OK. A little more ShadowDark.  Letters from the Dark Vol VI is all about pirates and sea voyages.  This zine by Chris Powell gives you some new character options, some rules for ships and ship combat, as well as the expected hex-crawl adventure.  If you’re thinking about taking your ShadowDark PCs out on the high seas, this one is probably worth picking up.

Keeping with the general ShadowDark design philosophy, the rules for using ships fit into just two pages.  There’s a bit more when you add in the specifics of weapons, ship stats, and monsters, but the core sailing and ship-combat rules are covered in just two pages.  Nice. 

There are two new classes, the Sharpshooter and the Swashbuckler.  And there are some new ancestries, the merfolk and sharkfolk.  Of those, the Swashbuckler has the best chance to make it into one of my games.  But I don’t know.  The Sharpshooter and sharkfolk seem interesting.  Merfolk?  Probably not.  To each their own.

Up next are some rules for having sponsors or patrons for the PCs, as well as some expanded stuff for rival factions and how they progress alongside the PCs.  Both feature heavily in the adventure to come.  I’ve certainly been leaning toward having some form of sponsor or patron for a group, as it gives a bit of cohesion and perhaps direction to a game.  Running some Call of Cthulhu a couple years ago, I brought in the idea of the PCs being part of an organization and that was nice.  It seems like it could work very well in something like ShadowDark, especially with its potential for high character mortality.  

After a couple pages of new monster stat-blocks, we have the adventure that takes up the bulk of the volume.  Plunderdome is a sea-based hex-crawl with three islands and three dungeons.  I like the basic conceit.  There was a massive storm that made the islands essentially unreachable for the last century.  That storm has suddenly ended and several factions are rushing in to accomplish whatever their particular goal might be.  PCs can pick which faction to join, giving them specific goals and potential rewards.  Each island offers different adventures, and while progressing through them, the other factions will also be on site, causing issues.  The whole section with the hunt for the wumpus is weird.  I kind of like it, but it also sort of feels out of place.  Maybe.  As with a lot of pre-written adventures and modules, I’d likely break this into all sorts of small pieces and build it into something that fits my GMing style more.  I think I’d like to use the wumpus hunt, but with very different circumstances surrounding it.  We’ll see.

The last chunk of the book is a collection of different NPC stat blocks.  I imagine you could use these not only as a quick go-to when running a game, but also as hirelings, as presented in a previous volume, Borderlands.  

Part of the charm of a game like ShadowDark is that it’s simple enough, you don’t really need rules for everything.  So, is this book necessary?  Not really.  However, I’m lazy and don’t really want to throw together rules.  These are pretty simple and well presented, and I don’t have to make them.  So, score.  The adventure has a bunch of cool ideas that I’ll definitely be raiding for my own games, even if I don’t run it straight.  That’s good enough for me.  That’s what these zines are for, as far as I’m concerned.  

You can see my unboxing of Scallywags here.

I ordered a print copy of the book here. 

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