Category: Design Page 2 of 3

No The Bleak + The Pearl For a Bit

There will be no The Bleak + The Pearl this week because I spent a lot of my gaming time going through and fixing up months’ worth of glitches that were holding the Eustace & Hitomi series back. Right after I finished that (within literal minutes), I { wrote | played } what I think is the longest ever session-post on the old blog: around 11k words. It took up all of my free time on Friday (Jan 3).

The week prior to that was mostly spent sorting through and updating a lot of “offline” and backend parts to my solo play kit: digital files, scripts, cloud storage folders, and other tools.

I have actually played a little of the second session for “In Search for the Harcuram Mantle”, but a lot of that “play” was going back and rewriting some of my on-virtual-table notes to be more character-viewpoint focused and running through a slightly complex encounter and realizing I was rushing it. I have discussed before how rushing solo play greatly dampens my fun so it was best to take a step back, breathe a moment, and just enjoy spending an hour fiddling with a virtual map and thinking about the characters.

This trio of things — (1) fixing up and restarting a series that had stalled out, (2) reorganizing the blog and the stuff behind the blog, and (3) feeling rushed to meet a “Sunday Deadline” — helped me to realize that it was a great time instead to take a step back and think up my plans for the new year.

This means, as you read on the next couple sections of resolutions, there actually won’t be any The Bleak + The Pearl for maybe a week or two. I’ll explain. Give me time.

2025 { Resolutions | Changes }

Let’s start with the bigger changes and then maybe move down.

Formal Move Towards { Worlds → Campaigns → Arcs } Format

I’m not 100% what you would call this but the first word that comes to my mind is a “mini-arc” format. Where mini-arcs (some not so mini) are played within a larger frame with a direction towards a few days or weeks or months instead of an indefinite time frame.

Start with a broad The World. Have one or more Campaigns set within it (each is a set of characters at a certain time), and then each of those Campaigns gets one or more Arcs (where the characters try to accomplish a goal within that Campaign, eventually leading up to finishing the Campaign as a whole). Each Arc is one or more Posts (representing a sort of traditional “session”). Where each Post is one more Sessions of actual playing | writing.

Fascinating insight into my brain that probably exposes me a librarian if you didn’t know already, I know. But, my intended format for my play in 2025 might look something like this:

The World
[Alabama Weird, The GLOW, Khel]
- The Campaign
  [Eustace & Hitomi, 1996, The Bloody Hands: REBIRTH]
  - The Arc ← *Focus on this as the Unit*
    [“and the Case of the Rambler’s Inn”, “Agent Johnny Blue”, “The Stone Crack’d”]
    - The Post
      [“Chapter 3. Arrests and Friends, in That Order”, “Chapters Two & Three”, “05 – The Triptych Healed”]
      - The Session
        [each time I sit down and accomplish something in game: art, playing, writing, designing, etc]

For some campaigns, like the offline campaigns, it might be less “arcs” and more “one to two pre-written adventures with some padding” but the principle is still the same.

Again, it’s more a formalization than an abrupt change. It does slightly free me up mentally — which I surprisingly need — to do things like build in the kind of time jumps, thematic clusters, and conceptual shifts that I love. Even allows for things like shifts in play-style or systems.

Focusing on One Arc at a Time

This is a bigger change than above but it kind of requires the other change to make sense. I want to spend a couple of months playing differently. Rather than juggling multiple campaigns, with multiple arcs, where I have to shift into and out of various worlds and modes, I want to focus on one arc at a time.

The broad structure would be to figure what arc I want to play next — based on interest, fun ideas I have, some spark of inspiration, some challenge, or just a broad sense that it is time to revisit some old friends — and spend one “time slot” thinking up concepts, keyed scenes, lore, art motif, and goals at the arc level. Play the whole story arc through to completion, divided up into sessions (posts | sessions | etc) with potential extra content.

Keep the three-times-a-week schedule.

When I get done with arc, take a bonus “time slot” to do one of my absolute favorite activities with solo play: the self debrief and edit process. That last step wraps up the arc with some thoughts, re-packaging, final sorting. Potentially, but not necessarily, sets out some seeds for future arcs.

Then, figure out the next arc and do it again.

Right now, my plan is to finish out “Eustace & Hitomi and the Case of the Rambler’s Inn” [+ bonus dog-catcher story which is somehow related], then finish up “The Bloody Hands: REBIRTH, The Stone Crack’d” after that, and then do The Bleak + The Pearl‘s current dungeon [the dungeon delving stuff will likely be shorter bursts in between the longer story modes] with each session being a bit shorter than current (a couple of hours at a time instead of trying for four to six hours at a time).

Around March, I will evaluate if this has improved, worsened, or not really impacted by game play and update accordingly.

Post Once (and Early), Edit at Least Twice

I need to get into a habit of playing and writing the session at least 24 hours before it is published. Edit it once immediately just to fix the no doubt several misspellings, broken sentences, and other glitches that show up from writing stuff down as I play. Schedule the post anywhere from one day to a couple of weeks later depending on the buffer. And, before it actually goes live, spend more time going back over and make sure it all makes sense with a harsher comb than that first edit. Once it is published and around the time I hit the “debrief” stage for the arc, maybe go back over it and smooth out the harsh edges but not in a way that is unfair to past-Doug.

A long variation of this discussion and my preferred method was included in the aftermath of realizing I had violated one of my own rules during playing The GLOW and I wrote a long commentary talking about how I like to do things and why it went wrong.

Trying Out “New” Game Systems

This blog basically grew up around two systems — Tricube Tales and Shadowdark — and frankly I could play those systems, backed with Mythic and Solodark, for quite some time, still. So much so that there has been a slight inertia towards bringing in something new. I could use a shake up, though, so a few systems I want to bring in (maybe two or three this year as a goal to start) include:

Cypher
Outgunned
GURPS Lite+: meaning start with GURPS Lite 4th edition and add in just enough content to play whatever game I want to play.
Ironsworn, Starforged, and/or Sundered Isles.
At least one Call of Cthuhlu game.
Maybe actually play one of Sine Nomine’s awesome …Without Number games instead of just using them for parts.
Troika and Advanced Fighting Fantasy.
Of course, a whole stack of other possibilities.

Besides these, try a few things like Thousand Year Old Vampire and other more solo-first systems (maybe as one-shots). The whole point of this is just to get me to think about other game systems and modes.

Trying Out “New” Game Worlds

I currently have a few game worlds into which the various campaigns fit: Alabama Weird (a “mostly” normal take on Alabama but one where cosmic horror and folklore are real and have influenced things), The GLOW (an even weirder version of the Alabama Weird), Barthus & Silt (the setting of The Bleak + The Pearl), Phillia (the island upon which Ick & Humb and related are played), and Khel (the continent from The Bloody Hands). What I would like to do is to add in at least one post-apocalyptic world and at least one science-fiction | space-opera world. Possibly also a kind of dreamscape type world but that one might just be technically an off-shoot of the Alabama Weird.

I figure as long as I can add one new world I should be happy.

That being said, I would rather develop new content for existing worlds rather than have a bunch of vague, unfinished places that never get revisited. I really love lore and I really love generational shifts and wide geographically-separated play.

(Re)Trying Out “New” Oracles

By “oracle” in this case I mean both the yes|no + and|but + twist generator — think Mythic — but also stacks of random tables, cards, and other tools. I am mostly good with the largish set of random generators I already use but it might be nice to bring up a few things — like Rory’s Storycubes — that I have gotten out of the habit of using. I also have a whole “Like the I Ching but with dice” system I created but then left behind.

One thing I am very excited about adding is something like Dixit as well as more real world divination methods.

Also, I have enjoyed using some diegetic oracles where music and images that might be part of the game world (or represent things in a similar way as the characters would experience them) can be used as oracles in themselves. Either by using the stock art to influence elements, music to shift the mood, or materials that otherwise could, in theory, be experienced by the characters that I play to determine outcomes. I want to find more ways to use this.

