The Arcane Library’s Shadowdark RPG is a streamlined version of Dungeons & Dragons. It cuts away the complexity of skills and feats, simplifies spell management, provides basic class-based talents, and introduces its signature element: light as a resource. In Shadowdark games, none of the player characters (regardless of ancestry) can see in the dark.
But the monsters can.
This makes light — cast via torch, lantern, or spell — a critical resource to be protected at all costs. Easy to learn, fast playing, and embracing an old school fantasy aesthetic, the game’s built a considerable following online and in the real-world. This page represents the Lair’s favorite Shadowdark resources.
Have a website, podcast, or other resource you’d like us to highlight? Leave a comment or email us at podcast@lairofsecrets.com
Getting Started
- Quickstart Rules – Contains separate quick start rules for players and game masters, plus an introductory adventure. As quickstart rules goes, it’s impressively hefty and covers everything you need to run the basic game.
- d12 Ways Shadowdark is Awesome – Want to know why we (and others) enjoy Shadowdark so much? Check out this episode of our podcast.
How to Videos
- Arcane Library: How To Make A Shadowdark RPG Character – Shadowdark’s creator, Kelsey Dionne, walks you through creating a character.
- Sly Flourish: Let’s Build a Character in Shadowdark RPG – The Lazy DM himself walks you through character creation.
- Bob World Builder: Shadowdark Character Creation – Calling it “D&D for Busy People!”, Bob pitches Shadowdark as an alternative to Dungeons & Dragons, and provides an overview of character creation.
Essential Source Books
Official Sourcebooks
- Core Rulebook – A compact tome covering character creation, game rules, spells, magic items, monsters, and world creation.
- Cursed Scrolls – Official rules expansions in zine form. Each edition introduces additional classes, monsters, magic items, spells,
- SoloDark – Official solo rules for the game, including an oracle system, a d100 prompt table, and lists of solo resources.
- Western Reaches Campaign Setting (Kickstarter) – The single biggest expansion for Shadowdark, which presents a cohesive campaign setting knitting together the existing Cursed Scrolls material with new and expanded content.
Third-Party Sourcebooks
- Gamemaster’s Companion for Shadowdark – Chubby Funster’s tome adds expanded hexcrawl options, additional location tables, more downtime and carousing activities, more monsters, and more spells.
- Creating and Adapting Shadowdark Monsters – A fan-created resource packed with monsters and advice on how convert critters in other games to Shadowdark threats.
- The Monster Overhaul – A fun bestiary of classic monsters, divided up by region (e.g. mountains, forests, dungeons) and supplemented with monster-specific random tables. While not a Shadowdark book, it uses stats similar to the original D&D Basic/Expert rules, which makes it easy to convert monsters to similar systems.
House Rules
- The Lair’s d8 Shadowdark House Rules and d8 Shadowdark Hacks run down 16 house rules and hacks submitted by our community or found online.
- Sly Flourish: Shadowdark House Rules – The Lazy DM’s own list of house rules (we highlighted a few of those in our own lists).
- Reddit: House Rules with Shadowdark – A hefty Reddit thread featuring a bunch of in-use house rules.
Online Tools
- ShadowDarklings – An the official web-based character for Shadowdark.
- Shadowdark Tools – A collection of random tools including generators for NPCs, rival crawlers, shops, taverns, and magic items. The super helpful Monster Filter tool lets you sort through monsters based on level, environment, type, and more.
Virtual Tabletop Tools
Foundry
- Shadowdark Mod – A fan-created and maintained mod for Foundry.
Roll20
- Roll20 Character Sheet (Git repository) – The rules are not available as a compendium on Roll20, but there is a fan-created character sheet. To access the sheet, you need to choose “Shadowdark” as your rule set when setting up a new game; the git repo is for reporting bugs.
Owlbear Rodeo
- Owlbear Rodeo 2.0 character sheet – A character sheet for the new version fo Owlbear.
Tabletop Tools
- Scratch-off “Fog of War” Battle Map – The Lair’s own David Moore demonstrates his scratch-off battle map. It uses a special opaque paint solution to conceal an underlying map, which is then removed during the game.