Shadowlight
A downloadable game
What is Shadowlight? It's a myth of truth and the truth of myth. It’s the middle ground, the deep breath before the plunge. It depends greatly on your point of view. It's the ultimate expression & the ultimate abstraction, the behind & the between. The empty space at the center of Nortat's Matrix.
The Shadowlight RPG is a game where the curious investigate mysteries, explore paradoxes and delve into the hidden truths of the omniverse. The themes of Shadowlight are supported by the Personae system. While Personae is a complete and fully-playable TTRPG system in its own right, Personae and Shadowlight are two sides of the same coin: when you play a Personae game, you're playing a Shadowlight game, and vice versa. Every unique Personae game, and for that matter every table playing a Personae game, is both a Personae stage and a monad of the omniverse.
Shadowlight is also
- meta-setting: a collection of settings where each is a monad in the omniverse;
- meta-cosmology: a set of common characteristics of how the omniverse is organized and a framework for how the supernatural works in the omniverse’s monads;
- meta-cosmogony: an explanation for how the omniverse was created, the progenitors who may have had a hand in the omniverse’s creation and framing, and how their “grand experiment” resulted in the omniverse’s present-day appearance, as well as the involvement of the shiruul, shaleth and beleshedaux;
- metaphor: recurring themes of mystery, paradox, and revealing the unknown
Download
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Development log
- Pregen Characters Updated to Personae v2Feb 02, 2023
- Shadowlight Pre-Gen Characters Uploaded - Sci-FiSep 15, 2022
- Fantasy Pre-gen Characters UploadedSep 07, 2022
- Shadowlight Blank Character Sheets UploadedAug 20, 2022
Comments
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So much here, generating a response I've never experienced reading settings/sourcebooks etc.:
My preferred style is 1-3 session adventures, but a single paragraph had me craving a long campaign in one of the worlds justifying one of those big fat hardcovers that clutter the market and often dilute their RPG's value and playability with filler.
Can we start playing this world, now? And when's the next session?
This is a fantastic, setting agnostic, ttrpg. I love the customization of the game for the characters rather than having to stick to *Just* prewritten talents/skills. It allows for each character to have their moment in the spotlight and for players to really get into a character they want to play. Being setting agnostic, but with enough lore and background for each place in the story allows GMs to have a structure that isn't too strict to create stories that they want to tell and that players want to play in.
While the mechanics can be a little confusing to pick up when first designing characters if you have a hard time following the math, but once I got it, it was easy to remember through the rest of the game and wasn't as complicated as I was making it. When rolling it's a certain number of die against the GM and highest number wins.
Overall, it's a good balance of customization with some structure in place to help those who are unsteady with freeform. The mechanic itself is built to help players shine in their own unique way, it doesn't have too much in the way of crunchy rules (simple GM die against Player die), and it allows both the GM and the players to play the way they want to play to ensure everyone is having fun.