Intro to Shadowdark - 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 the Kyzian Steppe to the north and the Djurum Desert to the south. The town is known for its mithril mines and cattle pastures, and its 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 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.

Playstyle: This is an improvised one-shot adventure set in or around the town of Ragadorn where characters can earn some quick coin by bounty hunting, pit fighting, cattle herding, rustling, mining, claim jumping, guarding or robbing caravans, and/or various "fetch quests" that involve retrieving an important item for a wealthy patron by any means necessary. Ragadorn is also ideal for "carousing" between adventures and turning spare cash into XP, although risk-averse folks are better off sticking to the taverns in the nicer parts of town.

Rather than using a virtual tabletop to track the characters' movement each round, we'll use the "theater of the mind" method where players imagine their positions based on the GM's description of the scene. This is a great way for players to earn some money & gain some experience in between pre-packaged adventures set in the ruins and wilderness areas surrounding the town of Ragadorn.

NOTE: To make this a "sandbox" where players can go wherever they want rather than following a less flexible "railroad" adventure with a pre-written plot, I'm using ChatGPT to help with narration. This allows me to quickly improvise scenes & NPC dialogue on the fly, and the process is getting better the more we use it. The vivid descriptions tend to be appealing to players who like dialogue and descriptions that sound like they came from a fantasy novel, but it can be annoying to players who feel it "sullies the purity of their creative process" or those who just want to get straight to the point and fight monsters, collect treasure & gain XP.

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

Session Number: 3 - but 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 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.