A Shadowdark Sandbox

First Shadowdark playtest:

A group of players was starting out from a village to investigate a plague of red fungus-growth in the land. I played Martha Porchslate, a beefy human pipe smoker who knew the goblin language. After obtaining some money and buying some equipment we went on something like a squarecrawl: a hexcrawl but with a grid. The group had very little information about the surrounding area, so we basically set out at random and went just by whim.

And so it happened that we discovered a group of enemies.

Some of us raced right at them to strike them down.
I tried to be a bit more careful and hang back – but the dice decreed otherwise: A javelin hit me and killed me on the spot.

Quick Chargen

My next character, who retroactively was with the party all along, was Lloyd Hamper, a Halfling. He joined the ongoing fight (creating this level zero guy took only a minute) and soon wrestled with one enemy for his spear.

As this wrestling went on and became important to the situation, the GM declared that struggle a formative one for the character: should I survive it and get back home in one piece, I’d level up to L1.

I did survive; as did most of the party. We captured one enemy alive and treated him rather badly; no thing to be proud of. On the way back we lost our way and ended up at a farm we had not expected. But it turned out we got there only moments after a murder happened: Two people inside the farm house were dead and bleeding out.

From gonzo to horror

It was a rather creepy situation, with the perpetrator somewhere on the loose, and odd sounds coming from a barn. We were too chicken to confront anyone, and holed up in a workshop.

During the night, our murderer snuck out and rode away with some massive beast of burden, while we stayed out of the way.

Level-up

The next morning we checked out the crime scene, looted a few things, and found our way back to the village, where most of us levelled up. Levelling up brought the difference between level zero and level one into sharp contrast: In classic D&D, a level zero “normal man” is about half as good as a level 1 guy. But in Shadowdark, a fighter with equipment can probably beat five level zero peasants.

– What stood out:

Apart from damage rolls, we basically needed only a d20 for everything. That is so simple that it can even get a bit annoying to people who happen to like dice. But I know enough players who have all sorts of troubles remembering which dice to roll when, so for them it would be a godsend to play Shadowdark and never have to worry about that choice again.

The atmosphere of the game was supposed to be a bit mysterious and slightly threatening due to the odd fungus that was taking over the whole countryside. But in fact it drifted into comedy pretty fast; then became really scary around a random murder that really should not have been that frightening.

It was all very volatile and on the spot, with a high level of improvisation for both the GM and the players, and virtually no planning ahead. Chaos!

A Shadowdark Gauntlet

For a gauntlet game, five players rolled up 4 peasants each, resulting in a crowd of 20 nobodies who wanted to save a few fellow villagers who had disappeared in the night. Only that the GM gave us two things that overpowered us: He gave every player 2 Luck tokens to use to change rolls etc, and he allowed us to stabilize downed characters with a WIS-roll to DC 15 if applied inside of 2 rounds.

It turned out we got downed a lot, but we also stabilized people a lot, so we had zero casualties for the longest time.

We stormed some old ruined castle, where we first met two zombies, which we destroyed with the power of superior numbers; then we moved through the moat and went through the door.

People got downed by the falling portcullis, but again stabilized. And then we fought a number of monsters to reach our initial objective: we rescued the kidnapped people.

All with zero casualties.

And all the while different personalities emerged due to the game: Some of the characters were brave fighters, others were nosy, others hid in the background … even though all but two of them had only 1 HP.

Finally we had one casualty: Looting the tower of the ruin, one of my guys got a rot grub; cutting it out of his arm cost him his HP, and this time the group rolled really badly and had no more luck tokens, so he actually died – not from the rot grub, but from the attempt at treating him.

Now part of us went to bring the kidnapped people and the loot back to the home village, the rest continued on the way and went down into the dungeon, where we overcame a bunch of traps until we confronted really tough monsters, at which point we really started losing people — often in very fitting ways according to the personalities that they had developed earlier: due to traps, due to curses, due to monsters.

– What stood out:

It was pure chaos, running around with so many characters, chanting, shaking fists, shaking clubs and spears. Some of the players where overwhelmed by the necessity to handle four characters at once, so they automatically concentrated on one and had the rest as backups. Others assigned different roles to their four people.

Disorder

At the same time, the GM also struggled to keep all these armed angry villagers straight. Repeatedly he asked for marching orders, but 20 civilians don’t slot well into marching orders, especially in open terrain. Heck, try to get half as many school kids to hold hands in pairs.

Personally, I would have solved this conundrum with random rolls: 20 civilians maps well to a d20. But as it stood we tried to stay in a certain grid as often as it made half a sense to help the GM keep his ducks in a row. At a later stage he profited mightily from setting up a battle map and have us move tokens around rather than just run back and forth in a mind’s eye.

Either way, being a mindless mob of 20 with proverbial pitchforks and torches turned out to be a lot of fun. And we practically overran the monsters with a mix of large numbers, stabilizing rolls, and luck tokens. Again: Chaos! Four monsters with spears are no match for an avalanche of 20 enraged neighbours.

Let em die

An important caveat was that we were too strong and too durable for the occasion. It was clearly not going by design: the soft-hearted GM and his second chances turned what should be a chaotic Shadowdark survival horror into a joyful stampede that brought Gary Gygax’ angry villager rule to life.

Little proto-adventurers

But it was abundantly clear that the process worked: the little villagers developed personalities during play and became three-dimensional beings. Proto-adventurers ready to become actual adventurers, with an actual, real backstory under their belt, one that actually happened, and an existing shared memory with the other PCs, and already important to the player too, if he struggled to get him through the first chapter in one piece. That is what the Funnel / Gauntlet brings to the table.

Bottom line

Shadowdark is the simplest and most natural bridge between modern new-school sheet play and classic old-school situation play. Easy recommendation to bring promising 5e-players over to the right side.