Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - AD&D v Shadowdark

 

AD&D 1e is the great-grandfather of everything else in the sweet sixteen: crunchy, sprawling, and alive in ways that modern players often miss entirely.

Shadowdark is modern D&D trimmed down, lightened up, and given a grimy old-school wash. It really hums at the table.

The oldest game in the bracket against the newest. One built the toybox. The other figured out how to ship it lighter.

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AD&D 1e

The system tries to do everything, and what it didn't cover out of the box arrived month after month in Dragon Magazine. It was an extraordinary time to start gaming. The fiddly bits accumulated into something you could grab and play with, keeping the parts that mattered to your table and leaving the rest in the book. Weapons versus armor class might never have come up at your table. Domain level play might have been the whole point. The game was different everywhere it landed.

The ease with which AD&D absorbed science fantasy still impresses me. Gamma World crossovers, technology rolls, figuring out how a laser pistol worked in a world of swords and spells. The game had an appetite for everything and the chassis to hold it.

Domain play remains one of the great unrealized promises of modern D&D. A high-level fighter attracting followers, building a castle, developing the land around it: that's a whole second game waiting inside the first one.

Wilheim the Paladin fell from grace consorting with the wrong companions. His god came to him in a dream and gave him a quest: take the foul cloak to the sea's teeth three days east, wash it in the water, burn it with wood carried from the ruined shrine. Bring one companion pure in heart and true. Wilheim chose Wulfgang, the guard dog. He fought goblins and a hagborn and barnacle-crusted skeletons rising from the waves. He burned the cloak. He heard his god's voice again that night. He rode home. That quest ran on the AD&D chassis and couldn't have happened anywhere else.

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Shadowdark

The roll to cast mechanic isn't unique to Shadowdark, but the implementation is good and the pressure it creates is real. Spellcasters make decisions differently when the spell might not come.

The old-school wink is there without being overwhelming. Play a goblin spellcaster. Feel the lethality accumulate. The OSR pressure is on, but delivered in a way a modern player can understand without feeling ambushed by save-versus-die.

That restraint is the game's real achievement. It knows what it is and doesn't oversell it.

Our opening sessions of Shadowdark went through the entire set of pre-gens in a couple of sessions. The lethality arrived fast and without apology. We started over with new characters and kept going. That willingness to start over, and the lightness that makes it feel fine rather than punishing, is Shadowdark working exactly as intended.

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The honest case for the loser

Shadowdark does something AD&D genuinely can't: it gets a modern player to the table fast, running old-school pressure, without a week of rules reading first. The pre-gen massacre in our opening sessions felt earned rather than arbitrary, and that's a harder trick to pull off than it looks. If you want to introduce someone to what OSR play actually feels like without handing them three hardcovers and a stack of Dragon magazines, Shadowdark is the answer.

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The pick

AD&D 1e, and thirty years of memories made it inevitable. Shadowdark is a better on-ramp. AD&D is a better destination. The toybox, the domain play, the appetite for everything from dungeon crawls to planar quests to Gamma World crossovers: all of it adds up to a game that shaped everything that came after it, including Shadowdark. Wilheim and Wulfgang walked to the sea's teeth and back on this chassis. That's not nothing. That's everything.

New zine: It's Worse Than That! (Devil's Bargains)

The second volume of my GM training zine series is out today.

It's Worse Than That! (Devil's Bargains) focuses on a single technique: how to put a real, costly choice in front of your players and mean it. Devil's bargains show up across a lot of game traditions, from Forged in the Dark to Trophy to old school play. The moment when a player does something unexpected and you need a consequence that fits the fiction, costs something real, and gives you material to build on later: that's the move this zine is built to help you practice.

Dougal on the Trophy Discord saw the sampler and put it well: "Devil's bargains can be tough when you're not feeling inspired and somehow tough to explain too." Worked examples, practice scenarios, and a clear framework for exactly those moments.

Vol 2 is $3. If you already own Vol 1 (Night Moves), you pay $2. Both volumes together are $4 as a bundle.

https://mountainfoot.itch.io/its-worse-than-that-spring-2026
https://itch.io/s/183782/its-worse-than-that-is-better-in-a-bundle

Thanks for reading.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Mothership v Mausritter

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG about surviving a universe that is indifferent at best and actively hostile at worst. Build tension carefully, because once the first domino falls, the rest follow faster and faster.

Mausritter is fantasy adventure writ small, mouse-sized. You play a band of intrepid mice facing off against everything a much bigger world throws at them.

These two games have no business being in the same bracket. Both filed under NSR, both doing something genuinely new, and almost nothing else in common.

