The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Let's Build a Character with Shadowdark
Wed, 28 Aug 2024
Mike builds a 1st level character in the Shadowdark RPG. Shadowdark RPG Campaign Notebook available to Sly Flourish patrons Visit the Sly Flourish Blog Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books Shadowdark RPG
Full Episode
Hey friends, it's your pal Mike Shea from Sly Flourish. Today we are going to do our fourth character build for 5e systems. I'm kind of counting Shadow Dark as sort of a 5e system, but really I just want to talk about building and show what it's like to build a character in Shadow Dark as a juxtaposition among the other three 5e variants.
I have done three previous videos for building characters, including the 2024 D&D Player's Handbook, Level Up Advanced 5e from EN World Publishing, and Tales of the Valiant. and today we're going to show what it takes to build a character using shadow dark If you like this show, please check out the City of Arches Kickstarter. The City of Arches is a high-fantasy city sourcebook for lazy DMs.
You can find a link to it in the show notes below. If you want to learn more about what it's like and what it is, there is a 42-page sample that you can download for free off the Kickstarters. No reason you shouldn't do so. It includes an introduction scenario, it includes a free adventure, and it shows you what this awesome book is going to be like. I'm super excited about the City of Arches.
I've been working on it for two years. It's a fantastic...
compressed campaign setting that you can drop into your own homebrew world or any published setting that you've got it's fully compatible with 5e but also compatible with pretty much any fantasy rpg including shadow dark so i hope you will check it out it's a really really fun setting and again you can find the link to that in the show notes below
So each of the other character build videos that I have done took about an hour. Now that was a chatty hour, right? That wasn't like, I wasn't working real hard. I don't think it takes a full hour to build a character using any of those systems. But one thing I can be sure to tell you is it is not going to take an hour to build a character in Shadow Dark.
I actually think that that is sort of a critical feature to the lethality of Shadow Dark and maybe to OSR games in general. That one of the reasons why OSR games can get away with murdering characters as often as they do is because it doesn't take very much to make a character in the first place.
I think if you were to try to play those other 5e variants as deadly as Shadow Dark, you would just spend all of your time making characters and probably people wouldn't really enjoy that. As an example, I have a player who plays both in my Sunday game and my Wednesday game.
In my Sunday game, he has probably gone through about seven different character deaths because we've been playing Shadow Dark. Most recently, he just had a fourth edition, a level up advanced 5e character killed. And it's going to take him like an hour to build a new replacement character, right?
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