The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Let's Build a Character with Shadowdark
Wed, 28 Aug 2024
Mike builds a 1st level character in the Shadowdark RPG. Shadowdark RPG Campaign Notebook available to Sly Flourish patrons Visit the Sly Flourish Blog Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books Shadowdark RPG
Hey friends, it's your pal Mike Shea from Sly Flourish. Today we are going to do our fourth character build for 5e systems. I'm kind of counting Shadow Dark as sort of a 5e system, but really I just want to talk about building and show what it's like to build a character in Shadow Dark as a juxtaposition among the other three 5e variants.
I have done three previous videos for building characters, including the 2024 D&D Player's Handbook, Level Up Advanced 5e from EN World Publishing, and Tales of the Valiant. and today we're going to show what it takes to build a character using shadow dark If you like this show, please check out the City of Arches Kickstarter. The City of Arches is a high-fantasy city sourcebook for lazy DMs.
You can find a link to it in the show notes below. If you want to learn more about what it's like and what it is, there is a 42-page sample that you can download for free off the Kickstarters. No reason you shouldn't do so. It includes an introduction scenario, it includes a free adventure, and it shows you what this awesome book is going to be like. I'm super excited about the City of Arches.
I've been working on it for two years. It's a fantastic...
compressed campaign setting that you can drop into your own homebrew world or any published setting that you've got it's fully compatible with 5e but also compatible with pretty much any fantasy rpg including shadow dark so i hope you will check it out it's a really really fun setting and again you can find the link to that in the show notes below
So each of the other character build videos that I have done took about an hour. Now that was a chatty hour, right? That wasn't like, I wasn't working real hard. I don't think it takes a full hour to build a character using any of those systems. But one thing I can be sure to tell you is it is not going to take an hour to build a character in Shadow Dark.
I actually think that that is sort of a critical feature to the lethality of Shadow Dark and maybe to OSR games in general. That one of the reasons why OSR games can get away with murdering characters as often as they do is because it doesn't take very much to make a character in the first place.
I think if you were to try to play those other 5e variants as deadly as Shadow Dark, you would just spend all of your time making characters and probably people wouldn't really enjoy that. As an example, I have a player who plays both in my Sunday game and my Wednesday game.
In my Sunday game, he has probably gone through about seven different character deaths because we've been playing Shadow Dark. Most recently, he just had a fourth edition, a level up advanced 5e character killed. And it's going to take him like an hour to build a new replacement character, right?
He's going to have to take time outside of the game in order to build a new character for the fact that his character got killed. In Shadow Dark, we just joke that, you know, hey, do you have printer and paper in the printer? Because I'm going to have to hit shadowdarklings.net and whip up a character in a few seconds.
Shadow Darklings, by the way, is their online character builder, but we're not going to use Shadow Darklings. We're actually going to do it the old way. We're going to roll dice and stuff like that.
But I think it's really critical that the speed that it takes to build a character in Shadow Dark is so much faster that it lends itself to a style of gameplay where your character is actually kind of temporary.
We joke that at early levels, you need to treat characters like you'd normally treat hit points, that you're going to be rotating through characters a lot because they have so few hit points they're going to die all the time. But we're going to get started and make a character right now. So we've got our... You can download a form-fillable Shadow Dark character sheet from Arcane Library.
I went and looked it up and downloaded it. I'll put a link in the show notes for that. We have the introduction of what Shadow Dark is. We have all of this stuff. And we are going to... We have characters. So there are four kinds of characters. This has description of what you knew. Name, ancestry, class, level...
experience alignment deity title background stats hit points armor class attacks talents spells and gear first level characters when you begin with a first level character starts with stats page 15 ancestry 16 choice of class 18 through 24 one class talent role hit points equal to one role of their class talent hit points plus constitution modifier background choice of alignment title and starting gear
So that is the list. Now, this list is actually kind of similar to the list you would find in one of the larger 5Es. It's just each of these is much faster to do. So to determine your stat rolls, roll 3D6 in order. I've got my 3D6. In order, and you go down the line. I assume it's Strength Dex Con. Yeah, Strength Dex Con, Int, Wiz, Charisma. First one is Strength is 443. That's 811 for Strength.
Dexterity is six and five, 11 for dexterity. And I'm just going to do a plus zero. Con. Ooh, I am very con. 16 con. I might survive. And that's a plus three. Intelligence is a six. I am not very bright. And a six is a minus two. Wisdom is 443 again. That's an 11, wisdom. Okay, not bad. Charisma is 11. So I'm healthy and I'm not very bright. And that's where that goes. So I've got my stats.
So we're already done with that. Then ancestry, there are, let's see, dwarf, goblin, elf, half-orc, halfling, and human. There are six. So that's pretty straightforward. So I'm going to roll to see, and I roll a six. I am a human. I get common. So let's see.
I will put in my talents and spells area one additional common language on page 32 and ambitious one additional talent role at first level and plus one language. Okay, so now our classes, and there's fighter, priest, thief, and wizard. I could probably get away with any of them except wizard. So I'm going to roll randomly to determine my class between fighter, priest, and rogue.
One, two for fighter, three, four for priest, five, six for rogue. I'm a fighter. All right. Nice and straightforward. Cool. Level is one. Experience is zero. And I roll a talent. So let's see. Let me make sure I'm following the rules here. Let's go back to our ancestry. One class talent roll, but actually I get two because I'm a human. Fighter talent. Bang. I rolled a three.
A plus one to melee and plus one to melee and ranged attacks. And then I roll again. And that was a seven. Plus two to strength, dex, or con. I'm a fighter, so I'm gonna stick that in strength. Thank you very much. That gives me plus one. Yay. I'm gonna just mark it as now. Let's go back to our list again. Hit points equal to one roll of the class's hit point die plus con modifier.