Things to Not Sweat…

Most of all, Don’t sweat the Dougness.
Don’t sweat the long commentaries that only I read.
Don’t sweat the long session building.
Don’t sweat the corny jokes that only I will like.
Don’t sweat the romances or friendships or moments that only I will like.
Don’t sweat the cosmic horror, folklore, body horror that I like.
Don’t sweat the literary references or in-jokes even if no one else catches them.
Don’t sweat the stories where some young upcoming hero saves the realm a few weeks later. It’s nice.
Don’t sweat the overlong explanations.
Don’t sweat the deadlines.
Don’t sweat the struggles to make sure it is fair. Make it make sense later or don’t.
Don’t sweat the formatting (so much). Things can look different later on.
Don’t sweat the way I play (sort of like the first one, but this is important). I like to pre-gen ideas and stew upon some concepts (the prep is play portion) and that is fine. Do it. Then break it down (the play is prep portion). Who cares if no one else does it exactly the same way? Besides, I’m sure some do… It’s ok if I figure out who the killer is early so I can work towards it. It is also ok if I change my mind and turn that all into a plot twist.
Finally, Don’t sweat the apologizing. I’m sometimes worry that I self-apologize too much on this blog. I do, but who cares. That is part of me finding out who I am and how I play.

Make More Art, Design More Stuff, Focus on Game Motifs, Etc

I like making (bad) art for my games. Bad maps. Bad character sheets. I like my campaigns (and arcs) to have their own style. I want to spend more time working on those little bits. I often avoid making my own art and own visual tools because I worry of it is good enough. It is good enough. I am the only person that has to be my own fan.

Just make sure I give lots and lots of credit as I go. A lot of people make things that help me tell the stories I like.

Build Up a List of Graphical Resources

I use a lot of stock art (most free, some paid) and a lot of illustrations and stuff to visually build up my blog. I think it might be nice to sit down and list some of those tools out in a way (probably a new page for the sidebar) so that others can find them.

It will also save me some headaches.

CREDITS

The art used to head the resolutions section is a CC0 licensed photo by Jeffrey Paul from the WordPress Photo Directory. According to the alt-text, it depicts the mysterious “O” rest stop (aka “Cerchio dello Staccioli”) outside Volterra, Italy. It summed up my feelings of looking forward fairly nicely. I have edited, as usual, using GIMP and several filters to give it a kind of video-game like feel. A motif I am thinking about adopting for an upcoming series about many tiers of reality.

The Bleak + The Pearl, Intermission #6 – New Icons, Learning Rolls, and Meet the Lighthouse 6

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-12-22

In Campaign Design, Intermission, ShadowDark, Solo Campaigns, SoloDark, The Bleak and the Pearl

Intermission #6 Contents

The Results of the Learning Checks

Trying Out a New Token Paradigm

In previous The Bleak + The Pearl Intermission (#5) I talked about taking the main storyline and putting it on a semi-hiatus as a way to focus on some new characters, get back to a purer dungeon delving experience, and just slightly rest up from what had been a kind of intense story building learning experience. This week’s post will combine some of the progress on that as I plan to (next week) launch into the first of these new delves.

A slightly minor aspect to this hiatus and soft- | hard- relaunch is that I wanted to go back to the days where I was using a homebrew virtual table top setup to explore the dungeon mixed with hand-rolled dice and both virtual and handwritten notes. While looking over my assets for this, I found a stack of tokens I had made using John Kapsalis art originally designed for or around Advanced Fighting Fantasy and while I love JK’s art and look forward to using it again in any AFF endeavors into which I might dive, I also wanted to give a good strong think about the aesthetics of this new era.

To remind you, this is what my original set up looked like.

Four heroes on a fantasy map face off versus 3 zombies and a berserk cultist.

The Blue Delve Boys face off against a berserker cultist and three zombies.
(Art by John Kapsalis, Dyson Logos, and Crypto Cartographer – arranged by Doug Bolden – used here for personal use but all rights are reserved by original creators).

Dyson Logos (or other) map, JK art, a GIMP template using some token borders I found (after digging through my files, I am 98% sure I was using “Character Token Portrait Frames for VTT” by Crypto Cartographer at least as base), and then a few other pieces here or there. Monsters were freqently “close enough” selections. Characters were “close enough” with some matching more than others. I would use text boxes to mark changes on the map and would often use a fog layer to update the map as I went to show explored areas and such. Over time, it made a nice digital artifact. You can see an example at the top of my recap for the “The Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur” dungeon.

There are a couple of problems with the set-up that are not quite actual problem. The two biggest (outside of a potential rights thing and tracking down credits for multiple sources every screenshot I might share) are that the characters/monsters never quite fit my mental vision and each token tended to involve a multistep process. I had to dig through my dozens of JK token packs, find the one I wanted. Snip it out from the whole. Import it into GIMP. Possibly trim or mask out portions of it to make it pop out better. Pick a frame fitting whatever mood or need I felt worked best. Export that out into a PNG. Upload that into my VTT. Then, when another encounter would show up, either reuse a “close enough” token or start back over.

As I have explored more and more with tools and aids that I like, one thing I have come to use a lot for some of my element is the CC-BY 3.0 tokens/icons at games-icons.net. It takes a little bit of practice to get used to what tokens are or are not there. As you get used to their selection, though, you start to get generate some ideas about how you could creatively add them in. At least I do.

This lead me to a new sort of idea. Find some broad “iconic representations” of the characters—Grusk can be represented by his axe, Bloodlust, while Tom might be lockpicks—and then use the icon customize option to add in a few colors, cut a few pieces out, and generally make icons not really meant to be precise tokens to the characters but stand-in elements that allow me to keep up my own mental map of the characters while also being clear enough that I am not confused about who is who. For monsters, a few basic icons can do heavy lifting: basic corporeal undead types, insect types, cultist types, spirit types, demon types, etc. Then when I come across a gnoll I do not have to find a gnoll token that is roughly the right shape and equipment but instead I use the mid-level humanoid beastman generic token. Save the tokens in such a way that I keep the symbol name, the artist, and the rough representation in the file type.

Here is what the above scene would look like using these more generic tokens. I’ll add in a “web spell” effect and a few more enemies to demonstrate.

Tokens on a fantasy map. Undead icons are attacking axe icons while some more like cultists are pushing up from the south.

Three zombies attack Grusk while an enraged berserker cultist attacks Inar. Three other cultists are being trapped in Rance’s Web spell. Two dead cultists are in the previous room.
(Map by Dyson Logos. Icons by Delapouite, Lorc, and GamerAce135 from games-icon.net [CC-BY 3.0])

While the old art definitely had its charm, I really like the “board-game aesthetic” of the new art. I also like how it frees me from trying to describe a scene with my token choices and instead gives me more freedom to represent a scene and encourages a bit of creativity with colors and themes. I also like adding the spell effects and such to better track the status of things, backed up by some text.

Re-Introducing the Blue Delve Boys and Learning Rolls

In that light, here are the Blue Delve Boys and their current tokens. These might change over time depending on factors but for now, here’s what they look like.

An axe with blood red blade, a hand with fingers crossed, a set of lockpicks, and a hand casting a spell.

As I was making up icons and working on the “Lighthouse 8” (see below) I came across a line in the Kelsey-made Bard write-up: “Add 1d6 to your learning rolls.” I realized I did not know what that meant. I found out that I had been missing a whole mechanic that is exactly the sort of reason why I like to play Shadowdark. As I said in a recent post, Shadowdark tends to allow characters to have more fiction than other OSR and OSR-adjacent games. “Learning” is precisely what I am talking about. While the Carousing rules got a fair amount of discussion during the build up to SD‘s release, I found that I had overlooked it’s first cousin. Instead, you can have your character attempt to learn a new skill or general knowledge during downtime instead. It is described as such on Page 91: “Learning enables you to do new actions or gives you advantage on certain checks.” You work out what you want to learn and can learn with the GM, then start out making a INT DC18 check. The next time you try to learn it, you reduce that by one step—i.e., DC15, DC12, DC9, etc—until you learn it or give up trying.

Over the course of these months of adventure, there have been a fair amount of downtimes. If I was playing a more traditional campaign, maybe four-ish. With the more story-heavy style campaign, maybe eight-ish. I will cut that into the middle and say six downtimes for six months of playing. Maybe high, maybe low. I don’t know. It’s complicated.

There were two carousing checks. This leaves four attempts to learn.

Grusk and Tom are going to want to learn Bleak navigation for sure. Then, if they pass that, then Grusk would want to learn more about delving while Tom would learn hunting. Inar will first try for first aid. After that, he will try for sneaking around. It is not really allowed for him to learn the full thief ability kit but since halflings have a natural sneak and he is prone to trying to stay a bit back to help once people get injured, I figure this is kind of a extending of what he can already do [and I have never really used his halfing invisibility properly except maybe once]. Finally, Rance will definitely start out learning the Ancient language. After that, he will work on improving his “monster lore” abilities since he seems to have that inherent based on how I play. Finally, he will being working on learning how to operate and repair automatons based on Jonias’s notes.

