Category: Campaign Design

The "Monolith of the Cyclops" will be something of the hub dungeon // wrap-around story for a few sessions in my SoloDark campaign: The Bleak the Pearl. I've dropped bits and dribbles here or there in the text already shared but the idea is that this dungeon (the "monolith" moniker makes no sense but it also sets a mood so I kept it, it was just randomly rolled as a title) is a mystical network of tunnels whose layout and composition were originally designed to channel energy into the "Lighthouse." The Lighthouse which is used to the keep The Bleak at bay and to allow humanity to have a stronghold against the tide. Lately, the Light is failing and so The Bleak threatens to overrun the last great uncorrupted city...

And there are forces in the city that considers the fall of the Light to be a useful profit making opportunity.

The map being used is The Halls of Amon-Gorloth II by Dyson Logos. I chose this one because it is big but not too unwieldly. It feels the right size to be a network covering the underground of what was essentially a "border city." It has some neat and varied features. And, frankly, it just sparked joy.

The plan is to split it into rough quadrants and to give each quadrant its own encounter table and to give each one it's own "fuelstone" (the mystical statues used to channel the energy towards the cyclops which then powers the Lighthouse).

The four "flavors" are just to make it a bit varied but also to give me some experience in building up reasonable encounter lists for ShadowDark and to try out a few different enemy types.

Northeast: Marine/Sea Monsters + Slimes. This section will be flooded by sea water coming in from the large north-east entrance and have several rooms underwater with some care being spent to drain them using the resources and gadgets of the Lighthouse Keepers. The creatures here will be a mixture of fishy (Fishfolk, Saltwater Crocodiles, etc) and slimy (Black Puddings, etc).
Southeast: Giant Insects and more Fungal Types. This section will have some of the icky from the first (so slimes are likely to repeat but I'll toss in some mushroomy things) but will focus more on insects and insect type enemies. There will be giant cockroaches. A lot of giant cockroaches.
Southwest: Automatons, Golems, and Plant Types. This section will more "mechanical" with automatons and magical armor type enemies and I want to try and work in some plants and such, possibly created more on the fly with the creature generation rules. I'll hold off any future predictions since I'll need to scale this to something more level appropriate but golems and such will make an appearance.
Northwest: Humans, Rats, and "Slum" enemies. will have some some human and various "fantasy slum" style encounters. A thieves guild setting up shop. Maybe some classic giant rats and such.

The characters will have a rough map and a rough location of the five fuelstones. One in each quadrant plus the main "eye" which is the large statue in the lower left. Not necessarily a perfect map, and one that was made roughly 300 years ago but I'll dial out some of the "which way to go" for this one to stop it from taking even longer. As I go, I'll do something like roll a d20 per room/section and a roll of 20 (or maybe 19-20...or make it so each roll counts "down"...I like that, eventually there *will* be paths up) will indicate there is a passage up to the city of Grunce, above.

The idea will be they will need to clear and purify the whole map before they are done, but as they go other adventures will crop based on various needs. They will extend out, make base camps, spread up supply stations, and generally retake the whole complex over several weeks or months in game time. Also retaking the city in the process.

Besides that, I will use the standard ShadowDark content generation d10 tables blended in with some of Philip Reed's ShadowSpark cards, bits of a couple of other oracles, etc. The first quadrant, the NE/Sea-Themed one will have no boss monster. The other quadrants will likely have a boss monster set to the current level the adventurers are at.

Once this is done, they will likely be level 6 or 7 and ready to venture deeper into the Bleak for a few hexcrawls and a build up to something like a final battle. If paced correctly it should give me plenty of experience with most of the elements available to explore in ShadowDark.

Part 7 will begin the actual delve where they work on reclaiming the first fuelstone (they already have the Marius Diadem) and cleaning out and confirming the next fuelstone which will launch on finding the relic they need to power it).

The Big Barston Bakersfield Chronicles Recap, Part 2 (Advanced Fighting Fantasy)

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-07-08

In Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Campaign Design, Solo Campaigns, The Bakersfield Chronicles

In Part 1 of this Big Recap, we saw how a simple Harper's Quest 2 story blended with a too-large Troika campaign to become something in the middle: a simple-beginnings but unknown-endings Advanced Fighting Fantasy campaign. In this part, I will recap some of the ideas and sessions that began to set-up all the threads that I am still working on to this day...almost entirely in ways that I thought would go differently.

