I Read Games reviews are me reading games when I have nothing better to do, like read a module or write or play a game. I don’t seriously believe that I can judge a game without playing it, usually a lot, so I don’t take these very seriously. But I can talk about its choices and whether or not it gets me excited about bringing it to the table.

I was going to read an old favourite AD&D module of mine instead, but evidently my copy is missing and there aren’t any available for free on the internet today, so Shadowdark it is. I’m not going to call it a review, because I don’t want to play Shadowdark. It’s more of me answering the question of whether Shadowdark is something that will ever come off my shelf and hit the table.

Oh, right, for those who don’t know, Shadowdark is a 5e-like retroclone that appears aimed at grabbing some of the 5e crowd and teaching them dungeoncrawling. It’s basically Five Torches Deep but with better branding.

Terrible terrible blackletter choice for the front cover. It’s barely legible. I hope this changes on release, but they use a cleaner version on the inside for headings, so I suspect they won’t. Great not-beholder on the cover, though, if the internal art is 50% as good as the cover art, it’ll be pretty. I’ll skip the endpapers with only the comment that I had misgivings even in the weapons list, which duplicates information and skips essential tools because it’d make their rules too hard. It’ll take 30 seconds flat for someone to ask for a glaive because it sounds cool, and probably best you have an answer for how they work rather than design your rules to avoid polearms altogether.

I’m not sure what size the pages are, but my children have fully illustrated picture books with more words per page. It’s clearly written for beginners, but honestly who’s coming to the Shadowdark rulebook without experience of either other diy elfgames or fifth edition already? Are you not aware of the difference between who buys the books between those two cultures?

The characters stuff is elegant in the way some diy elfgames are. There are some very nice rules flourishes, you can be a goblin, you level up randomly, there are lawful and chaotic gods. A nice touch is that every class level has a title like in the old days. Except, no 5e player is going to enjoy this, GM’s have got to stop writing games. Not only that, this game is written in such a way that all of the potential extra classes have their names taken already by the titles, which are by alignment! You can’t have a paladin, an invoker, a scourge, a barbarian or a battlerager, because they’re already in the rules! GM’s writing games that miss the point about 5e are grinding my goat lately. Retroclone with 1000 classes: Challenge.

I’m reading this with an imaginary 5e players handbook in one hand, and books like Whitehack, Errant and OSE in the other. And it makes me realise that the 5e Player’s Handbook is a damned fine rulebook full of rules I don’t care for, as is the OSE rulebook. Where Whitehack and Errant are perfectly adequate rulebooks full of rules I really like. Shadowdark is neither of those things. It lacks personality, it feels written for fourth graders, the (I’m assured) lovely author needs to talk to Jay about writing games with a narrative voice, because it’s as bland as invisible cheese slices for a game whose art and title scream grim and scary.

That’s not to discount what we have here, which is a relatively rules lite 5e clone that pulls from the best of the blogosphere, with touchings of Dungeon Crawl Classics. It tries to brin gits own innovations, but second guesses itself: The game passes in real time it says, but every moment in the game doesn’t need to be accounted for. It’s a dungeon crawler it says, but provides no structure for such an activity, as if it has missed all the obsession around procedure in the past few years. It seems to want to say: Play a retroclone! They’re exactly what you’re playing right now, but with less interesting characters but also fewer rules!

Cool! Wierd! It has a in-world gambling minigame! Ok. Strange thing to end the player-character centric part of your book on, but you do you I guess. I guess I’ll put a collectible card game in my next monster-hunting campaign to keep the players occupied? The GM-centric remainder is all the stuff that needs to be in here because it isn’t an existing book. Magic items, bestiary, all of that, plus the little dungeon-masters guide for the beginner to retroclones GM. It’s serviceable and dull, much like most of the rest of the book.

My impression of Shadowdark is that it’s a serviceable, clearly written, clearly laid out retroclone with a lot of rules in common with D&D 5e. But, it has no personality, it doesn’t bring shadow nor dark into the text, and it doesn’t leverage the huge advantages that springboarding off 5e brings. This game needs to be oozing horror; it needs banging layout that chills your spine; it needs to bring more personality than 5e brings to the Players Handbook and it doesn’t succeed in doing that. Most of the buzz I saw leading into the Kickstarter was that this was a 5e killer, coming in the wake of the OGL disaster to sweep up the disenfranchised.

This is not the one, I’m afraid. If you’re willing to learn a new game with the vibe that a game named Shadowdark should have, learn Errant, a game that does ooze horror while remaining D&D, and doesn’t skimp on tactics either. If you want to play 5e, but with dungeon crawling, listen to blogs on tape for a while, learn about proceduralism, and just add some rules to your game (honestly just take them from Errant). Your players will thank you for it; they like playing Moon-worshipping tabaxi princesses in space, let them. If what’s actually going on here is that you’ve gotten old and you don’t have the time or energy to devote to preparing the behemoth of prep that is 5e, then admit it and get your single friend to take over the job, because everyone likes their game already.

6th July, 2023

Idle Cartulary