Let’s see how this goes…

Making the Rolls and the Outcomes

Grusk, learning Bleak Survival (at -1 to INT): 7 vs DC18, 6 vs DC15, 13 vs DC12. Grusk (on the third attempt) gets Bleak Survival and advantages to rolls related to navigating and surviving the Bleak, including a broad sense of what level of Bleak they at.

Grusk, learning “Delving” (at -1 to INT): 9 vs DC18. Not yet, but he will continue.

Tom, learning Bleak Survival (at -2 to INT): 13 vs DC18, 3 vs DC 15, 3 vs DC 12, 10 vs DC9. Tom (on fourth attempt) gets Bleak Survival with the same as Grusk. No time to learn Hunting just yet, but that’ll be next.

Inar, learning First Aid (at +1 to INT): 19 vs DC18. He gets it on first attempt. He will get ADV to first aid rolls while trying to stabilize others. I’ll also say this can be used to generally do things like identify wounds, give a rough prognosis, identify poisons/diseases he might have some experience with. Generally the kind of stuff that might be helpful in a non-magical, non-specialized way.

Inar, learning Sneaking (at +1 to INT): 13 vs DC18, 9 vs DC15, 11 vs DC12. Next time he will be against DC9.

Rance, learning Ancient Language (at +3 to INT): 15 vs DC18. 20(!) vs DC15. Rance not only learns Ancient on his second attempt but we’ll say he is good at it and gets ADV to reading Ancient Text.

Rance, improving Monster Lore (at +3 to INT): 14 vs DC18. 19 vs DC15. His final learning attempt nets him ADV to identifying monsters and will allow him to make deductions about Bleak altered creatures. He will next turn to using his Ancient Language skills to translating Jonias’s notes about the automatons.

Background for the Lighthouse 6

Behind the scenes, I created the initial four heroes while learning Shadowdark and only spent a somewhat short while making them. I gave them only a thin backstory—they were in The Pearl, they were orphans raised at a monastery (which got the name “The Blue Delve” from somewhere, probably some random table), and one of them had nightmarish dreams of something going on in the Bleak—that picked up elements like a snowball rolling downhill. They quickly became the reason for the campaign and so had developed a kind of necessary plot armor. If one of them died, it would sort of be weird to continue the campaign as it was going. Part of the reason for the reset is to build up some other characters, personalities, explore some extended materials, and effectively remove the plot armor a bit. Things can get more tense as it goes.

In terms of The Bleak + The Pearl’s world: 300-years ago, Jonias Grunkheart enlisted the lords and ladies of the four other Grunce leading families to enact an incomplete version of a great plan. This is the Lighthouse, a rebuilt Ancient technology that takes the energy of The Bleak and uses it against itself to push it back (while generating both visible light and also The Light, the neutral energy power source of all Ancient technology).

The Grunkhearts provided the technology and planning. The Mariuses provided materials and wealth from their shipping. The Bittermolds provided magical assistance and expertise on darker truths. The Harcurams provided legal and administrative support. The Mistameres provided physical strength to build the Lighthouse and protection for the workers constructing it.

After the Lighthouse was completed, and the Monolith carved underneath (more a monolith symbolically, implying all the people of Barthus were one), the families continued to rule Grunce (the Grunkheart family estate, semantically decayed from “The Grunkhearts’ Land”). Other people from all over Grunce filled the city to the brim and other great houses from other cities were not content to be left out. Various power struggles occurred while the Lighthouse went from being well known technology to something increasingly forgotten, a background artifact shining light into the distance. The Grunkhearts remain with some power but other families have virtually pushed them out. Cal Grunkheart, nephew to the current ruler of the House, has taken on the goal of fixing and expanding the Lighthouse. The Mariuses have done marginally better but have given up their seafaring ways, focusing entirely on money trading. The Mistameres lost their family land and combined as a family with the Harcurams for form House Mysturam. And the strange, weird Bittermold House retreated into the Bleak and have largely vanished besides various small manors and estates all laying claim to the name.

[Doug’s Note: Mistamere is a reference to the Frank Mentzer created dungeon found in the red box Basic Dungeons & Dragons because running that adventure was the first time I ever played a tabletop RPG and I thought it might be fun to convert to Shadowdark. The name remains Mentzer’s though this family is quite different. Bittermold as a family name is a reference to Cursed Scroll #1 and was created by Kelsey Dionne. Unlike Mistamere which is 99% an original creation with a naming-shout-out, the Bittermolds are more directly influenced by their source and will soon show up when that module is run.]

Meet the Lighthouse 6

As our heroes have been risking it all to support Cal Grunkheart and the Lighthouse Keepers, Cal has come up with the plan of tasking his cousin Gryffin Grunkheart (possible future Lord Grunkheart) with gathering up members of each of the other five families to begin reclaiming Grunce and protecting the future of Barthus. Possibly even pushing The Bleak back and retaking the land.

A lighthouse, a lyre, and a dragon skull in gold and blue.

The leader of the Lighthouse 6 is Gryffin Grunkheart, the middle son of Lady Moreena Grunkheart (and technically third in line of succession, including his mother). His family protests him entering The Bleak since this precludes him from fathering heirs but he considers Cal to be the true Grunkheart lineage. Served for time as a minor captain of the city guard before aggreeing to help the Blue Delve Boys to deliver an anti-magic cloak to The Pearl. Here he met Boris Loo and decided to dedicate his life to adventure. He is a Human Ranger. His shares the Grunkheart symbol of a Lighthouse as his personal crest with Cal. He is a loyal leader and often will risk his own safety to protect his crew.

[Doug’s Note: Rangers were developed by Kelsey Dionne and released along with the Bard as a special supplement. Speaking of…]

Louis Harcuram is one of the few “true Harcurams” left. His branch of the family is much poorer and he was raised a fisherman before taking up performing and traveling as a minstrel. In the Sofron Desert, he met Ronick Mistamere and enjoyed the irony of partnering with a Mistamere due to the long family association. When he and Ronick received the call to join with Gryffin, they both took the chance and headed to Grunce. He is a Human Bard and his symbol is a lyre.

Ronick Mistamere is a Dragonborn Pit Fighter. Not all Mistameres agreed with the plan to merge and settle down running warehouses and stores. Those went west into the desert where they took any chance they could to reclaim the militant might of the Mistameres of old. Ronick’s branch combined themselves with desert dragons and attempted to lay claim to the desert. Beaten, they instead settled for being mercenaries and pit fighters. Ronick’s great strength and fearsome appearance (with bronze and lapis lazuli scales) earned him a fierce reputation, which was enhanced by Louis acting as hype man. The two are great friends and both look forward to working with Gryffin. His symbol is the skull of one of his desert dragon kin.

[Doug’s Note: “Dragonborn ancestry” in this case is derived from Unatural Selection with breath (and electricity immunity) from the desert dragon as given in Shadowdark, itself. Pit Fighters are from Cursed Scrolls #2.]

A crossbow, a deer head with multi-color antlers, and a velociraptor head crossed with a ninja turtle.

Dhelia “Del” Marius is the maybe-mad descendent of infamous Mad Del Marius. While the Marius family has officially given up the family tradition of sailing the high seas, this new Del has reclaimed it in style. Sort of. She mostly just swept up a lot of other, better, sailors’ vomit and trash. Once the chance came to prove herself, she requested a boat from her distant cousin, Lady Varren Marius, who granted it because Lady Varen had already pledged to support Cal after the return of the family spear by the Blue Delve Boys. Del is a Human Swashbuckler and has her own ship thanks to her reluctant cousin. Del’s symbol, and the name of her ship, are both “The Crossbow.”

[Doug’s Note: The Swashbuckler class being used here is from Letters from the Dark VI: Scallywags.]

Ada Bittermold is probably an actual Bittermold. The lost family had a complicated family tree involving humans, halflings, and less savory entries. Ada looks more human than most of the current members except for the fact that she has deer antlers and deer hooves and lower legs. Whether demonic or Bleak-touched is unknown by her at this time. She tries to offset this by dressing in bright colors to show she is friendly, but the overall effect combined with her odd sense of humor and weird moods makes her look more like a poisonous tree frog than anything else. She is a ??? Witch and her symbol is a deer’s head with multicolor horns and eyes.