-- Step One: Advanced Fighting Barston --

How to take a character from one system - Harper's Quest 2 uses the a similar STR/DEX/WIS loadout as Into the Odd's STR/DEX/WILL - and convert it into another: AFF's Skill, Luck, Stamina, and Magic? I handled this mostly by starting with the basics. I made a character in the default way and then looked for ways to tweak and update him. He had been pretty good in fighting groups of enemies so he got the Combat Tactics talent that meant he had training in facing multiple foes. He had absolutely sucked at casting or using anything magical so not only did he start with no magical talent or score in AFF but one of the inherent mysteries was why he seemed to be anti-magical. There was no disadvantage like that for him to take but it was baked into his story that he tended to avoid magical items. Even for potions he brewed herbal concoctions. Priestly magic was ok, but he horked up more wizardly magic...for some reason.

He had a whetstone in HQ2 that gave him +1 Damage. In this case, his AFF mace gets +1 damage but otherwise uses the AFF damage track.

One of the more perplexing items was a bow found in the HQ2 segment. It was in a secret room in a red warlock base and was tied into a wizard named Yevony The Great who had some non-specific dealings with at least some of the Reds. "Is this bow magical?" "Exceptional No." At the time I just played it as a very-mundane bow. Once the transition happened I wanted something more than that so ended up with it being anti-magic. The bow attracts magically inclined people and then destroys their magic ability when they use it. The supremely non-magical Barston just used it like a bow but it could even strip the magical nature out of entities over time.

-- Step Two: Building a City Brick by Brick --

Humb was a bustling commerce town...kind of. There were a lot of merchants' guilds and a lot of commerce in potential, but for years the city had been increasingly having trouble reaching the outside world. To the north and west, the red warlocks choked off trade routes. To the south and east, it was the blue warlocks. Shipments got lost all the time. People visiting the city were under attack. Humb was in a long downfall state of decay.

I also rolled on a random table - I forget which one but it might have been something from Matt David's The Great Book of Random Tables or one of his related Quest books - and got some basic hooks to generate some threads for Barston to solve. Outside of the long-term disruption to supplies that put a strain on all trade, there was

A general lack of faith plaguing the churches and the people,
A number of people had gone missing with no clear explanation,
A local troupe was in town having troubles getting people to join.

A big one with no clear ending, a big one with probably a clear ending once it is solved, and a smaller one for flavor. I liked it.

I also threw some Rory's Story Cubes to generate a few longer distance oddities to hook some adventures on and got there was a floating island related to missing livestock down south, a site where something had fallen from above and was altering the terrain (also down south), and a person who was trying to research stories of giants (in town, but focusing on the west).

I plonked a few more threads in about a plague and another about folks turning into statues but both of those kind removed relatively soon [as in, immediately] because it was getting to be a bit too much. Both got just kind of summed up into "Humb has troubles and needs more supplies".

Using The Universal NPC Emulator to generate some details along with some other rolls on things like Meaning Tables I ended up with some not-so-grimdark hooks such as the current mayor - Mayor Elore Mardias in a direct Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song nod - was an ex-bard and had a lot of fans and groupies who basically elected him and still hung on to him because of that. A river spotted briefly during the HQ2 session became the River Eos - a joke about "End of Service" derived from an online community I am part of for SaGa's Re;universe - and the major way to travel to and from Humb. There was a plotline about assassinating a shoemaker in Nallstay (an artisan city to the north alongside Lake Telos, another EOS joke).

Barston was staying at the Dog and Duck Inn, near the Brite Green (the only remnant of Malakar Brite in the city's history...a park named for the long serving family of which Malakar was a member).

The sheer number of details generated over these couple of prep sessions was growing a bit out of hand so it was time to actually play the dang thing.

-- A Grumpy Wizard, a Street Punk, a Reformed Warlock, an Elven Singer, a Con Man, and a Very Shaggy Dog Join a Journeyman Book Printer for Drinks --

Now having a working character, backed by AFF and Mythic GME 2, it was time to Barston to work. Why was Uncle Shell wrong? What actually happened forty-years ago when the Bakersfields fled Humb. How can Barston help all this chaos. The main goals were basically clear:

Find out the truth of Uncle Shelltyon and Malakar Brite
Punch out some Warlocks
Help get supplies to Humb

The first adventure was a quick one. Barston is chilling in the Dog and Duck's bar when he hears shouts. He calls out to see if someone will help and the person who answers the call turns out to be Yevony the Great, the same wizard who seemed to be helping the warlocks (turns out he had snuck the bow in to try and get it to Malakar to destroy Malakar's magic, but that was found out later). The two of them temporarily team up to help the person shouting who is Derron Underhill, a young street punk character who prefers to his fists to any blade. Derron, a rebellious but spiritual teenager, becomes one of the main allies to Barston. At the time, Derron was working in the stables and trying to stop blue warlocks from stealing the horses.

