To understand the concept of ShadowRealms as a game, you must first imagine the concept of a story: one person telling a tale, with their friends gathered around, intently listening as that story unfolds. Now, imagine if, during that story, the people listening weren’t simply listening passively, but were instead each in control of one of the protagonists. Imagine if they could make decisions for those characters that would impact the course of the story as it unfolds.
No longer would the story be a passive experience, but an interactive one—a collaboration between the listeners, who, as more than a simple audience, are now main characters within the story. The storyteller weaves situations for them to act and react to in an imaginary world they are all actively creating. The story flows as the storyteller describes scenes that put the characters front and center, with the listeners bringing nuance and agency to these characters, describing—and sometimes even acting out—what they would say and do.
Together, the storyteller and the people playing the characters craft narratives limited only by their collective imaginations. This is, in its essence, what role-playing games are all about: people using their collective imaginations to tell a story together. The listeners guide the paths of the characters as the storyteller sets up the scenarios and leads them through the narrative.
What is ShadowRealms?
Now, you could simply leave it at that—a collaborative exercise in make-believe. But what separates ShadowRealms from that is that it provides rules that help define the characters: what they are like, what they know, what they can do, as well as what can or cannot be done within the story as it plays out.
Certainly, leaving it up to the storyteller to decide what is possible can be rewarding to a point, but eventually, you may want a system in place to define what your character can do and what chances they have of completing their desired actions. Sure, most normal actions happen automatically, but dramatic actions—those that have an impact on the story—require rolls. These include making an attack against a fearsome creature, casting a magical spell, or trying to open a door that is locked.
Sometimes these situations call for different approaches. In the door example: do you break it down, or does one of the characters know how to pick the lock? The game system defines such things as a character’s physical strength—such as through their Might attribute, if they wanted to use raw strength to force it open—or what skills they might know, such as their Device Mechanics skill.
Here, the elements that make up the character—bloodline, abilities, and backstory—translate into actual capabilities. At this point, the interactive story becomes a game. The participants become full-fledged players; their characters, referred to as “player characters” or PCs for short, are the proverbial pieces on the board. The storyteller becomes something even more: the architect of that board, part writer, part director. They become what is referred to as a Gamemaster, or GM.
The Gamemaster is the person who uses a cast of non-player characters (all the characters in the story not controlled by the players), or NPCs, along with creatures and environments, to weave their stories. These can range in scope from tales told in a single session to adventures that take two or three sessions to complete, or even epic sagas that chain many adventures together into one overarching narrative that can take months or years—these are known as campaigns.
The Gamemaster also becomes the primary arbiter of the rules. For the game to run smoothly, they must have authority over the rules, but part of this social contract means the storyteller must be fair and always have the players’ enjoyment as their main priority. This balance and trust are necessary for any game to work. A Gamemaster should never view their position as adversarial; a Gamemaster’s role, first and foremost, is that of a storyteller. The rules and the characters exist for the purpose of telling an engaging story.
The Gamemaster’s job is to use the tools available to tell a story for the players to engage in. This requires a few things. First, you will need NPCs and creatures to populate these stories. If combat is expected, stats will be needed; this is where the Atlas comes in, as it will have stats for NPCs and monsters to populate your worlds. You will also need maps to visualize the locations where your stories take place. These are necessary to set the stage for your adventure.
The internet is a great source for these, as are pre-published adventures for other systems—or even this system, with any luck. If you choose to use tactical combat, actual battle maps and miniatures or some other form of counter will be needed, but these are not strictly necessary, as battle can also be played out in the players’ imaginations via “Theater of the Mind” rules.
At this time, you might be thinking: “Game, you say—but how do you win or lose?” This is not that kind of game. It remains an extension of that story analogy, but with mechanics that define character abilities and the success or failure of actions. There may be a story, and that story may have a goal. There are timeless archetypes: rescuing damsels in distress, destroying ancient and evil artifacts, or saving villagers from marauding hordes of bandits.
Completing such quests could be considered a “win.” But even then, victory or not, if a great story is being told and everyone is having fun, everyone wins. Victory is in the journey, not the destination. Even if a character dies, if they die heroically, it can be a win—especially if the player can simply create a new character and continue the story. Just as in the real world, characters die. The lethality of the game is a decision the Gamemaster and players must agree on, as no danger means no risk. However, if you have a TPK (Total Party Kill) every other session, players may lose interest because they stop forming attachments to their characters. The trick is to find a balance between lethality and fun that gives the characters agency without making it a bloodbath.
Ultimately, the goal of ShadowRealms is to create an engine for interactive storytelling that both defines characters in a rich and compelling manner and resolves actions in a way that is both intuitive and engaging. It is important that the rules be easy to understand while still being able to paint a vivid picture of the narrative you, the gamemaster, and the players are telling through play.