Shadowdark RPG Game Master Tips and Tricks 

I ran The Lost City of the Scarlet Minotaur for my mom and she LOVED it. Her first TTRPG experience, and by the end she had a new found love for the genre, and the loved the crawl. I will be DMing the same One Shot at our local game store to show my 5e group how much fun ShadowDark is.

This project is the first Kickstarter I have ever backed. Next week, my group has their last session in the 1-20 campaign I've been running for them over the past couple of years, and then we will start a new campaign using Shadowdark the following week. They are all excited to experience the whiplash of going from being demigods to fragile intrepid adventurers again. I've built out a campaign world in which there is a massive ancient underground civilization whose inhabitants all got cursed and turned into monsters, with descending circles like Dante's Inferno leading to a mystical gate at the very bottom.

As a historical fencer, I've never liked the attacks of opportunity. It is easy to break engagement... you don't just turn your back and start running away. Also, if you get a free extra attack for them stepping away, you should get a free extra attack if they don't do anything. But maybe you do in D&D, I usually play other systems.

I really like that there are no opportunity attacks. It means characters will actually move around in combat as they don't have to worry about getting hit, allowing it to be more dynamic. Also makes it easier to throw in something the party might have to do during a combat, such as having to interact with objects to disrupt a ritual while cultists are fighting to stop them. Keeping an eye on turns outside of combat is also a great way to help ensure quieter players are able to participate more. I know that's something I've struggled with in the past, and having it in the rule book would have definitely helped (and likely still will, as online play can also cause issues with connections, accidentally muted mics, and volume settings). I've also introduced the idea of running a Shadowdark game to my main group, and they like the idea. Definitely planning on running a one-shot or short adventure with it for them once our current campaign has concluded. (Or possibly if someone can't make it to a session. Always good to have something that can be done then.)

I would love to watch a video about Light in Old School/Shadowdark games. Not just what the rules are, but what they mean in play, e.g. Does needing light mean, denizens of the dungeon always see you coming? Does needing a free hand to carry a torch mean, Fighters hardly ever carry them? Can you cast spells while carrying a torch? Does a dropped torch give enough light, so you could just drop them during the fight? I assume, most of these questions are rulings the DM makes but as someone not familiar with the Dungeoncrawling Mindset, I can't tell which rulings make for the best Dungeoncrawling experience

Great advice! I will be running the Lost Citadel with my high school RPG club! I think this game will be the game I've been looking for since 1980! Thank you, Kelsey!

The real-time torch-lighting idea is just fantastic. It takes what was such a pain in the >>> mechanic that we didn't ever use it (as kids, back in the day) into being a real-world, keep you on the seat of the sofa mechanic in the 'real' world. Really good twist/take on the idea.

This is solid advice, not just for Shadowdark but for running the game in general. Makes me so excited to get my books!

I love the static initiative and zoned combat. These are at the top of my list for DM recommendations after running Scarlet Minotaur for several different groups now. Great work, Kelsey! See you at Gary Con!

About to run my first Shadowdark game, so excited.

Late backer and already loving it! Well written blend of OSR and 5e. Also love all the charts, reminiscent of Dungeon Crawl Classics but much more manageable.

We played last night with the lights off and flash lights and a timer. When the timer went off, the flash lights got turned off. Super spooky! Thank you so much for Shadowdark!!!!

Kobold Press' Tales of the Valiant (just completed) Kickstarter goal was $100 K, and raised $1,151,914. 10 times their goal from 10,057 backers. The Arcane Library's Shadowdark Kickstarter goal was $10 K, raised $1,365,923! Over 100 TIMES their goal from 13,249 backers. So, The Arcane Library got backed by ~3,200 more backers AND earned $214 K more than Kobold Press! Congratulations AGAIN on your great work. In case it hasn't hit you yet, Welcome to the the Major Leagues!

Thanks. In my 2nd session we just had the torch go out in The Lost Citadel just as the group came upon a lone ettercap. None of my vet D&D players had ever seen one and they were freaking out. They are scrambling to get a torch lit. I had them roll a Wisdom DC check of 11 DISADV to try and locate a torch in their gear, someone will also have to locate tinder and steel. I probably should have only put the DC at 9 but I surmised that seeing the monster briefly had set their nerves on end and they don't know if there are more scrambling on the ceiling. What a great moment. 😅

Thanks for the tips Kelsie! I am really looking forward to getting my hands on the full version of the rule set. So far this is EXACTLY what me and my group have been looking for. I am a DM of 30 years who grew up in AD&D 2nd edition, but most of my current player group grew up in 3e, PF, or 5e. We all love a grim, dark, gritty, but simple system. This really scratches that itch. Thanks from all 8 of us, seriously, keep it up!!!