Mothership

The Panic system is doing things no other horror RPG does as cleanly. Stress accumulates, checks get harder, and eventually characters stop being reliable. That escalation feels true to the genre in a way that hit point attrition never quite manages.

The concealed death die might be the single most unsettling mechanic I've encountered in any RPG. When a character hits zero HP, a die is rolled in secret. That's how many rounds they have left. Nobody at the table knows the number until someone reaches them to help. The tension that produces isn't artificial. It's earned.

The whole game rewards preparation and punishes overconfidence without feeling punitive. That's a harder design balance than it looks.

An android PC went ahead to confront the mind-controlling villain on a mining asteroid. Things started bad and went south quickly. The rest of the party heard an explosion and ran toward it. What they found was two androids' worth of parts scattered across a frag grenade blast radius. The concealed die had already told us everything. We just hadn't been there to read it in time.

Mausritter

The setting does real work before you ever start play. Small creatures in a large world produces a tone that shifts the stakes in interesting ways. A barn cat is a dragon. A mousetrap is a dungeon hazard with a body count. The scale changes what everything means.

The faction system is elegant in the way the best OSR tools are elegant: enough structure to generate conflict and motivation, light enough to get out of the way. Factions pursue their own agendas whether the players engage with them or not.

The magic system is the quiet star. Spells are items, items can be spells, and the recharging options create genuine decisions about risk and resource management without bogging down the fiction. It's the kind of system that makes you wish more games thought this carefully about a single subsystem.

Four brave mice went into a tunnel and met three skeletal rats. The fight was going reasonably well until a rat rolled well on damage and a mouse rolled badly on a STR save. Then there were three brave mice in the tunnel. They survived. They found a magic sword. They went on to have many more adventures. That fallen mouse mattered. The sword mattered more because of them.

The honest case for the loser

Mothership is the better game for one specific thing: sustained horror. The Panic system and the concealed death die produce a quality of dread that Mausritter isn't trying to match and couldn't if it wanted to. If your table wants a game that makes the genre feel true rather than decorative, Mothership earns that every time. It will always own October.

The pick

Mausritter. The android in the blast radius nearly changed my mind, and I want to be honest about that. Mothership does something remarkable with tension and horror mechanics. But Mausritter is going to get more sessions, more players, more moments like four mice walking into a tunnel and three walking out. The magic system, the factions, the scale: all of it compounds across a campaign in ways that keep me coming back. Mothership is the better game one month a year. Mausritter is the better game for the rest of them.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Trophy Gold v Teeth

 

Trophy Gold is a game about doomed adventurers trying to pay off their debts without destroying themselves in the process. The question isn't whether the dungeon will cost you something. It's whether what you find is worth what it takes.

Teeth is a dark comedy horror game set in a terrible corner of eighteenth century England, built on a Forged in the Dark chassis and stuffed with memorable hooks.

Two games that both lean hard into doom and consequence, arriving at completely different tones.

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Trophy Gold

Characters are lightweight even by OSR standards. There's almost nothing between the player and the fiction, which means the fiction has to do the work, and it does.

The combat system is quietly beautiful. No hit points, no war of attrition: just a repeated roll that builds pressure without grinding. Every exchange matters because the math never lets you feel safe.

The hunt token economy is the kicker. Tokens move you through the dungeon mechanically or convert to treasure to pay down your debt. That double function means every decision has stakes beyond the immediate scene. You're always choosing between momentum and survival.

Near the end of our Public Access campaign, we played a session of Trophy Gold as a game within the game: the Latchkeys sitting around a table, playing hunters in a dungeon. The mechanics were light enough that it almost disappeared. The fiction drove everything. It felt less like a rules system and more like the Latchkeys actually playing the game.

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Teeth

The Forged in the Dark heritage brings real weight to every roll. Player agency is respected, consequences are meaningful, and the dice never feel arbitrary.

But the setting is the reason to play. Eighteenth century rural England rendered as dark comedy horror produces a tone that's genuinely hard to find anywhere else. Grim and funny and horrible, sometimes in the same sentence.

The Night of the Hogmen quickstart alone is worth the price of entry. The hooks are immediate, the premise is ridiculous in the best way, and the whole thing runs with tremendous energy.

From a carriage crash in a thunderstorm to a mad dash across a flooding countryside, the PCs in Night of the Hogmen lurched from one misadventure to the next. The session ended with the party trapped in a burning church, fighting off a herd of marauding hogmen. That's Teeth in one image: catastrophe building on catastrophe, and everyone at the table grinning.

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The honest case for the loser

Trophy Gold does something Teeth genuinely can't: it gets completely out of the way. The hunt token economy and the pressure-without-attrition combat system are genuine design achievements, and the game within a game memory is one of the stranger and more satisfying things I've done at a table. If you want mechanics that disappear into the fiction, Trophy Gold is hard to beat.

