Shadowdark is quickly becoming my favorite TTRPG. Its simplicity makes homebrewing easy without breaking balance. It also addresses by biggest issue with 5e, it actually rewards treasure hunting, since PCs must earn gold to advance.
Whenever I learn a new system (the curse of being a forever GM), I build an adventure for it. This is one of two I’ve created for Shadowdark. This one is inspired by classic OSR dungeons where rival factions vie for dominance in the dark. For good measure, I added an ancient dwarven city, long fallen, now ruled by a necromancer. The necromancer manipulates the factions into destroying one another so he can swell his undead ranks.
The main inspirations for this dungeon are Caves of Chaos—the 5e remake of Keep on the Borderlands—and Barrowmaze. Running Caves of Chaos in the past led to some truly memorable player–monster alliances. Olly the Orc and Harry the Hobgoblin will live in infamy in my group (I needed names on the fly,I was expecting a fight, not a parlay!). The players even taught them the value of trade over conquest.
From Barrowmaze, I borrowed the idea of the mongrelmen and created a race of mutant humanoids adapted to survive the dangers of the dark.
Without further ado, here’s the back-cover summary and player pitch I use when running this dungeon in one-shots. Download the full adventure below.
Adventure Summary
Descend into a living dungeon, where every alliance is fragile and every victory feeds the darkness.
When monsters erupt from the depths beneath the village of Umberstead, desperate defenders pursue them into the caverns below. The tunnels once led to the dwarven city of Thargrond, but now form a labyrinth of warring factions and restless dead. In the heart of Thargrond, a necromancer known as the Pale Warden desecrates the city’s ruins, feeding on the chaos he’s sown and growing stronger with every fallen soul.
Player Pitch
Umberstead is under siege. Strange mutant creatures have fled from the depths—what horrors drove them to the surface? Fight beside the villagers, then descend into a cavernous underworld where rival factions clash for survival, unaware they stand between you and something far worse.
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Easy to share with players, and keep secrets hidden.
Proper Noun Detector automatically links pages. Aiding world development.
Rich set of connections to define and track relationships.
Affordable plans ranging from free to $19.95/month.
Very responsive developer seeks community feedback and quickly addresses issues.
Cons
Many key features are pay-walled, and most new features are in the most expensive plan.
Proper Noun Detector could use auto-complete (does have an ex-post AKA/alias option for linking).
Could use a non-GM comment capability to allow players to comment on pages too. Although, there are some features to allow players to add to the campaign.
I’ve wanted to start product reviews for a while, and I have a few more in mind. I’m going to start with some of my favorite resources for DMing. I’d love to see these products supported so they continue. This page does not contain any affiliate links.
Why Scabard?
Scabard helps me with my biggest problem as a DM, keeping details and campaign notes well organized.
This is especially true for long-running campaigns, and often the problem is exacerbated by intermittent breaks. Over the years I’ve tried numerous strategies for this. I have a closet full of binders with notes from past campaigns, countless OneNote and Word documents, custom software like RealmWorks (now deprecated), and multiple tools to store hand-written notes (RocketBook and a Kindle Scribe).
A small fraction of my notebooks, along with my RocketBook and Kindle Scribe
While I will never move away from using other tools for ideation and informal notes, Scabard is my go to campaign manager. Check out the campaign I’ve been playing for the last year, Bishou. More about it later.
Glancing through pages, you can see I have added many types of resources. Maps, images, notes, and more. I even create blank placeholder pages as well, often minor NPCs like this one. Sometimes, the blank pages contain secrets I haven’t yet shared with my players, other times they are reminders for me to write more later. After each gaming session, I publish a summary that I review those before sessions.
There are two features that make me keep returning to this tool time and time again. First, the simple wiki-style layout that can be shared directly with the players. Second, the Proper Noun Detector with Auto-Linking.
These two features provide the core functionality that I use most frequently. There isn’t a lot to say about the wiki-style layout.
Overall, the platform provides a simple page-layout and categories you can assign each page to. This places the pages within groups and provides some simple linking capabilities across the pages. These links appear on the right-hand side of the page. They can also be hidden by the Campaign Owner if you need to keep them a secret.
You can also click a simple check-box on any page to hide the entire page from the players.
What’s so cool about Noun Detection?
I firmly buy into the type of world building where you spin outwards from a starting point. The proper noun detector is a dangerous rabbit hole for me. It helps you quickly create pages for every proper noun it detects and automatically links to those you already have. It tries to identify similarly named pages and provides an option to use them as an alias. Aliases function as a list of names that will also link to that page.
My one critique is that I wish it was easier to reduce the list of nouns it detects and help with spelling errors. This may be an issue for me because I use google translate to create hard to remember names.
What would make this tool better?
Overtime, I have had to upgrade my subscription just to keep all my older campaigns. I don’t mind because I love supporting the tools development but the next tier is $19.95/month (or 25% off if purchased annually), and that is pricey.
I’d love a way for players to comment on pages. In my current campaign, my players often link or quote things in our discord server. It would be great if they could do this directly on the blog without being added as a GM.
Finally, I’d love an auto-complete option for the proper noun detector. Although, if I had it I would complain it’s always trying to change words like it does on my phone! That complaint is certainly nitpicky.
What haven’t I tried?
I subscribe to their legend tier, because I have years of campaigns saved on the tool and keep adding more. But, this means I haven’t tried many of the enhanced AI features. I’ll eventually write a post on my opinions of AI, so I’ll leave that for another discussion. Still, there are a lot of features in the Mythic tier that seem like they could be super useful. I find the tool more than sufficient at the lower tiers.
Power Players. This might solve my player comment problem. But it gives slightly more control to players than I’m looking for, and I find it difficult to get players to take actions outside of the game.
Worlds by Wally 