Shadowdark RPG (PDF)

Kelsey did an amazing job of combining some of the best ideas and mechanics in gaming into one beautiful package. I love playing this game. It's so fast paced and rules light. It leaves the door wide open to letting your imagination run wild and create.

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.

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.

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.

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.