On Shadowdark and Embracing Losing

Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, © 2020 Eric Lofgren.

How does one quantify the length of time they’ve been a Dungeon Master? Generally, the time you spend between jobs doesn’t count towards your experience in a given field. But being a DM is different. Do you count the weeks where the game was cancelled, but the aspects of the game continued to plague my mind? Do I count the times I was vividly daydreaming about running my game from when I’m eating my usual breakfast gruel to when I’m trying to fall asleep? Surely the times I’ve been kept up trying to think about how an encounter would go has to count as DM overtime. Let’s call it one and a half years in traditional terms, but when it comes to how long I’ve “worked” on running my games, a good two years.

Two years. That’s how long it took to encounter my first TPK. And it wasn’t my usual campaign, or my usual system. In my main game, a post-apocalyptic city survival game ran in Pathfinder Second Edition, we’ve had a couple of characters die due to the conditions they faced, but what I’ve experienced most is characters reaching the end of what they want to accomplish and retiring to let someone else fill their shoes. I’ve tried to not be too restrictive in terms of how characters come on board, as there’s a lot of variety in the game and I didn’t want to hamper the party’s ability to try out different builds. Perhaps a mistake in hindsight given the stakes I originally wanted to set, but I made that choice once, and floodgates are hard to close once opened.

We’ll come back to that discussion, but for now that’s just to contrast against what the party faced last week: Shadowdark. One of my players was sick, and it’s generally a faux pas to run a post-cliffhanger boss fight without everyone present, so we had to do something else. I had usurped the DM throne from one of the party before my campaign started, and I’ve found I’m loathe to hand back the crown. Some people can go back and forth between playing and running games, but others are born to DM. I’m in the latter camp, and I had been watching Sly Flourish’s GM Prep for the prewritten hexcrawl “The Gloaming”, which hour after hour made me want to try out the system. With very little warning I found myself spending the few hours I had left before the session hastily reading through the Quickstart rules, prepping character sheets, and reading through the free beginner adventure, Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur. Thankfully I also owned Old School Essentials and Dungeon Crawl Classics, two other systems I’ve not had the chance to run yet, but knowledge of them allowed me to fill the gaps in Shadowdark rulings I wasn’t yet familiar with.

It was half an hour after we were due to start when I had everything ready. I’m lucky to have a table where there’s a lot of banter before and after sessions, or it would have been a very awkward time. I set up my music on the portable speaker, narrated a mostly improv-ed introduction, and let everyone select their character. They got a good look at the different entrances to the citadel, picked the least ominous of the three, and crawled on in.

One of my players (again, the player whose throne I’d stolen) had been playing since BECMI, and that became incredibly clear when he was given access to 1E-style resources. He was mapping out the area, using combinations of the rope in his inventory and other equipment to net gold from water, tie up conspicuous statues before the thief could pluck gemstones from them, inspecting every door before advancing, basically treating the Citadel as the deathtrap it was designed to be. I found myself having to make a lot of quick rulings to accommodate how he was changing how traps would be able to function, but I think that’s part of the fun of running OSR games.

The rest of the party was not as cautious. In the northeastern-most room of the citadel is a magic +1 greatsword in an altar at the end of multiple rows of different-colored pillars. The pillars are trapped, each having different effects when passing between them. Our BECMI veteran tried to detect magic while our thief attempted to safely inspect the pillars. The description of the pillars in the book is intentionally left vague outside of their effects, so I ruled that there were both magical and mechanical effects that could be nullified.

However, players act in rounds even outside of combat, and while those two were doing this, the cleric walked in between the two red pillars before her to inspect them. Everything flammable on her person immediately caught fire. I rolled 4 on the damage die, her maximum health. The party dragged the cleric’s now charred body out from between the pillars and tried to resuscitate her. Suddenly the entire party was acting like the veteran, approaching everything as if it were an obstacle and inspecting from as safe a distance as they could manage. That moment when the cleric went up in flames was when the tone was set.

