in Shadowdark focuses on making characters with random dice rolls. Character statistics generated in the old school manner of rolling three six sided dice six times and slotting them in order. But that randomness continues into play where gaining class abilities is also determined by rolling on a chart.
“Random progression allows players to stop worrying about making the perfect build and to let go of a fixed idea of who their character is,” said Dionne. “This really ends a lot of mental anguish, honestly. It gives players permission to not know everything about their characters right away, and to enjoy the process of finding it out. They can embrace the moment instead of being stuck with a prior decision about backstory or concept! Plus, as random roll tables have shown us, unexpected results are the greatest creativity fuel. As we try to make sense of the new input, all these links and ideas emerge to help us explain it, to make it make sense. It's kind of like dreaming in real time. The story comes to life on its own.”
Old school gamers often prefer a sense of vulnerability to their characters. Later editions of D&D lean into fantasy hero mode with cooler abilities and spells right off the bat. Older versions of the game can be harder to find and often contain design decisions they disagree with they forgot since the last time they players decades ago.
“I hope old-school gamers will find that Shadowdark solves a lot of the little problems that trip up new players and don't follow a particularly consistent/intuitive path,” said Dionne. “For example, Shadowdark uses a d20 to determine all action resolution, and rolling high is always better. That's certainly not the case in older editions of D&D that resolve actions with mixes of d6, d20 roll-under, percentile dice, and even THAC0 combat mechanics in some cases. So Shadowdark’s numerous modernizations are quality-of-life upgrades that make everything more simple and intuitive. It took a lot of rebuilding things from scratch to pull off those changes throughout the entire system while retaining the feel of an old-school game!”
Modern players often seek out older editions to see the history of the hobby. Earlier games better reward a deep investment of time and study that those players don’t have. Shadowdark keeps the pressure up by adding elements that keep players under pressure like worrying about light sources and keeping hit points low.
“Classic elements really emphasize risk calculation and creative problem solving,” said Dionne. “All iterations of D&D have that, of course, but it becomes the primary focus in classic editions because characters are fragile and fights are not meant to be fair. I think that real and constant sense of danger, and the thrill of overcoming it in a moment of well-earned triumph, is the major draw to modern gamers interested in the classic gameplay style.”
Shadowdark has already shown robust support for the game. The full pledge for the Kickstarter includes three zines full of new classes, systems and, of course, dungeons plus pre-made characters and additional adventures. The free Quickstart offers a chance for potential backers to start playing now.
“The success of the Kickstarter makes me believe I'm on the right track with Shadowdark!” said Dionne. “There's a big community for it now, and my plan is to focus on making adventures and content for them. That's my favorite thing to do, so this has really been a dream come true!”
Shadowdark is on Kickstarter until March 30th, 2023. Digital fulfilment is expected to begin in April 2023 with physical books currently expected to reach backers in July 2023.
