In May 2025 we presented the all-new Menagerie Shadowdark Bundle featuring third-party adventures from Menagerie Press for The Arcane Library‘s old-school FRPG, Shadowdark. (All the adventures in this offer require the Shadowdark rulebook. You can download a free Shadowdark Quickstart Set from DriveThruRPG.)
Funded in a record-shattering (US$1.36M!) February 2023 Kickstarter campaign, Kelsey Dionne’s Shadowdark RPG is what old-school fantasy gaming would look like after an overhaul based on 50 years of innovation. Shadowdark plays fast and deadly in the Old School Revival manner: You roll six 3D6 ability scores in order, pick one of four classes, take your sword and pittance of hit points, and start down the tunnel. No crafting a character build for maximal rules efficiency – just making choices at the table, angling to stay alive through rulings, not rules.
But also – and here we see wherefore a $1,365,923 Kickstarter – also, Shadowdark replaces TSR-era cruft (weapon speeds, saving throws, etc.) with elegant modern mechanics: a coherent d20 task system, 5E’s advantage and disadvantage, abstract distance categories, luck tokens, spellcasting success checks, slot-based inventory, and then there’s the torches. If you know anything about Shadowdark, you know a torch lasts one hour of real time, tracked with an app or kitchen timer. (At Sly Flourish, Mike Shea’s house-rule duration is one hour minus D12 minutes.) In the dark, you can’t see, but monsters can. In the dark, you roll at disadvantage, but monsters don’t. In the dark, you die fast. Actually you die fast anywhere, because you won’t see decent hit points until level 5 or 6.
If you’re used to 5E-style superheroics, is this, you know, fun? Shadowdark is accessible, polished, clever, intense, pure, and scary. Your character’s vulnerability makes every moment tense, every brush with death exciting. After a 30-session campaign, Sly Flourish’s Mike Shea wrote, “If one wants to recapture the way D&D felt – or we imagine it felt, back in the ’80s – Shadowdark is an awesome RPG. I highly recommend it.”
Another awesome aspect of Shadowdark is its generous Shadowdark Third-Party License. Many publishers have started supporting the game with their own adventures, none more enthusiastically than Menagerie Press. Having produced nearly a hundred titles since 2013 for 5E, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Savage Worlds (and for his own 2D6-based FRPG in progress, Westlands), Menagerie’s William Murakami-Brundage has spent the last two years diligently bringing forth dozens of varied Shadowdark dungeon crawls, from ten-page one-shots to the sprawling Pits of Brund. Though each stands alone, these adventures draw on recurrent gods and story elements such as weirdstone, crystallized magic that enhances spellcasting but causes sickness and deformity.
This all-new Menagerie Shadowdark Bundle presented six large Menagerie titles, nearly four dozen dungeon crawls, for less than the cost of a knapsack full of one-hour torches. The titles in our Shadowdark Menagerie (retail value $85) were The Pits of Brund, Celtic Shadows, Rats of Ul-Gol, Ruins of Ardust, Woeful Barrows and Other Places, and Secret of Southwick.