Just bought the print & pdf this week. Can't wait to run an adventure I'm writing for my group.

Always-on initiative, like so much of Shadowdark, is a mechanical expression of game design philosophy. It reminds everyone at the table that everyone at the table matters. Kelsey’s ability to design from meticulously reasoned praxis and explain that process with succinct precision is Shadowdark’s strongest selling point for me. Inherent in comprehending the text is the rationale that makes better GMs and players. Kelsey Dionne makes hacking/customizing easy for anyone, because understanding the mechanics and intent of Shadowdark’s design is organically intuitive. Shadowdark forms a very strong foundation for anyone interested in ttrpgs to understand how games work, how to tweak, how to make calls, and how to communicate clearly about mechanics. Thank you, Kelsey. The value of Shadowdark, for me, is the insights and experience of such a talented game designer, distilled into a concise single-volume book. I’m drawn to the high level of both research and innovation which create such an elegant and transparent system. Videos like this make me confident there’s even more of what I want in the full book. I’m really looking forward to it!

Such great stuff, great advice here, and so glad to be covering this myself as well! Thnx, Kelsey!! 👍🤓 Those real-time mechanics are so COOL!

Thank you Kelsey! Always a treat learning from you.

Thank you Kelsey! Great advice. Looking forward to my second run!

Loving the tutorial videos!

This is very helpful. I’m stoked to run my first session of Shadowdark!

Excited to get this to my table ! Congrats on the project ! 🍻

Love what you've done and what you're doing. Keep up the great work. Congrats on the huge ks success!

Backed the kickstarter with everything! Can’t wait to get it and create some content around it. Looks great !

Excellent advice Kelsey! My players are growing more enamored with each session and I’m becoming increasingly anxious about the end of the Kickstarter!

We use one hour candles as torch timer. The candle would be in front of the player who is holding the torch, we have had as many as three candles lit at a time. It’s a lot of fun. Great game.

Love these videos!! Please do more 😊

I am so excited to get my hands on this!

Really looking forward to this! Can’t wait to introduce this to new players and (selfishly) can’t wait to enjoy all the streamlined gameplay.

Currently on holiday and I just got the PDFs of the core rules and the other goodies. I cannot wait to read them once I return home! Congratulations! 😊

The torch timer is great, and I've also recently moved to the range band style of engagements over distance measuring, which has worked great.

Love this game system! Just ordered from 4 pack adventure starter and starter rules from drivethrurpg. Can't wait to get an actual book. Love what I see of your writing style.

Congratulations on shadow dark and all the work you have put into it. Wish you the best.

Thank you for sharing your tips from your experience with Shadowdark, it's greatly appreciated.

Thanks for this, it addressed the things I’d been most unsure about.

I love the ‘Fall back to the initiative order.’ Great advice.

Great video! Thanks for the tips.

Thanks, I look forward to playing Shadowdark. I'll pick it up when it's available.

Man,this time stuff is really melting my brain. I’m excited to try it out and break some of my own, deeply ingrained habits.

I have to admit that Shadowdark is the first project i have backed on Kickstarter (subversion RPG being the second one for a grand total of two), I can't wait to try it out!

You are killing it! Every one of these tips point out something that I might have missed and immediately home-brewed out of the game but your perspective makes it super evident why that would be a bad idea. Thank you!

You are really shaking the TTRPG world... congrats Kelsey! I might drop a OD&D game to try Shadowdark ;)

Very cool summary, I am really curious to receive the final version of the book 😎

what would be fun for a next product is a mini setting - 12 / 12 hexes so we can fit our own adventures in it (or published) you can call your influencer friends to make one hex each.

Great video, just got it on Backerkit last month after a friend told me what it is. This is what I've been looking for for what seems like ages, its's brilliant, original D&D with modern conveniences. Totally blown away. Do NOT change a thing with this game. :)

just downloaded the Quickstart Rules and trying it tomorrow!

