Crawling Before Running
Some thoughts on Shadowdark as an introductory system for complete beginners.
Mild spoiler warning for Tomb of the Dusk Queen by Sersa Victory.
I ran a pickup game of Shadowdark for near total beginners yesterday. I think it went well, but it did leave me with a weird feeling that perhaps some expectations were not met. I don’t think I did a bad job GMing, but I do feel like the game I chose to run was not the best fit for a few of the players.
Shadowdark is a game that challenges players. GMs, in turn, need to be neutral and fair. That can be hard when you have bright-eyed friends playing their first ever RPG, excited by the possibilities, only to have their first action result in sudden and messy death.
It had me second guessing if this was the right introduction after all.
My priority with this one-shot was to show my normal, well adjusted, friends what a quick game of DND can look like. To me, Shadowdark is a perfectly pared back dungeon crawler. It’s close enough to present day DND mechanically, and it runs lightning fast. It’s my go-to system for a quick and dirty dungeon crawl.
Every mechanic was easy to keep track of and implement. I love always-on initiative and feel it's easy to break into and out of it as needed. It keeps the game going like clockwork. Great for bad attention spans.
Torch timers are neat at creating urgency but they shouldn’t be on the GM to track. It's the player's action to light one, it should be on them. That said, new players had too much on their plate learning the game to track their own torches so we had some issues there. Multiple torches can be weird to adjudicate during party splits and getting lost in the dark can mean certain death so I was a bit more forgiving, especially as I frequently paused to explain the rules as we went along.
The assumed playstyle does not want you to pull punches. I did anyway.
Because while I find this gameplay loop enjoyable, will a first time player with no prior experience in the hobby enjoy it? My game went fine overall but there were some friction points I noticed specifically tied to this playstyle.
I ran them through Tomb of the Dusk Queen by Sersa Victory. An atmospheric, dark fantasy dungeon that feels mythic. Elden Ring enjoyers will appreciate this one.
It is advertised as an introductory Shadowdark adventure. It broadly succeeds at being this. It understands the playstyle it is written for, and it presents a fair challenge without being mired in obtuse mechanics. It’s a short and sweet crawl that will give you an idea of what Shadowdark (or the OSR in general) is all about.
But here’s what players learn upon entering the first room: Don’t touch anything.
It sets a tone for what kind of game this is from the offset. Players introduced to this adventure will start on the backfoot unless they came prepared. The first encounter basically asks them: did you bring a priest?
If they didn’t, they need to run. That’s what my group did. Now they know to bring a priest to a tomb.
This adventure does not contain a single encounter that a group of level 1 characters is expected to win in a fair fight. They are all puzzles. Creative problem solving will keep you alive and make you rich. It’s great dungeon design that challenges the players to think outside the box and tempts them into taking risks.
But some people do not come to DND to be challenged. At least not on a first try.
This recent experience got me wondering to what extent this game is more appealing when you are already exposed to the popular fantasy RPGs, or at least their associated play cultures. Coming to Shadowdark after 5E feels freeing. You have less character options but you have agency, flexibility and swiftness. Progress is not expected, it has to be earned. The players are masters of their own fate.
But for a newcomer to the hobby, that level of freedom isn’t obvious. In fact, it doesn’t feel like you can do a whole lot. Your character is weak and their abilities are limited. When playing through a dungeon, those options feel even more restrained. You don’t have a wide open world to explore, just this confined space. And it’s on you to figure out what you want to gain from being here. The GM isn’t there to tell you what to do.
That’s a key difference with how other, mainstream fantasy systems structure their introductory adventures. The GM is often given guidance on how to loosely lead the players along a laid out plot. There is comfort in that.
The playstyle is broadly appealing to someone who is window shopping for a first RPG experience. The player can trust that the game designers and the adventure writers know what they are doing and will keep things fair. The GM is mostly expected to stick to the script.
The OSR style doesn’t work for passive players. You have to make decisions. Shadowdark, with always on initiative and torch timers, makes the time between decisions really short. It encourages you to get to the point and act fast on your turn. Torch is running out.
The players can also fail at this game. In my game only one player survived in the end, and I was being generous with letting the whole group undo really poor decisions that obviously come from inexperience. It was completely possible for them to have TPK’d on the first encounter. That’s kinda the point. Caution is advised.
Tomb of the Dusk Queen may have been written for a first time Shadowdark player but it doesn’t quite feel like it was written for a first time RPG player. It is unapologetically challenging.
It requires a lot of trust from players. Even friends may not understand that the GM is not working against them if it's their first experience at the table. I can point to the text in front of me as a guidebook, but even running someone else's adventure I have to make rulings, I have to make a call. Hence there needs to be trust in me, not the text.
Is that a lot to ask of someone who is playing their first RPG and immediately got their ass kicked?
I don’t think there is a right answer here. Playing with a table of total newcomers is always a fascinating experience. It’s usually when my assumptions are shattered about both people and the game we are playing. It feels like I am learning the hobby all over again with them.