SoloDark Pt. 13: Campaign Review & What’s Next
Thanks for reading my solo Shadowdark game running The Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands. I aim to tell a story and pull the curtain back on how to run a solo TTRPG. I use footnotes for smaller rolls, mechanics, and comments and italic blocks for larger stuff.
You can find all the prior posts here, and if you want to see more in the way of notes you can find my public Notion Notebook here.
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First, if you haven’t read the previous posts you should do that first. I’m going to be discussing a lot of spoilers for the adventure in this post, so consider this your warning if you’re not caught up.
Anytime I finish an adventure or section of a larger campaign, I take time to review how things are going. It helps me identify what’s gone well, what I might want to change, and what I just don’t want to use anymore. This looks different for every adventure and for this one, it’s going to be a combination of the adventure review and system thoughts. I’m also going to put up a vote for what to play next. I’ve got several options that I’m interested in playing and I decided I'm gonna put it to a vote. I’m not 100% committing to whatever gets the most votes but I really would like to find out what interests my readers most. So even if you don’t want to read the campaign review I would highly encourage you to skip to the end and vote on what to do next.
In addition to the campaign review, I always check in with my players between adventures. So consider this my check-in with you, my readers. Do you have any questions? Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear from you!
Campaign Review
First up is the campaign review. So yeah, everyone died. That's absolutely not what I thought would happen when I started this adventure. I very much assumed characters would die, it's the nature of a game like this, and that I might stop simply because we had replaced so many characters. But I never envisioned stopping simply because the entire group died all at once. Despite that, I did really enjoy the Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands and would highly suggest it if you are playing in person. One caveat is that if you prefer adventures written in a minimalist style…this is not for you. It is very verbose. I don’t think I’d recommend it for a Shadowdark adventure though and I’ll talk about why in a moment.
Things I Liked
I think the traits for the characters worked out well. I’ve always done this for NPCs in my game but it worked well here too. In fact, I might try doing this if I ever get to be a player in a table game. Having just three or four traits can easily get you in the mindset of a character.
Four characters seemed to be the right number. Once Diam got added it started to feel like I would need to ignore someone in order to keep up a full narrative. It was just a lot to try and keep in my head all the time. If I run a group of 4 again in the future and they bring someone else along I’d treat them more like a retainer.
Using the ShadowDark system as a whole. If it was more complicated it would have been challenging to run 4 characters and all the monsters (I shudder to think of trying to play 5e or Pathfinder 2e).
Sharing the game! I’ve always liked sharing the things I love with other people so that was great. I also like getting to work on my writing. It’s something I used to do more of but college really took that spark out of me (turning in two 15+ page papers a week will do that to you).
Things I’d Change
The group absolutely needed a priest. I might argue that every group needs a priest in it unless you are ok with a lot of character death. Without a way to consistently heal you effectively need to rest after almost every fight or two. If I run ShadowDark again I would either roll a priest even if they didn’t have good stats or immediately get a priest “retainer”. Which brings me to my next point.
I need to figure out a better retainer system. Shadowdark doesn’t really have one and that’s intentional. It’s not a fault of the system but I’d need to find something to use. I knew before the group died they were being super risky without a priest but wasn’t really sure how to solve it.
I’d start with a bigger dungeon nearby, maybe with a slower build-up. The jump from 2 giant spiders to 2 Orgres and 25 goblins was a lot.
I’d love to find a way to include the readers more than this last adventure. I don’t want to jump to polls about what to do every time but it might be neat to find a way to include readers in the worldbuilding.
Things I Didn’t Care For
The SoloDark Oracle. It is very simple, which is good, but it really just relies on Yes/No questions. This is normally fine but sometimes I want more than that. Going forward I think I’ll use a 2d6 system. Roll 2d6 and assign an answer to each die. This could be Yes and No, but could allow for more options. If one option is more likely than the other it’s easy to add a second d6 for that side.
I don’t like how you just heal to full after a long night's rest. I think this is probably more of an issue with how I was running the game not Shadowdark itself but I always have a hard time with low fantasy games where you can take an arrow to the gut and just “sleep it off”.
As for ShadowDark itself, I enjoy the system but it is absolutely best for a more “dungeon crawling” adventure. Given that the only way to gain XP is to find treasure, you need to spend your time finding treasure. Combining Shadowdark with Shadowed Keep led to a situation where the group really couldn’t earn enough XP to gain the levels they needed to fight who they needed to.
As a side note, I’m running a play-by-post using ShadowDark and it’s great for that. The simplicity of the system is incredible for that game.
What to Play Next
One of the ways I want to include my readers is to get some help choosing what game to play next. As I mentioned I’ve narrowed it down to three options that I’m interested in trying. As I mentioned I’m not 100% committing to playing whatever comes in 1st place but I want to know what you all would like to see. I’ve listed each option below along with what kind of adventures I might use that system for.
ShadowDark - The first option is to roll up some new characters and play some more ShadowDark. This would be using the same systems as before but I would change a few things. First, I’d focus more on hex-ploration and dungeon delving. Not that there won’t be any social gameplay but it’s clear that dungeon delving is where SD shines. I think I’d start at a dungeon location with a town or base of some kind a few hours away and then explore from there. I don’t fully know what rules I’d use for rolling new hexes or populating them but I would use the ShadowDark rules for hexcrawling and dungeon generation. I may change up the narration style a bit since the adventure won’t be tied to a quest. It might be interesting to write it up almost as a journal in the first person. I would choose this option if you want more ShadowDark, more dungeon crawling, and more hex crawling.
Dolmenwood - I don’t know how many people are familiar with Dolmenwood but I love the rules and the setting (I’m actually starting a group game soon). The ruleset is very similar to Old School Essentials (which is very similar to OD&D), with some quality-of-life changes. But the setting is where this game shines. It’s pretty rare that I fully use published settings but when I read this one I bought in hook, line, and sinker. It’s creepy fae forest meets OD&D meets the Brothers Grimm. This would be a bit more story-driven than the ShadowDark option, though it’s not an actual adventure just a setting. One of the big differences is that I would discover the world through play, not build it. The Dolmenwood is a fully built-out, very large setting. They have keyed all 200+ hexes and stocked them with some super interesting stuff. There are a lot of factions with themes of law vs chaos, and church vs fae all over the place. If you want to learn more about the setting you can check it on Necrotic Gnome’s website. I do think I may try to use the full Mythic Emulator system for this, at least in a trial run. I’d choose this if you want more of an OD&D or B/X D&D style game within the specific magical setting of Dolmenwood.
The One Ring w/ Strider Mode - I may not be a die-hard Tolkien fan (all hail the sage Steven Colbert), but I do LOVE some Lord of the Rings. Like I’ve read the Silmarillion but only once. My last option is a very different option. I’m interested in learning The One Ring system and playing in the lands of Middle-Earth. I would use the published Strider Mode which is an official supplement on how to play the game solo from the creators of the Ironsworn system. To be honest I don’t know a ton about this system so it would be a learning curve, but I love learning new things and I love Lord of the Rings so I think it could be a good fit. I’d choose this if you want to branch away from D&D and like Lord of the Rings!
I was considering including Blade in the Dark because the setting and rules are super cool but honestly
has that covered and their blog is amazing. You should go subscribe to their blog, especially if you’re interested in Blades in the Dark.
So I accidentally voted and Substack won't let me take it back LOL!
This means the poll is skewed slightly and currently Dolmenwood and The One Ring are tied.
All three options are great.