The Curious Case of Shadowdark Simps

Pictured above: everyone praising Shadowdork.

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Having spent the past several weeks fleeing the liberal hellscape of Oregon for at the least figuratively greener pastures, I’ve been largely and mercifully for the most part out of the RPG scene’s particular loop. However, now that we finally have internet more or less established I was confused to see people talking about—cue stifled laughter—Shadowdark.

I'd initially heard about it during the OGL panic a while back, where among so many others one Kelsey Dionne was worried that she might not be able to subject the world to her godawful post-modern vapidware trash game that like every other godawful post-modern vapidware trash game is not only bereft of anything interesting or inventive but also omits a slew of—sometimes necessary—content under the pretense of "simplicity".

Really it's due to some combination of laziness, ineptitude, and knowing your audience is either too stupid to realize what you're doing—or, rather, not doing—and/or like the so-called creator also don't give a fuck: these apathetic tabletop tourists are just happy to have yet another Troika-tier RPG with no standards or real depth that they can "hack" and churn out their own subpar shovelware for.

Laughably childish title aside, Shallowdark is basically a heavily stripped down version of 5th Edition D&D's Basic Rules with some mechanics, ahem, "lifted" from other games, as well as some possibly original-albeit-shitty houserules and mechanics shoehorned in, even though Kelsey swears it was somehow based on B/X:

Ah, the classic darkmantle. Truly an iconic monster of early editions if ever there was. It certainly didn't make its debut in 3rd Edition.

I have no idea why people would assume it's based on 5th Edition. Could it be, I dunno, a combination of how ability scores and modifiers are handled (ie, 3rd Edition and up), weapons, advantage/disadvantage, a universal XP chart, Difficulty Classes, make-a-Wisdom-save pretending to be Morale, the Misty Step spell, and full healing on a rest (including full recovery of ability score damage)?

While perhaps a handful of mechanics could be considered original, they are so horribly executed that Kelsey would have been better served just plagiarizing the entire thing and spending time coming up with a better name. I don't think all the retarded simps pretending to praise this heartless hack—paid or not—would have cared either way.

The core mechanic is that you roll a d20 and try to beat a target number. Nothing special but then if you are writing your own D&Dish game I would expect this to serve as the foundation for whatever alterations might be layered on top that would actually justify the existence of your D&Dish game (spoiler alert: there is nothing of value to be found within the bowels of Shadowblack).

There is a Morale system but again it looks to be taken entirely from 5th Edtiion, which is about the worst Morale implementation I’ve ever seen: it only triggers when a group of enemies have been reduced to half numbers or less, or half hit points for a solo creature, after which they have to make a DC 15 Wisdom check to avoid fleeing.

No modifiers, either, just a flat DC of 15. So even if the monsters still outnumber you, even if you only slaughtered a series of mooks and the BBEG and his elite henchmen are still there? They still gotta make a DC 15 save to avoid booking it.

At 0 or less hit points you fall unconscious and die after 1d4+Con modifier rounds. This sounds harmless enough but you cannot die from falling too far into the negatives: whether you are at -1 or -100 hit points, you have 1d4+Con mod rounds for someone to stabilize you. You also get to make a d20 check each round, miraculously springing back to life with 1 hit point if you roll a natural 20.

You can also be stabilized if someone succeeds at a DC 15 Intelligence check: apparently, the severity of the injury doesn’t matter.

Distances are divided into supposedly vague ranges of Close, Near and Far. This reminds me of Dungeon World, just somehow worse: Close is 5 feet, Near is within 30 feet, and Far is 35 feet and beyond, and since each distance is given a precise measurement there's no reason to do this in the first place (though it does result in the amusing range of "double near" for the lantern and wolf's Speed).

Instead of race you get Ancestry, so there's at least one woke flag. While the racial features are useful you only get one thing and they aren't particularly compelling. For example, dwarves grant a +2 bonus to your starting hit points, and each time you level up you roll twice and take the higher result. Goblins on the other hand can never, ever be surprised for some reason. Didn't know goblins had senses to rival that of elves (in a D&D context, in any case).

Speaking of elves, their trait is Farsight, which is a +1 bonus to ranged attacks only (why?) or a +1 bonus to spellcasting checks (also, why?).

There are only four classes: cleric, fighter, thief, and wizard, all of which function more or less as you'd expect. As with the core mechanic this isn't necessarily bad but also doesn't score Darkshadows any points in the innovation category.

