The Western Reaches, the first campaign supplement for the Shadowdark RPG, has already raised over $1.2 million in its first day on Kickstarter. It’s a clear sign that the audience for games and adventures inspired by the earliest editions of Dungeons and Dragons is alive and kicking.
Shadowdark is an Old School Renaissance game, a modern game inspired by the systems and atmosphere of the first versions of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s not the only OSR game, but it’s certainly one of the most successful, striking a good balance of ease of play and thematic depth.
Winning four gold Ennies in 2024 did not hurt. Perhaps most importantly for standing out in the market, it just looks cool. Sadly, we’ve been too busy with the latest DnD edition to give Shadowdark a review, but YouTuber The DM Lair has a comprehensive overview explaining why he finds it so compelling, which you can watch below.
Shadowdark’s new Western Reaches Kickstarter is raising funds for a variety of products, including three supplement zines, a Player’s Guide and DM’s Guide for the Western Reaches setting, and a DM screen.
We’ve got to talk about the aesthetics first. The art is consciously old-fashioned, from the pen and ink linework to the relatively simple characters. In actual DnD books of the ‘70s and ‘80s this kind of art reflected budget limits. Here it’s a minimalist aesthetic, rendered with blacker ink and whiter paper than TSR could have dreamed of back in the day. It’s framed by bold and legible typesetting and graphic design.
That minimalist confidence carries through to the description of the setting guide. Rather than promising a specific story or mystery, or laying out the history of a place, the Kickstarter shouts out a bunch of calls to adventure.
As an example, adventurers in the Western Reaches can: “plunge into the cursed Gloaming Forest, searching for the mysterious knights who are said to stalk the demon-infested woods.” Or they could “capture a pirate ship off the coast of the Tal-Yool Jungle and sail it north, stopping to explore long-lost isles full of strange creatures and forgotten artifacts”.
Those could each be campaigns in their own right, but they’re just a couple of options from a big list. Now this does mean that the setting guide is, from a certain point of view, just a massive stack of partly connected content.
But the difference between a mess of unconnected encounters, and a buffet of adventures, is presentation. It’s not like players are going to stay on track – and Shadowdark is promising that, wherever they wander in the Western Reaches, they’ll find something fun.
The Player’s Guide adds 18 new DnD classes and eight DnD races, plus useful information for grounding characters in the setting. Instead of lore dumps, there are tables of secrets and backgrounds, gossip and everyday knowledge, and adventuring factions to join. It’s all easy for players to actually use during games, rather than required reading.
It promises adventure with no strings attached and no questions asked – no wonder it’s made a million in a day. The official DnD release schedule is also very light on releases at the moment, which gives fans more reason than ever to explore other games and publishers.
It also can’t hurt that there are opportunities to spend a lot of cash on this Kickstarter. The basic pledges are fairly priced for the books or ‘zines you’ll get, but there are a lot of shiny things to spend money on. At time of writing, over 700 people have already backed at the $229 tier, which comes with both books, DM screen, three zines, useful cards, a character sheet pad, mini dungeons, a cloth map, and PDFs.
For another great old school hex crawl, I’ve had a lot of fun running The Painted Wastelands. You can check out my positive first impressions in this article. Since writing that my players have gone absolutely feral in the psychedelic playground the module offers, and have begun developing several distinctive fantasy religions themed around pies and bricks. It’s a blast.
Source: Wargamer
