Shadowdark stuff

Since we are building our game on top of Shadowdark we have been playing a couple games these past months.

As always, my main takeaway with this and several other OSR games is how great is the speed with which you get from sitting down to playing. I really think this is a MUST, even if you are a seasoned player.

Less friction is always better.

Sometimes you just want to play a quick game to test a new character or build or maybe fight an interesting monster and making characters, let alone look for, prep or just come up with a simple setting is always a non-insignificant investment of time and effort.

The tools to generate dungeons, characters and creatures on the MorkBorg site are in my opinion the golden standard for what I’m going to call “ANTI-prep”. You sit down, click a couple of times and you have EVERYTHING you need to play: characters, a pretty base dungeon and a couple fun creatures to kill (or try to), no prep needed.

There is only one problem we found while playing our Shadowdark games, characters at low level tend to lack any personality. Not at all a problem with the game itself, this happens to my group with most games at low levels but it becomes quite evident after playing many sessions and you go through all the classes and eventually you get more than one player with the same class on the party and realize that your Rogue and the “other” Rogue are the exact same character…. THE ROGUE who does roughish things (because they have more DEX than the others).

We are totally non-theater-kids so nobody is writing a 30-page epic dramatic background for their characters, besides, in games like Shadowdark or MorkBorg where PCs don’t usually live long, there is even less motivation for these details. The thing is, we are very fond of strange personalities and weird motivations in characters, they always make the game a lot more interesting and funny. Which is why we have been working for quite a bit in a fast, convenient way to create personalities that should work with any game that might need it.

I think I will upload a couple images or directly a PDF for our “personality generator”.

Meanwhile, we will probably keep playing a few more games of Shadowdark and burn a couple extra torches.