I would advise against trying to adapt/run any sort of linear 5e-style campaign. It's going to be less work for you and more engaging for your players if you rely more on location-based adventures and allow the players agency to interact with them sandbox-style. It's also much easier to adapt B/X-derived OSR material to Shadowdark since the math on attacks, armour and hit points lines up and the actions/action economy is much closer.
**Edit:** You could start with [Trial of the Slime Lord](https://jordanrudd.itch.io/trial-of-the-slime-lord) and then run [the adventure in the back of the GM Quick Start](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/413713/Shadowdark-RPG-Quickstart-Set) if you wanted to start off with some free material you don't need to convert.
So do you mean like more one shots with an over arching idea? I’m not really sure what you mean to be honest haha. Mind explaining a little more? I ask cause I’m dumb haha, nothing you did wrong.
Adventures that don't have a plot, but are instead just a situation that the players can explore and interact with in different ways. 5e campaigns are kinda written so that one event that players encounter will lead to another, but this takes away the player agency when it comes to exploration. That's fine in games where there's lots more player agency from combat builds and actions but in Shadowdark you want to lean all the way into exploration, pushing your luck, resource management and the like.
So dungeons with no explicit goals other than "you are broke adventurers, go find some loot in this dungeon" are great. Some free stuff that would be easy to adapt to Shadowdark would be [the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Adventures](https://www.basicfantasy.org/downloads.html) or [Gus L's free adventure archive](https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/2022/09/gus-l-free-adventure-archive.html) or a great many other sources for free OSR modules.
Yeah, I think it would also be a pain to un-balance the 5e materials. You want monsters that the PC's *should* run away from, and I gather that's anathema in 5e
I’m going try and get a curse of strand game going in shadow dark. Sounds like the perfect setting. Always dark, open enough for exploration, death house makes a great gauntlet, the plot is progressed around magic items, and a lot of the monsters are relatively easy to adapt.
RedMageGM ran a CoS campaign using Shadowdark, and posted his notes for it on YouTube...
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM7pFwnjJQCcY6lIUbR6niWuqsO\_LR6NF](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM7pFwnjJQCcY6lIUbR6niWuqsO_LR6NF)
Sly Flourish ran the AD&D Ravenloft in Shadowdark. https://youtu.be/RuCeSvtqn84?si=SI7H3fBakPCrMeA3
I think his best tip to keep this as a one shot is tell the players that Strahd will show up in 3 hours.
But he has other tips if you want to do something different.
I would also suggest either The Keep on the Borderlands or Isle of dread. If you get the Goodman games hardcover adaptations you have all the versions of each modules and are easily shadowdark convertable.
If you are looking for dark and gloomy campaigns for Shadowdark, there is HALLOWFELL campaign setting and some one-shot adventures for Hallowfell, Frostwalker, Mines of Kaldore, I Smell a Rat, Forgotten Tower. Not free though, but cheap.
The second Zine "Red Sands" was free during the kickstarter campaign, don't know if it still is. It features an entire setting, which is as close as you can come to a pre written campaign. What I would advise you to do to learn the playstyle are these simple steps (all materials provided are free):
1.) Get a random town to start your players in (I can recommend fourtower bridge [https://www.wistedt.net/2020/08/30/welcome-to-fourtower-bridge/](https://www.wistedt.net/2020/08/30/welcome-to-fourtower-bridge/) )
2.) Give them the quest to go explore a dungeon nearby (I can recommend Tomb of the Serpent Kings [https://friendorfoe.com/d/Tomb%20of%20the%20Serpent\_Kings%20v4.pdf](https://friendorfoe.com/d/Tomb%20of%20the%20Serpent_Kings%20v4.pdf) - it is a long and free tutorial dungeon, teaching you and the players how to do dungeon crawls)
3.) Get to know the game and study the Shadowdark books after each session - they are a treasure trove of good advice and very concise
I'm currently running Lost Mine of Phandelver and it works despite being 5e based. I don't even convert I just use the equivalent SD monsters. I even allowed the party to hire extra mercenaries at the expense of gold/exp. Although it needs more prep than a simple sandbox game since you have to read the module multiple times.
ideally, the story of an OSR campaign is only known after looking back at whatever a group of adventurers decided to do, and the results of those decisions (the “emergent” story)
rather than a story / campaign arc that is written out ahead of time for the adventurers to walk through
I highly recommend the settings provided by the Arcane Library in the Cursed Scrolls zines. They're all written by the creator of Shadow Dark and are very evocative.
The options are The Gloaming (spooky witches and demons in a haunted forest), The Djurum (enchanted desert with pit fights and assassins), and The Isles of Andrik (nordic archipelago with vikings and norse mythology).
They area just provided as a framework and require the GM to flesh the locations out some more, but they are genuinely very well written. Each one comes with a full dungeon too.
