Cursed Scroll Zine, Vol. 2: Red Sands, PDF (Shadowdark RPG)

The adventure of this zine is fantastic, having plenty of content to explore and work with while also being simple and consise to jump into. The art, characters, and new gameplay mechanics are also great additions to the system as a whole, making the zine more than worth your while to buy.

What I felt was lacking, however, was the overworld and hexcrawl aspect. Each location (besides the Fortress) only had a paragraph of things to work off of. This left me having to flesh out maps, factions, quests, and NPCs by myself when I don't have alot of time to do so.

This isn't a problem if your focus is only on the dungeon. But, when you have explorative players and a lack of time/experience to flesh out the region, it'll most likely stress you out improvising an ongoing campaign.

For future zines, I would love to pay more to see either locations with fleshed out maps, handouts, art, NPCs, and/or quests that make the hexmap confidently explorable OR simply less focus on the region and emphasis on the dungeon.

With all that being said, the adventure is still such a steal and more than worth your time to buy.

Delivers just what it promises in a compact yet fully featured package. A highly themed setting and components inspire worldbuilding and remain open to molding as desired. The main dungeon is 2-tiered with vivid factions and many approaches, and the hex map provides thematic hooks to follow with random encounters from the setting itself, and of course you can drop in whatever additional content you would like, generating it with ShadowDark or any other adventure source. New classes, weapons, rules for mounts and pit fighting, lasting wounds, and other relevant tables provide everything you need to brave the dunes.

Absolutely fantastic!

great addition to a fun game. Lots of ideas to use.

Okay, so maybe that is a pretty broad thing to day. But I have been gaming for a minute and there was a time when gaming held a charm that today's ttrpgs don't have. Today most games SEEM to be bases on number stacking and piles of feats that really make no sense. At one point the games were not stuck in a comfort box of rules that told you how to play and build your character. I always felt that games back in the day gave you some tool that you had to use to solve the problem yourself. You didn't need a stack of feats to tell you how to solve a situation, you used your own head. Shadowdark brings back the fun of figuring it out for yourself. And the cursed scrolls just add to the flavor. #2 is amazing with it's desert her crawl. Conan meets the Arabian knights. It felt good to run and all my players had satisfied smiles on their faces when they were done.