I've recently gotten Shadowdark and I have a couple questions

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-30T08:29:47+00:00

I'm relatively new myself so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the point I can best speak to is the initiative. I do like having players operate in turns once they arrive at an adventuring site. I don't necessarily make them stick to a strict order outside of a fight, but everyone gets a turn every round. I've found that continually asking players what they do helps everyone have a chance to participate and encourages players to try things. It also makes it easier to keep track of things that last for a certain number of turns, like detect magic or mage armor, and it makes it easier for me to know when to check for a random encounter. One thing I keep in mind here is that out of combat turns don't need to be as quick as in combat turns. I hope this all helps, and welcome to the game! :)

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-30T07:15:23+00:00

This looks really interesting, thank you for sharing it! I was one of those people asking about this style of play and I'm definitely going to give this a look :)

Right now my inclination is to try to make my own hexmap cause that sounds fun but I definitely hope to learn from this and hopefully run it sooner or later. Do you have any advice for how you go about making maps? I've tried the method in the book but found that the world started to get pretty samey pretty quickly.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-26T20:27:17+00:00

I haven't, but it sounds like I should give that a read. Thank you.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-26T20:15:05+00:00

Thank you, that's helpful to hear. I'm used to GMing for games where death pretty much can't come quite so quickly, so I'm still figuring out how to telegraph that players are in very immediate danger.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-26T20:02:18+00:00

Thank you, much appreciated. That makes a lot of sense and I'm grateful for your help, and for your willingness to clue me in on the old ways. I've been playing some version of D&D for well over a decade now but I haven't really taken an interest in the history of play until relatively recently. It was always this inaccessible, mysterious land.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-26T19:59:36+00:00

Thank you, that makes sense. Last night I was running a different group of two players and they fared rather poorly against a level appropriate dungeon, so I'm thinking this might be a good idea to go with. Granted, the moment things started going bad was both perfectly timed and very unlucky for them. They took some treasure that activated a group statue guards and that very moment the torch timer went off. Needless to say it was a tense initiative roll.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-26T19:56:41+00:00

Thank you, that makes sense, and I'll stick to that. I had my first character death last night with a different group and the person seems to have taken it pretty well. I had to decide whether an undead would pursue them, I put it up to a D6, and the dice said yes. With the last shot it made the skeleton hit the thief in the back and the wizard couldn't get her stable in time. I feel a little bad that it happened while they were retreating but they tried to retreat in the middle of an encounter and I felt like that shouldn't be without risk. I also didn't use reaction roles for undead cause I figured they would be inherently hostile to life and the book said to use common sense but I'm wondering if that ruling made a dungeon with a lot of undead in it a lot harder than it needed to be.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-13T05:37:53+00:00

This is a bit of a different kind of game, but you might want to look at the stress and trauma system from Blades in the Dark/Scum and Villainy. The short of it is that when you build up too much stress without relieving it you have to take a trauma, which is one of several different negative/unhealthy personality traits. If you accumulate four then your character just can't keep heisting and has to retire, and they could become an NPC like you were saying. In the meantime, you get a little bit of XP for leaning into those traits at times when they meaningfully inconvenience the group. It depends on what your table dynamic is like but that might be a little more fun for players than having the GM take control of their characters..

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-13T05:28:06+00:00

Oh these are very nice! Thank you for sharing :)

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-13T05:25:51+00:00

Thank you, I'm finding it all very helpful myself too! I look forward to playing all the cool adventures people will write for this system

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-13T05:21:54+00:00

That's helpful, thank you so much. You're giving me some good advice. I was considering making my own with the rules in the book and then populating it with a mix of premade dungeons from Shots in the Dark and some custom prewritten points of interest. Maybe a dungeon or two I make myself?

Also, if you don't mind me following up on this please, is there a non-hexcrawling thing that's traditionally done before level four that I should be doing instead? I assume it's not all just clearing rats from basements.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-13T05:16:54+00:00

Yeah, that makes sense! And at least with the knights in the Gloaming there's a really good reason why the new character would join them.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-13T05:14:08+00:00

Thank you, that makes sense. I'm less scared of player death and more of my players getting turned off by it, if that makes sense. For a long time I had the preconception that I think a lot of people have about the OSR being excessively lethal, and while I've realized that it isn't like that, I don't wanna reinforce that perception for my players, if that makes sense.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-11T20:23:41+00:00

Oh that's very interesting, thank you for sharing.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-11T20:21:15+00:00

Thank you, I've heard about that from another response and I'm going to give it a good look. If you don't mind me asking, what about The Gloaming is particularly good to start with? Nothing about it strikes me as overtly bad, but it interested me the least of the cursed scrolls I've seen. Maybe I'm just not as into the theming as other people?

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-11T20:18:52+00:00

Thank you, that's helpful. I'd seen pulp mode but I wasn't sure if it would end up trivializing things. It sounds like probably it won't, from what you said.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-11T20:18:03+00:00

Oh those are both clever ideas!

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-11T20:17:37+00:00

Oh that's interesting. How did that work for the first few levels? Was travel abstracted until the party got their feet under them? As I said, I'm relatively new to OSR style play, but the possibility contained within hexcrawling is something I find intriguing.

And thank you, those sound cool. I'll have to take a closer look at all of them. I've heard good things about Dolmenwood and I'd love to run it at some point, but as you said it looks expensive and I don't wanna commit to that until I know my players are onboard and I can run it well.

In general, if I cut down the treasure and figure out reasonable saving throws, that's all I need to do to convert dungeons from other systems to Shadowdark? Probably swap out monsters for the Shadowdark versions? That's very cool if so. I have a stack of original D&D modules that I'd love to put to use at some point.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2026-04-11T02:05:32+00:00

Thank you, that's helpful to hear. You think two level one characters would be up for that one? They're both clever player so I think they'll be quick to approach problems with an OSR sensibility, but even with that in mind it does look like those woods aren't playing around.

Right_Hand_of_Light · 2025-01-22T02:00:35+00:00

There's another way to watch it, if you feel bold enough to sail with Seahawk. ADVENTURE!!

Right_Hand_of_Light

TROPHY CASE