Saturday, November 09, 2024

Shadowdark - No Small Crimes in Lankhmar

This game was run by Shannon Ferguson as part of the Grogmeetish 2024 online convention using the Shadowdark rules - a new one to me, but easy to get into using the Roll20 interface. After a few glitches setting up the chat on Discord, we were away to Lankhmar!

As the title gives away, we were in Fritz Leiber's legendary city of thieves in the middle of a heist of the forgotten house of an ancient Lankhmarese nobleman called Lord Suttar who was rumoured to have stashed away a horde of gold and other secrets. Using the roll20 interface we were able to case the joint, making use of the inbuilt lighting effects to show what we could see as we cautiously edged around the boarded up building. This was a feature that was used to great effect several times during the adventure as our limited supply of torches would be extinguished at inconvenient moments, plunging us into gloom while our enemies could see in the dark.

The twist for this adventure was that as soon as we had broken into the supposedly empty house we were reduced to the size of rats, transforming a simple burglary into an epic fight for survival against a range of common household creatures. If you have read any of the Lankhmar stories then you will guess one of the plot threads here, but there is plenty to do in each room where half the battle is simply climbing the furniture or examining giant sized (to us) scrolls.

We didn't quite finish the adventure in time (only exploring the cellar and the ground floor), but we had a lot of fun and reached a suitably dramatic point to bring the story to a close. This was a whole lot of thievish fun and well worth playing if you see it on offer at a convention!





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