Writober! Fear! Shadowdark Post-a-Day In October

This month is Drawtober: 31 drawing prompts related to the Shadowdark RPG, 1 a day, throughout October. But I’m borrowing the prompts for short essays. Today’s prompt is “Fear”.

Fear in Shadowdark feels a bit underused. A few creatures are “Fearless” so they are immune to morale checks and a Ring of Feather Falling has a curse to make the wearer afraid of heights. Aside from that, fear only appears in a few charts describing encounters and people you meet.

So there isn’t a Fear spell that can make a foe run away for a few rounds or until they save. Dragons don’t have a ‘dragon fear’ aura, and some very nasty/horrifying/manipulative creatures don’t have something like it either.  One could argue that’s up to the player to role-play or a GM to enforce something like it (rulings, not rules), but I guess that depends on your taste and background as a GM. I personally would look into adding it in some cases, while balancing it with some other change–so that we don’t cause the party to lose on average one character for 2.5 rounds every time they fight a dragon (for example).

Here are our previous Writober posts so far:

1. Torch – Rules for magic torch items (each is a single use magic effect spell like alarm or detect magic).
2. Skull – Goblin shaman who can turn victims’ skulls into ways to store spells.
3. Fiend – Lists of talents that Devils & Demons typically have for making your own.
4. Shadow – Easy ways to make other creatures into shadows.
5. Contagion – Discussing the purpose of diseases.
6. Valkyrie – A new 3rd party class.
7. Toadstool – A new 3rd party ancestry.
8. Witchlight – Alternate sources of “witchlight”.
9. Luck Token – Alternate ways a GM may allow a luck token to be used.
10.  Rage – The signature ability of a Barbarian class.
11. Altars – Ways to amplify priest spells into rituals when using an altar.
12. Pit Trap – Several ideas to spice up the good old pit trap.
13. Death Slug – Looking at the Death Slug’s deadliness and how that’s similar to old-school and low fantasy games.
14. Evil Eye – Various types of “Evil Eyes”: magic items, monsters, or curses.
15. Morzo Moth – A look at the Morzo Moth’s talents/actions makes one see the variety of the Western Reaches book’s monsters.
16. Diamond – Three subtopics: diamonds impacting economy; as spell components for rituals or spells not-yet-accessible; and a enhancements for magic weapons.
17. Slime – Game-able aspects of mundane slime as well as a green slime monster for Shadowdark.
18. Wyrdling – Shows how different and fun Shadowdark can be with this unusual class as an example of how much design freedom a creator of GM has.
19. Stingbat – Renaming (or even not giving creatures names) re-establishes the sense of wonder players had when fantasy was new to them.
20. Poison – A list of how poison is used in the core book, grouped by use & types of effects, plus a few new ideas.
21. Grumby Billows – A tribute to Shadowdarklings, the online free character generator (and more!) for Shadowdark.
22. Blood – Varying & unsual ways to use blood in your game.
23. Green Knight – A look at the Green Knight from King Arthur and how that differs from the one in Western Reaches. Plus stats for the mythic version.