A year in the making (well, the books themselves taking the slowest trip on a boat ever), this game is finally showing up physically. And people are already being greatly underwhelmed by it after trying it at the table. I've watched youtubers and people on social media say things like "it's more meant for one-shots and convention games. A gateway game into the greater OSR." No. It's shit. Campaign viability is absolutely a measure of quality when it comes to OSR games, one of the only measures of quality, and ShadowDrek completely and utterly fails to meet that measure. Hopefully more will wise up and attain the opinion I had upon first reading it: It's complete trash only sold because the hobby is still full of incels and either would like to fuck or have traditional male values and want to take it easy on a female creator because of it. Either position is stupid and cheuvanist. I treat her with absolute equality - her game is shit.
She claimed to have years of playtesting, I'm going to call that a lie as well. If it wasn't a flat out lie, then the contributing factors above, that being the propensity of incels in the hobby, fucked her out of getting her game meaningfully playtested (pun intended). AFAIK it didn't meaningfully change between the free quickstart and the final version, so I am going to use the quickstart to point out how horrible it is without even having to get into it fully.
For starters the XP system which is incomplete per the quickstart but should be completed per the core is far too quickly progressing. The game tops out at 10 levels which you get to in 550 XP. And yes it uses Storyteller style small XP but there are still entries where you can get 10 XP at once, or even multiples of 3, which means you're looking at levels up every session, perhaps multiple (and nothing to prevent this). There's even a note about the completed Carousing system in the core further progressing characters quicker. Slow progression is not a problem this game has.
The Advancement system itself is garbage also. You get nothing but a HP bump for all even levels. You get a "talent" on odds which are mostly annoying static modifiers that have been randomized to maximize irrelevance to what the character has actually been doing. Furthermore there are only 1/36 odds of getting two of the results on each table, meaning the remaining three are what you are going to get the most of. This means the randomness isn't that random, and while your characters levelling benefits won't be based on their play experience, they ALSO will be probably getting the same benefits as every other character of their class. Playing a Fighter or Thief in this game once grants the experience of playing every Fighter or Thief this game has ever produced at any table. Characters will have both the bad part of randomness, and the bad part about static benefits, all at once. It's amazing this bad of an idea made it to production.
In 2016 Jim Raggi sent out a Playtest Document for another edition of LotFP which contained a similar "lol so random" character advancement. Or maybe it was in Green Devil Face 5. I don't remember but in either case it was such a bad idea that he reprinted the core of LotFP without changes twice since then. And he's a fucking idiot who can't even manage to write a Referee book he already wrote over a decade ago. Shitd'ohDerp is what you'd get if that game went to market. It's complete garbage, and anyone still playing it has been using outside resources to extend it's existence. It's players can't actually be interested in the systemics present within, as all it effectively does for characters is boost their stats, attack and defense capabilities, or add more spells. Skills don't even have a system outside of stat rolls. Progression itself is insipidly boring due to the complete lack of choice and therefore intelligence or interest, but falsely pretending there is intrigue in random permanency.
So, one last nail for ShadowFarce's coffin before I attempt to never talk about it again. The GM quickstart has three different tables that betray the person who wrote the game doesn't even know how D&D or RPGs in general work. They are all presented back to back, like they were copy/pasted from a goddamn blog post without any sort of explanation:
"Something Happens!" - basically a spark table of useless vague entries. There is no explanation on it's use so I'm getting Unconquered vibes (and for the same reason).
"Rumors" - So this is a generic rumors table which is the opposite of how rumors tables work. They are meant to inform the adventure at hand based on the environment at hand. The person who wrote this has never used a rumors table correctly and has no idea why it exists in any form.
"Ruins Encounters" - Similar to the Rumors table, encounters tables should be tailored to the actual location they are at. The fact that both of these tables exist in a generic form begin to make me question if the author has ever GMed before, and if so exactly how fucking horrible are they?
So really that's it. Somebody who doesn't understand design, play, or GMing, or the motivation behind every one of these elements in successful practitioners of each wrote a shitty game and made a million dollars because they got alpha simp youtubers to shill it to all of their beta simp followers and now they have a slick, well laid out, artistically pleasant turd winging it's way to their shelf where it will stay and collect dust forever. And having a pretty book that's never opened is THE BEST OUTCOME for the owners of this game.
EDIT: There are ones of people online who proudly proclaim they are still playing this game a year and change later. Four things: 1: there are no people who aren't online playing this game or frankly have ever even heard of it. You're not gonna kill D&D with a game that requires online interactions to know it exists. 2: There is no chance you are playing this game without adding extensive content yourself, above and beyond what you would add if you were playing a standard OSR. 3: Nobody online is talking about it, even if they are playing it now. 4: If you don't agree with all of the above, you're an idiot. These things together mean this game is still DOA and a flash in the pan POS. Playing a POS in spite of it being a POS doesn't make it not a POS. It makes you stupid. Stop playing garbage, dumbass.
EDIT2: It happened again, another fucking kickstarter with even more millions received. The proliferation of simping in this hobby cannot be overstated. If I knew a big-titty blonde who was half-decent and reading lines I could retire off these fucking losers. This is OF on eas(ier) mode for any half-competent mid as fuck woman.