[Doug’s Note: Originaly, she was going to be a Tiefling as outlined in Unnatural Selection but after I was working out how to make Boris (below) I decided to make her a bit more unique instead. 3/day she can talk to plants or fungus (though plants are not great conservationalists and mushrooms are worse). The Witch class being from Cursed Scrolls #1.]

Boris Loo is a Teen-aged, Bleak-Touched, Ninja Chelonian. He comes from a long line of gentle chelonian fisherfolk but his parent’s vessel was swept off course and shipwrecked off the shores of Barthus. Forced to travel through The Bleak to reach safety, his mother gave birth to Boris only to find her son was different. Rather than the soft curve of the sea turtle’s head, he had the head of a snapping turtle. What’s more, he was less concerned with gentle fishing and self-taught himself the ways of “the ninja” even as his Bleak-induced mutations made themselves more and more evident. The family tried to hide him belowdecks to act as the ship’s cook. Once the Loos helped Gryffin get to The Pearl, Boris met the young Grunkheart and immediately adopted himself as Gryffin’s hyperactive younger brother. His symbol is his own face, wearing his traditional green mask which match’s Gryffin’s cloak.

[Doug’s Note: Boris started out as gentle, turtle monk NPC meant to be additional backstory to the Blue Delve but I realized the potential TMNT joke and sought to figure out how to accomplish it with Shadowdark. He is the Chelonian ancestry from Unnatural Selection and then a reskinned version of the Ras-Godai class from Cursed Scroll #2. In his case, it is not the Black Lotus that gives him his powers, but being exposed The Bleak while still an unlaid egg. There has always been the potential for more Bleak-touched characters but I have not really worked on figuring that out until now with him and Ada.]

Gryffin and Louis have already showed up, albeit somewhat briefly, in the game. Technically, Gryffin was the start of the whole Grunkheart clan and the drama with the Lighthouse and is the one who introduced everyone to Cal, but the basic structure of the Lighthouse was already created before Cal and Gryffin were created.

The Potential Others

There are already four potential other characters to fill in gaps in any of the ten existing folks die, retire, etc. I won’t delve too much into them (pun!) until it’s a better time to bring them up but effectively:

A Garfolk Thief who was found by Cal in the Monolith
A Mycellan Priest who befriended the thief and joined him on his adventures
A Forest Elf Ovate who met and formed a relationship with Rance after a night of carousing (currently spending some time working with the city guard)
A Salamander Slayer who has dedicated his time after meeting Grusk to learning how to fight devils and demons.

Each of these are a shout out to a previous adventure or two and are mostly a thin sketch which can be built up if the need arises.

The Bleak + The Pearl Intermission #5: A { Short | Mid | Longish | Un- } Hiatus from the Mainline Plot [Shadowdark + SoloDark] [Meta]

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-12-15

In Campaign Design, Intermission, ShadowDark, SoloDark, The Bleak and the Pearl

Above is a glimpse into how this campaign started six months ago. Dyson Logos maps (or dice drop point crawls) imported as backgrounds on Google Presentations; John Kapsalis art (almost always, with some games-icon icons when nothing else made sense) made into tokens using GIMP; map adjustments and such typed directly as text fields on the map; and a few notes and details typed into a couple pages of a Google Doc file. This still persisted until the Monolith got going enough it was easier to switch the whole campaign to Theater of Mind and blog-format first.

Bonus: You can see which Kapsalis heroes and monsters I picked to represent our main four heroes. Spotted Tom was just one of the goblins that caught my eye. Rance was a contemplative blue mage (maybe an elf, don’t recall) token originally used as Haig Raven in my Barston Bakersfield campaign. Inar is a silly little hafling with a staff (he wears pretty sturdy armor in the main campaign and has a crimson-red mace). And Grusk was depicted as shirtless and got his signature axe because his token had one. With the exception of Tom, the other three names were from when I tried to make the campaign in Roll20 to start and I just literally used the default random names generated. I actually kind of forgot that’s what the characters looked like.

Too Long; Didn’t Read Summary

In short, the campaign started as my “just dungeon, don’t story” campaign and got immensely Doug-ified on the way so now requires pages of lore and while it still has some fun, usually quite short “dungeon” dives it has lost a lot of its initial anti-campaign focus (the exactly opposite of that, really). Since there are possibly months of main storyline left, using a natural break in the storyline coming up to go ahead and declare it time for a couple of months of side-quests and introduce several (at least six) new characters to make a kind of second team that will join the main one here or there in various ways. Will eventually shift back into the main storyline after everyone gets a few levels higher and we can move into the higher level, more domain-level of play.

Or, How a Campaign Changed Over Time

According to my notes, I launched this campaign, The Bleak + The Pearl, around the middle of June 2024. At the time, there were only a few basic lore truths:

There were two vast islands that combined were a complete continent.
The western island was “The Bleak” and was dark and foggy and grimy and full of ruins. This island was originally Barthus and for centuries had been the site of a great kingdom but now was mostly just skeletons of old buildings and smaller settlements. It was to be the setting of the more “grim” sessions.
The eastern island was “The Pearl” which was a wild and green place with huge mountains, ancient barbarian keeps, dragons, and much more of a “large scale, mid-magic fighters-in-leathers tackling giants” kind of vibe. This was “The Silt” and was the place the ex-Barthics took refuge. This was to be the more “Frontiers of Adventure” style setting with less undead and more, you know, dinosaurs.
The islands are separated by a five to twenty miles of ocean called “the Gray Channel”. Whatever caused “The Bleak” has yet to find a way to cross it.
The initial heroes were refugees raised in The Pearl who are now going back to The Bleak because one of them keeps having dreams about a light fading, darkness spreading, and things getting worse.

There was, effectively, two meta-truths:

This campaign was going to be dedicated to pretty much straight dungeon delving and hex crawling with a few interrupt “city/society” scenes to act very nearly purely as dressing.
Around half of the sessions would be played in pre-existing maps while the other half would either take Dyson Logos (etc) maps or just do a dice drop and use existing tables to find out content as I went.

It was the second (not posted to this blog) session where a drunken night turned into meeting Cal Grunkheart and deciding to help the Lighthouse Keepers which ended up becoming the meta-reason behind the campaign. This part is fine. It was initially going to be a mini-arc of sorts but over time morphed into a much bigger part of the campaign. Still fine.

As the mini-arc took over, there showed up a a mini-mega dungeon that was the cornerstone of this part of the campaign and a series of quests to the other dungeons and sites were going to be required to fix it up. This was fine. The “about 10 sessions to complete” was a lie but that’s ok. We were still playing.

Prior to even starting to make the dungeon, I ran a couple of sessions in a pre-existing map, The Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, tweaked to have elements from the campaign. Almost an entire month later, after spending way too long semi-agonizing on how to blend the more meta-elements with that initial intention we got the first entry into the Monolith.

Over the next few weeks, I entered into an era I’ve talked about before but it represented me dealing with the stresses of solo-play. It felt less and less like fun and more and more like a difficult puzzle to solve. On the positive side, this led me to work out my more multi-phase style that is a staple for this blog (see: The GLOW for perhaps the most elaborate variation of it). I’ve seen other solo players do similar things but the distinct GM-phases where I build up information and player-phases where I test and break down that information (along with lore, interjections, and other elements) is a fairly Doug-Unique style of solo-play, one that has influenced even the play I do off this blog.

However, on the more negative-or-at-least-neutral side, I essentially lost the ability to sit down and play with a couple of colorful tokens and some varied dice rolls and had to spend increasing amount of times fact checking and considering long term impact of any and every decision.

Around three weeks from the start of retooling this campaign more and more into “Save the Lighthouse, Save the World,” I got to an encounter that effectively derailed and forever altered the entire The Bleak + The Pearl: The Grunkheart Golem. I had one room left off the starter/main branch of my dungeon and when I rolled the contents I got a boss monster. I suck at the sort of OSR-style play where rooms next to each other to have completely different contents/encounters so I wanted to come up with a reason a boss-level monster could be a few feet from the main entrance. The Golem was a solution to this and it changed quite a bit.

Ancient Technology was actually some blend of high, science fiction technology with a much more refined magical system.
After the Ancient society collapsed, there were hundreds of years before Barthus showed up and established itself in the ruins.
Jonias had a more extensive appreciation for Ancient Tech than thought and had not died but instead went off to a lab in something called “The Everburning Forest” and not returned (I mean, he might have also died, we still don’t know at this time).