Playing shadowdark reminds me of playing dnd in the 70s when I first started playing it. Ps your wife makes amazing art

I just ran my 1st gauntlet for lvl zero Shadowdark. I gave every character a crawling kit for free but no weapon. I kept torches to 30 min, and my players used their phones to do individual timers so i didnt have to keep track of it. It worked really well. I also added Death Bringer RPG luck dice that recharge on a nat 1 to allow for a little super hero shennanigens. I adapted @HouseDM s 1st gauntlet and made it my own. It was so much fun.

I'm paying off two other Kickstarters on my card so I couldn't back this. However I look forward to this games retail release and plan on using this system.

Super excited to have the books in my hand

I ❤ Shadowdark TTRPG and after backing the Kickstarter I cant wait to get the core book in my hands!

Nice! Definitely useful explanations. 🙂

Great tips. Thanks!

getting ready to run this for my group at Garycon so these are great tips. I've never tried to run the real-time lightsource thing so I admit i'm a bit nervous about it.

Thanks for the video.

Can't wait to try Shadowdark with my group. Can't wait to get my hands on that beautiful book, but I'll have to wait quite a bit until its actually available in Europe because the shipment + taxes for EU on the kickstarter make it prohibitive. Still, love the whole idea of this, I'm pumped to DM it!

Hi there!. Like VERY many people I am super excited about your Shadowdark kickstarter. I would love it if you would share a video on your reaction to how well it's done. When you have time, if you feel like it.

Kelsey's hair is a force of elemental chaos...it is the terror within the scream, the dark behind the shadow...

I think what would be neat is to see a video on why you made these new rules. Like what things drove you to think them up and so forth.

Great video and excited the Kickstarter is going so so well!! Question: what about arrows and bolts from ranged weapons…could there be a distant range, beyond far, where the attack is then with a disadvantage?

I finally ran the quick-start adventure for Shadowdark. During the adventure, my girlfriend's first character died to a slime. I had never had a player character die in one of my games before, and although I had prepared the players thoroughly for that possibility, I was stunned. That's it? I let her get killed by a little slime? I didn't know what to do. For a second I thought my friends would be done with the game, that they'd riot...but they kept playing. My gf established her new character, they escaped from the dungeon back to a town I created, and they escaped from the Scarlet Minotaur in the nick of time. And afterward, they said it was one of the most fun experiences they'd ever had with an RPG...and I realized we had gone over the expected play time by an hour and a half. My girlfriend told her family and now I'm designing an adventure for them. They each put two characters together in an afternoon and I used the quickstart GM tables to get ideas. The dungeon outline was done in an hour. This is definitely my new go-to game for straight up adventuring!

A question for Kelsey or anyone else: when you get enough XP to level up, do you stop gaining XP until the session is over? Or can you spill over and keep going? Let's say you are level 1, you got 10 XP halfway into the session by finding treasure, and now you find more treasure. Are you capped at 10 until you go back and level up? Or do you get up to 11 XP, 12 XP, etc.

Just stumbled on my Bundles of Horror in my PDF collection. I've sworn off 5E but I bet some of those could convert to Shadowdark pretty well...

regarding the torch, it might be interesting to try out a similar system like Darkest Dungeon is using it. For example they start with a torch for 1h, the closer it gets to 0 the dimmer it gets. When the light a torch, they get back another 20mins or so. There could also be a big or small torch, that give different timer values. And attacks of monster to the torch reduce the timer and stuff like that. or it might just turn into another HP bar or a system to be managed... Might be interesting to try it out, how it works.

I have really enjoyed reading and watching Shadowdark content since the kickstarter launched. I was curious about how you would use this as part of a larger campaign or overarching story. Is that part sort of left up to the gm's discretion to be as detailed or 'hand-wavy' as their players like it? It seems as though that part could easily be summed up in a sentence or two (you go carousing, then resupply and find a rumor about the location of your next macguffin). Then boom, your players are standing at the entrance to another dungeon.

do we have a ship date on the crowdfund books yet? I can't wait!

Cavalier class: Mounted= test all distances as 1/2 (far is near, a hole 10 feet wide acts like 5 feet for you). You and your mount share health and carry capacity. if you ever die or leave your mount behind on purpose it is lost and you must buy a new one.

Thank you so much for the tips. Do the rules (or will the rules) have tips for DMs on creating fair but challenging combat encounters? It's always something I struggle with. Should a loose rule be to have the bad guys HD totals average out to the same as the party's HP?

