The Corpseless Coffin is a short Shadowdark annex dungeon for 1st-2nd level characters. Designed to be inserted into an existing dungeon, or played as a compact standalone adventure, it begins when an ancient stone coffin slowly emerges from a subterranean wall and compels the curious to climb inside.
Overview
Beyond it lies a crumbling funerary structure perched above an endless black void. Pale fruit hangs in an overgrown garden, two prisoners offer conflicting stories, and spectral warriors guard the forgotten treasures of a dead god. Time passes strangely here: for every hour spent beyond the coffin, an entire day passes outside.
The Terror of Dunmoor is a regional sandbox for Shadowdark Levels 1-2 built around a deteriorating situation rather than a scripted plot.
It was written for GMs who are comfortable running small adventures and want to try a more reactive style of play without adding complexity.
The module presents a region under strain: events occur, tensions rise, and NPCs respond. Players decide what to pursue, ignore, or misunderstand. Nothing depends on a specific sequence of actions.
Walk Alone is a short, atmospheric, menu driven adventure styled after early PC graphics.
Your car overheats on a remote road outside a silent town. To leave, you’ll need to explore, collect a few practical items, and decide how much risk you’re willing to take as the night grows later.
The game focuses on mood, isolation, and escalation rather than complex puzzles or combat.
What to Expect
10-20 minute experience (one sitting)
Light, grounded inventory puzzles
No combat or reflex challenges
Mostly silent
The Old Blood - An investigation in a decaying city built on overlapping layers of rot
Doomed to Die #1 - Beneath Stillroot - First issue of a small zine, a short adventure in a hamlet where an entity is using the former villagers as puppets.
I’ve been working on a big project for a while and as part of that I needed to come up with some rules to handle cold and exposure since Shadowdark doesn’t cover this in the core rules. Since that is still long ways off and these can be useful on their own I am sharing them here.
The rules aim to fit in with Shadowdark’s existing systems and focus on mitigation through the appropriate gear the expense of encumbrance or effects on an unprepared character.
This is the second issue of an ongoing zine series, each focused on short, atmospheric material you can drop into your campaign.
Doomed to Die Issue 2 features The Tower of Dreams, a low-level adventure for Shadowdark RPG.
An illusionist’s crumbling tower disguised by magic, a looping ruin that appears endless to those within. From afar, the tower rises into the clouds. Those who enter find fine halls, soft music, and a host of courteous phantoms. Yet as the climb continues, repetition sets in. The same rooms. The same voices. The same illusions fraying at the seams.
The Codex Ossium is a necromantic artifact, a tome of fused vertebrae, rib-bound leather, and whispering ink. Those who bind themselves to it find its knowledge unending, its hunger eternal. It grants power over death at the cost of the living, growing bone upon bone into a cancerous lair that consumes all it touches.
To wield the Codex is to unmake the boundary between scholar and corpse, to turn study into desecration, and to hear the whispers of ash and marrow beneath your dreams.
“Americhaos 1994 is a complete hypertext role playing rule book. The game itself is not played on the computer. It is to be used as a hypertext set of rules for playing the game with friends.” read the description of AC94.ZIP, a file for download on a local BBS. The context necessary when it sat next to shareware demos for early Apogee and Epic DOS games. Even amongst now forgotten Adventure inspired text based games that could be mistaken for one another, it stood out., If not itself unique, it’s uniquely ahead of its time and as such has been hiding out in the back of my head since I first saw it years ago.
Pharmacy Run is a third-party adventure module for the obscure tabletop RPG Americhaos 1994, originally distributed as BBS shareware.
Like Americhaos 1994 itself, this module is released as a DOS executable.
Designed as quick introduction to Americhaos 1994, Pharamcy Run is a short scenario of overland travel, gang-ruled towns, and moral compromises in the ruins of the American West. 164 bytes of mayhem.
Requires:
Americhaos 1994 rules
DOSBox (or a real MS-DOS machine)
Both are available as free downloads. Full instructions are in README.txt.