Shadowdark Live Play Session 1
My first foray into Shadowdark, starting a solo campaign to learn how the game works using the Cry of the Stingbat gauntlet.
How I was led into the Shadowdark
I’m pretty late to the Shadowdark party, I have to admit. Spending my career in marketing and sales has really disillusioned me on hype. The more I see something hyped, the more skeptical I am of it. I also already had a pretty extensive OSE collection. So I just let the Shadowdark wave pass and kind of forgot about it for a while. That is, until I read an old Substack post by Castle Grief. After reading this I had Shadowdark in the back of my mind, but as I am deep into Kal Arath, I didn’t want to split my focus. So, once again I let the Shadowdark itch pass, until two days later I found myself with 30 minutes to kill before picking up my kids from an activity that was right next to my favorite game store. I popped in, not expecting to buy anything, but walked into hundreds of RPG books laid out across their gaming tables. I apparently caught a massive customer trade-in that had just finished, and the workers let me dig through them before putting them on the actual shelves.
I begrudgingly passed on a 1st edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay book, but as I put it down, I saw a new and still shrink-wrapped Shadowdark, Solo Dark, and Cursed Scrolls volumes 1–3. All priced at 50% or less because they were trade-ins.
I think this is probably the best luck I have had in a while, but still I was forcing myself to wait to start because I had Kal Arath going on. I read through the books in my spare time though and quickly saw why the hype was there at launch. This is one of the rare cases where the hype is real. Shadowdark is the magic that happens when you have something that is actually good AND good marketing, and that totally explains how it blew up. I regret not picking this up sooner because it’s exactly what I have been looking for.
Determined to stop my habit of project hopping and leaving things unfinished, I still didn’t roll up any characters, but then last week, my phone was crunched in half by an RV recliner. This meant no recording, and because of 2FA I have been locked out of YouTube and Discord and a ton of other stuff. At the time of writing I have had about a week of a forced digital detox and I am actually thankful for losing my phone, for which I will finally receive an insurance replacement later today.
This has all been a roundabout way of saying how the stars perfectly aligned for me to play some Shadowdark after having no real intention of ever doing so, and how I have already fallen in love with it. So thank you to the muse for leading me down this path.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Runehammer had made two adventures for Shadowdark, so I spun up some level 0 characters and jumped into his gauntlet.
I will be sticking to the core Shadowdark book, Solo Dark for the oracle, and of course the Cry of the Stingbat adventure. A note on the oracle: instead of 1 always being no and 20 always being yes, the higher number will be the beneficial yes or no depending on the situation, so that rolling high is always good, and rolling low is always bad.
The Cry of the Stingbat
The half-orc rolls over, wipes the mud from his face and takes in his surroundings. A group of villagers from the nearby town are waking up just as he is. He sees three corpses, with obviously broken necks. Looking up he sees the night sky through a hole a few hundred feet up. He quickly rules out climbing up. While the townsfolk bicker and cower in fear, he gets up and moves to the corpses looking for anything useful on the bodies. He finds a club and a shortbow and manages to salvage some arrows (rolling a 12 on the oracle die roll and then a 2 on a d4, then rolling for two pieces of gear from the gear table in the Shadowdark rulebook). He’s soon joined by a goblin who checks the other corpse and comes away with a shortbow as well; across from him a halfling comes up empty-handed from the third corpse.
“Hey, stop that. You shouldn’t desecrate the corpses!”
“We will all be corpses if we do not escape here. We’ve only a few hours ‘til sunrise and they return. We need to find a way out, we clearly can’t climb.”
A torch springs to life.
“I think I found a way out of this chamber.” Another halfling stands, holding a torch at the mouth of a tunnel covered in slime and filth. The half-orc moves to stand at his side, quickly followed by his fellow looters. Not waiting to see if anyone else joins, he takes a step into the tunnel and hears the sound of heavy feet slurping in the mud. Holding a hand out, he draws his bow and signals to the others to ready any weapons they have.
The party creeps up through the tunnel until they are able to see their prey. A group of beastmen carrying an unconscious troll down the tunnel toward them, but unaware. The half-orc releases an arrow and sinks it right into the skull of the leading beastman (rolling a nat 20), the goblin follows suit but misses, the torchbearer drops the torch (but it doesn’t go out) and hides in the shadows at the entrance to the tunnel. The second halfling, who had awoken at the bottom of the tunnel with his bow intact, also sends an arrow flying and hits a beastman but does not take him down.
The beasts, initially caught unaware, drop the troll they were carrying and race down the tunnel toward the party.
Trying to quickly release another volley of arrows, the goblin and halfling miss their shots, their nerves getting the better of them. The half-orc, however, draws his club and charges into the beastmen with a roar. He is surefooted and crashes into the first beastman he finds, killing him immediately (rolling a 20 on the oracle roll to see if he slips in the mud of the tunnel, then an 18 on his attack roll, and rolling 4+3 damage).
The beastmen surround the half-orc, but he is able to fend off their attacks. The melee is at a standstill, with the half-orc unable to land a blow himself.
The goblin steadies his bow and sends an arrow into another beastman, but the halfling, still rattled, misses the mark (rolls a 2 on the attack roll and then 6 on the oracle roll to see if he hits his companion) and his arrow lodges in the back of the half-orc (bringing his HP down to 1 from 2).
The beastmen, caked in mud from trying to carry the troll down the tunnel, still miss their attacks. The half-orc, now enraged, kills the wounded beastman, triggering a morale roll on the remaining two beastmen; one fails the willpower 15 check and flees down the tunnel, but one remains, pressing the half-orc back but still unable to land a killing blow.
At the start of round 5, a new encounter is rolled per the Cry of the Stingbat book rules, but I rolled a 4, so no new encounter comes.
At the start of the round the goblin sees an opening and stabs the remaining beastman in the leg, giving the half-orc an opening to smash the beastman’s head in. The half-orc looks down and nods in appreciation. The two halflings, finally realizing the reality of their situation, approach the group. The archer apologizes profusely to the half-orc, stumbling over himself.
The half-orc waves a hand, reaches up and pulls the arrow from his back and hands it to the halfling.
“Next time, you will not miss.”
A flash of teeth that might be a smile from the half-orc.
“I found something.” The three look at the end of the tunnel as their 4th member stands over the troll who is still unconscious (oracle roll), holding a mirror with broken glass (treasure loot table roll — this halfling only rolled a single torch as his starting gear and a magical apprentice background).
The group steels themselves to leave the tunnel and enter a larger chasm.
Next: Shadowdark Live Play Session 2
Links & resources mentioned in this article
The Cast
Character pages show each sheet as it stands now, so they can give away sessions you have not read yet.