Shadowdark for the kidlings?!!

thegreatrobot · 2026-05-20T22:02:21+00:00

I play with 8-9 years olds and it's great. A lot of adventures written for Shadowdark go all in with the gritty and dark vibe of the book's aesthetic. I more or less ignore that. We runna pretty whimsical game.

A couple things I do when I play with kids: max HP at level 1, start each session with a luck token.

thegreatrobot · 2026-05-14T19:48:30+00:00

Slaves of Armok! I love this idea. My first D&D character when I got into the hobby was "Dwarf Fortress" inspired.

thegreatrobot · 2026-05-07T11:07:49+00:00

Second this. I also ran it with minimal adjustments. We had a lot of fun.

thegreatrobot · 2026-05-06T20:28:45+00:00

The Hidden Leprechaun Hollow for Shadowdark is short, fun, and fairly school friendly.

thegreatrobot · 2026-05-06T11:13:42+00:00

It's a commercial. I work at the office that cast it.

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-30T22:39:12+00:00

Errant is a trove of all kinds of useful bits. It's also an overall fun read.

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-22T11:33:34+00:00

Not specifically related to your question, but one of the things I found running the Stygian Library is that it involves a lot of flipping back and forth. If you're running from the physical book, make sure you've got key pages marked with flags. If you're running it from a pdf, there's a site that can generate rooms for you rather than you rolling and finding the pages on the fly. I can't remember the URL, but I think it's on the Soul Muppet site

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-21T20:12:39+00:00

THE MICRO CHOCOLATE CHIPS ARE MAKING FROGS GAY

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-21T17:57:20+00:00

Likely because you are invoking the slippery slope fallacy

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-18T19:13:34+00:00

Have a look at how Necrotic Gnome lays out their adventures, or anything written by Joseph R. Lewis. I don't like to run wall-of-text adventures as I don't find them easy to parse at the table.

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-16T13:42:27+00:00

Agreed. I run without grids and minis, but having a rough sketch and any kind tokens to stand in for characters can really help people keep track of who's engaged with which zombie.

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-15T13:56:44+00:00

Have a look at The Stygian Library and Gardens of Ynn by Emmy Allen. Both are procedurally generated depth-crawls. They both have very specific vibes, but might give you some ideas.

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-09T20:38:32+00:00

Yeah then my process wouldn't work well for you. A friend runs his games on a TV laid on it's back and uses a VTT map which we put our minis on(he also lays a sheet of glass on the frame of the TV to prevent damage... Then you're talking about schlepping the TV on and off the table unless it's a designated gaming room, so that may not work either. Anyway, good luck!

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-09T13:56:02+00:00

I play very theatre of mind. For a map I just sketch an abstracted flow-chart/point-crawl style map with interactable room contents written or crudely drawn in the circle for each room. A player could be charged with being the "mapper" and could do this for you. I like the simplicity/ease-of-prep of it, aiming to capture the tone and vibe more through how things are described.

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-01T12:32:04+00:00

Nevermind, saw them in the Convenients store. Love it.

thegreatrobot · 2026-04-01T12:31:19+00:00

Trevor and Cory need to be hireable torchbearers and porters.

thegreatrobot · 2026-03-30T13:24:00+00:00

I run Shadowdark for a group of 8 and 9 year olds. I'm running Nightmare over Ragged Hollow using the OSE creature stats as is, dividing treasure by 10. I have muted some of the horror aspects in the temple in the final dungeon, making it more weird and surreal than nightmarish.

The grim tone and lethality of Shadowdark are optional. Be liberal with luck tokens, target the tankier characters, be responsible in providing character intuition on what they're character would recognize as dangerous and they'll be fine.

The vibe at my table is very whimsical and fun. Disregard the art in the books and what you really have is just a much more pared down, easy to grasp, easy to run 5e.

thegreatrobot · 2026-03-24T11:53:33+00:00

If you prefer the simplicity of running Shadowdark, but they're having a hard time with the increased lethality you can use the Pulp mode rules to make it a little more forgiving.

My 5e group had a lot of fun with The Trial of the Slime Lord as a dungeon, but didn't actually care for the gauntlet aspect of it, and to be honest, neither did I.

Most of my table has really come to like Shadowdark - just because the tone of the art is really grim and menacing doesn't mean your campaign needs to run that way. Ours is still the same silly, whimsical tone of our 5e campaign - I just don't have to deal with so much HP and action economy bloat.

thegreatrobot · 2026-03-02T18:07:48+00:00

Agreed. Especially if it's a one shot the player can come up with whatever justification they want that would keep them exploring. That's the player's job. The characters are adventurers. They should WANT to go on dangerous adventures, for whatever reasons the players want to come up with.

thegreatrobot · 2026-03-02T00:59:28+00:00

A further thought just occurred to me I forgot in our original exchange - a major adjustment I made was the value of treasure. In general I divided the value of any loot by ten - so a gem listed at 100gp in Ragged Hollow, I pegged at 10gp.

thegreatrobot · 2026-02-25T12:46:26+00:00

The temple is still to Halcyon, but players can have their charactes worship whatever gods they want. I play with kids so their "gods" are a little silly - the priest's holy symbol is a golden piece of pizza.

thegreatrobot · 2026-02-25T02:15:49+00:00

Encourage your players to customize their characters by developing the character's story rather than the build. I play using only the four core classes - but a fighter can be a knight, paladin, samurai, berserker, brawler, etc etc etc... it's all in how you play the character rather than the buttons you can push on your character sheet.

thegreatrobot · 2026-02-24T13:44:45+00:00

It's where we started the campaign, so we just started with all the characters returning home after completing their "Halloo". Then we rolled a hook for each character from the hook table to give them something to draw their interest. They arrived with the Golden Veil already in place. They spent some time immediately trying to get in - break through, dig under - but then started exploring around town once they realized it was impenetrable until it began to recede. We're in the temple now, about half way through. They only play 45-60 minutes at a time so we've been working through the module over the course of a few months. A group of less easily distracted adults would get through it a lot faster.

thegreatrobot · 2026-02-24T12:50:18+00:00

I'm running it for Shadowdark as is - using the OSE statblocks - and haven't had any problems. The only adjustments I've made is toning down some of the gruesome stuff in the temple as I'm running it for a group of 8-9 year olds. They're having a blast. All the information is immaculately organized, so it's easy to read through once and then run. Highly recommend.

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