Shadowdark RPG (PDF)

Name: Shadowdark RPG (PDF)
Brand: The Arcane Library
Price: 29.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.93 (41 reviews)

$29.00

The PDF version of the Shadowdark RPG core rules! Old-school gaming, modernized.

Shadowdark RPG is a critically-acclaimed tabletop fantasy RPG that raised $1.3 million on Kickstarter in March 2023.

It won the 2024 Three Castles Award for best game design, as well as four gold ENNIEs: Product of the Year, Best Game, Best Rules, and Best Layout & Design.

Want the physical print + PDF version? Link here.

"Feels just like the ideal version of a game I was playing forty years ago, but forty years better."

Matt Forbeck, New York Times Bestselling Author and Award-Winning Game Designer, Forbeck.com

"A grimdark witches' brew of B/X, real-time mechanics, and the best random charts I've ever seen."

Professor Dungeon Master, Dungeon Craft

"The perfect jumping-in point for 5e players interested in the OSR!"

Baron de Ropp, Dungeon Masterpiece

Simple, clean, familiar but also refreshingly different. This has quickly become my go-to system."

Jake House, House DM YouTube Channel

What Is Shadowdark RPG?

In Shadowdark RPG, you and your group of crawlers use magic, steel, and wits to delve into mysterious ruins, lost cities, and monster-infested depths.

Wondrous treasures and long-forgotten secrets await you! But don't let your last torch burn out, or you could be swallowed by the Shadowdark...

5E players will find what they've been waiting for: an intuitive and complete TTRPG that serves as a seamless bridge into the heart of the Old School Renaissance.

Old-school gamers will find a system that is familiar and nostalgic, but with major quality-of-life upgrades that modernize the old-school experience.

Your legend awaits, crawler.

Lift your blade, light your torch, and plunge into the unknown depths of the Shadowdark!

Features

• The four core classes: fighter, priest, thief, wizard

• A d20-based, roll-high system

• No darkvision — total darkness is dangerous

• Treasure grants XP, and tracking it is dead simple

• Roll-to-cast spells — magic is exciting and risky

• Simple distances (close, near, far)

• Monster morale and reaction rolls

• Always-on initiative — time is easy to track

• The six classic stats (3d6 in order)

• No skills — just ability checks and advantage/disadvantage

• Separate ancestry and class

• Randomized character class abilities — emergent character growth!

• Low hit points — fast and deadly combat

• Simple encumbrance (gear slots)

Inside The Book

Shadowdark RPG is a complete game with all you need in one tome. It includes:

• 330 pages in a concise, two-page spread layout

• A5 handbook sizing for easy use at the table

• Full rules for characters, gameplay, and GMing

• 239 classic monsters

• 85 iconic spells

• 97 mighty magic items

• Dozens of robust roll tables for just about everything

• Spectacular black-and-white art

• Chapter markers along the side of the pages

• Ribbon bookmark in hardcover version

Shadowdark, an Old Grognard's View

I heard the hype about Shadowdark during the Kickstarter, but I ignored it. I have an established 5E campaign and I wasn't looking for a new system.
Now it's September, and rather than shift to the latest version of D&D, I'm looking for something else. Something with fewer complexities that I can get running quickly, where character generation doesn't take hours and the rules can just fade into the background.
Shadowdark seems to be a good fit. The reduced number of rules options means that the players are more imaginative with their ideas. The tendancy for fights to be more deadly did mean a bit of adjusting, but new characters are quick to roll up and my group were always pretty good at talking before fighting.

Appealing and easy to run!

I really love the old school vibes. From the art to the rules. What I also love is the lore that is full of adventure hooks and really open-ended.

I love it

Shadowdark is a great system, it's OSR, but in a twist, it's modern. So you could say it's the modern take on the whole OSR movement that we were waiting for, yet we didn't know we needed.

Excellent

The result of two decades of experimentation in reviving classic D&D inspired gameplay with modernized quality of life features. A triumph in design wherein the scaffolding provided specifically works well with smaller scale dungeon crawls and West Marches style games where multiple parties are exploring the same dungeon. The key to everything here is abstraction. This takes away from the verisimilitude of the game to some degree, because many things rely on DM fiat to resolve rather than having an exhaustive rule set to cover multiple scenarios, but this is the cost of producing such a lean, spartan, and effective system. Two issues the game has is that it seems to presume some foreknowledge of gaming from the potentially uninitiated, and does not explain itself fully in some areas to players who may be unfamiliar with gaming terminology. It also fails to innovate in any significant way, however, if anything it stands as a kind of icon for what is achievable in the space in this particular weight class of game.

But, if you are looking for a good, basic OSR system that retains the flourishes of modern D&D and has a cohesive and effective tone and style encouraging the kind of dank dungeon crawls so popular in the eighties, this is as good as you can get, and in my opinion, is a nail in the coffin for games that are just trying to present a cleaner, prettier B/X implementation. This stands above the rest, and is a worthy poster child for what these games can be.

Just got the pdf. Amazing layout, great illustrations, really fun to read (for a rulebook!) Looking forward to running the game when my group are back together again

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Shadowdark RPG (PDF)

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