For example, fighters can use all weapons and armor and get a hefty bonus to hit and damage rolls with a single weapon (Weapon Specialization by another name). They also add their Constitution modifier to what they can carry (I'll get to that in a bit), and get 5E-grade advantage on Strength or Dexterity checks (I guess that's another 5th Editionism).

Every odd level you get to roll for a talent, but unlike the extensive options you get in an actually complete role-playing game like Dungeons & Delvers, here you roll 2d6 on a table with only five results. Worse, one result is "choose a talent or +2 points to distribute to stats" (another 5th Edition-ism). So it's really more like four class-specific options.

Actually, scratch that: another result is just +2 to one stat, which while useful isn't very interesting. Neither are the rest: for example fighters can get Weapon Specialization with one additional weapon, +1 to all attacks, or +1 to AC when wearing one specific type of armor (why?). These are all bog-standard benefits that anyone could have come up with, and come nowhere close to justifying the cost of admission.

I'm guessing Kelsey was "inspired" by Lion & Dragon, which also gives you the option to gain random class features on a level-up. It's a phenomenally retarded mechanic even in Lion & Dragon, but at least there you have the choice to either pick what you want or roll twice, got something at every level, and there were more possibilities.

Clerics and wizards have to make spellcasting checks whenever they cast a spell, but don't expect anything nearly as creative/crazy/exciting as, say, Dungeon Crawl Classics. You just add your Wisdom or Intelligence to the roll, and have to beat 10 + the spell's level (which is called tier for some reason). If you succeed the spell does whatever it's supposed to do, and if you fail you just can't use it again until you "complete a rest".

Doesn't make any fucking sense "in-game", this is basically how cleric spells work in Lion & Dragon (where it also didn't make any sense), and because of how it works and the randomized class features I wouldn't be surprised if this is also where Kelsey got the idea from. The only real (still unoriginal) difference is that if you nat 1 you either have to undergo penance if a cleric, while wizards roll on a mishap table. 

Penance involves a vague "holy quest" (no examples are provided), wholly undescribed ritual atonement, or just donating/destroying some cash based on the spell's level. For wizards there's just one mishap table, used for all spells. It features a mere 12 results, with an equal chance of getting any one, as opposed to a much more sensible percentile table that would make it more/less likely to get specific results.

All in all, it sort of reminds me of Dungeon Crawl Classics, just stale and sanitized, the sort of phoned-in mechanics I would expect from an apathetic hack pretending to be a game designer.

I don't like the wizard mishaps because the results aren't keyed to spells, so you can fail to, say, charm someone and have random gear disappear, which would make more sense for teleportation and conjuration spells.

Cleric penance is also terribly implemented because, what? Your god just gets arbitrarily so angry with you solely because of a bad skill check and not at all what you were doing at the time, that he revokes access to one specific spell and that's it? 

You aren't penalized in any other way: no penalties to further spellcasting checks, and all of your other spells work just fine (assuming you don't happen to nat 1 while casting them). It's so fucking stupid and nonsensical, but it's precisely what I'd expect from Darkodarkness.

A better mechanic would be to have it so that your god doesn't get upset, but perhaps there's a chance at a certain point that he just stops helping you out for a period of time, forcing you to confront challenges on your own. Like a kind of test. 

But then that would be an original mechanic, something that would require creativity and effort to design and playtest, as opposed to just pulling from another roleplaying game.

Each class has alignment-based titles, which are for some reason presented before the section on alignments. This was already a retarded concept “back in the day” and I can only conclude that Kelsey has continued this moronic tradition in an attempt to pander to simps that at least pretend to have played older editions, because why does your title arbitrarily change based on level? How do NPCs know whether you are a veteran, warrior, swordsman, or hero? For fucks sake what's stopping you from being a level 1 fighter and just calling yourself a warrior? Or a swordsman?

It also reflects a lack of understanding of medieval society.

For example, in Darkitydark all level 1-2 fighters are squires even though you don’t have to be training under a knight and nothing about the fighter class remotely implies this. At levels 3-4 everyone instinctively knows to refer to you as a cavalier whether or not you have a horse or have been knighted.  Oddly at levels 5-6 you are somehow automatically knighted even if you’ve never interacted with anyone capable of granting the title. Even more bizarre at level 7 you are promoted to a thane, and at level 9 become a lord or lady.

These titles are automatically conferred regardless of your actions. Even if you spend your time adventuring on the borderlands of civilization, and only people in a few towns know of your presence, with enough time and looting you will become a lord, though to be fair the title has about as much impact as a participation award: there are no benefits attached to any of the titles.

