Shadowdark

 

Welcome back! Today I am writing about choosing a game, particularly Shadowdark. 

I think one of the hardest things to admit when you're looking at games is that they are meant to address desires and logistical needs. As a designer, I frequently forget that my games are built to address my needs. This is a very difficult thing to remember, because as you design you start to view the object as its own thing, and start to modify it to address needs other than yours, while you use it to continue to satisfy your own. There's a difference between liking the design of an object and actually having it address your desires and needs.

So, here's what my desires and logistical needs are.

My desire is to have two kinds of games running, one to satisfy and synthesize two competing urges into the same setting. 

1. To have game with a ton of emotional depth, where it is safe to do so. This would be a small, somewhat insular group. 

2. A large living world table, ala Noonan’s living campaign model. This would allow me to run for whomever was around, without any fear of people not being able to commit. 

Crescendo satisfies the first desire quite admirably. I mean, I designed it to. Burning Wheel MIGHT do, but Crescendo is far more flexible, by several orders of magnitude. Its inherently chaotic sessions also create natural shake ups that could ripple into the larger table. Overall, Crescendo does well as a “beating heart of the setting” sorta a game. 

But what about the second?

See, that’s what has been tripping me up. Instead of simply listing out what I logistically need and being ruthless about it, I have engaged in mooning over how cool all these games are, which lightens my wallet considerably, but doesn’t actually accomplish a stable table. 

Here’s what I need:

- Something familiar enough to my 3.5 days so that I can just skate by. I do all my innovation in Crescendo. I have no interest in bending particularly far for the other game. I paid my dues to originality and then some.

- A game with extremely low entry. Literally fifteen minutes of character creation at most, and then off to the races. 

- Emergent depth. As the game progresses, people who stick with it find there’s actually mechanics to sink their teeth into. It doesn’t have to be super deep, but as time goes on people can naturally develop new goals and their personal narrative evolves. 

- Worldbuilding and mechanics I can adapt Crescendo to without spending tons and tons and tons of time in order to produce for both tables. 

- Something that encourages the kind of loud, over-the-top, party attitude I actually enjoy quite a bit. 

Once I lay that all out, it’s just obviously Shadowdark. 

Familiar but well-done rules. So some reading required, but not really. Dionne's work isn't revolutionary. That's fine by me. I don't want revolutionary, I want something that I can intuit enough to where I can just run it and be surprised a few time and then readjust fire.

I also found that I could hack Shadowdark's basic stuff to fit my setting really easily. It took me a half hour to write my own setting’s level 0 character funnel table. Not even that. And if anything I made mine faster than what’s in the core book. People can just walk up to the table, shrug and say “what the hell”, and start playing. 

Shadowdark has some surprising spots for depth down the road, especially if you adapt Living Campaign/BROSR principles, like 1:1 time and Braunsteins. You can use the pieces to do some really impressive stuff, if you know what to aim for. The fact that there’s a bunch of 3rd party stuff that fleshes this out (which I was literally given) doesn’t hurt. 

Is it perfect? Nah. No system is. The lethality can scare off the wrong newcomer, and if someone really wants narrative-heavy zero-to-hero arcs with minimal risk, they'll bounce. But for what I need—a reliable, low-friction engine that supports a big, breathing world while leaving room for Crescendo to be the emotional heartbeat—it's damn near ideal.

So if you've been staring at your shelf (or your itch.io cart) wondering why none of the "cool" games quite fit your actual life and table, try doing what I finally did: write the ruthless list first. Then see what matches.

For me, it was Shadowdark.

And here I pause. If you do not show up next week, I don’t blame you. It is no easy road.