SUPERDARK is a death metal spin on superheroes in a grimdark world of vigilantes and violence, made for use with Shadowdark. Create your own super individual by choosing the powers and talents that define them, with Shadowdark’s ease of creation, advancement, and lethal ethos fully intact.

SUPERDARK has been in active development and playtesting for over a year, and one lesson became obvious almost immediately: Superheroes are way more fun when they are glass cannons.

In SUPERDARK, Heroes and villains deal huge damage and everyone has low HP. We laugh when PCs accidentally kill the villains they mean to interrogate, or they murder their own teammate when they decide to throw them through a pane glass window to escape the cops.

Questionable decisions like those consistently create the best stories. The idea is to give players enough power to eventually convince themselves that an awful idea is actually genius. Sometimes they're right, but most of the time they're wrong. Either way, everyone remembers it.

Dark humor has become part of SUPERDARK's identity. When powers are absurd, collateral damage is everywhere, and disaster is one bad (or good) roll away. Our test groups find themselves laughing at situations that should probably have been horrifying.

One of the more difficult decisions was eliminating classes. It was tough because this approach was probably the largest departure from the core Shadowdark rules. But "Speedster" and "Brute" are too limiting and, honestly kinda lame. We instead focused on simplified custom creation. You build your hero by choosing powers (talents) and skills (also talents), or letting the dice choose. 

That left us with leveling concerns. One of Shadowdark's most attractive components is the easy level advancement system. You roll 2d6 on a table, roll additional HP, and voilà! You're level 3! 

The solution was allowing players to create their own level advancement table during character creation. You fill in three slots and your chart is complete. That way, when it comes time to level up, Shadowdark's advancement system works exactly the same way it did before! 

Another distinguishing characterstic about Shadowdark is the talent system. Everything is a talent, which keeps things simple. Superheroes rely on their powers like flight and super strength, but they also rely on skills like engineering, detective work, and computer hacking. Even though we call them powers and skills, they are just talents like spellcasting, backstab, and turning undead.

This keeps everything simple without the need for reinvention.

As we're world-building and tweaking the rules, we've been leaning into our favorite inspiration like The Boys, Invincible, Watchmen, Judge Dredd, Robocop, The Crow, and decades of comic books, action films, and heavy metal album covers.

Speaking of album covers, one of the earliest decisions we made was that SUPERDARK would be death metal.

Honestly, we're not connoisseurs of that style of music as much as we're connoisseurs of the look, feel, and the attitude! The attitude of defiance, standing against impossible odds, costly victories, villains who sometimes have a point, and a world that doesn't care about you.

We were surprised how well this fits superheroes. They throw themselves into unwinnable situations knowing people are going to get hurt and that they might die.

Yet, they do it anyway.

That's SUPERDARK!