Mail Room: Shadowfinder

I loved Pathfinder 1e, and its remix of D&D 3.5E, the original world, the almost brutal Conan-meets-D&D flavor, and the entire “do anything” 3.5E rules. The backgrounds, classes, and savage world just worked so well together, and it was one of the near-perfect fantasy settings.

I bounced off Pathfinder 2E hard, and while I have many of the books, the new system doesn’t appeal to me. The books are huge, the system is voluminous, and there is too much for one person to fully grasp and appreciate.

So I find myself returning to simple games like Old School Essentials and Shadowdark for easier play, faster pacing, and rules I can keep in my head instead of needing to reach for a book to look up. But what if there was a compromise between Pathfinder 1e, D&D 3.5E, and old-school gaming? What if there was a game to fill the 3.5E hole missing in my life?

Part of that hole is tonal. D&D 5E often feels like high-fantasy superheroes; magic is abundant, characters grow into larger-than-life figures, and the system leans into power fantasy. Old School Essentials and core Shadowdark sit at the other end: low-fantasy survival, where resources are scarce, magic is dangerous or rare, and the world feels harsh and unforgiving. D&D 3.5E and Pathfinder 1e (and therefore Shadowfinder) hit a middle-magic sweet spot that still feels right to me. Magic is present, potent, and flavorful, but it doesn’t take over the entire system or turn every character into a walking special-effects show. The world stays dangerous and grounded while still allowing for the wonder and variety that made those earlier editions sing.

That middle register is exactly what a lot of us who loved 3.5e and PF1e are looking for when pure OSR games feel too stripped-down and modern 5E feels too inflated. For those players, the jump all the way back to four classes and extreme minimalism can feel like losing the texture that made the game feel like home.

You don’t have to go all the way back.

Shadowfinder is a third-party conversion that takes the best of Pathfinder 1e’s player options and its entire six-book Bestiary line and rebuilds them on the Shadowdark engine. It keeps the content density and character-option richness that made 3.5e and PF1e feel like “your edition,” while delivering the speed, lethality, and modern table feel of Shadowdark. You get alchemists, bloodragers, gunslingers, magi, skalds, slayers, specialist wizards, alignment-flavored clerics, dozens of ancestries, firearms with mishap tables, and a monster catalog that still feels like classic Golarion, or a close cousin you can file the serial numbers off of for a custom world.

The project is still expanding. Menagerie Press has already released the Complete Bestiary and the Player Guide as the first two core books. A full GM’s Guide has now completed crowdfunding as the third volume in the set, with the books and PDFs coming soon. Once those arrive, Shadowfinder will have a complete core trio that covers player options, monsters, and referee tools in one coherent package.

What changes is the chassis underneath. Real-time torch timers still tick. Darkness is still deadly. Magic is still risky (roll-to-cast instead of pure Vancian). Hit points stay low. Combat stays fast. The incremental bonus stacking and long character-optimization loops of Pathfinder 1e are gone. The game still favors player decisions over character builds, but it no longer starves you of the toys that made the older system feel rich.

In practice, this means you can recapture a lot of the classic pre-PF2e Golarion flavor, or run a custom world in that same high-fantasy-but-still-grounded register, without the system weight that made Pathfinder 1e start to drag, and without the more radical minimalism of pure OSE or core Shadowdark. The conversion work for adventure paths and homebrew is lighter than it would be in either of those systems, because the content is already speaking a familiar language.

This isn’t a claim that Shadowfinder is “better” than Old School Essentials or core Shadowdark. Those games remain excellent for the tables that want pure procedures or the most focused possible dungeon-crawling experience. It is simply a recognition that not every 3.5e or PF1e veteran wants to make the full cultural and mechanical leap those games require. For the players who still love the option depth and the classic middle-magic tone but no longer want the bloat, Shadowfinder currently sits in a useful middle space that didn’t really exist before.

You don’t have to choose between keeping all the complexity or stripping everything down to four classes and a torch timer. There is now a more gradual off-ramp that still gets you into faster, more dangerous play while letting you keep more of what made the edition feel like home.

If the pure OSR versions have always felt like too big a step backward from the game that defined your table for years, this might be the compromise worth looking at.