My “Not Three Gnomes in a Trenchcoat” table (a joke that started in a Out of the Abyss campaign 7+ years ago) agreed to trying out a different system before diving back into a long form campaign. I wrote up three proposals and Shadowdark was the one selected.

Here’s a copy of the pitch with some editorial notes about my intentions for a setting I’m calling –

Beyond the Broken Veil

The Pitch

Old School Dungeons & Hex Crawling

This is about exploration and survival, tracking rations and braving the Darkness with the ticking clock of the torch.

For this I wanted to lean hard into some of the qualities of an old school game and less of the super heroic high fantasy of our last campaign, “Shadows of the Dragon Queen” a.k.a. Tyranny of Dragons with some narrative changes. Normally, I am very much about the narrative and less interested in the minutiae of encumbrance and daily rations so this was going to be a change for me as well.

The Characters

The PCs are explorers and dungeon crawlers, seeking treasure and fame, facing danger and learning secrets of the World That Was.

This was going to be about dungeon crawling, not saving the world.

The Setting

Raven’s Keep stands on the edge of the Western Wastes, not far from a number of abandoned ruins and misty moors.

A starting point very much inspired by the classic “Keep on the Borderlands” and appropriate for a Points of Light style game. Taking a cue from a detail I had read about the original Gygax games, I dug out the gameboard from the Avalon Hill classic, “Outdoor Survival” and used that as the regional map.

The History

For hundreds of years, the Empire spanned across many lands and people. Then came the Great War that turned all against each other. Scholars still argue over how it started but the fact remains that oaths and lands were broken and for generations all was Chaos. Into this erupted the monsters of the Shadowdark. This enemy did what no diplomacy had, forcing alliances against a common foe. The final battles of the Great War are less than a decade old, leaving survivors seeking to piece together a brighter tomorrow even as they fight against the Darkness today.

Again, a very generic “Things were great until the Catastrophe, then something worse happened and wiped out most of great Civilization, leaving only points of light against a world of danger, treasures, and the unknown”. PCs are not expected to try and solve what the mystery cause was or bring a permanent end to the threat of the Shadowdark. At best, maybe remove some of the bigger threats close to the base of operations.

So we rolled up some characters, and then some back up characters (if nothing else, providing a choice as to the starter and the replacement in the event of PC death), got a plot hook for the Lost Citadel (found in the QuickStart), did a carousing roll, and started some hex crawling …