The Doug Alone

A man wanders through a liminal space with dice and dominos.

THE BIG BARSTON BAKERSFIELD CHRONICLES RECAP, PART 3 (ADVANCED FIGHTING FANTASY)

By

On 2024-07-08

In Actual Play, Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Solo Campaigns, The Bakersfield Chronicles

 

In part 2 of this big recap, I discussed some of the various characters and elements that had shown up over the months of playing and the general BIGGITY [technical term] of playing out a campaign so deeply decided by random dice rolls. I also hinted that I was needing to parse some things and get back to the Barston Bakersfield core. 

Barston and company had cracked open a big conspiracy. I wanted to do one last dive into the Humb-issue quests and solve the problem of the missing people so I could be freed up to dial a few things back. But, before I could really do that, I had an issue inherent in the whole "always expanding" campaign world: what was meant to be the first or second quest, destroying the red warlocks, had never been attempted. It was time. By the lore of the campaign world, the warlocks were entangled with some of the missing people (*cough* zombies *cough*) but also controlled the northern paths. 

By returning to the campaign roots I would open doorways to more adventures, several which had been seeded and glimpsed in excursions. 

-- The Return to the Forest Ick -- 

Using the original Harper's Quest 2 sessions, I had a rough map of Ick that I could use to track back towards the base (the same place that Shellyton died at the very start of this campaign). I did build up some random tables using Mythic's Location Crafter and I built up some random encounters that made sense and worked out some various objects and complications I wanted to face. It was a way to control some the randomness while still not having a clear impression of what the team - being the now definite main team of Barston, Derron (street punk become something of monk type), and Astrid (elven bard who had developed into a fairly powerful nature mage). Derron has a backpack full of highly explosive fire oil. They plan to go full "goblin sapper". 

It would honestly take 2 to 3 long posts to cover ALL the details of these sessions, so I will sum it up into six quickish sections...

- 1. The Sennas Faith - 

A growing theme hinted at in part 2 was the idea that Humb had somehow been tied to a now lost faith. This faith involved a god of beauty and art called Sennas, appearing as a supremely beautiful male youth and whose symbols was a gauntlet pouring a rainbow of colors. Humb and Ick were still connected to this faith, though most trappings related to it were missing. Barston has pledged to find out more and finds himself drawn to the mystery. He seeks to return a statue to the ancient Sennas temple (now a place full of bohemians and artists drawn to it).

During this adventure, Barston is deeply wounded and has to limp off into a safe spot to try and heal. An encounter leads to a meeting with wood elves (from Ick) who love that he is trying to take down the warlocks. The warlocks have been destroying large swaths of the forest in their spread while the elves have been trying guerilla warfare tactics but know if the warlocks learn too much about where the elves live that the elves will be outnumbered. Dice rolls and oracles lead to a plot twist here where the elves are followers of Sennas. They have kept the faith alive for generations while the humans have let it lapse. Barston is invited to seek out the village. When he is ready, he will be able, though there are some "conditions" initially applied.

- 2. The Warring Reds - 

I realized I had made a slight mistake in that the blue warlock tribe (once more powerful than the Reds) had been largely destroyed so technically the Reds should have been running rampant. I decided to take a side trip and run a short session from the viewpoint of the red warlocks, partially using Mythic Magazine #41's Villain Crafter table to set some scenes, combined with a few Meaning Table rolls. The end result was that the Reds were at war with themselves. The powerful leader, focusing on demonology, had been deemed too theoretical in his tyranny and a younger upstart, focusing more on martial skills and rule-by-force, had started to push him out. Both considered themselves to be the true follower of Malakar Brite. 

On top of this, the remaining blue warlocks had decided to try and take over the Red territory. A few miles from Humb, a bloody war was going down, largely unnoticed. [At the end of each scene, day, etc...I would roll a basic opposed test and keep track of the relative damage each side was sustaining]. 

