Sometimes with solo roleplaying, the RNG and other aspects of playing leads you down rabbit holes and loopholes through strange vistas. Even though "just play the dice you get" tends to win out, you should always leave yourself an escape door. In this case, I am going into a panic room for half a second to reset.
the tl;dr version
I was a bit unsure how to handle the Ida Fell plotline from the beginning and as it got more and more cultish with implications, I realized it was neither fitting the Outgunned vibe nor precisely something I wanted to introduce in this campaign. Rather than push through and have this flavor everything, I am going to [REDACT] the original Episode 1, Acts 1 & 2 to help bring it back on track.
On Just Rolling with the Dice...mostly...Until You Don't
One of the best pieces of advice I can give for Solo Roleplaying in all its varied forms is this:
Just roll with the dice.
But this one comes with a pretty major caveat:
It is your story and it should ultimately spark joy for you.
In good sessions of solo play, these two things tend to vibe ok. You get some ups and downs. You get some twists. Two players hitting similar oracle results might play them out in completely different ways because there is always that personal interpretation aspect to it, but the very mechanics of
oracle results + personal preference
tends to end up with something like a satisfactory game for those of us who stick around with the hobby.
Then you reach moments where you realize that either (1) the oracle results or (2) the in-the-moment {interpretation | decision} ended up being at a clash with the central tenet of all solo play: have fun. What do you do? Even then, I would mostly say to try and find a way to dance with what you got. Add stuff, blend stuff, retcon stuff here or there, but overall work towards some central place of calm.
And if the workload of doing that is not actually vibing your vibe? Well...
You look that solo play session in the face and you tell it, "Not today, jackass."
What We Talk about When We Don't Talk About Cults
I wrote the bit about Clo Mirza hiding in the panic room because his girlfriend was pregnant in something like twenty-damned seconds.
Then, I went: shit, why?
This isn't a slice of life game and not precisely a comedy game. Why, in a game meant to be all about constant action and dumb action-movie plot twists and tropes, would I do this? How do I make it work?
The next few steps in my brain looked a bit like this:
he is scared of her father → her father is a powerful man → ooo, church leader → church must be scary → something *weird* is up with the church → some kind of cult-like church with a doomsday prophecy → the pregnant daughter must be important to the church → blah blah blah virgin birth and space jesus
On pretty much any other day, I would absolutely adore the the final steps of that, the whole "cycle of Jesus" and alien entity entering the world and the mechanics of how that might play out in a "normal" Alabama Weird // Horror campaign.
You could easily imagine Eustace Delmont and Jani Blum investigating a cult leader who thinks she is going to give birth to the One True Final Christ with lots of cosmic horror and fights with Hitomi about stuff. Perfect.
Just not really a good fit for this campaign, and mainly for two reasons.
The Flavor of Fiction Reason
The "shallow" end of why is because it is a mismatch for the flavor of fiction:
- This is a game system mostly dedicated to an action-movie flow where having a third or fourth high concept pushed into it would simply disrupt it too much [I speak from experience].
- This is a campaign largely about daughters breaking free from their dads and the relationships between fathers and daughters and having a daughter be the cult-worship-object of her father takes that a bit too far and removes her own control.
"All the Damned Implications" Reason
The deeper end is just all the, you know...
This type of cult is right up there with serial killers, abusive asylums, and international cabals of billionaires committing {economic | ecological | stuff involving creeps on an island} crimes . The sort of plot point that tends to track in genre fiction by being painted in a very broad stroke and being turned into a set of easier to digest tropes rather than a deep dive.
For now, in this specific instance, I am not judging that. It's problematic, but then a lot of things are. I am not yucking yums for the moment.
However around the time I was working out why I wasn't going to include a scene where Olive was having to deal with HOW they were going to guarantee a pregnancy in Ida, I realized I was not having a good time. I kept pushing through. I got a cult in a compound with guns but I am also trying to make them relatively nice folk and it ends up just being a big old ick from me, dawg.
I started obviously rushing through a few aspects and the only thing in the whole thing that I didn't personally hate was the fact that Fell had realized that Olive could handle "The Object" and was going to start spreading its gospel more directly without the whole virgin birth plotline. Again, something more fitting to a Delmont/Patel/Blum outing.
The death straw for the whole thing was reading, this morning (2026-03-19), about the trauma teens go through in such cults and not-so-obvious cults.
Nah. Dead. Dead in the water. Out on the curb and set on fire. All that.
The original Episode 1 is dead. Long live....Episode 1.
The New Episode 1: What Stays vs What Goes vs What Changes
What GOES is pretty easy:
- No cults
- No child/teen-pregnancy arcs
- No removal of anyone's agency
- No strange compound
- No forcing The Generals to have to fight folks who might be victims, themselves
What STAYS is also pretty easy:
- The opening scene will stay but the explanation of how its a problem and all that will alter
- I'll keep The Reverend Thaddeus Fell
- Ida Fell will still be pregnant
- Fell will be (over-)protective and loving over Ida
- There will be some religious trappings
- Olive is fun, I'll keep a version of her
- Eustace will show up, because I already made the art, dang it
The remaining aspect, what CHANGES, is trickier since some of that will be entirely determined by starting over with the opening scene and playing it out. However, a couple of parameter shifts:
- Fell will play up being a church leader, but his church will actually be a gang of somewhat violent people who traffic contraband
- Ida will be moved up to 20 with Olive probably more around 18
- "The Compound" will be an old dusty church used to store their goods (I might reuse the original art to be a scene, like a local industrial plant with a business type bigly into religion or something)
- Less sneaking around, more fights
Limited Series Moreso than Movie
And just to have it written on paper, want to note that my conception of the pace of this is less an action movie and more like a limited series where you have
- Opening Episode: probably two-parter or extended special which establishes characters
- The Drift: a few episodes where single-shot adventures show up to help build up the worlds
- The Fall: a couple of episodes where "Everything Changes!"
- The Main Plot: the last half or so of the series where the actual main plot shows up in force and little bits of the rest tend to interact and maybe were actually part of it the whole time
In this light, there will possibly be another mission or so of The Four Generals prior to The Fall, which will likely focus on the cult we know is hunting Major.