🌊 Brave the deep!

Sapphire Seas for Shadowdark RPG from Menagerie Press is now on Fantasy Grounds VTT.
Set sail for peril and plunder! ⚓

we’re looking for podcast guests

Do you run a cool home TTRPG campaign? Would you like to share it with the world? Are you able to make it to our studio in Seattle for an interview?

If so, you should get in touch with us! Either DM here, or email us at campaign.spotlight@gmail.com. We’re trying to showcase a broader range of home games, and that means I’m going to be posting in a lot of places looking for guests.

Printed and painted this guy for a campaign. He is one of many things on the encounter table for Cursed Scroll #2 “ Red Sands” STL file from Brite Miniatures. Printed on a Bambu A1 using a .02 nozzle. Painted using Army Painter Speed Paint

Mice of Legend - Omnibus Volume 1

I’ve had the very great pleasure to work with Alchemical Press and its owner Paul Hoeffer on the layout of a number of their products.

In particular, the Mice of Legend line which includes the Perils of Portal Lake campaign setting and adventures, in both OSRIC/1E/OSR and Shadowdark variants. Over on DriveThruRPG they also have OSE & 5E connversion guides. From the Alchemical Press…

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chester’s fucking dead so please welcome ANKHOV MOLIERE to the stage

🔥 AlchemicRaker brings the battle to life!

HellMarch Mass Combat is now on Fantasy Grounds VTT.
Lead your armies and march to victory! ⚔️🎲

Kelsey Dionne, creator of SHADOWDARK, looking at the death board of a game run by Professor DM from YouTube @wilwheatondungeon craft. … can’t explain the Wil link, but whatevhz

I have started listening to the latest campaign that the Glass Cannon Network is running, using the Shadowdark system. And I am really enjoying it. I didn’t know how much I was missing having a campaign without a clear goal in mind. No Adventure Path, no Big Bad, just a bunch of people struggling to survive in a hostile world. The fact that their driving goal is to make money, purely to be able to have a place to sleep and food to eat, is a really enjoyable story.

VOID CAT WHIP 🐈‍⬛

Shadowdark Magic Item
A whip of corded void cat tentacle, its shimmer causes the lash to fall where the eye swears it wasn’t.

• Bonus: +1 magic whip
• Benefit: Fleeting Displacement — You have advantage on your first attack roll against any creature.
• Properties: Finesse; Lash (near range, does not leave your grasp)

Crafted from the hide of a slain void cat (displacer beast), this weapon isn’t alive—but it remembers what it was. The leather was stripped, cured, braided, and bound through an hour-long ritual, leaving behind a lingering distortion that plays havoc with depth and timing.

This is one of my favorite kinds of magic items:
not a relic of a lost age, not a god-gift—
but something the players earned, built, and now have to live with.

Magic as craft. Monsters as materials.
The dungeon provides. The party decides what to make of it.

The Blood Knight — a Heretical Knight Class

I just finished locking in another homebrew class for my setting: the Blood Knight. This is my redesign of the Knight of Saint Ydris from Shadowdark’s Cursed Scroll 1.

Blood Knights are warriors who willingly accept a controlled vampiric curse in order to hunt undead, fiends, and forbidden cults. Their power comes from blood rites tied to an ancient act of sacrifice—one the world was forced to forget.

Those who take the oath are changed.

Blood Knights don’t draw strength from divine purity. Their power comes from discipline over corruption, channeling something monstrous without letting it rule them. They fight with honor—but that honor is constantly under strain.

They are not paladins.
They are not saints.
They are knights who chose damnation.

Mechanically, the class is a heavily armored frontline warrior with short bursts of vampiric power and limited blood magic. They hit hard, endure longer than they should, and flirt with the edge of transformation every time they unleash the curse.

In the world, Blood Knights belong to a secret order known as the Knights of the Bloodied Hand—a heretical group tolerated only because they destroy horrors others cannot face.

Player characters are not required to belong to the Order.