- 3. The Order's True Place in the Tale - 

Towards the end of these sessions, another clump of plot twists revealed that a major player in backing both sides of the warlock war was The Order of Illkar. The cultists-pretending-to-be-merchants were behind not only the missing people but also behind the gutting of the Humb churches and temples. Barston is able to lay claim to many stolen artifacts (and later, Derron is able to return them) and help start a pretty massive healing project around town. 

- 4. Ick Is Fighting Back -

There is a scene where Ick shifts into a more primal version of itself, an ancient forest full of strange creatures and large mushrooms. A group of warlocks who had been torturing and killing another group of warlocks is trapped inside the event and killed. Barston realizes that the forest is far more deeply magical than he realized and something is reawakening in it to protect itself from the increased destruction by the warlocks. 

- 5. The Great Storm - 

Also near the end, the team gets caught up in a trap that threatens to bring both groups of warlocks down on them. Astrid burns off essentially all of her magic points to create a massive storm. Since the Blues are also decently powerful weather mages, they inadvertently join in and power the storm even more. Portions of the forest are flattened and many warlocks are outright destroyed in the hurricane force event. The entire forest is charged and the trees glow and pulse in the energy. This act weakens Astrid considerably but allows the team a chance to get closer to the warlock base and to try and carry out their mission. 

- 6. The Team Suffers a Loss and Barston Undergoes a Crisis of Faith - 

Right as they get near the warlock base, they find the warlocks in a final death struggle. Too distracted with killing each other to notice the team of heroes sneaking in. Alas, some terrible dice rolls reveals that a telegraphed threat - a wood demon summoned up by the Reds to guard their base - is actually worse than intended. Random rolls all go from bad to worse as Astrid is snatched off the path into the trees. While Barston and Derron try, and fail to free her, she is hit several times and crushed. Derron and Barston are both deeply injured before the dice suddenly "turn back on" and Derron just flips out and pummels the demon into woodchips. 

Barston snaps and takes the backpack from the very-nearly-fatally injured Derron and just runs full tilt into the warlock base (he was here before, it was wear his bow was found), lights all the fire oil, and tosses it in. 

For every dice roll that went poorly for Astrid (and the trapped team that led to her summoning a massive storm), every dice roll about the extent of this explosion agreed: kaboom. The Reds, who use fire magic as a base, have explosives built up in their own plan of wrecking everything. Except now Barston has intentionally but also accidentally set it off. 

The explosion flattens him, kills off many Red, destroys many of their "stored up" zombies, and knocks many tall trees down. 

We have an unconscious, 1-ish HP main hero, his best friend that has around 2hp, and a dead friend who had been a core of this campaign for months. 

- The Aftermath - 

While the team bled out at the doorway of victory, the wood elves they had met a few days before showed up and gathered our fallen heroes. They are all three taken into the secret village of the Ick wood elves - Tarlanei - and there Astrid is buried with her kingdom's crown (used for some time by her as a magical focus) returned to her own elvish people. Derron recovers fairly quickly and returns to Humb with news. Barston stays in Tarlanei and dedicates himself to becoming the new high priest of Sennas. A process which will take months in game-world time. 

Astrid's troupe, the Skipping Faun, has a new leader: Athella. She was taken from the solo adventure "Bringing Back the Princess" in The Warlock Returns #11. I adapted it as a stand alone scenario for Barston and it ended with her joining the Faun (as always, based on a lot of random oracle rolls). 

The Sennas temple, still infested with Bohemians in a now thriving art community, has many of its artifacts restored and awaits Barston to take on his new role as leader. 

Derron keeps the outward appearance of a street punk but is now much more mature and deeply dedicated to understanding himself. He will follow Barston when Barston is ready to lead.

Humb is now freed of the years-long warlock interference and the Order has been destroyed. The town is suddenly finding itself bustling again. 