One of the Blues turns on the others and helps out the good guys. This ends up being Haig Raven: eventual reformed warlock and general digger into ruins and mystical mysteries.

Besides these three, these early sessions introduced

Astrid - runaway wood elf princess and current troupe leader of traveling performers The Skipping Faun who is intrigued by Barston,
Nizel Torel - supposed Great Hero but actually a conman who told most of his own exploits to help with various schemes, and
Gulwin - a great big shaggy dog that showed up during the HQ2 sessions but returned here to save Barston a couple of times.

Nizel, by the way, was the one associated with the assassination plot at Nallstay, though this turned out to be a ruse by the Reds.

It was a lot of characters already. Others got added as NPCs and townsfolk, including a Sheriff that was initially a main ally since the mayor always seemed dismissive of Barston. Our main group, swollen to capacity, eventually ended up tracking down the main base of the Blues and wrecking it, which freed up trade to the south and allowed Humb goods to reach the coast and Goldenbrook, a large coastal town with one hell of a political conflict going down.

While I was doing a bang-up job of introducing characters and plots left and right - be it by oracle or meaning table to pulling some card or another, etc - one thing was clear: the campaign was losing focus and it was losing fun. The heart of this campaign was Barston and it was quickly becoming a group effort where there was no reason to believe that Barston was anything significant.

-- The Great Split and the Move from the Original Plot --

Early on, there were two main goals for Barston that had never really been approached or close to solved: find Malakar Brite and find Uncle Shell's stuff. Taking care of Humb became the entire plotline, even greatly outpacing fighting off the warlocks. More and more people showed up. Bill Samford was a poor merchant and a worse guard. Bill had three friends with him (originally, before I made the whole circus, those three friends were going to be Barston's buddies at the Dog and Duck and kind of a Greek Chorus to back up our lone adventurer but frankly I did not have time for them). This cast of a dozen and then dozens became kind of background noise.

The great split started to happen. Nizel and Yevony (the conman fighter and the morally questionable wizard) got sent north to Nallstay to handle whatever was up with the assassination plot and take care of business up there. Haig and Gulwin (reformed Warlock and shaggy miracle dog) fled town and justice and eventually team up with Ali Ahussa, professor and archeologist who had tried to hire Barston early on to hunt down proof of giants, to go off and explore. Astrid gets about half her time with Barston and Derron, half her time with The Skipping Faun.

The sheriff got several story beats, A storyline involving Derron and Barston tracking down some bandits ended up triggering some interrupt scenes in which a new character - Alice Hunter - hires the two of them to free her friend and maybe lover, Lun, a member of the Humb guard who has been captured while the rest of the guard look the other way. This introduced a whole new bad guy, The Order of Illkar, which was posing as a merchant's guild specializing in religious supplies. This Order is the major instigator of many of Humb's issues, playing temples against one another while also stealing supplies and kidnapping people.

There ended up being a rescue mission, finding out that the Sheriff and many of the guards folk were in on this "kidnap people for profit" plot, and a huge fight in the street in which Barston, his allies, and the printer's guild manages to win. The sheriff is arrested. Barston is an unsung hero. Alice and Lun are reunited.

And absolutely none of these madcap and ever spiraling adventures had ever done anything to answer the question of Uncle Shellyton, the truth of Malakar Brite, or any of the things I assumed the story would be about. I could have reeled it in at any time. Haig had told Barston that Shellyton's stuff was kept in the old Blue base which now was now the domain of a lamia: in session two or so. The plotline about the assassination and the trip up river got delayed until it no longer felt timely but I could have just sent them on up earlier. There was a simple plan, early on, to have the team run missions to disrupt the warlocks, to find out the truth of Malakar, but those kept taking backseat to all the other stuff going on.

-- A New Meta-Plot Slowly Develops --

While I was having fun, I was getting frustrated by my own allowing of things to keep building. Any attempt to hold myself back ended up with me going "ok, just one more". The "to be played" pile in this campaign was piling up.

