Welcome to Day 13 of the RPGaDAY 2025 Challenge and today we are looking into ‘Darkness’. Is that a pun? Was it a good one? Yea, let’s move onto the gaming instead of the joking.
At the last SaltCON that I attended, I had the opportunity to play a one-shot of Shadowdark. It’s a D20 clone, but like most clones, there is a twist of some sort to make their system different. Well the difference was darkness. I’m not certain it is Rules-As-Written, but the GM was very strict about our light source. He utilized an hourglass that was big enough to last one hour. He stated that once that expired, so did the torch or lantern.
The player that was caring the torch, had the hourglass in front of them. But others could see it. We also had to ration our torches and not split the party (it would have required us to use one of the limited torches). Even the fantasy RPG races that have some sort of low-light/darkvision in other systems, did not have them here. The monsters had them, but none of the PC races had that ability. And if we were in darkness, there were major disadvantages to our dice rolls.
This use of the hourglass and the threat of darkness really added another dimension to the one-shot. The convention session was also run in a level-0 funnel like the one I had experienced in Dungeon Crawl Classics. So, I don’t know how this darkness aspect would have affected a long term campaign. I’d be curious to know if anyone has run a Shadowdark campaign and how it went.
Could a GM port this part of the Shadowdark system into their own game of Basic Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC or Castles and Crusades? I’m fairly certain it could be done so with little difficulty. The players would need to be informed of this change before it is implemented with the common use of darkvision. If I wasn’t on a time crunch, I’d probably look up the different D20 and non-D20 clones and see how many races have this ability. But that may be a blog post for another day.
Have you played or ran a game with a strict light source policy? How did it go? This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.
