Writober! Fireball! 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 “Fireball”.

To quote my friend Mike Shea, “Flavor is free.”  And today’s prompt reminds me that in a simpler system like Shadowdark there where less is spelled out, even more flavor is available.

I interpret “flavor is free” as a way to let players feel more involved in the setting and story.  Mike often asks “describe your killing blow” when you do the final damage to the foe (somehow our group has a thing for hitting spleens) but if an active player wants to describe something else about the room or something in their background, if it doesn’t tread on the GM’s plans and isn’t going to serve as a particular unreasonable advantage a GM should let it happen. And sometimes that can be subject to a roll.  If characters are running from something across the countryside and they come to a river a player can’t just say, “We’re going to take the large rowboat on the riverbank.” But a GM might make a roll to see if one is nearby.

Now in Shadowdark, there are even more options and possibilities.  The one that comes to mind and to tie this back to “Fireball” is to let your mages customize their spells.  So if a wizard wants to be all about acids or poisons or electricity or cold or whatever, they can choose to make their energy spells be of the chosen damage type.  In Shadowdark it is rare that particular monsters are hurt more or less by a given damage type so min/maxing this is much less likely.  Further a GM could impose that if the wizard’s fireball is actually acid, that’s fine–but it will always be that type.

And allowing this makes for more involvement and immersion of your players.

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.
24. Fear – Speculating on new ways to use fear in your game.
25. Drow – A stat block for a level 6 drow fighter.