Like many GMs, we have a number of campaign ideas floating in the back of our head. For us it’s not plots per se, but campaign structures and broad concepts. One we’d love to run someday is, in Cypher System, but using lots of generation tools from Stars Without Number, is a sci-fi “Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off” – players would run characters from the crew of a large starship. Open table, mission based. And we just see where it goes. We have a lot of Open Table ideas – as we’ve mentioned before, its the best way to keep your campaign alive when your players are busy adults.

But our problem is we often have trouble starting things. Or continuing when we get stuck, getting past the block is really hard. Our resting inertia is brutal. That all said, one of our campaign concepts that was burning a hole in our brain is “Scarlet Citadel with Shadowdark“.

Well, we’ve made it happen, and we’re five sessions in and it’s going pretty well! You can follow along with the campaign by reading the campaign session reports. We’ve also put up session reports from our past Open Table games, for those curious. Find them in the Campaign Recaps section. We hope to write up a post-mortem of those experiences someday, now that the notes are organized and in one place.

So now that things are up and running, and we’re five sessions in, we thought it was a good moment to take stock. What’s working? What’s not? What’s the plan going forward?

What’s Working

We run this game every Thursday night at a FLGS. It’s a great store and we have our own little private conference room. It feels great to support a local business too. Our current living situation rules out hosting a home game, and that’s OK. We advertise as an Open Table and even though, we’ve had a pretty stable core of players. But having it open means we don’t have to cancel if a person or two is missing, and we have had a few “wandering adventurers” that have only played once or twice. It keeps things interesting. The character creation process for Shadowdark is very quick, and a few players even just took pre-generated characters. Everyone seems to be finding their characters’ personalities at the table in real time, which is fun to watch! Everyone has engaged well in the setting and adventures, and we’re very pleased with that.

The party has only ventured into the Citadel once so far, but have been nibbling around the edges with sidequests. Connections are being made, plotlines are forming, rivals and allies are developing. Adapting 5e to Shadowdark, even on the fly, is pretty easy at low levels and doesn’t take too much work. The dangerous nature of Shadowdark and the Scarlet Citadel are a good thematic match. The foundation is sturdy and durable. We’ve only had 1 death so far, but a number of close calls. The players do not feel like this is a cake walk, and their hit points are precious things. That’s exactly what they should be feeling in this system/adventure. They’ve all bought into the treasure = xp motivation, so that’s kept the story moving forward with minimal forcing.

This is the first campaign we’ve run that was not only Open Table, but Open to the Public. Our players are, in most cases, essentially strangers the first time they sit down at the table. That was daunting at first, but has gone well so far. Everyone is getting along and meshing pretty well, and we’ve explained a simple rule – if there’s anything going on that you’re not comfortable with, or isn’t making sense – call a Time Out. We’ll figure it out.

What’s Not Working

You learn something new every campaign, or at least we do. No two are the same, no two have the same problems. And so it goes, we are working through a few issues, largely a factor of the logistics of this campaign.

Because it’s a weeknight game and at a place of business, our time to game can be a bit tight. Our work schedule doesn’t allow us to start too early either, so we’re looking at two or two and a half hours tops. For an RPG session, that’s pretty tight, and we are struggling to manage the pacing – it’s extremely difficult to run a satisfying session in that amount of time where the characters are supposed to be back at home base by the end. We don’t have time to spend on travel sessions, or random encounters. We have to get to the main location for the session and get out, quickly. It’s a bare-bones sort of process compared to our normal pace and structure. We’ve been studying tips for running short sessions, but so far – we’re already doing most of the suggestions. They all manage the problem but don’t solve it, especially for an Open Table concept.

Getting the party back home at the end has proven to be VERY difficult. It’s just really hard to wrap anything up in the time frame and get them back. It takes away all the danger of getting home with treasure and running low on resources. We are working on an “Escape the Dungeon” table to sort of simulate the danger, but it’s a thin soup compared to the fun of running through the dungeon with gods-know-what chasing you out, risking everything to keep ahold of the treasure.

Shadowdark is designed to put a sense of urgency on the players at all times – the real-time torch clock is supposed to keep the players moving. After playing in a one-shot prior to the start of our campaign, we knew we were going to play in “Blitz Mode” with half-hour timer instead of a full hour. Especially since we only had less than 3 hours per session. Unfortunately, it’s still not giving the sense of danger and urgency we’d like, doubly especially since random encounters take so much time out of the session, we’re very lax on checking for them. This is the biggest failure, in our minds, of the game so far – was Shadowdark the right choice? Should we just have gone with something like OSE? Or Basic Fantasy RPG? Or perhaps we should have done more research into something more modern, like Cairn or Knave. We’re not sure, and it’s too late to change it – but it does bother us.

What’s the plan, going forward?

We’re having fun, and so are the players, so that’s the first and most important measure of success. We’ll keep doing what we’re doing – running a fun, rules-lite, 5e inspired OSR-adjacent game in the Scarlet Citadel. We will continue to tweak around the edges to try and manage the 2.5 hour game window. To that end – continue practicing pacing and bite-sized adventures – really just a couple of scenes per session. We may also look into “narrative” random encounters, where we narrate the challenge and the outcome based on a roll or two, using them largely for lore dumps or small treasure distribution. We’ll also work out the “Escape the Dungeon” table and hopefully get to something satisfying. We’ve currently patterned it after Shadowdark’s Carousing tables, but if it seems way off, we may turn to a 2d6 or 3d6 style table instead. We want to simulate danger without being unfairly punishing.

We’ll have another retrospective after another 5-10 sessions to see how things have developed further!