Thoughts After Ending my Shadows Over the Barrowmaze Game
THE SIX MONTHS AFTER PERSPECTIVE
So, back in April 2024 I decided that I was going to start up a Shadowdark open-table game using the excellent Barrowmaze mega-dungeon book. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of an open-table/west marches style of game (if you’re not sure what a west marches game is check out the excellent Ars Ludi blog) where the players set their own goals, organise a party and then book a slot with the GM who preps specifically for the adventure they’re going on.
Here’s a link to the original pitch document I designed.
Shadowdark was the new hotness at the time (and is still going great guns, at the time of writing the Western Reaches Kickstarter has raised over £1,137,539 and still has 24 days to go) and I was itching to bring it to the table, and I’ve always been a fan of Barrowmaze so I decided to combine the two.
I did a fair old amount of work for it, producing the earlier pitch document and also an additional rules document.
However, in July 2024, only a handful of months after beginning the game, I made the decision to shelve it and end the campaign.
I’ve thought about it a few times since it finished and decided that—now a bit of time has passed—it would be a cathartic exercise to revisit it in a blog post and examine my decisions and what I learned from running it.
So, if you loved it so much, why did you decide to can the campaign?
As with most things in life there were a number of different reasons I decided to end the campaign, but the main one was that I changed jobs.
When I started the campaign I was doing fairly low-stress data entry work at a company which left me plenty of time to prep for games and do other stuff. A short time before I decided to end the campaign I moved into the IT department of the same company and had much more responsibility, leaving me with less time for everything else, including game prep and running.
Obviously you still have to do all the everyday stuff around the house and other responsibilities in addition to work, as work took up more of my “free” time and those other responsibilities had to be upheld, something had to give and (unfortunately) it was the Barrowmaze game.
High Points of the Game
For me the high-points of running an open-table game were:
Getting to run more gaming sessions with varying groups of different people.
Watching people in the Discord I used for the game organising their missions and talking about what they were going to explore.
Some of the crazy stuff and conversations that happened in-sessions.
I learnt a lot about Obsidian Notes (the software I used—and still use—for tracking my RPG notes).
I got to to delve into the online resources available for Barrowmaze (maps, etc) and make some of my own.
I got to try out Shadowdark, a game I very much enjoyed and am strongly considering for future long-term play once one or more of my current WFRP campaigns wrap-up.
Challenges During the Game
As with everything in life there are always challenges when it comes to every endeavour, and thinking back on it now, the following were probably the main challenges for me:
Combining Shadowdark and Barrowmaze: Not massively difficult but it did mean I spent a long-time reading both and then working out which bits of both books I was going to use or omit from the game.
Creating some of the maps: This was a real time-sink, since I’d decided to use Owlbear Rodeo as a VTT (it’s simple and has a low barrier for entry), which meant laying out all the maps, putting fog of war on them, creating monster tokens, etc etc, something I quite enjoyed doing but it all took time.
Shadowdark didn’t cover all of the things: Not really a criticism of the game itself since no one game covers everything, however I think there are several OSR-style assumptions made in Barrowmaze that aren’t really dealt with in any great detail in Shadowdark (such a taking on hirelings for example). None of this is insurmountable and we came up with house-rules or found stuff on the web we could use but again, it all took a fair amount of time and effort to glom it all together.
Running the game for disparate groups of people: I’m not the most highly social person in the world, although I’m no stranger to running games at Cons, and running games for groups of people who I didn’t know beforehand, some of whom obviously didn’t get on with each other (although everyone did their best to remain cordial) was a strain. Now people might be saying “well just man-up and deal with it”, which is fair enough, but TBH I spend all day at work being diplomatic with people and I don’t have much enthusiasm for it in my leisure time.
The last-minute impacts on my schedule: Many of the games were booked last minute, which is something I probably could’ve got a better handle on by setting firmer limits at the GM (benefits of hindsight) but I didn’t and it lead to me not being able to make plans for other stuff in advance in-case a game was randomly booked for that evening.
Not talking enough to my players about this enough: It’s easy when given the benefits of hindsight or when advising someone else to say “Oh well, just discuss it with your players” and to be fair, I probably should’ve talked more to my players about the issues/struggles I was having, but I didn’t, I don’t really like it myself when people bring out of game issues to the table so I wasn’t going to dump my own on people. Possibly the wrong move, but there you go.
Advice for others planning to run such games
Now feel free to take this advice with a pinch of salt, after all, I’m hardly the most successful open-table GM in the world (in-fact I’m probably not even a tribute to the most successful open-table GM in the world), but I have GM-ed a fair bit over my *cough, cough* 20+ odd years in the hobby.
Sort out your rules documents at the start and stick to them: One of the things I did right was creating a central document that the players could look at to get some of the background and the rules I was using.
Create a central place for discussion and booking delves: Discord works really great for this and was what we used.
Don’t go overboard with your prep: Even if you enjoy prepping like me, if you go too hard it can end up feeling like work or a chore, and nothing is going to sap your enthusiasm for the game (trust me), and if you’re not enthusiastic, why should the players be?
Pick a game you’re comfortable with: Shadowdark is an excellent game (as I say, I’m planning to run it again in the future as a campaign with my regular group), however I hadn’t ran it before when I started the Barrowmaze game and getting up to speed took me a little while. In retrospect I’d probably have felt more comfortable using something like Old-school Essentials which I was more familiar with at the time.
Have a procedure in-place for dealing with “problem” players: If you’re throwing your net wide you’ll get some colourful characters, we had a couple of people who weren’t really a problem but who obviously rubbed each other up the wrong way. I hadn’t come up with a procedure for dealing with this and as a result didn’t deal with it as effectively as I should have.
Start small: Again this is not a criticism of Barrowmaze since it’s a great book, but it’s big, really big, I think that perhaps I would’ve been more comfortable if I’d started with something of my own creation that was smaller in scope and could’ve grown along with the PCs explorations.
So how do I feel about the game now?
Looking back on the game I regard it with fondness and am glad that I did it, I got to play some very fun sessions with some great people and flex GM-ing muscles that I don’t often get to use in my more regular games; yes there were challenges and in the end I felt I had to wrap-up the campaign, but I’m still glad I did it at the end of the day.
So, would I run an open-table game again?
I think yes, I probably would, although not at the present since there are still a lot of demands on my free time and I think squeezing an open-table game in would be too much to handle; if that changes at some point in the future though I may think about re-visiting the idea of an open-table game, although I don’t know whether I’d return to the previous game or start something new.
So, there’s my brief ramblings, if you have any thoughts or comments please feel free to drop a message below.
Game Resources
If you’re interested in any of the documents/resources that were used the Shadowdark Barrowmaze game I ran, you can click here to view the folder where they are stored in my Google Drive.
When I eventually get desperate for space on my G Drive I may eventually remove these but, until then, if you find any of them useful or interesting feel free to give them a look.