Mail Room: Shadowdark

Believe the hype.

I got the PDF for this, and wow, the GM section alone puts the 5E DMG to shame. The art is fantastic. The presentation is up there with Old School Essentials, but it is easier to read and grasp and uses 5E as its rules engine.

The rest of the game is a fun mix of B/X style and 5E rules, and the game leans a little into the gamist side of things - especially the gear system with slots. But this gear slot system lies at the heart of the game and brings back old-school inventory management in an accessible and theme-defining way. And it isn't hard, and you are not using a calculator to figure everything out.

Another blurring of the lines area is in time management, but this, again, is the game. Like the gear slot system, the game abstracts time and links it to the real world instead of the game world. This encourages efficient and intelligent play, and wasting time in every room looking at every tapestry is a risk and reward calculation the players need to consider.

And it leads to faster play sessions that stay focused on worthwhile endeavors. The rules are simple, too, standardizing DCs and when you check (you succeed in every skill and ability check unless there is time pressure or consequences of failure).

Every OSR ethos is enforced by design, and these are driven like nails to hold this game together. With a game like OSE, the old-school "happens because" and is more the accepted style of play for a familiar framework. Here, the design is baked into the game, like how an iPhone's UI is designed to feel seamless and natural.

It isn't said, but it is there.

And the OSR is baked in and drives every rule decision and what text appears on the page. Coming from the horribly overwritten SRD 5.1, the intelligent and frugal writing here feels like fresh air. One section on "choices" in the GM section says more in four sentences than the entire 5E DMG says in the book.

And the use of white space around these points drives every point home.

I am putting my overly-written games away and focusing on these amazingly-designed digest games where space is at a premium, and there is no room to waste your time. Sometimes I like background and flavor, but only sometimes in the core rulebooks.

Get in, find the rule or table, and get out. Here is the SRD 5.1 section for the initiative rules:

And here is Shadowdark's:

Four sentences versus three paragraphs. 

Everything in SRD 5.1 possibly needs to be said, but you can design things so they don't need to be said. It is like having a rule in Monopoly for moving a playing piece stating the player reaches (with their hand and arm) to the game board, grabs the playing piece (and not anyone else's), and moves it a number of spaces equal to the dice roll (indicated by the dice). And then having a paragraph in there saying not to bump the game board (do not dislodge houses and hotels from their placements) and unnecessarily move the other pieces on the game board around (with lots of parenthetical anecdotes like this). And then, another paragraph goes over placing your piece in the center of the square so it is clear where it is during this turn (so as not to cause confusion). A likely final paragraph saying that your playing piece, while it may be a shoe or a car, does not mean that the character it represents is actually a shoe or a car in the game's world (perhaps this piece reflects a facet of the character's personality, but it does not have to, and you are free to use other small items from your house as playing pieces but make sure they fit on the square, not damage the game accessories, and are clearly understood by the players present to represent your token on the game board).

At some point, you realize someone was getting paid by the word.

Or the editor was trying to be everyone's friend, which is not an editor's job.

Or the game wanted to fill a few hundred pages long hardcover books, and there is only a little game in there. To be honest, the "big hardcover" game companies are all guilty of doing this, and it makes the games inaccessible for so many.

A thousand pages of rules for a 20-page game.

A simplicity and elegance of design here put this up there with Old School Essentials, and like that game, creates its own miniature "setting in a shoe box" sort of world implied in the book. And like OSE, these shoebox settings, essentially a game world modeled after the game's mechanics, are highly compelling and amazingly deep in flavor.

Highly recommended, and this reminds me of Old School Essentials, or even Mork Borg - as a slap across the face, telling the community to WAKE UP. Where Mork Bog attacked the layout, goals, and structure of the roleplaying game; Shadowdark is a wake-up call to both 5E and the OSR, in presentation, focus, and clarity.