The only alignments are Chaotic, Lawful, and Neutral, and I find it amusing that even though Lawful is described as revolving around fairness, order, and virtue, that thieves can be Lawful and attain the title of burglar at levels 3-4. Yep, a burglar sure sounds like the sort of guy that values fairness, order, and virtue. Unrelated, Neutral wizards are referred to as shamans at 1st-level, and eventually are called druids at levels 9-10. Good to know that the difference between a wizard and druid is alignment, and not, you know, flavor and class features.

The gear list is unsurprisingly sparse, featuring a mere 18 items, which is about half of what I'd expect at the least. The items are all standard fare: backpacks crowbars, 1/3 near distance poles, double near distance ropes, iron spikes (but no hammers), etc. While it's missing typical selections such as waterskins, shovels, picks, ladders, empty vials, ink, and paper at least it includes gems. 

Not any particular type of gem mind you, just...gems, which have a cost of "Varies" and you can hold 1-10 per gear slot (so whether you have one or ten, it's going to use up a slot). Yep, for all the retarded tabletop tourists out there this Troika-tier vapidware hack uses gear slots. I'm so very shocked, shocked I say.

You can carry ten slots worth of stuff, or equal to your Strength but only if it is 11 or higher.

So two people, one with a Strength of 3 and the other with a Strength of 10 can carry the exact same gear and magically suffer no penalties whatsoever, even though the guy with a Strength of 3 will be severely penalized on all Strength checks and saves (-4 compared to the other guy's +0 modifier). And if you have a Strength of 11? Whelp, you'll be able to carry all of one more thing than the guy with a Strength of 1.

Armor is hilariously bad. Leather armor is AC 11 + Dex mod, while chainmail is 13 + Dex mod, meaning that chainmail is just marginally more useful even though in reality it would be far superior. I still think D&D gets it wrong but at least normally you have something like a 5-point difference between the two. Plate armor is even worse: it’s a flat AC of 15, meaning that with a few points in Dexterity you can wear chainmail and magically be equally safe as someone decked out in plate, if not more so!

(You can also achieve the same level of protection with leather armor and a high Dexterity, which probably isn't too hard to pull off given the likelihood of stat boosts.)

Leather armor takes up 1 slot, while plate takes up 3, meaning slots are just arbitrary bullshit: they cannot represent weight because plate armor would weigh ten times or more, and they cannot represent how cumbersome something is because a dagger is infinitely easier to carry than a spear yet both eat up a slot, and the first backpack you carry doesn't impede you at all (neither do the first hundred coins you carry).

Weapons aren’t anything special, just a watered-down 5E list like you saw with adventuring gear and armor. You still have arming swords erroneously labeled as longswords, and longswords erroneously labeled as greatswords. Arming swords receive no benefit when wielded in two hands, but bastard swords do. They also take 2 “slots” even though swords are some of the easiest weapons to carry.

Bows have a range of Far, which means they can be fired at anything you can see. Even better there's no penalty for range, so you can by the book loose arrows against targets miles away without any difficulty. It's at this point I wonder if anyone gives a fuck about Shadyshadows, if they are too afraid to criticize Kelsey, and/or if she just rejects all criticism because this is one of many obvious flaws that I picked up while skimming the PDF.

Luck Tokens are just Index Card's Hero Coins by another name. The GM is supposed to hand them out, you can only have one at a time, and you can somehow exchange this nonsense story game currency with other characters. 

The game kinda sorta but not really tracks time in "real time". So, allegedly, every minute in the real world means a minute passes in the game. Not only is this BrOSR-grade nonsense but Kelsey also contradicts herself on the same page by saying that "every moment in the game doesn't have to be accounted for in real time". So game time and real world time pass at the same rate, except when they don't. Got it.

Light sources all last for an hour, except when they don't: if you light another torch while one is burning the new torch's duration is magically set to the first torch. So, got 10 minutes left and light a new torch? It will also only have 10 minutes left. This means characters have little to no incentive to do what normal people would do, which is to utilize multiple light sources.

Of course, Kelsey also contradicts herself by immediately stating that the "GM should use their best discretion and avoid being punitive", and that if there isn't much time left you should just cause all original light sources to (also magically) extinguish themselves and start a new timer for the fresh torch.

Okay enough of that, let's hop over to the Game Master Quickstart PDF, which is likewise unsurprisingly devoid of anything resembling quality or purpose.

