Five Mini-Adventures – PDF (Shadowdark RPG) by The Arcane Library

Seth Stauffer

The OSR movement trudges ever onward, and mixed in the fray is the game, Shadowdark, from The Arcane Library. So many great TTRPGs are at their core, centred around adventuring, and more specifically, exploring unknown places. More specifically, no role-playing game is complete without a dungeon or two. The mind behind The Arcane Library, Kelsey Dionne, has made available for purchase a collection of dungeons ready for adventurers seeking to test themselves.

There are five dungeons in this bundle.  Each dungeon is intended for a particular PC level, ranging from three to six, and contains a fully loaded map, complete with foes and treasure. This product is only ten pages long. Each dungeon is two informative pages, and there are no appendices or anything like that—simple, efficient black-and-white design with a focus on use. All that’s missing are the player characters’ corpses. I jest, mostly. 

One thing that is missing is a raison d’d’être for the dungeons. The bundle is a collection of encounter spaces, not adventures.  For example, aside from the treasure, what quest rewards or objectives are fulfilled after surviving these places? Who directs PCs towards these sites, and why?

Whoever is behind the screen will need to tie these into their game session(s). If the contents of the bundle were separated from a larger campaign to play them individually, that isn’t immediately clear either. There is booty to be had, but no larger goal or storyline is apparent.The Arcane Library has a very affordable set of perilous dungeons for playing Shadowdark. However, because it’s an OSR product, it’s simple to reuse for other game systems with very little prep. Whatever work the GM needs to place these sites into their gaming sessions should be easy. These dungeons are a handy resource to have on hand when adventuring is required, planned or not, and are helpful for GMs short on time.