A small but vicious little kit landed in my bucket this week: a Shadowdark RPG adventure headed for Kickstarter in the near future called Demidirge: Fanged Funnel.

At first, I hesitated to do a preview. Normally, if I’m going to write about an adventure, I want to run it first, spill some blood, break a few characters, listen to players argue about marching order. But then I remembered: I’ve been a DM for so long that I can smell a good dungeon from a cold read. Also, this is a preview, not a review, so nobody needs to clutch their pearls. I think I’m on solid ground here.

What really hooked me wasn’t the premise, the stats, or even the promise of grisly player death (though those are all respectable selling points). It was the art.

Now, I’m no art connoisseur, but I read a lot of adventures and RPG material, mostly scavenging for ideas to steal for my own tables. And these days? A lot of RPG art blurs together. It’s competent. It’s polished. It also often looks suspiciously like it was generated by a machine that’s never rolled a saving throw in its life.

Demidirge, however, is something else entirely.

This is unmistakably original, hand-drawn ink art in that grimy, old-school style, raw, evocative, and absolutely smashing. It’s the kind of art that doesn’t just decorate the page; it dares you to run the adventure. And honestly, this is one of the things the OSR does right. There’s a genuine love of illustration here, a reverence for the weird, the nightmarish, and the slightly unhinged, something that’s increasingly rare in the broader modern RPG space (and yes, I say that as someone perfectly comfortable using AI art myself).

The art in Demidirge is the sort of stuff that crawls into your brain and starts whispering encounter ideas. It’s moody. It’s grotesque. It’s inspiring. Old-school gamers are going to eat this up.

And here’s the thing: great art makes you want to read the adventure. That’s exactly how this module got its hooks into me. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but when you see this cover, you’re absolutely going to crack it open and see what horrors are waiting inside.

The Adventure

There are three things you need to know about this adventure, but fair warning, as always: if you’re a player, stop reading now. Seriously. This is a funnel. Knowledge is a liability. Spoilers ahead.

First, this adventure is written for Shadowdark, the current darling of the OSR scene. That said, like most good old-school modules, the bones are system-agnostic. You could run this with just about any OSR ruleset without breaking a sweat. That said, Demidirge is very deliberately tuned for Shadowdark and even includes a bespoke zero-level character creation framework designed specifically for this nightmare. You’re not playing “peasants who happen to be here”, you’re playing tunnelers, and that distinction matters mechanically and thematically.

Which leads neatly into the second thing: this is a funnel, and it wears that badge proudly.

If you’re not familiar with funnels, here’s the short version: instead of lovingly crafting a single hero, each player controls a small crowd of level 0 nobodies. These unfortunate souls are fed into a lethal gauntlet with the full expectation that most of them will die screaming, dissolving, or being recycled into something worse. The lucky few who survive crawl out the other side as first-level adventurers, scarred, changed, and usually carrying some deeply troubling memories.

I’ve always loved funnels (Dungeon Crawl Classics remains my personal poison of choice), because they’re one of the best onboarding tools tabletop RPGs have ever produced. Minimal rules. Immediate stakes. Constant laughs punctuated by sudden, shocking death. They’re perfect for non-gamers, party games, or just reminding veteran players that life is cheap and heroism is earned. Demidirge understands this completely and leans into it hard.

Now for the third element, the one that really elevates this adventure from “cool funnel” to “oh hell yes, I need to run this.”

The entire funnel takes place inside a shared nightmare.

The characters believe they are workers in a vast subterranean mining complex known as the Malic Mindshaft, a living, bureaucratic hellscape of quotas, rival labor crews, holy management cults, and acid-filled tunnels. In reality, they are prisoners trapped inside the mind of an inhuman entity called The Hermit Queen. Their physical bodies hang elsewhere in the real world, sealed inside organic coffins, while their consciousnesses are forced to dig ever deeper toward something called the Sunless Horizon. The queen’s nest of sorts from which she is attempting to escape, and the players are inadvertently helping her to do so by digging her out.

Their real objective, though they won’t realize it at first, is to notice that something is wrong. To pick up on anomalies. To question the reality of the tunnels. To recognize that the rules of the world don’t behave quite right. Only by collectively triggering enough psychic “cracks” in the illusion can they awaken… at which point the nightmare ends in spectacular fashion and the survivors emerge into the real world as first-level characters.

This setup is brilliant for two reasons.

First, it gives the GM enormous freedom. This is a dream. A hostile one. Reality can glitch, contradict itself, loop, or outright lie. NPCs can behave inconsistently. Dead crews can reappear. Shadows can move wrong. You are encouraged to mess with player expectations, and the module provides a long list of concrete tools, events, rival crews, nightmare phenomena, and outright body horror, to do exactly that.

Second, and this is the real GM gold, Demidirge is setting-agnostic by design. Because the adventure ends with the characters waking up somewhere in the real world, it can slot cleanly into any campaign setting. You don’t need lore buy-in. You don’t need a starting town. You don’t even need to explain where the characters are from. They wake up, alive, confused, and hunted, and now your campaign begins.

For me personally, that makes this an ideal opening adventure. I’ve been planning to kick off a Dolmenwood campaign and have been wrestling with how to start it in a way that feels strange, unsettling, and memorable. Demidirge: Fanged Funnel solves that problem completely. Drop the players into the nightmare, let them claw their way out, and then unleash them into the woods with no safety net and a head full of questions.

That’s a hell of a session one.

Conclusion

I’ve been intentionally vague about the finer details of this adventure, and that’s very much by design. The two questions people usually want answered are “What is this adventure about?” and “How do I actually use this in my game?” I hope I’ve given enough context to answer both, without robbing anyone of the joy (or horror) of reading it for themselves. And yes, that includes DMs. This is very much an adventure best experienced fresh.

What Demidirge: Fanged Funnel offers is that classic OSR, “trust the referee” style of adventure design. You’re given strong impressions, clear themes, and a well-organized structure, tables, factions, events, and evocative bite-sized descriptions, rather than pages of boxed text and rigid scripting. The module assumes you know how to run a game, and more importantly, that you want to. It’s fast to read, easy to internalize, and leaves the real magic where it belongs: at the table.

That’s one of the OSR’s greatest strengths. Instead of overwhelming you with lore dumps and hyper-specific contingencies that immediately fall apart once the first sword is drawn, this adventure gives you the tools and trusts your instincts. Once play begins, the dungeon breathes, reacts, and mutates based on player choices rather than a prewritten flowchart.

There are key elements that matter, of course. The slow discovery that the characters are trapped inside a nightmare is central to the experience, as are the unsettling monsters and factions that inhabit it. The adventure is carefully seeded with obstacles that double as clues: rival tunnel crews, bureaucratic cruelty, ritualized labor, and nightmarish events that don’t quite add up. Everything subtly pushes the players to dig deeper, literally and figuratively, while quietly hinting that something is very, very wrong.

Mystery is notoriously difficult to pull off in tabletop RPGs. Players are clever, suspicious, and prone to setting things on fire just to see what happens. But here, I think the author genuinely succeeds. The truth is neither obvious nor handed to the players, and I fully expect many groups won’t survive long enough to unravel it at all. This is a funnel, after all. Death is cheap. Insight is not.

Players will need to bring their A-game, and probably a few spare character sheets, if they want to make it to the other side.

In short: this is a great story, thoughtfully constructed, beautifully illustrated, and deeply engaging. It’s weird, cruel, and imaginative in all the right old-school ways. If you’re looking for a funnel that does more than just kill characters, one that leaves survivors changed, this is absolutely worth picking up.

Highly recommended.