Hype!

Interesting, thanks! Would you say Dungeon Crawl Classics is easy to adapt for Shadowdark? I have a bunch of adventures (Harley Stroh

Noted & already did some of this stuff. I find keeping players in initiative makes them more paranoid (alert).

Do you treat spellcasting in Shadowdark as requiring a verbal & somatic component? This seems like the default assumption in D&D style games, but I don't think it's mentioned. Could a caster still do magic while bound and gagged (or in a Silence spell)?

Pretty Dungeon Master❤

I've played systems with n without opportunity attacks n prefer not having them. It adds tension, tactics n freedom to games. I also like not being able to break up movement between attacks even tho that's more restrictive

As a player of many editions of D&D/AD&D, I was wondering if initiative is rolled once or every round. I do love how unpredictable every round initiative is, but I guess it make tracks durations harder.

I tried to back your kick starter and didn't get it to go through but I hope I can get Shadowdark RPG later

Look forward to trying out the game. Do you have any plans to get this into Foundry VTT?

I’m very smitten by the torch timer mechanic. I DM a lot.

*I like to see in tt system: *Roll location D10 with DMG 1 Head. Cost. Fix 2 back: 3 torso: 4 arms: 5 hands 6 Main hand 7 off hand: 8 Belt 9 legs: 10 feet. Cost. FIX With defferent arnor pieces like helms, cloaks and boots. Good example of this is in D100 Dungeon.

Played with my guys last Friday and had a an absolute BLAST! Question though, once a character drops to 0 hp and gets stabilized (dramatically just before their timer ran out in our case!) how do you figure out when they’re back in action? We ruled on the fly the downed character made a DC13 CON check each turn and when they hit it they came back with d4 hp (they were a fighter starting with d8 hp). Was so fun, deadly, and refreshing!

hey Kelsey, speaking of DM tips, do you have any for a smaller party? In my group there are me (the cruel DM) and two players. I've never had any problems with 5th edition and I don't think I will either with Shadowdark but if you have any tricks up your sleeve I'd gladly listen to it.

I have a question regarding treasure and XP, actually. In the quickstart book there didn't seem to be a concrete indication of what actually will give x amount of experience. There were examples yes, but the tables themselves seemed as if I'm supposed to just wing it?

About Thief Backstab ability, is it intended to be only allowed if the character achieve a surprise at the start of a fight? Or the thief may try to hide again during a fight a take others backstab attack?

Im trying to get on the newsletter, so I can be on the Late Pledge list😅 please help. I heard that it might be Tuesday or Wednesday. Im in PST, so do I just wait till 12am??? 🙏🏽👍🏽

🙏🏻

Will I be able to buy shadow dark after kickstarter as I cannot afford to back it at moment?

🔥👌🏼

Hi! I am about to start two groups one is a community youth group and the other is a group for folks struggling with ptsd. I love your work and was wondering if you would consider reaching out to me and we could talk further about shadowdark and how I could use the free pdf to teach folks how to play. I had planned to use 5e, but this seems a lot more interesting and I can do it more episode based instead of a long campaign.

I have a question, I don't understand clearly how to balance a combat encounter, the book says about the 1:1 monsters but it's still not clear to me. I get that you must combine the character levels per encounter and distribute like a budget. So technically, 4 level 1 characters could fight a lvl 4 monster, am I getting it right?

Is there any chance that you will make a late backer option for the recent Kickstarter?

I tried to back a couple of days ago but it looks like it didn't go through, don't know what went wrong since it's not showing up on my PayPal, is there any way to get a late pledge in?

Can you break the movement up like you can in 5e? Move 10 ft shoot a bow then move 20ft? Thanks

Do u have plans to have other books to the game like a monster book or campaign book

I understand there's no opportunity attacks, but what about a player holding their action? Is this something allowed by The Arcane Library.

Neat

I didn´t get how to create my own monsters stats. Does anyone know how many hitpoits does a monster have if you rolled -3PL and the players were for example lvl 1? its the minimun 1D8? what about their attack bonus?

How do you run dual wielding....you get 2 attacks but cannot use a shield ( OSR Berserker ??? )

Does Shadowdark have a OGL?

QUESTION: Do SCROLLS Critically fail like WANDS? Also, can a spellcaster use a scroll of higher level than they can "know"? Can they "learn" a spell from a scroll higher level than they can "know"?