-- The End of Volume One and the "Truth" of Malakar Brite --

I had a problem on my hand. The main major threat of a year of playing seemed resolved EXCEPT we never got around to main baddie. And it felt like shoehorning in the big bad at this point would lessen what was actually a fairly upsetting (to the characters and to myself) death. Astrid was always a bit of a back up character but she was, inversely, kind of meant to be the one who lived on and told the story so future generations of Bakersfields (possibly half-elf Bakersfields since early meaning tables had essentially set up that her reasoning for following Barston was romantic interest) could follow along. In world terms, Barston and Derron got on people's nerves even though people trusted them. Everyone, including some of the not-so-good people, loved Astrid. 

Prior to this point, I had Brite shoved into every random list, sometimes more than once, and the dice always avoided having him surface, so I basically decided to forget the oracles and just go with my gut.

Brite was an old man when Shellyton and the other Bakersfields fled Humb. That was now 41-years-ago. He would be in his 90s or even over 100. While fantasy wizards, especially evil ones, tend to outstay their welcome, the campaign had clearly painted him as a threat-by-proxy and never something more active. In fact, oracle type rolls to see if the warlocks had received missions "from him" had basically all come back as "no" or "exceptional no" type results ever since the Order was destroyed a couple of months back. 

To wit, my own interpretation of these too-many-rolls is that Malakar is gone. 

Dead? A man who got turned into a legend while being essentially innocent? Whatever. Just "left". Maybe Ick absorbed him. Maybe he is in an alternate Humb painted on a different canvas. In his place, the Order had used warring bands of warlocks by pretending their missives were from Brite himself and had played them off of one another to fill their own pockets. For years. Maybe decades. The destruction of The Order led to the in-fighting led to the downfall. Brite himself might return but it is obvious that Shellyton's beliefs of a Xagor-esque Warlock were the byproduct of a kid who had long processed the loss of his childhood home through some grief-tinged revenge fantasy. The warlocks were real but Shellyton's take on Brite was, at best, outsized. Maybe. Maybe this is the long con. 

At any rate, it barely matters. A final scene played out in the aftermath with Barston and Athella (The Skipping Faun remains loyal in their support of Barston) ended up with the conclusion that Barston now wants to be himself. No longer a continuation of Shellyton's quest. No longer a warlock smasher. A man who is finding his faith while refinding a lost faith for an entire region. 

All the characters tended to anti-adventurers. Barston was a book printer in training, a herbalist by hobby, who beat warlocks while wielding an old family mace. Derron was a kid who took care of animals and got into drunken bar fights. Astrid was a run away princess bride who now played music and hung out with a pair of losers. That theme kept going for all the heroes - the conman, the reformed warlock, the shaggy dog, the amateur detective, the struggling merchant, the crackpot professor, the bard play-acting a mayor, the great-and-powerful wizard who is also kind of a petty power player. 

Barston is now a priest in the proper fantasy sense of the word, struggling to reawaken a faith that is built into the lifeblood of the land. Derron, his best friend, takes on the role of a friar monk and right-hand-man. The two of them will return, eventually, in much more seriously minded storylines. For a campaign about un-heroes, the two of them are now full blown heroes of the realm. Yet, people have barely heard of these two men. I like that contrast. 

But the campaign does not merely end because its titular main character is less of of a main character and has now become an entire plot device. There are plans afoot. 

I had planned to wrap this Big Recap up in three parts, but there will be a part 4. We will finish this up talking about how the campaign will continue with four (or more) different faces: the new city guards, the treasure hunters, the con men, and the priests. And that's not even getting to the grumpy goblins, the young rangers, the town beset by werewolves, the glowing figures in the hills. or the massive power struggle as Athella's mom attempts to take over an entire dynasty. 

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

By

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

  1. A general lack of faith plaguing the churches and the people,
  2. A number of people had gone missing with no clear explanation,
  3. 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:

  1. Find out the truth of Uncle Shelltyon and Malakar Brite
  2. Punch out some Warlocks
  3. 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

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.

Expanding my Tricubes Tales Solo Card-Based Oracles and Adding Several Framework Rules (July 14, 2024 Edition)

By

On 2024-07-04

In Design Philosophy, Oracles and Tools, Tricube Tales

When I started playing The Bloody Hands using Tricubes Tales Solo I used the system as is except for tweaking the basic oracle to something a bit more complicated. That worked just fine through the first four "episodes" and I still like my little "Dice of Changes" style resolution.