A PC Blood Knight might be:
– a former member who walked away
– a lone initiate made in desperation
– someone carrying the curse without permission

They exist outside the institution, not protected by it.

The Blood Knights exist because:

• some evils cannot be faced cleanly
• memory has been erased by force
• someone must bear the cost anyway

They aren’t holy.
They aren’t safe.
They are what hunts monsters when faith is no longer enough.

🩸🗡️🔥

🏹 “The difference between a threat and a disaster is often just vigilance.” 🏹

There’s something so satisfying about the “Ranger” archetype—the mottled cloaks, the double-knife sets (Saxe and Throwing!), and the silent movement through a forest.

I made this infographic for the King’s Rangers of Caliburn. They’re a formalized group of frontier scouts who answer only to the King. They spend five years as apprentices before they ever get their Silver Oak Leaf.

The Vibe:

• 🍂 Late autumn gatherings in secret clearings.
• 🖋️ Coded messages and carrier pigeons.
• 🐎 Legendary horses from Wensley Fief.
• ⚔️ Dual-blade combat and longbows.

If you’re a fan of Ranger’s Apprentice or just love the “protector of the wilds” trope, I’d love to hear what you think of this setup!

did some chargen for a shadowdark thing. i hate this guy so much i hope he dies

This is Iago Bane, my very first (and only, so far) Shadowdark character! I commissioned this drawing from HODAG RPG on bluesky and I couldn’t be happier with it 😎

Iago is a chaotic-aligned acolyte of Dominus who is not really cut out for the chaotic lifestyle. He gets queasy around torture, doesn’t like getting blood or mud on himself, and is really just in it because he saw what the “good” guys (judges, guardsmen, tax-collectors, executioners, etc) were doing to the downtrodden, and decided that being good was kind of a drag, so why not live for yourself, because no one else is going to help you but you!

So he left his life as an acolyte of Saint Terragnis and fell in with Dominus, a god whose goal is to get people transitioning to the afterlife to give in to their temptations and lose their way, mostly just because he’s a dick and it pleases him. As an acolyte of Dominus, Iago’s goal is to turn as many living souls as possible away from their own gods by giving in to temptation in this realm.

He has a Charisma score of 9, so you can guess how often he succeeds at this.

My dude just isn’t made to be totally evil. But he made his choices and he’s following through. 😔

Currently, Iago is fighting some cultists, but is thoroughly distracted by some books in a shelf that, in the right combination, will do…something! He’s determined to figure it out before the cultists capture or kill him. Which is pretty foolish, but he ain’t a smart man.

If you think this art is cool, please commission HODAG RPG on bluesky for your own!

and my shadowdark ttrpg character..she’s a priest of a wax based religion so she has many candles. inspired partly by those guys in the archives in dark souls 3 you know them

Day 1 of Dungeon26:

The Statue of Ilus, God of prophecy

Entering from the western peak, through heavy-set oaken doors, you find a long corridor with well worn cobblestone flooring. It’s walls are carved with reliefs of religious scenes, depicting travelers saved on the road by a benevolent stranger. At the end of the room stands a statue of the same cloaked figure, faceless, and carrying a copper bowl of water about 3 feet wide, filled with coins.

For my first week of Dungeon26, I’ve started with an entrance. I deliberated a bit over if I should start with Section B (The western peak enterence) or C (The eastern peak enterence) but for reasons I’ll get into, I went with option B.

I was kinda lacking for immediate inspiration: I know what I want to /get to/ with this dungeon, but how do you start? what’s at the enterance? so I rolled on a room theme generator from Knave 2E. My result: Prophecy.

This excited me - a lot went wrong with this place, as in most fantasy post-apocolyptic dungeons. what if someone predicted it?

The idea I’ve come to is that the followers of Ilus, the god of Prophecy, were the first inhabitants of The Chaos Peaks. They built their temple to seal some great danger from bellow. It’s an idea I want to carry on throughout this week of design.

So, what does the Statue actually do?

