In Praise of Shadowdark

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.

Best of the Web, Settlements

I haven't done this in awhile but Best of the Web was always intended for me to be able to find and revisit cool links, and I found one that intrigued me so we have Sandbox Settlements: Prep, Run and Thrive by Among Cats and Books. The post has a lot of little useful bits and pieces and a lot of links worth tracking down.

One of those links is to a post called In Praise of Legwork by Sam Sorenson  about all the details required to make a proper settlement ready to go at the table. He uses Citystate of the Invincible Overlord as an example in that every shopkeep has a statblock. I like the way 5E did generic statblocks for commoners and such (but not enough of them) which simplifies this sort of thing. What makes me sad is that WoTC has never assigned an employee or team to map all the buildings in Phandlin, or all the landmark spots in Waterdeep and Everwinter. They should have done so in 4E when everything was a battlemap but 4E didn't take place in Forgotten Realms so I give them a pass on that but they've been using Forgotten Realms for 10 years now and since covid VTTs are becoming more and more common, and they have failed. Probably saving it up for their own VTT but that's money left behind. If I ever get a city product together I'm gonna have as many interior maps as I can manage, that's for sure.

Knight at the Opera has three posts about urban campaigns worth reading. Urban Gameplay 1: The Search for the Holy Grail (is futile), Urban Gameplay 2: Crawling (is not the answer), and Urban Gameplay Part 3: Maps (usually aren't useful).

Colonialism in D&D

Grumpy Wizard had a post called Colonialism in D&D: A Rebuttal that rebuts a Dwellers of the Forbidden City Post/Poll called Race, Colonialism and Dungeons and Dragons - A Story in Two Parts about Colonialism in D&D. Grumpy Wizard made some really good points, but then closed comments so I figure I'll make a short post out of it, because I have an opinion.

I'll start with a quote from Gary Gygax's B2 the Keep on the Borderlands. This module is not only ranked very high in every poll of modules I've ever seen but because it shipped with the Basic Set for awhile it has been played (and replayed) probably more than any other module. I think it would be fair to say that the module helped form most peoples opinion of what the game was about during its early years.

The Realm of mankind is narrow and constricted. Always the forces ot Chaos press upon its borders, seeking to en-slave its populace, rape its riches, and steal its treasures. If it were not for a stout few, many in the Realm would indeed fall prey to the evil which surrounds them. Yet, there are al- ways certain exceptional and brave members of humanity, as well as similar individuals among its allies — dwarves, elves, and halflings — who rise above the common level and join battle to stave off the darkness which would otherwise overwhelm the land. Bold adventurers from the Realm set off for the Borderlands to seek their fortune. It is these adventurers who, provided they survive the challenge, carry the battle to the enemy.

Bolding is mine of course. If anyone is the colonialist in this scenario it is the residents of the Caves of Chaos. Just because they drag their women and children along with the invading army doesn't make them victims. D&D is anti-colonialist.

The Crazy Way Wizards chooses Products to make

 So my characters went to Neverwinter and it got really sandboxy very quickly which I like, which they like, it's all good. The problem is we're playing Roll20 and you really need battlemaps. I found a nice map of Castle Never, and another of the Moonstone Masks location. Other generic maps worked for what I needed. But it made me think, Neverwinter has been around for a few decades now and there isn't a proper product with interior maps of the major buildings (same with Waterdeep). Back in the day they had books of generic battlemaps, why not have a book full of Neverwinter maps? Another book of Waterdeep maps. I don't even care if you include Factions or an adventure, just a book of maps. 

Now we are in the world of VTTs I bet they'd sell a lot of that sort of thing. Back during 4E when combat sort of needed a Battlemap I bet they'd sell a lot of that sort of thing. But you can't sell it if you don't make it. 

Legend no longer supported

 In the State of the Mongoose 2024 Matt Sprange admitted they were sunsetting Mongoose Legend. They haven't really done anything in a while but still its odd to see a whole product line just abandoned. I assume the sales were not great, especially compared to their new Traveller stuff.

Sadly I never played Legend, but it seemed the closest to RuneQuest 2 which I loved back in the day. Low amount of crunch, but not too low. Nice sweet spot between Mythras and OpenQuest is now open.

I Mongoose goes for a Creative Commons license because almost anything else will just leave it dead. 

An aside, it would be nice if more companies did a State of posting to tell fans how things went and where they are going. 

SIZE in RuneQuest

Not much of a post, just thinking about the SIZE statistic. I always liked it because it fit with the grittiness of RuneQuest but I don't think I ever used it (beyond how it gets baked into skills). 

RQ 2 had size that was based on both height and weight. RQ 3 and Ringworld were based on mass. I don't know about Call of Cthulhu (Also It's kind of cool that spelling correction software knows how to spell Cthulhu). Below is the table from RuneQuest Classic (which is RuneQuest 2 with added bits).

Encumbrance & Treasure

I've talked about Encumbrance before. Basically I prefer a slot-based system which is fairly common among the OSR. What I'm thinking about now is how treasure is designated in an adventure. Typically a module (at least the ones I've run recently) will list off the how many coins of what type, like this bit from Lost Mines of Phandelvin.

My problem with this is the module gives boxed text all over the place. Why not here? It's not like the players are going to count out the cp and sp, at least not until a short or long rest, they won't know what the potions are, and it doesn't list how much it weighs in a system that counts every lbs. This is a place for boxed text. 

For my example 1 ENC = 1 Slot. 

In addition to the stolen provisions, Klarg has a wood chest with metal binding (5 ENC capacity, 1 ENC when empty, takes two hands to carry) with two potions (.5 ENC) and a jade statute of a frog (.5 ENC) small enough to fit into a pocket or pouch. The chest is also full of copper and silver coins (3.5 ENC).

Potions are both potions of healing. Jade statuette is worth 40gp. 600 cp (2 ENC), 110 sp (1.5 ENC).

The numbers are made up for the example, a GM should determine how much coins weight in bunches of ten or a hundred. When the players take a break and have time to roughly count the treasure, they can learn the amounts of the coins (they may just decide to leave the copper behind, or separate out coins so that they can dump the copper in a pinch while knowing the gold or gems are safe). Also notice that the chest takes two hands, so now it's a useful tool but all that ENC is gonna bog someone down.

Anyway, I'm still organizing my thoughts but it seems like it should work.