Last night was my first ever time running a Shadowdark rpg session.
As I have said in the session planning posts we were using the adventure that comes with the free Quick Start Kit, The Scarlet Minotaur. Which meant naturally we were also using the rules that come in that kit. Sadly the full rules are in Backerkit limbo at the moment.
I had hoped I would have access to the pdf version of the full rule set by the time we played. But I knew it would be cutting it close.
Not having the full rule set did not stop us having fun.
Anyway like my D&D post mortems I will be looking at what worked, what didn’t during the session.
First off I have to say I love the mechanic for torches, where they last one hour real time. It does force the players to be a bit more focused in their discussions about what to do.
Related to that I think the always on initiative order also helped and made sure everyone got to do something and had their moment.
I did think I was going to have a tpk with the very first encounter with the party. One of the party made a loud noise in the very first room that when I rolled to see if an encounter occurred, it did. Then I rolled to see what the encounter was and it was a massive centipede. Although I did give the party 2 xp at the end of the combat, as I thought they had earnt it defeating a level 4 monster.
Luckily my rolls as the GM were not good, although I did get a couple of hits in. It was getting close for one of them.
And after that first encounter roll, I never rolled another encounter all evening!
It took a while for the wizard to get used to how spell casting worked. They felt they should be doing more than just casting magic missile. But as we discussed at the end of the session there is that push your luck element to casting magic. Where if you fail the casting check you lose the spell until you have rested. Plus there is the whole issue of the natural 1 and the negative things that can happen.
If you compare the GM area for the session to the one I have for D&D I’ve never played with so little gear. But it also means the rolls, etc were in the open.
It did help having a print out of the annotated level map to refer to, whilst I had an A3 copy of the map on the table for the players.
For me the jury is still out for the movement in combat. The close,near, and far. It kinda worked for me. I think it flowed better.
My cheat sheet was useful. I did find myself referring to it more than once. But thats not a surprise whilst using a new system and still getting to grips with it.
I would like a Shadowdark version of the monster and spell cards that Kelsey did for D&D 5e. I like these as a quick reference that way I’m not forever flicking between pages.
Overall we had fun, and another session to continue further into the dungeon is on the books.