I did find new hope, though, in a series of hints and concepts that were laying a groundwork for a possible way out. Ruins near Humb that emitted brightly colored water every midsummer. A missing statue from a religious temple that seemed to have significance to Barston. Hints that Ick is more than a mere forest. A grove in a swamp with giant fruit trees and giant bees. Glowing people in the hills. A mask that made the wearers dream, and those dreams keep telling those people to find Barston. Reality was bending, like someone or something had painted on the canvas multiple times...

...and Barston's own strange anti-magic nature might be the key to unraveling it all.

But first, it was time to return to the original plotline. Barston wants to find the missing people the Order has sold off, but to do that he has to finish the Warlocks once and for all. Our now main three characters - Barston, Derron, and Astrid - set off on an outsized mission to bring volume one to a close. The Blues have been scattered, now it is time to break the Reds. And that mission ends....

Badly.

In Part 3, I will go into how an epic trio of sessions made the world a lot more FANTASY while also making the original plotline more a form of therapy for a lost man who finally finds himself. And I'll go into how I plan to make sense of all these dang characters I could not stop myself from making.

The Big Barston Bakersfield Chronicles Recap, Part 1 (Advanced Fighting Fantasy+)

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-07-07

In Actual Play, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Campaign Design, Harper's Quest 2, Solo Campaigns, The Bakersfield Chronicles, Troika

I think now is as good of a time as any to discuss the kind of odd origins of the campaign that took me from a long time dabbler in solo roleplay and made me into a solo-first roleplayer, from a person with a couple of solo/oracle type books to someone with a massive shelf of books and tools dedicated to the hobby.

This is the story of a book printer turned warlock hunter Barston Bakersfield, whose story started out as an absolutely bog standard adventure romp: avenge his uncle's death and kill an evil wizard. But first, we go back a whole generation.

-- Harper's Quest 2 Era & Shellyton Bakersfield --

In August, 2023, I launched a Harper's Quest 2 game after watching The Lone Adventurer play through it on his channel. It sounded fun, the price was right (just $2.50 for the pdf although I did get a physical copy later on), and I wanted to expand out a bit after being on a bit of a Fighting Fantasy kick (about once every two or three years I tend to deep dive through several of the old FF books).

We had my hero above. Shellyton Bakersfield. He had been driven from his home, the town/city/place called Humb, years ago by the Mayor/Elder - Malakar Brite - after Brite pulled an Obed Marsh and trafficked in powers beyond the human sphere. 30+ years later, Shellyton was ready to get revenge and set out through the Forest Ick to battle Red Warlocks, Zombies, Demons, and more to get to Humb where he could battle Blue Warlocks, Skeletons, Mutant Minotaurs, and...eventually, Malakar Brite himself: The Gray Warlock.

Shellyton. Malakar. Ick. Humb. Where did any of these names come from? No clue. I think I just syllable-spewed the first bits that came to mind. I know "Brite" was an odd reference to Reginald Bright from Endeavour. The idea was a somewhat unassuming, unthreatening older man who was actually a major threat.

He set off through Ick. I took my time. I would roll on HQ2's oracles to generate a scene and then would either generate or search for artwork that matched and use that as some additional inspiration. There were some fights but it was partially just about getting used to solo playing NPCs and solo playing the aesthetic experience of hex/dungeon/wilderness-crawling.

And then outside a red warlock outpost, Shellyton went kaput. Terrible dice rolls stacked up back to back. No problem, HQ2 has a "generation" system that is probably meant to be taken a little less literally than I did but still: enter our new hero, Shelltyon's more practical and less fanatical nephew - Barston. He wants to know what happened to his uncle. He was raised hearing about "Crazy Uncle Shell's" revenge stories. Once Shellyton disappeared, Barston took on the quest to finish off Brite and to bring Shellyton's stuff back to the "town in the valley".

Still, there's another twist in Doug's machinations...

-- How Two Things Were Coming together to Become Something Else --

While playing through HQ2, the itch had started. I wanted more and more solo play experience. I had started cooking up an idea for far-too-expansive Troika solo campaign fueled by some fantasy books I had been reading (e.g., The Books of the New Sun). A massive world with seven huge islands surrounding a continent that was also a city that was also two cities. One island was the gothic horror world. One was a Victorian magic school kind of world. One was more Mad Max post-apocalyptic. Another more mythical fantasy. Another more Lovecraftian horror. One more science-fiction-y. You get the idea. Each island was the personal domain of some ancient long-dead wizard who had structured reality to their own personal taste. No matter what sort of story I wanted to tell I could pick an "island" and drop characters into it. There were more minor islands I could make if I wanted to do something more one-shot-y. Over time, I could swap back and forth, have characters criss-cross in funny ways.