This can't go wrong. Eight. Oh, this is important. Oh, roll high. Am I gonna survive? I get the plus three, which is nice. Eight. Holy cow. I am the healthiest Shadow Dark character ever with an 11 of crazy 11 hit points at first level. Man, this is awesome. Oh, let's see. So I didn't, I didn't, I picked my talents. Weapons are all weapons. So I can say all weapons and armor and shields.
I add my con modifier to gear slots. So my gear slots are normally 13, but I also get an additional three. So I get 16. I can carry. I'm a pack mule. I can carry. Weapon mastery. Choose one type of weapon. I'll see what weapons I get when it comes to gear before I choose a weapon. And grit. Choose strength or dexterity.
Advantage on checks of that type to overcome an opposing force, such as kicking open a stuck door or slipping free. Grit. I'll just say grit. it's cleaning doing some cleanup here cool all right so let's go back to our list of things that we've done so i've got hit points background page 26. one page for backgrounds you just roll and that's what you get i am an eight a jeweler that's funny
I can easily appraise value and authenticity. That's cool. All right. Got my background. No feats, no ability score modifiers. You just, you just pick a background and you get a little bit of text. So the alignment, oh, that's linked page 27, one, two. So let's see, I'm going to pick a God and that will determine my alignment, I think. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
So I will roll an eight. I got a one. Who's the first god? St. Taragnus. And I'm lawful. Cool. Title. I am lawful and I'm level one. So I'm a squire. Cool. Starting gear. Level zero characters start with 1D4 of the following. First level characters start with 2D6 times five gold to buy gear. I get six times five is 30 gold. So I will put 30 gold in here and I can buy some stuff.
So what am I gonna buy? So I cannot buy chain mail, but I can buy leather armor. So we'll say leather armor. I'm gonna buy a shield. And so that is already 20 gold. Oh my God, that's too expensive. I don't think I can, I'm not sure I can afford a shield. Weapons, so a bastard sword would be great. It's heavier. It's a two slot weapon, but I can wield it with two hands.
I think I'm going to do that. We're going to have a bastard sword and that's going to cost me 10 gold. And that's a two slaughter. That's okay. And that's going to be my specialty. I think that was under class. Well, I'll come back to that because we're already in the gear section. Always have a ranged weapon. So I'm going to have three javelins.
I presume a javelin takes up a slot, but that's okay. So let's see, leather armor, I'm down to 10 gold and then 8.5 gold because I bought three javelins, but that's good enough for weapons and stuff. Crawling kit costs seven gold and uses seven gear slots. I think we're going to do that. So that's seven gold. So then I have one and a half gold left. And that's backpack. Oops. Iron spikes.
Grappling hook. Grappling hook. Rope. 63. And I know that I can hold a few more things, but that gives me one and a half gold. Is there any other basic gear that I wanna carry? Torches, man. Gotta have torches. So I'm gonna have three torches. And then I'm gonna buy a final ration. No, three torches. I'm going to do two torches.
I'm going to assume my friends and then a final ration because I only have, oh, that's three. Okay. So I already have three rations. So I'll do a third torch and that is, then I'm at zero gold. I have no, I have no money at all. I've blown everything. And so now we figure out our attacks. Now, if I recall, when I went back to the fighter, the fighter had a specialty, weapon mastery.
And I'm going to be a weapon master bastard sword. So plus one. So my bastard sword attack is... is going to be plus one for strength, plus one because of my talent. And so it's plus three to hit, I think, for 1d10, because I'm not using a shield. And then I get to add that one. So 1d10 plus one. And the javelin is plus one. And the javelin is for how much? I think it's probably d6? d4, light.
And that's a flat d4. Armor class. I am wearing leather, right? I chose leather armor. That's 11 plus my dex mod, which is zero. So I have an AC of 11. That hurts. But hey, it could be worse, I guess. I wonder if I'm carrying a shield. The shield is plus two. So I'd be better off with no armor and a shield. I bet you I can go jack a dude and get a shield though.
So we're going to skip that because I like the D10. I don't know. That might matter. I'm going to switch out my leather armor for a shield and do a D8 plus one. And that way my armor class is a little bit better. All right. And then we have character names. I'm a human. I'm going to roll a D20. Four. My name is Natius. Natius the Brave. And there is my Shadow Dark character.
So I don't know how long that took. It was recording time was 18 minutes, but that was a slow 18 minutes. I bet you if you sat down and actually built a character, it does not take you 20 minutes to build a character. I bet you can do it in an even shorter amount of time. And if you're using Shadow Darklings, you can randomly roll one really, really quickly.
But obviously significantly faster to build a first level Shadow Dark character than it is to build a character in traditional 5e characters. And this looks a lot of fun, right? Like, so one thing is like, oh, is it really, is it boring? Like, you know, no, not really. I'll tell you, I got a group of,
Full of DMs who are very experienced with not just 5e, but pretty much every version of D&D, at least back to second edition. I bet you... Let me think. Now... Okay. There's one person who I think started with 5e. I'm pretty sure. But I think everybody else has had multiple versions of D&D under their belt. And nobody's bored. You know? Because you get to do stuff as your character.
It's really good. So... That is how to build a character in Shadow Dark, build a first level character in Shadow Dark. I hope you enjoyed this show. If you did and you want to support the work that I do, please consider checking out the City of Arches sourcebook. The link is down in the show notes.
High fantasy city sourcebook built for lazy DMs intended for you to be able to drop it right into your campaign. 42 page free sample that you can look at and actually play out at your table. Really, really cool stuff. I hope you enjoyed the show. Thank you so much. Have a great day and get out there and play an RPG.