Dank Dungeons' 5B and The Arcane Library's Shadowdark: A Comparison
Examining two titles attempting to attract D&D 5e players to an OSR mindset.
Edit: it is worth mentioning that I was given an advanced copy of B5 to take a look at/review. I backed Shadowdark at the physical tier on Kickstarter.
Update: I have thusly been corrected that the Shadowdark physical book is A5/digest-sized, not 8.5” x 11” as I incorrectly assumed. Added some updated thoughts as a result of this!
5B, by Lex Mandrake and Harald Maasen, is a B/X hybrid that seeks to apply OSR principles of play to a ruleset compatible with 5e D&D material. While rulesets that seek to bridge the gap - or at least the playerbase - between "the OSR" and 5e are of course nothing new, many suffer from a great deal of extraneous pages and bloat, a lack of overall focus and direction, and are ultimately failed attempts at making a project that appeals to everybody that instead result in a project that pleases largely nobody, leaving readers questioning whom, precisely, the book was made for. My read-through of Shadowdark (which I'm planning on expanding on, eventually) highlights many of these problems of unclear scope and focus and perhaps a misunderstanding of why 5e players play 5e and why OSR players play whatever OSR they feel particularly drawn towards.
Shadowdark here is the obvious comparison to 5B - both are aimed at attracting 5e players to OSR playstyles, both are released recently, both are small(ish) teams working under an OSR DIY aesthetic constraint. Of the two books, there are some obvious other similarities, but also many interesting differences.
The first and most obvious difference is the financials. Shadowdark raised a whopping $1,365,923 via Kickstarter. 5B was made, as I understand, for the cost of labor using public domain art. It is a testament to the production quality of the Dank Dungeons crew that if you put their work side-by-side with Shadowdark you have two books of what I will confidently say are of equal polish and quality.
The second-most obvious difference here is size. Shadowdark clocks in at a whopping 332 pages of digest-sized hardcover. Conversely, the 5B Player's Guide clocks in at 10 pages (including the cover), the Game Master's Guide at 7, and the Creatures & Treasure book at 16, meaning the entirety of this game is a grand total of 33 pages. Does Shadowdark have more content? Yes, of course. Does it need to have that much more content? Obviously not, as having read both books 5B says in 33 pages what Shadowdark says in 332.
A lot of game books - and OSRs aren't the only ones guilty of this - seem terrified of paragraphs and the written word of late, instead opting the nebulous concept of "gameability" whereby everything is in increasingly unuseable and borderline unreadable point-form, superfluous diagram, "helpfully" and inconsistently Titled Caps Keywords, font formatting, and my least favourite: short sentence (relevant info in parentheses). Using any one of these devices can be exceedingly helpful for readers to find the key information in a sentence or page but using any of them too frequently or all of them at once betrays a lack of trust and in many cases an outright contempt for the reader's ability to parse information.
Fortunately, neither 5B nor Shadowdark do this to an excessive degree (although I find Shadowdark's use of bolded keywords and overuse of headings/subheadings gets a little cute at times). Also different but interestingly similar with both books is the layout: both Shadowdark and 5B make use of two column pages to relay information. As mentioned, Shadowdark uses - overuses - headers to break up sections into digestible pieces. The conversational style of writing keeps instruction from being too dense but does nothing to keep it from being overly verbose, and space (and time!) could have been saved by editing down many of these sections to a sentence or more and dropping the headers.
5B, in contrast, retains its punchiness by using a large column/small column (column and a half?) format: large column has the "meat" of paragraphs - with a simple bolded keyword instead of a whole header - and a smaller column for example plays and summaries. As mentioned above, Shadowdark seems more focused on taking up as much space as possible, whereas 5B is written to be lean, easily flippable, and ready to be put down during play rather than constantly needing to be flipped through.
I’ve been informed I was wrong about my initial assessment of Shadowdark being formatted for 8x5” x 11” - it is, in fact, digest/A5 sized - which I think given the layout choices and size raises additional questions. A5’s space economy, as brought up, requires a much tighter hand on editing and layout. 5B does this very well. Shadowdark definitively presents information in a readable manner, but at a cost of not a lot of information per page. This coupled with the much higher page count necessitates a much larger tome where a more aggressive touch with the edit knife would cut down on page count (and thus printing cost) while maintaining readability. Again, the first thing that I’d hack to pieces are the giant-sized headers, but that’s me.
"What is a role-playing game?" is a question role-playing game books have sought to answer since 1974 at the least. Here at last Shadowdark may finally have somewhat of one-upped its peers: while 5B's paragraph is perfectly functional - "... [a] game of collaborative storytelling with a group of around four to eight friends. Everyone's objective is to have fun playing pretend for a few hours together" - it is like so many others focused on what is a broad strokes definition of role-playing games in general, which is in my opinion a nearly impossible goal. Much like the impossibility of defining a tree or a chair in a way that only includes chairs or trees and does not include non-chairs or non-trees, a frontpages definition of what is a role-playing game is can and will never fully encompass what is a medium that largely defies definition to such a degree. Moreover, I ask: why would anyone attempt to define all role-playing games in the frontpages? No other medium does this. The frontpages of the rules to Monopoly or a deck of 52 do not attempt to define all board or card games. Novels do not attempt to encapsulate all fiction within a single paragraph, nor do film, theatre, music, or any number of worthy pastimes.