The party had been doing a good job avoiding random encounters as they traversed, up until they came to the bathhouse. Steam was rising from behind a wooden door. The wizard attempted to cast burning hands on the door, his reasoning for why still eluding me as I’m writing, and he rolled a 1. For those unaware, on a natural 1 when spellcasting, a wizard faces a terrible mishap. This mishap presented as our wizard exposing too much of his mind to the arcane realm, being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of knowledge pouring into his brain within the millisecond he started casting and screaming until he lost his voice.

The party advanced into the bathhouse, leaving the wizard screaming in a corner, and began to inspect the area. While a random encounter wouldn’t normally have been rolled in this room, the screaming was drawing attention. I rolled, got a 1 on the die, and rolled to see what monsters showed up. Six skeletons entered the room, swords holstered and all wearing towels or bathrobes. They were immediately hostile. Our wizard was unable to fight, only able to scream in horror, so the remaining party was outnumbered two-to-one. Things moved very quickly from there. A good couple of blows were swapped back and forth. Our cleric removed one skeleton’s right arm but was taken down with a blow from its left. The thief tried running to high ground atop the gorgon statue at the far end of the room, only to trigger its scalding water trap, fail the DEX save and die to a spray of boiling water to the face. The wizard and BECMI veteran were swarmed and taken down within the skeleton’s next turn.

Their first fight in the game had killed them all within 2 rounds. I was nervous, worried I had turned the party from a system I’d like to run a longer game in later. To my surprise, everyone cheered. A couple of the players pulled out their phones to take photos of their miniatures lying dead on the XPS foam flagstones to send photos to our sick player. They had only lasted an hour and a half in the dungeon, and we had plenty more time, so I got the party to roll up new characters, introducing them to character generation in the process, and sent this second group through one of the other entrances.

The first group of Shadowdarklings, all horrifically killed off.

The next group had some similarly tense encounters and managed to make it back out with as much treasure as they could carry. What stuck with me was how well received the death of the first group was. The party was aware of how mortal they were after the pillar trap, and with two players on a single hitpoint (our cleric lost the ability to cure wounds, and our thief had a maximum of 1 hitpoint to begin with) and another unable to fight, it was obvious they wouldn’t last long in any fight. They still appreciated that they managed to make it so far and find some cool things before going down.

That moment was very poignant for me, as in my Pathfinder game we’re likely to face a similar situation next session. The party has for the past three sessions found themselves trapped in the basement of a wizard’s university, pursuing an elusive illusion wizard who keeps altering the layout of the rooms. They’ve managed to find them now and will need to defeat them to return to safety. They were struggling with the various puzzles and traps laid out in this hexagonal maze and refused to rest along the way, which while it prevented any overnight ambushes also means that they’re going into this boss fight with very low resources.

I had considered lowering the difficulty of this boss fight by removing a couple of traps and monsters from the equation, but with the overall difficulty of this dungeon it would be clear to the players that I’m pulling my punches to let them survive. In the Combat Threat section of Pathfinder’s GM Core there are two notable things written for Extreme encounters, which this fight is closest to in experience: ‘An extreme-threat encounter might be appropriate for a fully rested group of characters that can go all-out’, and ‘use an extreme encounter only if you're willing to take the chance the entire party will die’.

If the party had either conserved resources or had found more clues leading to the wizard’s location earlier on, this would be fight on equal terms. Because of the player’s choices, it isn’t. In the words of Matt Colville, ‘there’s always something you could have done differently’. Maybe I’m wrong, and they’ll manage to bring this wizard down. I’m hoping that’s the case, as I wrote up some cool magic items for the party on some not-so-cheap linen card if they can kill and loot them. But I shouldn’t be tailoring the experience to guarantee that success. I must take the chance that they could die here, their task unfulfilled and the doom of the city assured. It might not be a satisfying end to the story we’ve been collectively telling for so long, but it would be an ending that makes sense.

Heroes, as brave as they are, aren’t invincible. Casters run out of spell slots and martials can only take so many beatings. I’m glad I had this Shadowdark session beforehand to get me comfortable with that idea. My fingers are crossed for my party, but it’s anyone’s guess as to what happens from here. And I’ll probably buy the full Shadowdark book now in case we move onto another campaign sooner than expected.