The idea is, travelers passing by would throw their gold into it’s bowl to get a blessing for good fortune on the road ahead. At the time, the magic was weaker, but since it’s coalesced for centuries without use, it now has a few prophecies to give directly to the players, if they’re generous enough to leave a coin.

So far, I have “Beware the deep running, mercurial elixer”, in reference to the Chaos Oil deeper in this dungeon - but I haven’t filled out the rest of the 1d6 table. The idea is I can fill it in as the dungeon goes along with relevant advice for more complex or dangerous rooms, assuming they remember getting it.

Day 0 of Dungeon26:

Since I’m starting out posting this challenge, I think it’s worth going over what the challenge actually is!

Back in 2023, Sean McCoy, creator of Mothership, proposed a challenge - draw 1 room a day of a megadungeon, optionally with a theme for each week, and each month a floor.

It blew up like crazy. I’ve seen at least like 4 published zines from it. Really Impressive stuff.

I only found out about it in late 23’ though. And in 24’ and then 25’, I completely forgot about it around new years. So late November this year, I decided to hard commit. I got myself a nice journal, nice stationary, grid paper and a calender insert. Hoping to invest enough in that I actually pull through and keep going for the whole year.

So, here’s what I have so far:

The Chaos Peaks - an ancient dwarven hold, built into a frigid mountaintop. Beside it, the ruins of an academy of alchemy, where they study the stars.

An idea I’ve wanted to explore in a dungeon for a while is messed up, chaotic effects of transmutation. Creatures with horrible, shifting elemental ailments. But I didn’t think I could commit a whole month to it. I’d considered making just a small dungeon to publish on itch, but never got round to it. But making it one of a number of overarching themes for a megadungeon, that excites me.

Some other ideas I want to explore with this dungeon are the classic ‘dug too deep’ dwarf tropes. My setting for OSR styled games has the forces of 'chaos’, in a raw, elemental sense, coming from the depths of the world. That’s why dungeons are often found going downwards, and get more dangerous the lower you are. In particular, in the lowest parts of the world, you can find Chaotic Oil - a fluid of shifting colour and state, which on contact transforms it’s environment. That’s something I’d really like to include in this adventure.

Anyway, to explain what this map is, I’ve written out the major connections between each of the 12 monthly areas. I kinda thought of it like a metroidvania map, since I recently finished Silksong. The goal is for the areas to connect in interesting ways such that each entrance and each route provides a different experience. As with anything, this is subject to change, but I think I like the current layout, particularly in how there’s so many rooms between each enterence, so leaving and trying both is a very valid strategy for careful adventurers.

Currently, I’ve not written anything mechanical into this project yet, but I intend to stat it and it’s treasure out for Shadowdark. Whilst I have some qualms with how it handles Treasure as XP, I do like the simplicity of the minimal XP points, and the base system in general has really appealed to me so far.

So, happy new year everyone! I’m wishing everyone with new years resolutions luck on the year ahead - may your projects be successful, but most of all, take care of yourself. Remember that these resolutions are for You first and foremost.

Oh you know… just Ivara at 19, burning some paper. Nbd (context under the cut)

Throughout the ages of 16 to 19, Ivara was subject to a few courtships, per her adoptive father’s word. She didn’t want this, because all of those she was set to court were young men, and Rosaire (adoptive father; a Baron on the Privy Council of the kingdom) is pointedly homophobic as are his fellow nobles.

So Ivara set to scheming, and taught herself how to forge handwriting. To dispose of her draft forgeries, she burnt them in the fireplace in her room. The letters she’d make were in the handwriting and voice of the men she was in courtship with, declining any further involvement (or something like that).

This bought her enough time to request specialized learning at a monestary, where she would stumble into her own faith and advance towards priesthood.

Played shadowdark for the first time today

• 1hp wizard walks into dungeon
• Pokes big pile of earth with stick
• It’s full of skeletons
• Runs back out of dungeon
• Dies in the doorway