1. Hype
Shadowdark’s success should perhaps not be as a surprise. It’s a very polished product with great art, made by a creator with an established 5e fanbase who clearly had a good viral marketing plan. Is it a good game? Reading the quickstart, it seems like it will do fine as a rules-lite dungeon crawler, though at $30 for the pdf it is far more expensive than many similar games like Cairn ($0) or The Black Hack ($6). As a game, it reads as the “factory preset,” as this one critic calls Mausritter (and Shadowdark is far less innovative and evocative than Mausritter (one of my favorite OSR games, also available for $0)).
What I would like to think about what its success says about the hobby. The $30 digital tier of this game, expensive as that is, was not the most popular by far. A plurality of backers opted for the $109 “Shadowdark complete” which included all the physical and digital rewards, with a substantial number backing at the $129 and $159 levels. Those prices are eye-popping considering the game occupies the same niche as the games mentioned above.
The game was accompanied by a truly impressive amount of hype online. Indicative of the general tone was the “Dungeon Masterpiece” youtube channel, which proclaimed, after a two-hour gushing read-through,
“We have reached a new chapter for what it means to be in the OSR. This is a turning of the tide. No longer are we doing the regurgitation of retroclones. In the future, we will look at Shadowdark as this pivotal moment of what it now means to be OSR. This is the new path going forward.”
Of course, that’s laughably hyperbolic, and moreover strongly ignores the plethora of OSR rulesets that are not retroclones. Personally, I wonder less whether this is a “turning point,” but whether people, including the backers, will playing or talking about Shadowdark in a year, or two years. It seems as though the author is cultivating a community and will continue to support the system with her own adventures; that’s good, and it points to a best case scenario of a core group of enthusiasts, like for Runehammer’s ICRPG. But I wonder if for the most part the $109 worth of material will be played a few times and then put on some encumbered shelf. I wonder if the superficiality of the 5e elements fail to convince trad players to play OSR games for anything other than one shots here and there. In sum, I wonder whether the enthusiasm for this game speaks to the fomo of kickstarter and the idea that more consumption lead to more fulfilling games.
2. Entitlement
I don’t think Shadowdark is unique in the above respects within the OSR. Certainly games that I’ve backed on kickstarter and played--Mork Borg and Old School Essentials—speak to the consumerist desire for “official,” consistently-designed and branded game products, along with the idea of buying into a community with your purchase. Which is to say I get the fundamental desire involved in consumption, retail therapy, and lonely fun.
The other side of hype, however, is that the desire for uniform brand consistency leads to a kind of entitlement among people who purchase gaming products. This was clear when Necrotic Gnome recently decided to package Dolmenwood with a house-ruled BX, adjusted to match the setting. As someone who has played in the setting, this makes sense; it’s not strictly necessary, but the pulpy tone of early dnd is not a perfect match for the whimsical and sinister faerie vibe of Dolmenwood. The changes seem minimal in any case.
However, this was met with a backlash from some online. Most curious were people who backed one of the OSE kickstarters—dropping $100+ on the recent box set KS for example—who say they backed that product specifically to play in Dolmenwood, a setting that hasn’t even been completed and released! For example:
These individuals were somehow content to spend all of that money on a retroclone—a product explicitly created to play the massive archive of TSR-era + OSR adventures—only for it to patiently sit on a shelf until the setting was released. Or, they expected their purchase to be used only with official Necrotic Gnome modules, which could be placed on the shelf next to the box sets for their next shelfie. And then, what happens when this Dolmenwood campaign is over? Back to the shelf to gather dust.
Certainly, I have games gathering dust on my shelf, or digital dust on my hard drive. So I get it. But I think these two examples show how we become enamored by the idea of a game, and with it the long, rich campaigns we are going to run, only to be met with the reality of scheduling conflicts and groups that fall apart or never form. In the face of this reality, the gaming shelf is a “lonely fun” comfort, at best, but at worst, a reminder of carelessly spent money and the failure of certain social and creative ambitions.