Intro to Shadowdark RPG - Adventures in Ragadorn

OSR System: Shadowdark RPG

Created by Kelsey Dionne and published in 2023 after raising $1.4 million on Kickstarter, Shadowdark is an old-school fantasy adventure game redesigned with 50 years of innovation. It won the Three Castles Award for best role-playing game design and the gold ENNIEs for Product of the Year, Best Game, Best Rules & Best Layout and Design!

Shadowdark RPG is fast, familiar, intuitive, and deadly. It’s primarily built for old-school dungeon crawls and experience points (XP) are awarded for finding treasure, not killing monsters. Combat can be lethal, especially at lower levels, so it's often best avoided through stealth & strategy. There's the familiar D&D classes (fighter, priest, thief, wizard, bard, ranger) as well as some new classes unique to the setting. Players generate character statistics and class abilities through randomized dice rolls. Gameplay focuses on risk evaluation, resource management, and problem-solving. Shadowdark uses a 20-sided die for action resolution. One of its unique features is that real time comes into play - a torch only holds back the looming darkness for one hour of actual game time!

Setting: Ragadorn is a rough border town in the arid, hilly scrubland on the border between thr Kyzian steppe to the north and the Djurum desert to the south. The area was once wilderness inhabited only by orcish aurochs hunters & cave-dwelling kobold tribes, but a couple generations ago mithril was discovered in the nearby hills by some dwarven prospectors. The dwarves founded Ragadorn as a mining camp, recruited human warriors to help drive off the orcs & guard the caravans, and brought captured goblins down from the northern forests to handle the town's dirty work. The town has since attracted human & half-orc herdsmen who use it as a stopping point for their cattle drives. Desert elves ride their camels north occasionally to trade, and some have found a permanent niche in town as skilled artisans & merchants. Though most of the desert elves are proud of their "pure" bloodline, some have mixed enough with the humans that the town now has some half-elves who ply various trades -- often excelling at horseback archery.

The town's lawless frontier atmosphere attracts a mix of mercenaries, outcasts, and fugitives from more civilized realms. The town is currently divided into two factions that coexist in uneasy tension, with the dwarves, elves & half-elves controlling the artisan & market districts inside the wooden palisade, while the half-orcs & goblins occupy the low district & slums outside the walls. Humans are the majority and -- along with the half-elves -- can be aligned with either side and often act as go-betweens who mediate disputes & broker deals, or they serve as spies & turncoats whose allegiance is for sale to the highest bidder. It was some human warriors who brought the institution of pit fighing north from the Djurum, and for now it has served to alleviate tensions by limiting duels to a specific time & place, although bar fights & muggings are still common in the low district & slums.

A few kobolds reside in town, but most dwell in the surrounding hills & caves and only come to the edge of town at night with their obsidian shards to barter with the goblins. Halflings are almost non-existent in this region, but the few that wind up here typically know well enough to stay in the nice part of town.

Campaign Name: "Town on the Border Lands" (homebrew)

Session Number: 2 - new players are welcome!

How to Join: Click on the Zoom link on the scheduled date/time

PREPARATION: Before the session, please design a 1st-level character using the Shadowdarklings character-generator page: https://shadowdarklings.net/create

PLAYER BACKGROUND: Feel free to pick a background that makes sense (i.e. your pre-adventuring trade) rather than randomly rolling it. You'll get advantage on skill checks associated with your background.

PLAYER BACKGROUND, ALIGNMENT & DEITY: In terms of alignment, choose from chaotic or neutral - not lawful. In terms of deity, choose one of the neutral or chaotic gods to worship or the mysterious deities known as "The Lost", but don't pick any gods form the Norse pantheon (Odin, Freya, Loki) since it wouldn't fit the setting.

PLAYABLE CLASSES/RACES: To make things interesting, players will be restricted to the lower-class faction composed of humans, half-elves, half-orcs, goblins & kobolds. Certain classes are only open to certain "ancestries" (a.k.a. races) as follows:
- Fighter (any race except kobold)
- Thief (any race except half-orc)
- Bard or Duelist* (human or half-elf** only)
- Ranger (human, half-elf**, half-orc or kobold only)
- Desert Rider or Kyzian Archer** (human, half-elf** or half-orc only)
- Pit-Fighter (half-orc only)
- Seer (human or half-orc only)
- Warlock (human, half-elf**, or half-orc only)
- Basilisk Warrior (kobold only)
- Wizard (kobold or half-elf** only)
- Witch (goblin only)
- Delver* (goblin or kobold only)

*NOTE: The Duelist & Delver classes debuted in Cursed Scrolls #5-6 but aren't yet listed on the Shadowdarklings character generator page, but you can find their class details in this Reddit thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/shadowdark/comments/1j93qbt/new_classes_from_cursed_scrolls_5_and_6_previews/

**NOTE: Details on Half-Elves and Kyzian Archers only recently appeared in the free preview of the Players Guide to the Western Reaches sourcebook - see pages 6-8 of the Dropbox copy: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/bneo4ii3tca2wba5hkpxa/AH9f36wT7k7lP71d9ZIXfQk?rlkey=k81omxc93aei2w4wfldo9hxri&e=1&st=0xhhym6b&dl=0

What You'll Need:

1. Your imagination & whatever roleplaying skills you can muster
2. A printed character sheet - it can be directly downloaded from https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/blogs/shadowdark-blog/shadowdark-rpg-character-sheet.
3. Set of standard RPG dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20) or online dice simulator - https://tacticaltokens.com/dice-roller/
4. Zoom app (free for users) - https://zoom.us/download

Useful but Not Necessary:
1. A downloaded copy of the The Shadowdark RPG's "Player Quickstart Guide". https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/collections/shadowdark-core-rules/products/shadowdark-rpg-quickstart-set-pdf.