I was already planning on using a few Advanced Fighting Fantasy modules and books and had an idea for a more traditional fantasy world being one of the islands. You can maybe figure out where this is going.

What if the fantasy island/sphere/world was the same one that Shellyton had lived and died on? What if the "Harper's Quest" land was just a gateway to this more expansive forever-and-a-day Troika campaign, slightly channeled through an Advanced Fighting Fantasy lens? What if Barston (or, some two or three generations of Bakersfields later) might complete the quest and then get transported into this broad campaign? It tickled my creative juices.

It just was not quite meant to be...sort of...

-- Barston Finds Humb and It All Changes --

One thing I wanted to do to prep for the above campaign was to introduce Mythic Game Master Emulator 2nd Edition into my HQ2 game. For practice. I made a rule that every rough scene needed to have at least two oracle questions: one to determine what had changed in the 10-year-gap between Shellyton and Barston. Another about whatever felt most appropriate. This will be important in just a minute.

I had even more fun as Barston. He fought better, more smartly. I had gotten better and journaling and building in details. Battles were more tactical. Barston back-tracked, planned ahead. I pushed my comfort zone and had more detailed NPC interactions. I built in intrigues - two heroes of the land, a fighter of reknown and one of the great wizards - were entangled in this whole Evil Warlock business, a mystery Barston was trying to solve.

One of the descriptions I got was that there was giant footprints found in the forest. I took that a step further and made them GIANT footsteps. In fact, this whole HQ2 realm was not only an island in that upcoming-but-never-happened campaign but its founding wizard was a wargamer: he had made a world full of fantasy miniatures that he played out scenarios with, living miniatures that had been long abandoned and founded entire histories in his absence. Sometimes full sized people from one of the islands comes across the island and they appear as mountain sized giants. Fun, right?

The important change came right at the end of these sessions of track and backtracking through Ick. Barston finally finds Humb and before I roll on some dice to start generating that, I do a Meaning Table: City Descriptors and I get "Bustling" and "Commerce" and I wonder... "Wait, is Humb currently a bustling city full of people going about various merchant shops and such?" and get an Exceptional Yes result.

Suddenly, I decide to drop HQ2 and to effectively drop Troika because I realized what I wanted to do...

Barston Bakersfield got translated into an Advanced Fighting Fantasy character and Humb became a city under siege by at least two warring clans of Warlocks: each thinking they were the true followers of the legendary Malakar Brite.

-- From One Random Oracle Result Came an Entire Year --

Could I have handled that one question differently? Sure. Humb could have once been a market town and now be just a random collection of ruins. No problem. However, that one question and my needing to stop and retool my whole scope was such a good thing. I "dropped" the immense, slightly pre-plotted conception of the mega-meta-campaign, technically. I worked on honing all the skills I could dealing with oracles, on-the-fly rulings, dungeon and landscape design, adventure tweaks, villain crafting, and detailed NPC interactions. I got a lot better at just playing to the table, ignoring tables when it was time to take the helm, and having lots of fun just doing my thing.

To put it into perspective, a world that essentially started out with three points - a still not really fleshed out "town from the valley," a forest, and a city from generations ago - has turned into, well, this...

In Part 2 of this Big Recap we'll look at how early adventures in the City of Humb led to a host of characters and working out how to actual play a sizeable solo campaign and then in Part 3 I will look at how it developed into its current state of a multi-POV campaign founded on a deep, deep mystery. Will that eventual answer be "TROIKA"? I don't know. I don't need to know.

Just note that there are now dozens of characters, several towns and cities, some deep mysteries, some loose threads, and recently the start of a whole new religion.

After these updates, I will return to the Bakersfield Chronicle (I took a month-long break after a campaign shift last session) and start playing again so later this month we should have posts and recaps about it showing up on this blog.

By the way, the above map was generated by HexKit using the Strange Tiles pack. This is not exactly an endorsement. I like it but I feel like the program probably needs an update (the files were last updated in 2019 it seems though the page gets updates more regularly). Still, it works for me.