These seeds grew and sprouted a bit. After one intermission where I came up with a general layout map of the forest, I had another intermission that finally sat down and figured out what the Bleak and the Pearl were. No longer just the name of two different fantasy tropes, The Bleak was a corruption of some primal energy inherit in the western island (in the Ancient tongue, it was The Becoming). Ancients had used it as part of their vast engines (along with The Pearl’s “Being”). The fall of the Ancients was basically due to them using up too much energy and draining it. Now, several centuries later, it has returned and it is changing people and causing buildings and landscapes to mutate though there are “shallows” where it has little to no impact and many settlements drifted into those shallows while traveling between them is basically an invitation to body horror.

This led to a fight with a fight with an oddly mutated cyclops around two weeks later and then a full month after that I finally hit a stride with playing as the entered into the forest and encounters and mechanics were a lot more normal. Over the past couple of months they have pushed through the forest, found the old lab, and realized things are a lot weirder.

While all of these shifts and dynamics have been broadly fine it still is a much different campaign than intended. For one, there has not been a pre-built dungeon/adventure since June (6 months). For two, roughly half of the session time has been dedicated to building up the world and establishing dozens of new World Truths.

I adore the four core characters. I love Cal Grunkheart and his doomed mission that might just succeed. I like the whole trope of science-fiction world becomes high-fantasy world becomes weird body horror world.

BUT, this was meant to be the campaign where I did not have to spend quite so long building up dungeons and where I could spend a lot of time just flipping through shopping lists and throwing a few fun monsters at people while checking for random encounters. It is just very hard to swap back to that without there being the sense that I am giving up on a lore I have spent four months honing and perfecting.

To sum up some changes: A simple world to allow both “grim” and “dark” styles of fantasy play with only a vague storyline to justify it >> a “short” meta-quest that requires some more storyline >> the storyline becomes entirely about the meta-quest which starts dictating exactly which kind of adventures can be played >> dungeon delves start taking a backseat to more complex encounters >> virtually every post is as much about lore building and campaign design than any sort of proper dice rolling >> where we are now.

Taking a Hiatus from the Mainline “Jonias Grunkheart Legacy” Quest

That’s why I am going to take advantage of plot developments in the world where it will take months of in-game time for Cal and his crew to move into the lab, learn the Ancient language more completely, and just get out and do some dungeon delves with pre-built or quick-built dungeons.

The “main four” will still be part of this. However, I am about to introduce a “second six.” There were Five Great Families that came together to build the Lighthouse. The plan is to have a member from all five families join in. Some of the second six will be a tad weirder than the “four default” classes. A bard and a ranger. A pirate of some sort. A dragonborn pit fighter. A tiefling witch. I also have a silly idea for a turtle monk. The ranger will be second level and a character already met in the campaign. The other five will all be brand spanking new.

This allows a few things. First, I can a couple of low level adventures again and those are always good fun. Second, it gives me a chance to build up a few back-up characters just in case one of the mains gets taken out or needs to spend months crafting spells or running a kingdom, etc. Third, it gives me a chance to build up a few alternate parties and combinations since those can be fun. Fourth, it just allows me to use a lot of supplements and zines I have paid good money for and I am itching to see how other classes and races work.

Finally, it gives me a chance to go back for a bit to the OG campaign design: dungeon delves with minimal story requirements. An anti-campaign again, only this time backed with months of story that shapes some truths.

Folks show up at a dungeon entrances, they go and grab treasure and experience, and then get drunk afterward.

Being Spoiled for Choices and Return to Recap

Part of this is just because I currently have three very “talky” campaigns: The GLOW (which has at least two more mini-arcs I’d like to do, and it will likely spawn more), The Bloody Hands (the Stone Crack’d mini-arc likely has four to five more sessions at least, and a lot of world building is going down there, and I want to run another mini-arc soonish dealing with one character’s hidden illness and a hidden benefactor plotline from near the start), and Eustace Delmont (which is on pause, technically, because I have no time to play). There are also a few one-shots and playtests brewing or on-going. All told, I spend between eight and twelve hours a week playing these solo campaigns. I get lots of NPC interactions and world building time.

I like the idea of taking a few maps, importing them into Google Drive, playing with some digital tokens and spreadsheets, then spending maybe half an hour a week writing up some of the fun things I did. This new arc will be back in recap style with a more OSR-style balance and less seriousness. A lot more braindead than I tend to solo-play. In balance is joy…

The “side-line quests” [I’ll call it something like The Gathering of the Families and Sundry Adventures] are a way for me to play with some of my absolute favorite solo characters, add in some more funky folk that will either be fun to play or get kicked off the team, and reduce lore from multi-paragraph continuations to maybe a short passage about why an Inn is called “The Screeching Duck” or something equally silly and funny (to me). Eventually Cal will have deciphered some stuff and we’ll be ready to get back into the main questline again. The Bleak is still there so hex crawls can have unexpected results, for sure.

In fact, a couple/three of the planned adventures are actually going to be from the original story bank of adventures intended to tie into the Monolith (though now low enough level I would have had to redesign them or tweak them a bit for balance and content only now I can just drop a newbie team into them and play as is). The very first one I plan to play will be a different crew going after one of the fuelstone relics. Maybe also the second. So it’s less a hiatus as a bunch of side-quests presented in a different way until I feel like it is time to get back into the deep lore and two pages of conversation again.

The Four Solo Play Techniques of This Blog

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-11-25

In Design Philosophy, Solo Musings

tl;dr version

Over the months of adapting my playstyle to the blog, some of the “Dougness” of my playing got increasingly lost. This post talks about trying to reclaim that and establishes the four baseline techniques I use to communicate my sessions to folks through this blog:

Play it in my normal style and then write up a recap (the original flavor)
Try to play it in-line with each session being an hour-ish spent playing and writing a blog at the same time
A fiction-first style of play where the mechanics are minimized and the focus is more on presentation and development of “chapters”
A style of play that embraces different modes (Gamemaster, Player, Lore, Commentary) to give the different elements each a fair shake to build up mental gaps

In this post, I will look at those different elements and talk a bit why a return to #1 while retaining #4 (and some #3) is likely the best options for me.

It also has a longish example of the kind of roleplaying mistakes I like to make: building an entire session around lore and worldbuilding that never actually got used.

The Four Solo Play Techniques of This Blog

My usual playstyle for solo RPGs, at least before I started this blog earlier this year, tends to be a bit haphazard fitting my mood, location, time-available and some other elements. I tend to lean a bit more digital-notes rather than physical because my handwriting is crap and I toss so much text into the game-space that my hands start cramping but past that it can lean anywhere from “a stream of notes in a text document” to a bundle of (digital) character sheets, digital maps, Mythic tools, VLC Player set to stream something ambient, a stack of PDFs, a handful of physical books, and a set of physical dice.

One of my quirks is that no matter how much digital everything else gets, I tend to prefer physical dice unless it is just too inconvenient. It’s a question of blame, you see. You can blame digital dice but you cannot properly build up a sense of resentment unless you have something physical at which to point and glare.

This is not exactly a post about my overall playstyle, though, but instead about something closely related. As I started posting just a portion and ended up posting the vast majority of solo play content to this blog, I realized that haphazard notes and shorthand scribbles would not make anyone, not even myself, happy. I began to develop a few different write-up styles which in turn deeply impacted my own playstyle.

Prep is play and play is prep, after all.

I thought it could be a good time to sit down and quantify the four different styles that developed around this blog (with links to some examples). This gives me something to point towards when I am trying to explain some different flavors.

Technique One: External Play with Recap and Notes

The original style used for this blog. Just play however I want to play with posts largely being just summations of that with some commentary and possibly links to actual supporting documents and notes.

The style here is to play as I normally play – digital files, pdfs, books, dice, notes – and then to type up a summary of what happened usually with some link (or embed) of maps and notes.

You can see it most in the earliest posts on the blogs initially. The first Bloody Hands episode – A Fragile Merger – has a link to an external document. The original Bleak + Pearl episodes – such as the Scarlet Minotaur playthroughs – had only a map with a few quick notes and then a lot longer recap trying to sum up some of the significant rolls and events.

After a couple of weeks posting like this, I kept thinking about how to actually turn the blog as a whole into a more interesting long term project and that led me to phasing that style out because I, like a lot of folks new to something, felt the need to copy other people and their advice and there were a handful of people saying that fewer mechanics and more fictionalized story was the way. Which is a shame because a lot of my talent in the solo-sphere is the way I dance around with rules and rulings and concepts and flow and ebb to let things develop a bit organically (a paragraph might be several encounters or a lot of details alternatively).

