Good afternoon! 👋

I’ve been working on spells for ShadowTech this last couple weeks. Also just finished my prototype character sheet. Check out some previews below! 👇

Hope you are well! 🤗

As some of you may know I’m a high school history teacher and I’ve been trying to build a TTRPG community at our campus for the past few years. I’ve taught staff, students, and parents how to play D&D, Shadowdark, and other games for several years now, but this year I’ve partnered with another teacher to really expand our D&D club offerings. Our goal is to build a library on campus of TTRPG books and accessories (old and new) that students can use during club time or even checkout and take home. We want to help foster the next generation of TTRPG gaming groups by removing some of the barrier to entry, and provide a great socializing activity that reduces student doom scrolling and brain rot.

Hit me up on my social media if you’d like to reach out and donate old material instead of, or in addition to, a monetary contribution! I’d love to connect with you!

Our school partners with a crowdfunding company called Snap Raise for fundraisers like this, often used by our athletics department. They handle the campaign itself and send a check directly to our school’s business tech as soon as the campaign ends. We are hoping to get a nice set of Shadowdark books, among other things, for the school library! TYSM for any help you can provide!

Please use this link to donate to our school club fundraiser!

In my last newsletter I shared some initial sneak peeks of what I’m currently working on for the next issue of Grim Games zines. ShadowTech is my attempt at a Sci-Fi Mech RPG, but with magic and monsters just like Shadowdark RPG. In fact, my loose lore / setting is set in the far distant future where the Shadowdark has expanded to engulf world after world, with humanity pushed to the periphery of the galaxy, struggling to survive.

Anyway, these past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a Quickstart Rules level spell list and settled on 10 T1 and 10 T2 ShadowTech spells. Here is what I have cooked up so far:

I’ll highlight everyone’s favorite bread & butter spell Magic Missile in the context of ShadowTech RPG:

In this fusion of tech and magic, this spell uses a Near-Ranged Missile (NRM) or Far-Ranged Missile (FRM) you have equipped and basically precision guides it a Far distance (regardless of what missile type is used). Later I’ll also show you how normal missile volleys work, but just know a 1d4 for 1 missile is a good upgrade! In this case, Magic Missile also uses up one NRM or FRM of ammunition. I’m trying to make several spells that interact with your weapon and equipment loadouts, and this one is a pretty straightforward example of that!

As you can see, you’ll also notice another new factor in spell casting: heat generation. Typical weapons will generation heat that you’ll have to manage (I’ll preview that in more detail in a future update), and spells use your mech’s ShadowTech drive system which also generates heat. The higher tier the spell, the higher die category for heat generation! Think of it like overclocking a CPU or graphics card on your computer: The more you push it for quality output, the hotter it runs.

This morning I also completed my poor quality attempt at a character sheet in canva. I’ll be using this to do lots of playtests with my local groups starting in November! I’ll be hunting around the internet to commission some character sheet designers to do the real version for my zine, but this will serve its function for now. If you have any suggested designers for the ShadowTech character sheet, feel free to reach out! Ping me in the Arcane Library discord, or on my social media!

Maybe by looking at the character sheet you can decipher some of the gameplay mechanics I’m cookin’ up! 🔎