I haven't played Shadowdark yet. In fact I've been working on my own game for when our 5E campaign ends, but I kept thinking does the world need another RPG? Even one as brilliant as mine? What I really want to do is create content so why not jump on someone elses bandwagon and use some of their momentum instead of trudging along on my own.
So the next logical step would be to create for 5E as that's the biggest market, but there is so much I don't like about 5E. Even the early levels are fiddly. So I looked over Mork Borg but the art style made my eyes hurt. So I looked over Shadowdark. I'd bought the game when it came out and was turned off more by the over-hype it was getting than anything else. It seemed to have too much emphasis on dungeons, but the game has continued chugging along, and the new KickStarter is about wilderness and not so much dungeons so it keeps growing.
So I looked over Shadowdark, and a few of the Shadowdark modules and the Cursed Scroll Zine and one thing that stuck with me is that almost everything is well designed for the DM. It's the opposite of 5E in that way. Statblocks are simple, character abilities are simple, its designed for lower levels. So far I liked most of what I saw. And the graphic design was well done. I studied as a Graphic Designer in college so I have a little knowledge of the basics and to me usability is number one. Shadowdark is designed to be usable. Mork Borg is totally unusable, designed to create an impression of the setting more than usability. Its one saving grace is they repeat the important bits in the last two or three pages so you can ignore the bulk of the product.
In Shadowdark they use page spreads well to group information. They have very clear headers and don't use any hard to read fonts. Things have been distilled down to the basics which is nice.
One of the products I'm considering writing up is a city setting. I had all sorts of ideas about how to manage encounter tables, then I saw the ones in Shadowdark and it got me thinking I needed to simplify. Again and again I kept cutting out 'clever' ideas that were overly clever and just didn't really add that much. I had a basic table with entries for each district, and then a follow table for each entry so that the guards would have a bunch of stuff to do when encountered. I figured roll d20 and d100 and you've got a metric ton of results but it was a bit complicated. Then I had Events which were things such as minor holy day that would change the encounter tables for that day, or in a specific city district no matter what scenario you were running. Might not be a bad idea but added to the encounter tables it was even more complexity. In a city the bulk of encounters shouldn't be hostile, they should just be creating atmosphere so why kill myself creating confusing tables? I decided to go with the Shadowdark style 100 encounters table for each district and move the events tables into individual scenarios where appropriate. Give some of my scenarios a bit of extra pizzaz without complicating everything else.
And my city was run by a viking. The idea was an German city-state like Hamburg or Lubek that made a deal with a viking leader to stop the raids (the way the French gave Normandy to Rollo to stop his raiding Paris), and in the Cursed Scrolls #3 they covered Vikings which is nice. The only problem is the vikings worship real world deities (Odin, Freya, Loki) which I think is silly, but so be it.
So that's the story so far. I like Shadowdark but don't have any rose-colored glasses on about it.
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