Writober! Glass Cannon! 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 “Glass Cannon”.

Honestly, I hadn’t heard the term “Glass Cannon” outside of the Youtube channel. So I looked it up and learned it also/originally refers to a character with great attack capabilities, but little defensive ability and/or hit points.

I’m a bit dumbfounded by why you’d want to do this, unless the party has another PC who has some option to defend an ally–but that is rare in Shadowdark, especially considering my next point: Because Shadowdark’s talents are rolled, it is harder for a player to min-max their character. It is still possible because you can always pick one particular ability (Strength) and skill (say melee weapons) every chance you get, but harder.

But it is plausible that your random rolls for new talents give the same results and you keep picking the same options of those results.  On the other hand, the ‘power curve’ of Shadowdark doesn’t increase exponentially or anything close to that, so that is an even better way that a ‘glass cannon’ can be avoided.

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.
26. Fireball – How you should allow your players to flavor the world and aspects about their background and abilities–and in Shadowdark that can even include spell effects.
27. Minion – What are minions and several unusual ways to use them.