On this episode, we talk about ShadowDark monsters! We look at a number of monster bestiaries, a zine dedicated to creating and adapting monsters for the game, and two dedicated monster-finding tools.
What more ShadowDark? We’ve got more ShadowDark!
- d8 ShadowDark Mistakes We Made (S4E19)
- d12 Ways ShadowDark is Awesome! (S4E15)
- Shadowdark Impressions (Campaigns & Coffee)
- Unboxing Cursed Scrolls 3: Midnight Sun for ShadowDark
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:54 Monster 24
03:02 VALHOLL!
04:21 Shadowfinder Complete Bestiary
05:24 Creating and Adapting Monsters for ShadowDark
14:16 The Monster Overhaul
15:12 Ruincairn Bestiary
17:20 ShadowDark Monster Tools
19:34 Conclusion and Future Discussions
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Show Notes
ShadowDark specific Monster Resources
- Monster 24
- Cost: $2 (pay what you want)
- 250 monsters by Tom Phillips, who spent 2024 creating monsters and publishing them to Reddit. This compiles his various critters into one document. Includes gaggles of hags (forest hags, tomb hags, venom hags), plenty of plants (carnivorous cave moss, blood orchid, vampire grass), and oodles of oozes and slimes (chaos pudding, green slime, umber jelly)
- VALHOLL! Nashcraeft #1
- Cost: $6.99
- A fanzine that builds on Cursed Scrolls #3: Midnight Sun. Introduces a bunch of monsters as well as a “lot system” as alternative to carousing, new magic items, new blessings, and 4 classes.
- Shadowfinder Complete Bestiary
- Cost: $25 (PDF) $29 (POD+PDF) as part of the Kickstarter
- Every PF 1E bestiary, #1-6, converted for Shadowdark RPG. The kickstarter is over; hopefully they’ll release this for sale when the Kickstarter-created book releases in October 2025.
- Creating and Adapting Monsters for ShadowDark
- Cost: $5 (pay what you want)
- Very handy, fan-created rules for making your own monsters (or converting them from other systems).
- Advice on creating monsters including “VIBES OVER COMPLEXITY”, “USE NATURAL LANGUAGE”, “MONSTER SPELLS ARE WEIRD”, and “RULES ARE MEANT TO BE BROKEN”
- Options include:
- BUILD BY EQUIVALENTS
- If your monster is like a knight, bugbear, or zombie … just use the stat block as is.
- BUILD BY ADAPTATION
- Say you want to recreate the 5e Bandit Captain, you take the ShadowDark bandit, and beef it up.
- BUILD BY BENCHMARK
- E.g. converting Yakfolk warrior. Look at the CR (in this case, CR 3, compare it to CR3 monsters in ShadowDark, and start building.
- It has a talent bank describing all kinds of monster capabilities and a big list of monster spells.
- BUILD BY EQUIVALENTS
- It includes a bunch of horrors as well, including blink dogs, ettins, pseudodragons, unique horrors like the “Eyeball Wall”, and a number of NPCs (pyromancer, cultist, etc.).
ShadowDark adjacent Resources
- Runecairn Bestiary
- Cost: $13.49
- 100 Norse-inspired monsters for Runecairn, an Old School Renaissance RPG. The OSR stat blocks are close enough to ShadowDark to make conversion pretty easy. Includes sabertooth cats, grave newts, ogres, and giant octopi.
- The Monster Overhaul
- Cost: $30.00 (PDF) $60 (PDF+Print)
- Come for the 200+ monsters, stay for the ecology and random table pieces. Uniformly praised online. It’s got entries for NPCs (adventurers, barbarians) each with d100 names and character traits. For monsters, it delves beyond the stat block.
- Goblins get the same d100 names and traits PLUS physical descriptions, motivations, mounts, elite weapons, and loot.
- Plus there are random tables like “50 mercenary jobs” and generic maps of locations like a wizard tower and a village.
ShadowDark Monster Tools
- ShadowDark Tools: Monster Reference
- Filter monsters from the ShadowDark core rules + the first three Cursed Scrolls. Criteria include monster level, environment, type (e.g. angel, aberration), movement type (burrow, climb, fly), attack (blood drain, petrify, venom), effect (blindness, charm), and trait (corrosive, damage reduction, immune non-silvered weapons)
- Ken the DM’s Shadowdark RPG Monsters By Level
- A PDF index of ShadowDark core monsters by level. It includes each monster’s special abilities and its page number.
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A list of monster stat blocks generated using ShadowDark Tools.