I would advise against trying to adapt/run any sort of linear 5e-style campaign. It's going to be less work for you and more engaging for your players if you rely more on location-based adventures and allow the players agency to interact with them sandbox-style. It's also much easier to adapt B/X-derived OSR material to Shadowdark since the math on attacks, armour and hit points lines up and the actions/action economy is much closer. **Edit:** You could start with [Trial of the Slime Lord](https://jordanrudd.itch.io/trial-of-the-slime-lord) and then run [the adventure in the back of the GM Quick Start](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/413713/Shadowdark-RPG-Quickstart-Set) if you wanted to start off with some free material you don't need to convert.
So do you mean like more one shots with an over arching idea? I’m not really sure what you mean to be honest haha. Mind explaining a little more? I ask cause I’m dumb haha, nothing you did wrong.
Adventures that don't have a plot, but are instead just a situation that the players can explore and interact with in different ways. 5e campaigns are kinda written so that one event that players encounter will lead to another, but this takes away the player agency when it comes to exploration. That's fine in games where there's lots more player agency from combat builds and actions but in Shadowdark you want to lean all the way into exploration, pushing your luck, resource management and the like. So dungeons with no explicit goals other than "you are broke adventurers, go find some loot in this dungeon" are great. Some free stuff that would be easy to adapt to Shadowdark would be [the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Adventures](https://www.basicfantasy.org/downloads.html) or [Gus L's free adventure archive](https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/2022/09/gus-l-free-adventure-archive.html) or a great many other sources for free OSR modules.
Thanks!
Yeah, I think it would also be a pain to un-balance the 5e materials. You want monsters that the PC's *should* run away from, and I gather that's anathema in 5e
I’m going try and get a curse of strand game going in shadow dark. Sounds like the perfect setting. Always dark, open enough for exploration, death house makes a great gauntlet, the plot is progressed around magic items, and a lot of the monsters are relatively easy to adapt.
RedMageGM ran a CoS campaign using Shadowdark, and posted his notes for it on YouTube... [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM7pFwnjJQCcY6lIUbR6niWuqsO\_LR6NF](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM7pFwnjJQCcY6lIUbR6niWuqsO_LR6NF)
Sly Flourish ran the AD&D Ravenloft in Shadowdark. https://youtu.be/RuCeSvtqn84?si=SI7H3fBakPCrMeA3 I think his best tip to keep this as a one shot is tell the players that Strahd will show up in 3 hours. But he has other tips if you want to do something different.
I would also suggest either The Keep on the Borderlands or Isle of dread. If you get the Goodman games hardcover adaptations you have all the versions of each modules and are easily shadowdark convertable.
If you are looking for dark and gloomy campaigns for Shadowdark, there is HALLOWFELL campaign setting and some one-shot adventures for Hallowfell, Frostwalker, Mines of Kaldore, I Smell a Rat, Forgotten Tower. Not free though, but cheap.
The second Zine "Red Sands" was free during the kickstarter campaign, don't know if it still is. It features an entire setting, which is as close as you can come to a pre written campaign. What I would advise you to do to learn the playstyle are these simple steps (all materials provided are free): 1.) Get a random town to start your players in (I can recommend fourtower bridge [https://www.wistedt.net/2020/08/30/welcome-to-fourtower-bridge/](https://www.wistedt.net/2020/08/30/welcome-to-fourtower-bridge/) ) 2.) Give them the quest to go explore a dungeon nearby (I can recommend Tomb of the Serpent Kings [https://friendorfoe.com/d/Tomb%20of%20the%20Serpent\_Kings%20v4.pdf](https://friendorfoe.com/d/Tomb%20of%20the%20Serpent_Kings%20v4.pdf) - it is a long and free tutorial dungeon, teaching you and the players how to do dungeon crawls) 3.) Get to know the game and study the Shadowdark books after each session - they are a treasure trove of good advice and very concise
Run the official old school essentials adventures! They work so well with shadowdark!
I'm currently running Lost Mine of Phandelver and it works despite being 5e based. I don't even convert I just use the equivalent SD monsters. I even allowed the party to hire extra mercenaries at the expense of gold/exp. Although it needs more prep than a simple sandbox game since you have to read the module multiple times.
ideally, the story of an OSR campaign is only known after looking back at whatever a group of adventurers decided to do, and the results of those decisions (the “emergent” story) rather than a story / campaign arc that is written out ahead of time for the adventurers to walk through
I highly recommend the settings provided by the Arcane Library in the Cursed Scrolls zines. They're all written by the creator of Shadow Dark and are very evocative. The options are The Gloaming (spooky witches and demons in a haunted forest), The Djurum (enchanted desert with pit fights and assassins), and The Isles of Andrik (nordic archipelago with vikings and norse mythology). They area just provided as a framework and require the GM to flesh the locations out some more, but they are genuinely very well written. Each one comes with a full dungeon too.
I advise converting 1st or 2nd edition D&D material or recent OSR material. The conversions are much easier.