How To Play ShadowDark Solo

Playing Arcane Library's flagship game solo style

This week I, like many others, got my Kickstarter backer materials from Arcane Library.

I was stoked, so rather than waiting to get ShadowDark back to my table (we are currently several sessions into a Black Sword Hack campaign, which has been tons of fun - more on that later), I decided to use the concepts from my no-prep Shadowdark session (READ IT HERE) to play solo.

I love solo gaming, as it gives me ideas for sketches and drawings, and I’ve started integrating that aspect in a lot more. I like to play analog, to unplug from all the devices and get a chance to just relax and play out a little story at my own speed.

First, I planned to use the basic oracle I like:

1d6, 1-3 no, 4-6 yes, with 1 and 6 being “extremes.” Roll two dice and take the highest if it’s “likely” and do the opposite if it's “unlikely.” Suuuuper simple and keeps things fast.

I use the oracle constantly, so I hate having to keep consulting charts or tables for that, and this keeps things moving fast.

This time, I flipped through some art for inspiration, found a cool Frazetta sketch, and started coming up with an idea for my character and who he might be.

Looking at fantasy art is a great way to get your mind jumpstarted into an adventure or solo campaign. It helps pre-determine the feel of things and I find it’s very useful for getting my imagination “locked in” on the setting so I can already start to feel immersed in my little world.

From here, I sketched a tiny area and took a few notes, just letting the ideas flow - I don’t worry about this as I can always change things later or adjust to fit where the story is going. Just a city, a few places around it, and a few basic ideas: Dwarves and Elves would have a very dark and mythological feel, and the world would be a warlike place where human culture felt like a kind of very primitive medieval chivalric type thing.

I’ve been reading a lot of Dunsany and Tolkien, so the names and places kind of had that feel from the beginning.

Remember - it’s just a solo game, so you don’t have to feel bad about stealing stuff or if this name or that one was in someone’s book somewhere. It’s ok! Steal away! I find the more I slow down on ideas or rules or mechanics, the more likely I am to get distracted, so I tend to move forward quickly and only slow down when I’m thinking about the story or setting…when I usually will draw a person, place or thing in my notebook.

Armed with some “vibe,” I rolled my character.

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I like to do a single character, and then get my companions/NPCs from the fiction as the story unfolds, so I just rolled up this fellow and drew him off the Frazetta sketch I liked.

(Check out the character sheet and the other sketches and notes at the end of this post)

Aiwar has some pretty good stats (also ShadowDark lets humans get an extra talent at first level, so my stats were really good from the get go.), and I decided on max HP at first level for survivability. I selected a few mods from the “modes of play” section, knowing this wasn’t going to be a ton of dungeon crawling and that most XP was going to come from defeating enemies.

That’s my kinda game!

I added a “broken table” house rule - although later forgot about it in-game, as you’ll see if you look at my sketches and notes, but that’s ok, I don’t worry about getting everything “right,” and it all worked out for Aiwar anyways. Kind of. 

Even this is a bit more prep than is really “necessary.”

With ShadowDark, you’ve got tables for “What Happens?” as well as excellent encounter and point of interest tables for hexcrawling and so on, so you really can absolutely just throw a character together and start cracking out on a hexcrawl and see what happens.

If you have the Cursed Scroll zines that came with the backer kit, you could also easily use those as self-contained crawls, randomizing things with the oracle and encounter tables.

Here, I’ll break down my specific play style a little for this adventure, which might not be for everyone, but works well for me.

Like I said, I like analog. I try to keep all my adventures in one place, in this case a hard cover Moleskine artist sketchbook, that also has a folder in the back for “loose”pages and notes and so on.

I keep bullet style notes. At the beginning of this one I was kind of using an old world kind of dialogue but realized quickly that would get annoying for me, so I abandoned it haha. But it did work to get me into the feel of things, and in my head, the characters all talked this way with “thees” and “thous.”

If you’re not an artist, I think it's more than ok to steal for your solo games. Find stuff that looks like how you want your characters and NPCs to look. Trace or Print. Cut. Glue.

This may not be how everyone feels, but I think keeping a physical record of your adventures with images and maps and such in it adds an immense amount of immersion, connection and so on to your game and keeps it “real,” and keeps me coming back to it. When its only in an app, I don’t feel anchored to it. Opening a sketchbook and paging through the events of last session, the scraps of map, the scribbles of the rooftops of a village, or the drawing of a sword I plundered from the troll-kings just *feels* so damn good.

Highly recommended.

You don’t have to go crazy - an image here or there. A scrap of map. A village on the horizon. A rune or scroll. These things are plenty, and actively build out the lore of your game.

Which is another thing: lore can happen as it happens, and I do it as brief “notes” within gameplay as needed, as you can see with my “Concerning Goblinkind” block on one of the pages.

For your actual gameplay, it is also highly enjoyable to remember: you don’t have to share the time with anyone. This is about your character and what you want to do and think is cool - don’t let anything stop you from telling the story you want to try to tell (except the dice, sometimes!).

I won’t fudge dice rolls, because what’s the point of dice if you’re going to twist things to how you wanted, just write a book - but I also won’t limit what I want to do.

In this adventure, I decided I wanted to challenge the hobgoblin champion to a duel out on the bridge while both sides watched - in a normal game of DnD or whatever, I probably wouldn’t, based on level and also not wanting to hog the spotlight. Solo? Hell yes, go for it.

It wound up being an epic battle, and I almost died after a late round critical hit, but I pulled things off and turned the tide of the fight for Twin Waters!!! Heroic stuff!

Most things can be determined with the oracle, or rolling on a table from the core rules if you get stuck. Without a DM, you do have to put in a little work to decide “what is it that want to explore or see about next?”

A map is infinitely helpful in this regard - either one you just cribbed from somewhere or a hexmap you fill in with the ShadowDark core rules as you explore.

At the beginning of my game I wrote: “Aiwar considers the map of the area.” Then I did just that. Where did I want Aiwar to go? Well, south of town into the goblin hills seemed like fun, so I did.

It was the oracle, and going where the dice led that created the story.

Are the orogs going to the city of Ygg? No. Are they going to the ruins of Tarvannion? No. Are they going east towards the Inn? Yes.

Ok. Let’s see what happens.

Got to the Inn. Are the bandits planning to attack the Inn? No. Are they part of a force troubling towns to the East? A 6 - yes, very much so, and they’re planning on attacking tomorrow, etc.

Any time you’re unsure of what to do, you can look at the area map, just like a video game and think - I want to go here. Use encounters for your journey from the core rules, and then generate the location using the other tables and the oracle.

Another thing that’s worth doing is every time I encounter people or places or things, I ask the oracle, does this have anything to do with this other people, place or thing?

This creates connections that wind up helping stories emerge, and it’s how the majority of my narrative winds up filled in.

In this game, the treasure rolls indicated another critical story point - the armor I looted from the bandit camp and then rolled for told me that my NPC ally will betray me at some point. Whoa! The plot sickens!

Ultimately, there are enough tools in the ShadowDark core rules (and if you got the zines, there’s a ton more) to run satisfying solo games for a good long while.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask - I’ve included all 12 pages of notes and sketches from my week of short sessions for you to peruse and hopefully enjoy!

Next two images are in reverse order, sorry!