We kicked things off back on March 1st with a simple call for the RPG Blog Carnival, inviting the community to write about the “things” lurking in the dark. Maybe a creature. Maybe an encounter. Maybe an item. But whatever it was, shed a little light on it and share it with the world.

After a great month of exploring those things in the dark, I think it’s time to drag all of these great posts into the light.

Creatures

• The Umbra – a creature even the Shadows fear in the dark. (RPG Blog Carnival Kick-off Post)
• And then we brought up a strange combination between a gelatinous cube and a dimensional rift with the Void Cube.
• Phil at Tales of the GM offered some conflicting reports about the River Ogre, a creature that may or may not exist on the edge of one of his world.
• Jaye Foster at 6d6RPG offered a handful of critters living in the shadows — the Drop Snake, Soul Coral, and Turned Steel. All of them statted out for 6d6!
• Art Lyon from Imfinite Possibilities took the idea of a Shade and turned it into a race of creatures for D&D 5e. Primordial creatures of the dark! Spooky!
• And Sean Holland over at Sea of Stars explored some cool creatures that explore the darkness beyond and between the islands, including manta ray-like creatures, dragons, and spirits exploring the space between realms.

Encounters

• Codex Anathema offered some fantastic suggestions on how to ramp up fear at the game table with “The Art of Fear.” Gonzalo offers all sorts of fantastic examples from horror and suspense movies and television that you can easily roll right into your technique toolbox!
• Keith talked a bit about using creepers in the fog to keep your PCs guessing…
• Johnn over at Roleplaying Tips offered some great tips on exploring the PC’s worst fears in the dark with a three step recipe for wandering monsters.
• Anthony Wright at Temple of Ravens explored the darkness of space to give us a glimpse at some potential life on rogue planets scattered throughout the galaxy with some fun ideas on how to explore their world in a science fiction setting.

Items

• You can’t talk about the darkness without talking a bit about light sources, which we covered in a post here.
• Over at Leicester’s Ramble, V.A. has taken some real-world lighting options and created some awesome magical (and non-magical) items to aid those explorations in the dark. Some very cool lanterns that every PC should be clamoring for very soon!

Miscellany

• Clark Timmins took the fantasy rules for light and brought them to a more realistic conclusion in “Seeing in the Dark” over at RPGGeek. He provides some comparison between light rules for a variety of systems from 1e to 5e and beyond!
• The guys at RPG Circus covered a bit of what lies in the darkness in their podcast episode for Season 9, Episode 5. Always fun to hear them ramble on like every game table I’ve ever been around (they have a great chat about cartoons of all things!). They actually get to the blog carnival topic about minute 56 or so. 🙂
• We even took the blog carnival into space to talk about things in the dark of space, some ideas for dark rooms in the dungeon and some reasons those dark rooms might exist in the first place.
• And I even chatted a bit about some of the darkness inside a couple of the characters I’ve played over the years.

Conclusion

Thanks for all the amazing contributions to the carnival. Great ideas to mine for many adventures to come!

April brings with it an exploration of Megadungeons by Johnn Four at Roleplaying Tips, so I look forward to getting lost in a few posts this month!

And a big thanks goes out to Johnn for hosting the RPG Blog Carnival Archive and keeping us all on track every month!