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The pick

Teeth, and I want to be honest that it took some thinking, some remembering, and maybe a little dreaming to get there. Trophy Gold is a more elegant game. But Teeth is a more joyful one, and that counts for something. The hogmen, the burning church, the flooding countryside: it all adds up to a game that generates stories with a specific, ridiculous, horrible energy I keep wanting to return to. That's enough.

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A related note

Trophy Gold's & Teeth's (FitD) devil's bargain mechanic is one of the things that made them stick with me long after this matchup. That tension between what you want and what it costs is a skill at the table, not just a design feature. I've been working on a zine that isolates exactly that move and gives you ways to practice it. It's Worse Than That! Devil's Bargains is coming this weekend. Keep an eye out if that sounds useful.

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That's my pick, and I won't pretend it was easy. Who would you have chosen? Tell me in the comments.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Toon v FATE Accelerated

Toon is a game about Saturday morning cartoon characters: unconstrained chaos, pratfalls, and plans that absolutely should not work. (A new edition just funded on backerkit, but late pledges are still open.)

FATE Accelerated is a system that can run anything you put on the table. It takes some getting used to, but once it clicks it handles Cthulhu adventures and post-apocalyptic generation ships with equal ease. (A free SRD with all you need to play, or kitbash, is also available.)

One game is pure id. The other is pure flexibility.

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Toon

The character sheet was the lightest I had seen at the time. The idea that you could get so much from so little was a genuine revelation.

Your schticks matter more than your stats, which tells you everything about the game's priorities. The fiction comes first, and the mechanics are there to make it funnier.

The low intelligence mechanic is quietly brilliant. If your INT is low enough, you might not realize something is impossible, which means you can do it anyway. That's not just a funny rule. It's a design philosophy about what cartoon logic actually means at the table.

Characters don't die. They fall down, and come back in a little while. That single decision keeps the chaos moving even when things go south faster than anyone planned.

I played a mouse with a giant wooden mallet. His master plan was absolutely unworkable. Anyone who interfered got flattened. The plan never worked. The mallet always did. That's Toon in one image.

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FATE Accelerated

Aspects are the engine. Everything at the table can have one: the crumbling edge of the crevasse, the distillery full of flammable spirits, the relationship that's about to break badly. Invoke them, and the fiction moves. One false move and someone is falling. Two false moves and the whole fight is happening inside a conflagration.

That system means the environment is never just backdrop. It's a participant.

The flexibility compounds over time. Once you understand how aspects work, the system genuinely handles anything.

Running the Starship Warden with FATE, I converted on the fly because I didn't need stat blocks. I needed to be able to read and embody the space. The aspects did the rest. The ship came alive as we played through it, and the system never got in the way of that.

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The honest case for the loser

FATE Accelerated does something Toon genuinely can't: it runs almost anything. Cthulhu horror, post-apocalyptic generation ships, political intrigue: all of it fits on the same chassis. You could probably build a Saturday morning cartoon game in FATE in an afternoon. That flexibility is real and it compounds across a gaming life. FATE also rewards a certain kind of player who wants to author the fiction as much as play it. That's not a small audience.

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The pick

Toon, probably by putting a banana peel in FATE's path on the way to the judging table. FATE can run anything. Toon absolutely nails its specific space, and anyone with a sense of humor can sit down and play it. That accessibility matters. The mallet, the unworkable master plan, the mouse who didn't know when to quit: Toon produces that table energy without asking anything complicated of its players. Some games do one thing perfectly. That's enough to win.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Public Access v Kintsugi

Public Access (currently Kickstarting) is a Carved from Brindlewood mystery game about young adults in rural New Mexico in the early 2000s, encountering horrible things while trying to solve a mystery that keeps getting stranger.

Kintsugi is a d6 game about failing and coming back stronger. It fits on a trifold, runs in any setting you can imagine, and gets out of its own way fast enough to make one-shots feel complete.

These two games are both built around a single powerful idea. For Public Access, that idea is dread accumulating in a specific place and time. For Kintsugi, it's that failure is the point.

Tabletop Sweet Sixteen - Crash Pandas v Kingdom

Crash Pandas is a one-page RPG about a gang of raccoons who have to cooperate to drive because none of them can reach the steering wheel, the brakes, the accelerator, the clutch, and the shifter all at once, much less see over the dashboard.

Kingdom is a game where you play members of a community, guiding it through a series of growth and changes at crossroads and crises, without ever rolling a die or using any other randomizer.

One game fits on a page and produces pure mayhem. The other asks you to build something that matters and watch what happens to it.