Eventually, I realized abandoning it entirely was a mistake that was trapping me into spending more time working on a blog than just playing and I brought it back for some campaigns. The Bloody Hands returned to this format with “The Late Returners” and by part 2 of that mini-arc, the idea occurred to me to go ahead and start posting the actual in-Doug-style type notes while prefacing it with a short recap. I really like that style. It gives me the freedom to both play in the vibe I tend to play and to have some mental space and time to go back and analyze, right up, and organize it. It maximizes my own particular solo play in both ways, without requiring a lot of external write-up.

However, in the arc between starting this way and then returning to a modified version of it, three other styles started being used and all three deeply altered my own workflow for solo roleplaying.

Technique Two: Blog-First Playing with Actual Play In-Line with the Blog

Trying to make posts that felt more like the standard style of such things, I started moving towards “in-line” play. I would fire up the blog editor and start typing. When I got to mechanics, I would put it in italics or have a footnote. As I wrapped up the post, I wrapped up the session (and vice versa)

This style involves typing into the blog directly as I play with mechanics set-aside but generally in-line with the rest of the post and the blog itself being the primary storage device of the session. The idea was to not slow down or hesitate but play as I wrote and write as I played. Mechanical notes start showing up at the bottom of the post (and sometimes in set-aside italics/bold-passages).

The earliest examples would be my playthrough/playtest of Sinister Semester X and then the fifth episode of The Bloody Hands (Biting the Hand that Feeds You). Both of these are definitely more in the older school of my posts and are written in a kind of quasi-summary style. A few patches of dialogue got worked in, some after-post edits showed up to blend early passages with later passages.

Around the first delve in the Monolith of the Cyclops in Bleak + Pearl, you start to seeing this style mature a bit more. Mechanics are more blended into dialogue and room descriptions. At the peak of posts (roughly one a day), this was the style the blog was based around.

However, it had two rough problems that are largely just a clash with own playstyle. The first, and primary one, was that mechanics tended to have been wrote up in a way that did not completely derail the flow of the fiction. My personal playstyle will sometimes involve writing up whole charts, maps, and details.

Any but the simplest of these things simply did not fit (see the bonus story at the end of this post to see exactly the kind of thing that would not fit in with the “in-line technique”).

Each post was a session and each session was a post and I generally wanted each to be whole unit: one played in a smooth, complete sort of flow. It put me in a mindspace where I was having to constantly bounce back and forth from a fiction writer to a gamemaster (with a much smaller sprinkle of player and a much larger sprinkle of editor). This meant that posts started getting shorter since it was more mentally exhausting. It was not easy to keep a thread going and as soon as some sort of twist or heavy scene shift occurred I would often have to take a break so I could contemplate and build up a few expectations before starting again.

Things like scenes and threads starting getting muted because it was hard to tell exactly where one might end and another begin. I sometimes had to go back and rewrite earlier, even posted, sections because later developments would make these half-developed sections non-sensical.

The breaking point of that playstyle was the Bleak + Pearl fight with the garfolk and the meeting of the strange mushroom man.

Because of this, I developed another style to handle more OSR/event-heavy content. But first, the happy accident of me trying to Doug-up the in-line playstyle.

Technique Three: The Fiction-First Game

Around the time I was taking a three week break from SoloDark to try and figure out how to move from Technique 1 to Technique 2, I embarked on what was meant to be a fancy one-shot: Gareth Hendrix and the Bunker Bigfoot. While it remains something of a successful failure that got better, that series worked out a new style for me. It is a modified take on the second technique – in-line blog-first play – but it put fiction first.

For this style, game mechanics are minimal. Each scene tends to have only one or two rules and one or two oracles checks. Each chapter has between one and four scenes. The focus is on a more literary take with game mechanics being used to add plot twists, find out secrets, develop characters, and challenge me to take stories to places I did not expect.

Gareth and his barely novella length adventure was a major reason this entire blog kept going. During the time period I was getting deeply frustrated about finding my voice there was a series that was entirely my own voice. It involved personal photographs and personal stories woven into the narrative and was set in (though fictionalized) my home town.

I love that I did that. It was a risk I would not have taken without this blog.

That being said, there is a non-zero chance that the Eustace Delmont series might be the final time I try it for a while (I have long had an idea for a third part but I do not know). It can be frustrating. The Gareth storyline was kind of quick and punchy but trying to mature it into the Eustace one meant it takes a lot of time and a lot more external note taking.

There is also the slight glitch that it is the solo roleplaying equivalent of a walking sim. 90% of the flow is decided with my own brain as the primary oracle. There were major twists that I did not expect but in between these islands of dice rolls were great seas of short story workshop. Maybe I just need to keep working on it.

Going to the other end of the spectrum in the meantime…

Technique Four: The Gamemaster + Player Style

In essentially the same week, I was wrapping the last of the original Bloody Hands arcs (Sink or Swim part 3) and concluding the garfolk obstacle in Bleak + Pearl (Drying off just to Get Wet Again). Both in the then standard “Technique 2” style. I had struggled through both (the “Doug’s Notes” for each talks about frustrations and switching things up while trying to put a positive spin on it). The honeymoon era of the blog was fading and I was slowly but surely getting stuck with a completely alien way to play solo games where a month long gap was suddenly noticeable.

Would I keep going? Would I just go back to my Google Docs and quick notes? I was not sure. However, I was becoming aware of two definitely truths:

(1) I realized that I worked best when I gave myself space to cook. I had to play with the ingredients, tweak the tastes. I would never be consistent with the ebb of flow of my playing. Sometimes I just wanted a fight with no real backstory and sometimes I wanted a backstory with no real fight. Sometimes I would spend hours crafting a town to never really visit it and sometimes I would spend around 10 seconds to make a town that would be the backbone of a campaign. I needed something that allowed for me to be me.

(2) I am not actually that good at what might be the kind of “standard” roleplaying set of tropes. I GM a lot of games and do a decent job. I play in some games and do a decent jobs. But when it is just me, the kind of old-standards just do not quite jive with the kind of stories I like to tell. I suck at being a being a murder hobo. I play at long and complex subplots. I like my dungeons to feel uniform and purposeful. I like my NPCs to sometimes have little details like “favorite food”. Months might pass with the same story impact as days.

I started playing with making a more Doug-like playstyle in the next Bleak + Pearl post (On Waterfalls in the Dark, Painting the Past, and When Fighting Is Best Saved for Another Day). What if I take time to construct the rooms and encounters completely separate from the “play” (though of course such prep is play even if the more in-line version made it hard to spend much time with prep without “spoiling” it) and then took more time to figuring out how the puzzles worked before trying to figure out how I, from a different viewpoint, would solve it. I have a lot of experience with dancing around the meta-game and I was pretty sure I could pull it off.

This technique involves having two to four distinct phases of the game that each have their own methods. The first is the Gamemaster Phase which involves the construction of rooms, encounters, and scenarios using all the standard tools and a more relaxed flow that speeds up and slows down based on personal need and story requirements. Then there is the Player Phase that matches more the in-line phase but bounces off the stuff established by the Gamemaster with the post being in essentially “real time” with the play and writing flowing together. There are optional Lore Phases that are more like the Fiction-First Games of Technique 3 that are about pure world-building with a minimal amount of mechanics. Finally, there is a Commentary Phase to sum it up, figure what did and did not work, and to set-up expectations and ideas for the next session.

The breaks in between phases allow for natural mental rests. The Gamemaster and Lore phases give a chance for worldbuilding, zooming out, and changing up the cadence so that not everything has to feel evenly split. The Player Phases then can be varied, quick, and often kind of punchy. Sometimes the Player Phase challenges the Gamemaster Phase’s assumptions. Sometimes elements in the Gamemaster Phase are not used in the Player Phase.

It works really well for me and is kind of the ultimate expression of my personal style, though is a bit more complicated than I need for all of my campaigns.

A Real Life Example of Why Technique 4 Is Needed for Solo Players Like Me

To show a variation of this from before I had my blog, let me tell you a story about my Advanced Fighting Fantasy campaign near the end of the Barston Bakersfield arc.

I wanted a simple quest: a man along the side of the road has lost a valuable relic to some goblin bandits. Bog standard, right? Except I started out playing out what the jar was and who the man was. There was an entire session of backstory involving several moving pieces. He was a con-man who robbed old tombs. He had found the tomb of an ancient king and found, in this tomb, a relic that made anything inside seem valuable. People just had to have it. It was a perfect set-up for him. Toss in some rocks and sell people what they think is a jar full of gold. Later, they think they were robbed and he gets the jar back.

