r/shadowdark

Bit of a rules quandary popped up the other day: Far is simply defined as “within sight”. In the dark you cannot see. So if a spell has a Far range can you cast it in the dark?

Two of my favorite things about SD is the simplicity of the rules and the OSR feel of it. As a new SD GM, I am struggling with do I verbally describe the scene and let the players map out the dungeon by hand or do I use something like Owlbear or VTT to create a map and use fog of war.

I see an upside and downside to each.

The hand mapping, they have to be engaged the whole time, ask questions, and maybe get the mapping wrong, get lost\confused, which adds anxiety to the campaign (I like that). Downside is, it could slow down combat and light management (where’s the torch?).

VTT type mapping makes fog of war easy and character placement easy, but now I feel like we’re playing a video game, and there are characters to add to the platform, all kinds of settings, training the players, looking things up that aren’t working right, etc…. This I feel would really diminish what the whole point of SD is…

So - what is your group doing and why does it work for you?

Thanks!

My review of 3 adventures for Shadowdark from Joseph R. Lewis - they're so good!

I ran “Lost Citadel” Saturday night ahead of my upcoming conventions and I introduced the crawling clock as the random encounter mechanic. It was fantastic, and I don’t think I’ll go back to RAW mechanics.

For those who are new to it, the crawling clock is a timer using a d20. Every round a d6 is rolled and subtracted from the current. On a “6” you roll again - exploding die mechanic - which means there is the potential to instantly trigger an encounter.

The way I played it at the table:
- The d20 clock was out on the table in full view.
- I had players roll the d6. They can only be disappointed or pleased with themselves.
- I had players roll the d8 for the encounter table if they ran the clock to 0.
- Encounters were not always instant combat. I used the distance roll to determine placement.
- Close meant the adversaries appeared in the room or in the next one the party was likely to go.
- Near meant the next room or one room over.
- Far placed the encounter deeper in the dungeon and it would begin moving every round. I kept the GM version of the map behind the screen and used tokens to track party and monster locations.
- Lastly, I allowed the use of luck tokens to re-roll the d6. This was a player request to avoid an exploded die roll that was going to guarantee an encounter.

One last thing I used the clock for was the final battle. Once the party entered that remaining 30 minutes of the 4 hour session the triggered encounter is automatically the Minotaur and a fight to the death.

The players like the visual of the countdown; they liked the apprehension it brought, and that they were doing all the extra die rolls instead of me made it more enjoyable.

10/10

Come by and check it out! Hopefully we'll get some entries!

https://itch.io/jam/a-mystic-wood-osr-adventure-jam

I’m mostly looking from a hypothetical angle, but I’ve seen my players be a little bit annoyed sometimes while trying to act together during crawling. (Such as the last player in turn order having the one torch the rest need to explore)

Do you know if there are any good ways to work around this problem, assuming they aren’t passing the torch around (like two people have hands taken up and last in order doesn’t).

This applies to any situation where you’d prefer to defer to the last person in order. Is there a good ‘delay’ rule, or is it best to just embrace that the faster players will sometimes have little to do on their turn?

I’ve watched Chubby Funster’s and LichHouse’s series about CoS, and I could swear there was a Sly Flourish video about CoS where he specifically talks about how Strahd should invite the NPCs to his castle and if they don’t go, he should kill a PC and have that PC animated as a zombie or asa vampire spawn the next time the NPCs show up… but I can’t find it.

Does anyone know what I’m talking about? It might have been another YTer…

What does a grappling hook do in shadowdark? I can't find any description of the benefit of using it. Does it lower the DC or give advantage on checks? Or is it just a narrative item?