07/11/2025

I’ve been gaming for over 40 years now—which still blows my mind, even as I stare at a shelf groaning under the weight of rulebooks older than some game stores. It all started with the Red Box D&D set I got for Christmas in 1985: that iconic red cover, the weird little crayon-fillable dice, and the promise of danger lurking in every dungeon. From there, it was a glorious descent into decades of dice rolling, dungeon crawling, TPKs by rats and rust monsters, and collecting RPG material like a dragon hoards gold—loudly, obsessively, and with no intention of ever stopping. I still have my original Fiend Folio on the shelf, bought new back when the Githyanki were terrifying and no one quite knew what a flumph was supposed to do.

You know what that means? I’ve got a massive treasure trove of adventures, monsters, maps, and rulesets sitting on my shelves and hard drives—just waiting to be stolen and dropped into a Shadowdark game. And I’m here to tell you: you should be stealing, too.

Why Basic Fantasy Is a Goldmine

Basic Fantasy RPG is one of the best open-source, no-fuss systems out there. It captures the old-school vibe we all love, but with just enough modern polish to make it sing. It’s rules-light, modular, and best of all—it’s 100% free and open.

That means you can take anything from Basic Fantasy—monsters, spells, traps, dungeons, NPCs—and plug it right into your Shadowdark campaign. No guilt. No gray area. It’s open game content. You are legally encouraged to pillage it.

Maps and Monsters, No Conversion Needed

The mechanical differences between Basic Fantasy and Shadowdark are minor, and most of the heavy lifting can be done on the fly. Here’s the big secret: you don’t need to convert much.

Shadowdark and Basic Fantasy both run on that good old d20 + modifier system. They use familiar stats like HP, AC, HD, and all the usual suspects. Need to adapt an orc from Basic Fantasy? Just use the listed HD, tweak the AC down a bit (since Shadowdark runs lower armor scores), and you’re ready to roll.

The same goes for maps. I’ve got dungeon layouts from 1981 that are still killer today. The style of exploration-first adventuring hasn’t changed. Whether the map is from a module published by TSR, Goodman Games, or some PDF from a defunct blog in 2004—it still works. Drop in a few Shadowdark-style traps, light some torches, and let the crawl begin.

Don’t Forget Old Editions of D&D

If you’ve been playing as long as I have, chances are you’ve got a stack of old Basic or 1e/2e D&D modules collecting dust. Guess what? Those are prime real estate for Shadowdark sessions.

The plots are often simple, direct, and built for fast-paced exploration. The kinds of things Shadowdark thrives on. And since most players coming to the table now haven’t experienced those early adventures, you get all the benefits of fresh content without having to reinvent the wheel.

Want to run The Keep on the Borderlands? Do it. Just scale down the ACs, ignore descending armor class math, and you’re good. Shadowdark players won’t bat an eye. They’ll be too busy fighting kobolds in torchlight.

Relive the Glory with PDFs from DriveThruRPG

One of the best parts about being an older gamer (besides having a +2 bonus to wisdom checks) is getting to revisit the adventures that first lit the fire. Thanks to DriveThruRPG and similar sites, a huge number of classic D&D modules are just a few clicks away in PDF form.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve downloaded something like Tomb of the Lizard King or The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh just to flip through the pages and remember what it felt like to face those traps and monsters for the first time. The maps, the boxed text, the oddball art—it’s all there, ready to be pulled back into your game.

These aren’t just nostalgia trips either. Most of those adventures drop beautifully into Shadowdark with very little tweaking. You already know the beats, the tone, and the danger—they just need a little torchlight and maybe a countdown timer to bring them to life for a new generation. And if you’re lucky, you might even get to run them for players who were born long after THAC0 disappeared.

Steal with Style

To be clear: I’m not talking about plagiarism here. I’m talking about mining the enormous amount of old-school content that’s freely available or sitting unused in your collection. You’re adapting, remixing, and reshaping it into something that fits your table.

If you’ve got an adventure that looks fun but has boxed text the size of a novel—trim it. If the traps are too fiddly, make them more dangerous and fast. If the NPCs are boring, give them weird motives and secrets. Shadowdark is about mood, pacing, and danger—not crunch.

Final Thoughts

You don’t have to wait for the perfect Shadowdark module to appear in your feed. You’ve probably already got more content than you could run in a lifetime. Take that dungeon from a Basic Fantasy zine. Dust off that Dragon Magazine side quest. Download that free OSR one-pager. It all works.

I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and the biggest thing I’ve learned is this: there’s no such thing as “too old” to be useful. If it’s fun, fast, and deadly — it belongs in your game.

So go ahead. Steal everything that isn’t nailed down. Shadowdark won’t mind.

Keep on gaming!