Along the way to town to set up such a con, he runs into some goblins. These are not bad people, per se, but they are extremely cranky because their home had been overrun by hobgoblins who considered the short, unlucky gobs to be worthy of all the jokes and the pranks. They basically stole what they thought was a worthless jar because they were wanting to be petty. Only the man who stole the jar has angered a fairly powerful guardian who is hunting him. Now, it is hunting the goblins. Said goblins have gone to a grove that was once a place of giants and are staying in essentially a small garden that looks like a massive walled structure, complete with giant bees.

This was going to be a set-up for a meta-story that had been going on since early in the campaign about people on the hunt for giants in the area. It was going to set-up some lore for the place. It was also going to establish a moral dilemma of the player trying to help thieving but not really bad goblins versus a righteous but murderous guardian. And there was a whole other place of power (the tomb) baked in for backstory.

After this story session I spent time thinking what the giant garden might mean. Figuring out what might happen with the goblins if any survived. Would they become regular NPCs? Allies? Enemies? Would the conman get caught? Would the guardian be a multi-session arc?

Only right as I was getting ready to play out the session where Barston meets this man and kicks off the whole thread I spent a couple of hours developing, a random event shows up. Barston’s best friend needs help carrying out a task. It takes a couple of days then another event shows up that gets Barston tangled up with unraveling a conspiracy. This kicks off a big fight between guilds and establishes some important lore.

I never got to play the scenario with the goblins. I never got to meet the conman. I never got to fight the guardian. I never got to visit the giant garden.

I spent an entire worldbuilding session building up a lot of truths that never made it “to the table.” Except they did (a side story involves a person who had to deal with the aftermath of the goblins fleeing into town while being hunted by the guardian). It is one of my favorite stories to tell because all of it is canon but all of it happened behind the scenes.

I love the vibe of consistent inconsistences and organic plot development. I love side stories. I love dumb twists. I ADORE fun NPCs. I love ad hoc mechanics. I love off-the-cuff worldbuilding. I love that I have found different ways to achieve this in the blog format.

It just means this blog needs to be my style of play rather than my style of play being a blog post. And I think I can do that.

The Bleak and The Pearl [SoloDark] Intermission 4: Leveling up to Level 4 (and the Hunt for Magical Weaponry)

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-09-19

In Campaign Design, ShadowDark, SoloDark, The Bleak and the Pearl

Note: This whole post will be out-of-character and just in “Doug Notes” mode.

Leveling Up to Level 4

The four adventurers hit level four with the most recent outing so we will work on that, first.

Grusk gets +6HP (bringing his total to 21). His Weapon Mastery will also hit 1+2 (1+1/2levels rounded down). This brings his total bonus to hit to +4 for all weapons (STR+ & Talent) and +7 for axes. He also gets +3 damage when using axes. My boy! His title rank remains Barbarian
Inar gets +3HP (18 total). He gets an additional 2nd level Priest spell. While Smite is tempting, I’m going for Cleansing weapon (+1d4 extra damage, +1d6 vs Undead) since he tends to be the kind to cast spells on others for effect. His title remains Invoker.
Tom gets +4HP (15 total). He gets an additional dice to his backstab (+3D in total, though that is +3d4 for his attacks). His title remains Outlaw.
Rance gets +3HP (12 total). He gets an additional send level Wizard spell. I’m going for Misty Step since scooting back out of battle will likely be beneficial to him. His title remains Seer.

All four need 40xp to hit level 5.

Acquiring Magic Items

In the pre-written adventures, low level magic items are not super rare. I have been using random tables for around 2/3s of the campaign and have really not generated a usable magic item since the Wand of Webs. This leads us to a place where there is a single magic item (the axe, Bloodlust), a Priest who can temporarily magically enchant weapons based on a DC11/DC12 check, and a Wizard who can cast spells. The team is high enough rank now that plenty of creatures require some degree of magical damage to actually take damage. By level 4, if I was GMing for a group, everyone would likely have 1 magical item or more at this stage. I have also been very, very stingy on GP. This is putting the group behind a bit on material possessions.

To rectify this, I will not add any Gold/etc to their total but I will roll for 2 magic weapons (one for Inar, one for Tom, page 292 of the book) and then generate 2 additional magical items.

Inar gets a +1 Mace that is studded with gemstones (ruby). It gives advantage to initiative checks but grows stupidly heavy in water and causes the wielder to make swimming checks vs DC18. It will be called The Crimson Star.
Tom gets a +1 Short Bow. Arrows shot from it trail sparkles. The arrows can pierce through any material and once per day the bow will shoot flaming arrows (+1d4) for 5 rounds. This will, of course, interfere with any sneak attacks. The Lucifer’s Breath.
A Potion of Mind Reading (all creatures within near for 1 hour).
A statuette of a phoenix (with actual phoenix feathers) that makes the wielder immune to cold damage.

That should be a good balance check. Tom’s is a bit OP BUT it also makes him a clearer target since his arrows will sparkle as he shoots them, etc. I am not sure if cold damage will be even in this campaign but there you go.

The Bleak and The Pearl [SoloDark] Intermission 3: The Effects of the Bleak and The Pearl

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-09-02

In Campaign Design, ShadowDark, Solo Campaigns, SoloDark, The Bleak and the Pearl

On Being and Becoming and the Fall of the Ancients

In the language of the ancients the names of the twin islands were Artuunila and Siluutila: the place of being (siluut) and the place of becoming (artuun). There were not mere philosophical notions, but a way to describe the great immanent energy in these lands. Artuun warped and changed those exposed to it. Siluut reinforced the nature of things but in doing so made things outsized. Artuun turned a mountain into a magical plateau of strange fay magic. Siluut turned a mountain into a huge monolith beyond comprehension.

Both took time. The creatures and plants on Artuunila shifted and merged in strange ways. The creatures and plants on Siluutila grew large and strong and severe. Neither was a place for civilization, both would inherently destroy any attempt to tame the land. Until the Ancients did just that by discovering uuxa: a form of energy generated by the tension where the two forced clashed.

Uuxa is the same energy that Jonias Grunkheart later dubbed The Light. It feeds off the Being and the Becoming and repels them both, simultaneously giving the resource to fight back but also to make a safe place where the great teeth of the land can not grind those within it. Jonias suspected that the two energies were outsized here because of the Ancients who might have actually increased their output to create more uuxa, but the result was the opposite. Both energies decreased until they were barely noticeable: taking centuries to recreate the impact that a few years might have.

The twin lands became just two large landmasses with somewhat unique ecosystems. The great engines of the Ancients ceased to function.

And so the Ancients entered into millennia of decay, until the Barthic Empire rose to the west, led by the mage tyrants tapping into latent amounts of artuun as a mystical force further decreasing it.

To the east was Silt, a semantic degradation of Siluutila. Remnants of siluut meant magic struggled to take hold so the Barthic mages avoided it. Left it a wild and unexplored land.

On the Bleak and the Impact Upon Those Within

It is unknown exactly how the primal energy known as artuun became corrupted into The Bleak but the effects are known in more recent history. There is no immediate indication of your exposure to its foul energies. Buildings might decay faster. Certain fast growing life forms like molds will spread and grow new and strange spores. New growth on plants will be more gnarled, more diseased. Stranger. Darker.

New generations of life are where it is always most obvious. Offspring of two healthy parents might show some strange mutation. Deer with spider legs. Two headed serpents. Birds with odd number of wings. For the people of the Barthic Empire, rumors of strange “witchery” in the provinces gave way to panic when it was their own children. A generation later, the children of people impacted by The Bleak were even more twisted. If it was every child, every generation, the society would have collapsed before it could attempt its great failed migration.

The effects were tenuous at first. Even as they became stronger they were never automatic. A small village might find all of its newborn children born more mushroom than goblin but then the dwarf clan a few miles away would merely see a slight shift in hair color. This was the great cruelty. Because of this, people turned on each other. Those who suffered The Encroachment were blamed: a sign of the gods’ disfavor, a sign of some great sin.

As wars and fleeing marches of refugees wiped out the Barthic Empire, researchers like Jonias Grunkheart realized it was already too late. The slow increase of The Encroachment meant that everyone sailing across The Gray Channel was already infected to some degree. Still, he and others fought valiantly to buy people time, to stop the flow of the strange destroying energy before it could cross.