Even more to the point: why try to include a definition of all role-playing games in a book specifically written for people familiar with one variety of role-playing game that you are attempting to proselytize into another? Both 5B and Shadowdark are written for either 5e players to try an OSR mindset in play, or for OSR players to find common ground in a 5e ruleset. Either is highly unlikely to be anyone's first role-playing game by design. This is where Shadowdark shines: by defining instead "What is Shadowdark?" ("... a fantasy adventure game where you and your companions delve into buried ruins, lost cities, spider-infested forests, and even fearsome dragon lairs in search of gold and glory") and "What Defines This Game?" ("Speed, danger, and simplicity.") While a little on the overwrought side, as is nearly everything within Shadowdark, it at least takes the care to keep such definitions manageable and realistic.
The overwrought definitions and prose of Shadowdark, however, immediately begin to weigh on the reader. 5B does a marvelous job of condensing information in digestible short paragraphs with immediate play examples in the half-column across. Ten pages covers rules, key terms, character creation, casting spells, inventory, and an even more in-depth (though possibly unnecessary) example play. Shadowdark, on the other hand, has "the basics" detailing most of the important rules in 2 pages... and then an additional 18 pages for the "core" rules, 30 for character creation, and more 30 for magic and spells. Again: does Shadowdark have more content in those 80 pages than 5B's 10? Undoubtedly. Is that content useful? Debatable. Is it necessary? Absolutely not.
That being said, while 5B's Game Master's Guide is a tight 9 pages cover to cover and does have some immediately useful information such as negotiating spells, coming up with interesting cleric prayer results, example DC numbers and - incongruously - the character advancement tiers, much of the "how to be a Good GM" advice is, while written and presented perfectly reasonably, I would likewise categorize as superfluous. 5B's greatest strength is its brevity and accessibility and while I understand the mindset of paying homage to the source material and having a "players" and a "GM" book, given the scope of the work and the intended audience I'd argue it could be even leaner and more aggressively brief. As mentioned above: the most likely person to pick up 5B is going to be either someone familiar with 5e interested in OSR or vice versa. They don't need this entire book (save for a few things that can and should be slotted into the player's guide). This is not an error solely committed by 5B, of course - Shadowdark's "how to" sections are equally unnecessary and ten times as long! - but I wish more books would trust the reader to know how best to wield it, trust itself to deliver only that information which is necessary to begin play, and trust the table to figure everything else out as it goes along. Creation's greatest tool is, after all, the knife.
Both books have perfectly servicable monster & treasure sections. This is the one section where I think more is better and neither disappoints. 5B, having entirely filed the serial numbers off, presents all the classic D&D monsters in slightly different names and appearances. Everything you'd want to start is there. I cannot tell you how many system books I read that do not include a goblin, which is, as far as I'm concerned, borderline criminal. I am happy to report that both Shadowdark and 5B include a goblin. 5B's goblin is significantly more powerful than Shadowdark's goblin, so advantage 5B.
Shadowdark opts for character-level-based treasure tables, which is... okay, I suppose. It isn't a particularly bad way of handling things, but requires a lot of consulting the book whenever treasure is found. 5B uses the more classic, tried-and-true method of treasure tables, which admittedly often requires the pre-generation of treasure but overall yields both more interesting and more varied results.
To conclude: 5B is just as effective at pitching OSR-style play to 5e players and does so in smaller books at a lower price point and in less words. Which may, ultimately, work against it: 5e players are most often looking for 5e-style production values. To that degree I would say that Shadowdark, with a larger audience from Kickstarter and the aesthetic appeal of a large and well-funded hardcover (and thus the illusion of both quality and value) is going to be the "easier" sell on players heavily invested in 5e, if only because a glossy and expensive Shadowdark hardcover is going to fit in on their shelves with their other glossy and expensive D&D 5e hardcovers for the purposes of shelfies.
Ultimately, system choice most commonly boils down to nothing more complicated than comfortability and the ability to find similarly interested people to play, no matter how much designers on Twitter clamor about bespoke systems for bespoke "narratives" (still waiting for an adequate definition there). To that end it does not matter that 5B accomplishes the same goal as Shadowdark in far fewer words and pages and at a much lower price point. However, where 5B can "make up lost ground" so to speak on Shadowdark is in the fostering of an invested community base of people making 3pp modules and other such content, in the manner of Mothership, Mausritter, and OSE. Since the Kickstarter's funding and the release of the digital files, there have been some Shadowdark 3pp modules floating around - but not nearly as many as a $1.3 million dollar Kickstarter would suggest. And this is where a grassroots, ground-up approach actually works better than the flash and popularity of a large and well-funded project. One of the biggest - and I would argue, most important - OSR releases of the last few years, Luke Gearing's Wolves Upon the Coast, was a slowfunded slow release of new content that relied on word of mouth and people excitedly playing and more importantly talking about the work.
This is all to say that the only thing Shadowdark has that 5B doesn't is people playing it and talking about it, and while you'd think more than a million dollars spent on crowdfunding would yield a passionate fanbase Quest and the Avatar Legends role-playing games would beg to differ. Long story short? We're going to need some 5B modules.