| Storytellers Forge Announces The Black Ballad: Second Chances, a Shadowdark-Compatible Afterlife Supplement Launching on Kickstarter Storytellers Forge has announced the upcoming Kickstarter launch of The Black Ballad: Second Chances, a tabletop roleplaying game zine designed for the Shadowdark RPG system. The project expands the award-winning Shadowdark ruleset with new mechanics focused on death, memory, and consequence, allowing campaigns to continue beyond character death rather than ending at a total party kill.Set within The Black Ballad, a dark afterlife setting, Second Chances reframes what happens when adventurers fall. Characters do not simply vanish from play. Instead, they awaken in the Sunless Crossing, a purgatorial realm where survival, identity, and memory are gradually stripped away unless they earn the right to return.Designed for Shadowdark from the ground up, The Black Ballad: Second Chances also provides guidance for groups transitioning characters from 5e-style play into Shadowdark’s more lethal, torch-lit design philosophy.“The Black Ballad uses death as a jumping off point for a heavy metal opera as players journey through a dark underworld. Death is rarely the end for characters in fiction and mythology. If Wolverine can come back to life over and over again, why can’t a beloved rogue?” – Rob Weiland, Forbes.The zine includes new playable options, expanded modes of play, original monsters, spells, and a complete adventure that introduces characters to the afterlife itself.Key Features Include:72-page zine available in PDF and physical formatsTwo new playable classesTwo new ancestriesNew gear, magical items, and equipment 20 new spells designed for Shadowdark’s casting framework17 new monsters drawn from the Black Ballad setting Multiple new modes of play, including systems that support repeated death with escalating consequencesGuidance for adapting 5e material into ShadowdarkA complete reusable afterlife adventure that begins when the characters die40 minutes of in-universe professionally narrated letters and tales of the dead for immersion.Rather than negating danger, Second Chances leans into Shadowdark’s lethality. Each return from death carries lasting consequences, unraveling characters mechanically and narratively as memories, abilities, and identity are worn away. Follow the campaign on Kickstarterhttps://www.kickstarter.com/ For interview requests with creators Rick Heinz and Erik Frankhouse, or to request a Review PDF, contact: Media@storytellersforge.com |
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