People spending days and weeks in The Bleak may show very few symptoms. A general sense of unease. A tendency to nausea. Of not feeling well. After a few months, shifts might be minimal. Fingers slightly different in length. Joints that bend at slightly new angles.

Years in, and people will almost definitely show some changes. Different for everyone. Lifespans will decrease, even for those who manage to avoid the new dangers and monsters. New sicknesses and curses will be found.

And then, for others, the Encroachment will never begin. Others can spend decades in The Bleak and never show any changes at all.

Those that have children may see the true cost of their adventuring days because while not every child is born Bleaktouched, enough are for every person driven to expedition to understand the true cost of exploring the twice great land.

On Borders and Shores

Another element unknown about The Bleak is why there are pockets where it does not reach. Jonias believed it was like an ocean that flowed to the rhythm of a tide we could not see. Islands rose out of this ocean and there some semblance of normalcy could remain. Other places he classified as Shallows and Deeps. In the Shallows, effects would be relatively minor. Entire generations could live somewhat peacefully if they were lucky. In the Deep, people will find it nearly impossible to survive even a single generation without risking great harm and change.

As an old man, Jonias began to suspect that the material used to make the fuelstones were possibly the cause of these small regions of normalcy. He had believed them to be unique to the Everburning Forest, but grew to believe they were the leftover generators of the Ancients. People naturally gravitating to the places The Ancients had harnessed uuxa. Unfortunately, Jonias died before carrying out an expedition to study these energies. And the infighting in Grunce meant that the Keepers had to switch fulltime to keeping the Lighthouse functioning until Jonias’s dream of retaking Barthus had morphed, like everything in The Bleak morphs. No longer was it a conquest, it was merely a last stand.

Others call these pocket zones of safety “The Borders” and several towns and villages and forts have grown up in them. Expeditions to raid the corpse of The Barthic Empire use them as layovers. An entire economy based on people willing to brave the miles and miles in between. Sometimes only to find that some border fort or border town had fallen in the weeks since it was last visited. Another victim in the centuries of Encroachment.

DOUG’S NOTES

The general crunch of the new academic year is not precisely over but I am getting some time to actually sit down and play things and think about playing things again so wanted to try and work out some ideas and concepts. The intention was to jump straight into the short hex crawl related to the Everburning Forest but while prepping that I decided I wanted to go back and actually answer some questions. This is one of two campaigns I am running about some non-specific dark energy force that does…something. Figured it was best to work some mechanics about what that something might mean.

Reading through Made in Abyss and thinking about the Southern Reach trilogy got me into the mindset of the broad “Stalker” genre greatly influenced by Roadside Picnic. The fictional trope of there being some place where reality and normalcy breaks down and people risk going into that place for knowledge and for fortune.

The idea of a great civilization that was built on the back of an even greater civilization means it is logical that many, many treasures are buried out in a realm infested by an unknown source. But…did I want “The Bleak” to be something more allegorical – a general decline in civilization (the rough explanation at the start of the campaign) – or something more tangible – an energy that actually does something? I have been leaning towards it as an active force more and more so I decided to dive into the latter. The Bleak is an energy that corrupts. Everything. However, at its core it is a natural, primal force of change. One that is merely accelerated. And itself corrupted. I might not ever get around to getting more specific than that. I do not really need to be.

When it started, this campaign treated “The Bleak” as basically a land where old magics had shifted reality and burned out the old cities but there was really no reason not to immediately retake it. In this new “twist,” no one can stay out in The Bleak for too long.

Eventually we may get around to how The Pearl is a sister force to this, but there is no rush. It is the sword and sorcery counterpart to the grimdark fantasy of The Bleak. That is enough, for now. The “Being” and “Becoming” energy trope, by the way, is a nod to my very first RPG product from some years ago: Ghostlight. In the never completed “second edition,” the notions of being and becoming were going to be more definite forces with the general world built out the energy at the center of the two.

The plan from this point on with the campaign is to lean into worldbuilding and plot development from here on out. While the campaign essentially started as a way to just dungeon dive without any real explanation, I think we are past that.

Probably was from the get go.

I’m also going to try a new style of art for this campaign using high contrast two-color art to highlight the “twin” nature of things but also to tap into the sort of dark art of the source material.

The Bleak and The Pearl [SoloDark] Intermission 2: Creating the Everburning Forest

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-08-18

In Design Philosophy, ShadowDark, SoloDark, The Bleak and the Pearl

The adventurers have a map to lead them through the Everburning Forest. Let’s break this down and start figuring out what this means.

First, some lore. The Everburning Forest is going to be a valley with a lot of geothermal activity, lava pools, and the burning smell of sulfur. At some time in the past, the pre-Barthic Ancients developed flora which could resist the constant burning heat and low oxygen and which to this day thrives in a place where even the Bleak has trouble penetrating. 350 years ago, a young Jonias Grunkheart found this forest/valley through local legends and went in with a team to build a workshop to study the Ancient technology and to find out how to channel it. Such technology was used by him to create the burning light of the Lighthouse.

Now, let’s populate it.

Flipping through Bestial Ecosystem Created by Monster Inhabitation (Courtney C. Campbell and others), I wanted to pick a couple of “faction” types that made sense in an ever burning forest. Efreeti made sense to me but I was thinking maybe just a single entity who has been cast out from the City of Brass and found some solace in the valley (and possibly, long ago, worked with Jonias). Another one was lizard folk but I was immediately put in mind of Romancing Saga 2‘s Salamanders and so we’ll use them instead. Besides this we can use fire elementals and fire beetles. The salamander tribe is not necessarily going to be an enemy (at least not until I absolute fail reaction rolls again). I’ll save the question about the efreeti being a boon or bane if the adventurers encounter it.

With those ideas in mind, let’s make up a basic map using some ideas talked about at the end of my contemplating hex-crawls post. Rolling 10d6 “green”, 1d6 “red” (to represent the workshop), and discarding all green 1s I come up with the points of interest and get a rough number of paths. I then roll another set of 5d6 “on top of it” to represent difficulty of terrain. 1-3 is varying degrees of easily passable. 4-6 gets increasingly hard to traverse. Then for each path, I roll another d6 with 1-3 being “in good condition, lower is better” and 4+ being a path that will require some trouble. Putting that all together, I get…

I pick the blue star to be my starting point. There are two dead ends off of it that are passable. There’s another path the south that is harder to traverse with very rough terrain to get through. The air is harsher and the lava pools are wider while the path breaks down. Then, there is a clear and obvious chunk that takes a couple of hours (the left over bits of some road that has not yet been reclaimed) but it passes by a significant element. We’ll make that the salamanders who hunt the road. After another point in the road, another long stretch through less passable terrain happens. However, the workshop’s path is collapsed (workshop was a 6 so no paths to it). At this point, the characters will have to go off road and deal with the issues.

In the distance, in the deepest and roughest portions of the Everburning Forest, is the makeshift manse of the efreeti. Now I’m going to roll on the Overland Hex Maps table to learn roughly what everything else might be though I will not dig too deeply into elements. I get the “4” and the rightmost “3” are holy shrines. Stopping spots on the way for researchers to reset and to perhaps even worship the Ancients. the “middle 3” and the “topmost 2” are “natural landmarks”. We’ll have one be a crag and another being one of the largest trees. We’ll make that the one-time home of a Sulfur Dryad but we’ll see what’s up when it is found. The other “2” is a cave complex which could be interesting.

Putting this all into Hex Kit (using Thomas Novosel’s Strange Tile BW hex pack) and then taking some liberties with exact layout, we get…

The intended path will then be to start at a ruined tower (which was the 5/crossroads). Head south to the crumbled roll until you get the first shrine. Head deeper into the relatively clear forest past the salamanders you come to the First Burn tree and then find another shrine. Here, you have to leave the path and head through the rough terrain until you find workshop. Go to far, and you end up in the territory of the efreeti.

What exactly the shrines are and the cave complex and such…we’ll figure it out.

Step one is to start at the beginning: gathering up fire protection something and then figuring out the tower as a start and going deeper and deeper.

Other details will be developed as I go. For those that want to see this with a hex overlay, with each hex this time being about 1.5 miles or so…it looks like this…

The Bleak and The Pearl [SoloDark]: Intermission 1, The Monolith of the Cyclops Overview

By Doug Bolden

On 2024-07-23

In Campaign Design, ShadowDark, Solo Campaigns, SoloDark, The Bleak and the Pearl

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.