You're only supposed to use the following DCs: 9, 12, 15, and 18. You're also supposed to tell the player what they have to roll to succeed, which also makes me think of Index Card and that's probably where Kelsey got the idea of telling the players what the odds are so there's no tension.

There are some very shallow sections on topics such as challenge variety, character skill versus players skill, and rules versus rulings. Nothing noteworthy, and I don't think they will be of any real assistance for either novice or veteran gamers (not that I expect people to really play this 1/5th Edition rehash).

A paragraph on Distance states that they are loose and don't require precise measurement, even though in the Player book Kelsey gave them precise measurements. She claims the reason for the loose-but-not-loose distances is because, for example, nobody wants to "miss firing an arrow into a dragon's eye because of a mere 5-foot deficit" even though in the entire history of gaming this has never happened to anyone.

In Danger she states that casting spells comes with great risk, even though it's just a 5% chance you will be actually inconvenienced in some manner beyond merely losing access to that particular spell for a bit. Also, only wizard spells have a chance to cause any particular harm: clerics just gotta do some quest or maybe give away some money, because their god gets so angry with them only 5% of the time that they revoke access to one spell and impose no other penalties or drawbacks.

Oh goody, characters for some reason get XP for finding treasure, one of the dumbest fucking ideas ever conceived, which probably explains why it was wisely abandoned in Editions 2 and up.

There's a stock Reaction table, which surprises me because I figured Kelsey would have found some way to fuck it up.

All randomly encountered monsters have a 50% chance of having no treasure. All of them. Doesn't matter what you run into or what the context is. Fight a group of bandits? Did they just rob a caravan? Whelp, 50% chance for none of them to be carrying any sort of loot. It would make more sense to give monsters varying chances of possessing personal and/or "lair" loot (and even specific types of loot), but that would require work to type up and Darkitydarkdark is not driven by passion or reason.

There are no example traps. Instead, I guess you roll on a table three times, which can have goofy results such as a barbed net being triggered by speaking a word, and inflicting 3d10 damage and petrifying you. Unsurprisingly it's a d12 table, with equal chances of any given result. Yet another place where a percentile table would have been more appropriate.

The hazards table is even worse because none of the effects are given any mechanics. How much should a tar field impede movement? Rushing water? How much damage should an acid pool inflict? Lava? A gravity flux? How much should a disorienting sound weaken a character? A sickening smell? A confusing reflection?

Pretty much all of the monsters are bog-standard D&D, just hollow copies. For example, here's an orc:

Gotta love the fighting technique of not utilizing your shield at all, while clearly telegraphing your attack.

Amazing, right? There's simply no way you or I or anyone could have statted all that out. I like how the stat block says chainmail but in the art it's wearing scale armor, and that it attacks with a greataxe even though it's wielding a morningstar. I also like how greataxes can be wielded in one hand, while greatswords require two.

This is all monsters, by the by. As another example, here's something that's technically original, I guess:

We get a vague idea of what she looks like, but no useful information or ideas on how to use her in-game, what other monsters she might team up with, or even what sort of treasure she might typically possess (50% of the time, anyway).

Why is her health-stealing ability called Drink Pain? Does she drink...something? No, because it has a range of 30 feet. It's not dependent on a target suffering damage or being injured. And she isn't absorbing anything. It would make more sense to call it Life Leech or something, but whatever.

Magic items are given about as much attention. Oh look, Bracers of Defense, which grants a...+1 bonus to AC. Wow. Hey, Gauntlets of Might, which...set your Strength to 18 just like they do in 5th Edition (another 5th Editionism). Huh, 3rd Edition's Pearl of Power makes an appearance, letting you...regain access to a spell that you can't cast for a bit due to a failed spell check.

There's an adventure in the back but who gives a fuck: Blackityblackyall is largely derivative drivel. There are a few things it does technically differently—like kinda-sorta-but-not-really-real-time torches—but they are such godawful ideas that they should never have been put to paper in the first place, and sensibly excising them from what little there is would barely serve to elevate it to the lowly status of half-assed clone-ette.

Which to be clear would be a vast improvement over the slapdash vapidware trash Kelsey is peddling. Not that you should ever play 5th Edition for any reason, but if you're the sort of virgin sparkletroll into that sort of thing you can get a superior Doubledark experience by downloading the 5th Edition Basic Rules and just ignoring most of the content, and if you're a chad that wants to play something OSR there are a bunch of actual OSR games to choose from.