Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur

By Kelsey Dionne

The Arcane Library

Shadowdark level 1-3

Premise: Bad things happened when a cult completed the ritual to turn their leader into the Scarlet Minotaur, now you can go raid their citadel.

What do we get here?

 Contained with in the GM's quickstart for Shadowdark is this 13 page adventure that covers a dungeon with 27 keyed locations.

 Usability/formatting

 Much like the style of Necrotic Gnome published adventures this is an easy to follow adventure with everything laid out in short paragraphs that use bolding and bullet points to expand on initial descriptions. 

 There are plenty of things for players to interact with in the various rooms and some decent treasure to be had. Three factions inhabit the dungeon although you can only really interact with two of them, the Scarlet Minotaur is the third faction and he does not appear to be much for talking.

 The map for the adventure is decent with plenty of loops and secret doors. As with many adventures I would rather have had the map up front to help orientate myself before slogging through all the room keys.

 You can easily run this one straight out of the pdf and I think it gives you a decent idea of how the game plays.

 Portability

 Given Shadowdark is a b/x-ish type game you could easily drop this down in most other b/x-ish games and run it. The only issue you may have is some of the more 5E type elements such as ability checks might not translate directly. As to the lore of the adventure, it is pretty generic and will fit anywhere.

 Recommendation

 Not the most evocative adventure you will come across, it does a good job of telling a story through the clues you find in the dungeon and there is plenty of fun to be had with the various interactions, both NPC and rooms, along the way. You will have to come up with your own way to hook the characters in although the adventure does come with a rumour table to help with that. Included in the quickstart for the Shadowdark game this adventure is free so well worth checking out.

https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/pages/shadowdark

Thoughts on Shadowdark itself

 As I have you here I'll give you a quick reaction to the game itself.

 I would say this game is 80-90% B/X d&d with the remaining amount being a few imports from 5E such as advantage/disadvantage and ability checks. The rules are super streamlined and very might a lite rpg. Some of the fiddler elements of B/X are smoothed off to give a slick playing experience. I would say the game exists in the space between OSE and something like Maze Rats, a notch or two above Maze Rats in terms of complexity but just a easy to play.

 The game is firmly focused on dungeon crawling, there are not any wilderness or overland travelling rules so far. Only four classes come with the game and I would not expect to see many more, the lite nature of the rules seems to be more about exploring with in your class rather than having a bunch of different classes to explore different roles.

 Everything you need to get up and running is included in the quickstart. The GMs booklet has a nice selection of random tables to help you with things like traps and so on. Monster stat blocks are concise while managing to keep a nice been of variety and uniqueness in their abilities.

 There are one or two things I was slightly confused on how they work but I expect they will be cleared up by the time the game gets to release. The only thing I found really annoying was the way the spells are listed in the players booklet, all together in one alphabetical list regardless of level or class.

 So far Shadowdark does not do anything revolutionary but everything it does it does well in a streamlined and easy to use way. For shorter campaigns I think this will be a great game, not sure I'd want to run a huge campaign in it.