It’s been about 3 months since we last checked in on our Open Table Shadowdark game. Let’s revisit and talk about what’s been going right, wrong and what we’re doing to fix it!
Are Things Still Working?
In short, yes! We have a very stable core of players that show up nearly every week, but with the flexibility of the Open Table model, we’ve not had to cancel due to low attendance or anything like that. It truly is the best way to Slay the Scheduling Dragon. There is capital-P Plot happening around the Scarlet Citadel, but last session saw a major swerve that might occupy the adventurers for a while. And that’s OK – we go where the players go. The Citadel will always be there, doing what it does.
Did the Other Things get Fixed?
We are still learning and adjusting to how much we can get done in a short or short-ish session. We’ve been trying to push close to 2.5 hours as much as we can, and that basically means we can run 3-4 scenes a night. Unfortunately, that’s an average with a rather wide standard deviation – a night of bad rolls from the players, or a night of exceptionally good rolls, can derail the best of plans. We had one session really drag out because of how bad the players were rolling, so we cut the next session’s planned scenes back – only to have the players then roll incredibly high and blow out the planned stuff about 35 minutes early. Too short to feel satisfying, but too long to start anything new – so we just did some carousing and called it a night. Overall pacing has improved, but inconsistently and marginally. Still a work in progress.
The second major issue we were wrestling with – urgency, danger, torch management, encounter management – continued to be an ongoing problem. Our attempts at minor changes either were ineffective or did not stick. Drastic measures were needed, though we were not willing to change systems. Luckily, as always, it was darkest just before the dawn. We were catching up with Dungeon Master Diaries and cued into their mentions of a “Crawling Clock” – and as context built, it sounded very intriguing. We quickly raced into their backlog to listen to the Crawling Clock episode and found an absolute gem of a random encounter triggering system. It’s based on a Goblin Punch post from 2023 that details their “Underclock” system. With some advice and discussion from the podcast hosts, we quickly adapted it to our Shadowdark game, giving it a maiden voyage just last night.
Anything New Going Well or Ill?
Yes, on both counts. In the former camp as we mentioned, we’ve had a consistent core group of players, which means we now have some real veterans of the system to help the newcomers (both to the game and RPGs in general) get acquainted. They also have characters that are starting to become “competent” adventurers – Level 3+.
However, in the latter camp, we were heartbroken a couple weeks back, to the point we truly knew some radical changes were needed in the game. As the characters negotiated with an undead sorcerer, a “deal with the devil” was offered to them. To take the deal would delay justice for those that hired the PCs, and put them in league with a truly – and very obviously – evil baddie. One of my best role players looked at me in this moment and genuinely asked, “Am I allowed to RP this? Can I do some role-playing here? My character wants to take this deal…”.
Friends, we were taken aback, absolutely flattened by this question – of COURSE our players are allowed to RP. Of COURSE we want them playing to their character’s motivations, as long as it doesn’t harm other players’ fun. That this player felt they had to ask the question was not a failure on their part, but on ours. Our game had become too mechanical, too rigid, too predictable.
This will not do.
We immediately encouraged the player to do what their character wanted to do – we trust them to play fair with the table and we were not disappointed. The character, thirsting for more power and seeing a path to that power, agreed to the deal. The adventurers now must gather powerful items from across the land to allow this sorcerer to break free of a curse, thereby also saving the camp of the beings that hired the adventurers in the first place.
After this session, we had a real moment of introspection and vowed to make some changes.
So What’s the Plan?
The Scarlet Citadel is great, and it’s there, but it’s time to branch out a little more and let the players explore. We’ll always have the problem of getting them back to a central location after the session, but its much easier to handwave some of those things. Wider adventures, more options, more choices.
We tested out the Crawling Clock, with our changes for Shadowdark, and it was an instant improvement – both for us as GM and the players. Torch management became important again (and indeed, the timer went off at some VERY inconvenient times, heightening tension). The countdown die gave real stakes and a sense of impending doom that, even though it’s Shadowdark, hasn’t been present before. Thumbs way up on this one, a fantastic little system that is truly going to change the way our game is played – and for the better. Here’s our initial draft of Shadowdark Crawling Clock rules, and of course hat tip to the Dungeon Master Diaries hosts and Goblin Punch.
For the first quest to fulfill their Deal with the Devil, the party had to navigate a Minotaur’s Maze and find an artifact. There’s nothing that will grind a session to a fun-killing halt (in our opinion) faster than tedious square-by-square mapping of labyrinth. That’s a real shame, since labyrinths are a great adventure trope, some might even say a classic one. And they’re right! But I don’t want to run a cartography session that requires surveyors tools. We set out to find a better way – and we feel we found it. We ran it last night – it was a great fit with the Crawling Clock, and truly simulated being lost in a maze without becoming frustrating, tedious – or worse – unfun. More on that next time.
