It has now been two years of writing Shadowdark supplements for KNUCKLEPUNK GAMES. Even though our first supplements and settings were not for public consumption until Spring of last year, that stuff had all been in the works for about a year before, just like our current adventures have been a long while in the making. So after two years of Shadowdark and now a year of seeing it rise to an establish place in the ttrpg space, I have been thinking a lot about why Knucklepunk's Shadowdark stuff even got released.

I started outside D&D, with a diceless ttrpg called DREAD in summer of 2014. I was only mildly aware of D&D, had played a session of 4th edition in late 2014, and did not like it. But I loved running DREAD for people. So, I've always been in the more broad ttrpg space and had no idea more people played D&D. I just thought I found a cool new boardgame in DREAD. I started into 5e in earnest in 2019, which led to a better appreciation for D&D and what it was doing. This combo set me up to discover Shadowdark, a 3rd party 6th edition of D&D.

That was Shadowdark to me. A 6th edition of D&D. It seemed like it fixed all my little tiny quams with 5e. Most especially ACCESSIBILITY, which is a punk passion of ours. But I found others aware of the Quickstart Guides that I really liked did not like its "dungeon specific vibe," with physical darkness playing such a big role. So, we set out to make GODLESS, what we thought of as a high fantasy D&D 6th edition setting, to illustrate how Shadowdark could be used for overland adventure stories, not just dungeons. And we had no idea when we released it that the lovely team at the Arcane Library was launching their Kickstarter the same day, and we didn't find out till quite a long time later. But now, two years later, GODLESS is out, the other SHADOWDARK adventures and settings we started two years ago are still coming out, and now other people love this game the way we loved that first, SRD dependent Quickstart Guide in 2022. 

And we have more settings that we want to give, ones that view this as a 6th Edition and more than JUST a 6th Edition, that show how versatile the game is - like WRATHEN, which is apocalyptic fantasy. Even KYMBRIA, which is a different kind of fantasy altogether, illustrates how little you need in order to run an adventure and set a compelling scene for a game. We want to continue expanding this way and giving people free resources that expand how they apply Shadowdark, and push on what people see as any limit on one of our favorite games.