However, I played a TriSolo style game with my partner and have been trying to introduce some more friends to the concept of how solo playing works (yes, I understand the irony) and sometimes it takes a bit more of a framework to kick off some ideas. That got me thinking about how to expand on some of the inherent design choices in TriSolo to make something that could meet folks more half-way and could be adjusted/tweaked on the fly based on the comfort level of the player. 

Here is my current working model. Like all things on this blog, I'm considering it CC-0 so take it and run with it. The OG Tricube Tales Solo materials are CC-BY 3.0 and this post in no-way-shape-or-form is meant to interfere with the original system. As we sometimes say in the adaptation business: with apologies to Richard Woolcock. 

-- How to Use This --

This is primarily intended for solo and GM-less play when a more structured framework is required. If a GM wants to use this to give players more control or to provide a more precise framework and gameplay loop, sure, but is mostly designed to stand in for a GM in a fair, consistent way . As always, everything is optional. Always has been, always will be. Such are RPGs. 

-- Changes & Additions to the Aces/Jokers, Face Cards, Discard Piles, and Reshuffling --

In default Tricube Tales: Solo, Ace and Jokers are marked as "Scene Changes" and then have a 1d6 element that represents something inherent in the scene. In this framework, to keep language more consistent, Ace/Joker trigger "scene shifts". 

A shift had at least a minor to moderate impact on the current scene and story line, and may or may not be a major shift. Draw a second card once you get an Ace or Joker. This is the "Shift Test". To sum up these variations:

  • Ace or Joker is pulled
    • Roll 1d6 as instructed in TriSolo. 
    • Pull a second card, this is the Shift Card. 
    • If the Shift Card is another Ace/Joker:
      • Elevate the shift to a major shift
      • The second 1d6 should highlight the focus, combine the results together
      • In cases such as "Positive (for you)" and "Negative (for you)" treat the combination as somehow involving both 
      • Do not pull a second Shift Card
    • If the Shift Card is a face card:
      • Progress the associated plot as expected
    • If the Shift Card is a number (2-10) card:
      • Play the shift as is, discarding this card
      • Alternatively, use the Suit and/or Value to give hints about the direction and value of the shift (see the various oracles, below)
    • If you still need a card to answer the oracle or establish the scene, draw again and discard additional Ace/Joker cards. See the note, below. 

For face cards, they only trigger plot advancements when pulled as a Shift Card or as a Main Scene Card. In all other card draws, they are read as values 11, 12, and 13. 

EXAMPLE

Jerry is trying to sneak into the chemical factory to search for a missing teenager in a crime drama style campaign. The player draws a card to figure out what kind of task Jerry will need to face and gets a Joker. Rolls a 1d6 and gets "Negative (for you)." Drawing a Shift Card, Jerry's player gets an Ace and rolls 1d6 again and gets "New Character (roll)". These two results are combined together that there is a major shift in the scene with this new person making the issue much harder on Jerry.

OPTIONAL: For plot shifts (Jack, Queen, Face) and scene shifts (Ace, Joker) you will only get one per card draw. Besides the Shift Card, extras can be discarded. For instance, if you draw a King of Spades and the main plot is progressed negatively. You have to draw another card as per TriSolo rules and get a King of Hearts. Rather than interpret this as a shift back into the positive (somewhat neutralizing the first) you discard it instead. The scene has a single plot shift for this one card draw. Later oracle draws in the scene might generate another shift, though. This does not include the Shift Card itself for obvious reasons. 

There is now a more obvious discard pile. All cards except  the main scene task cards are placed in it after being used. There are a lot of cards across the oracles, side tasks, and such. This also means you might have to reshuffle. The only cards NOT reshuffled should be the completed main scene task cards and current main scene task cards. Those are held until the end of the session. 

This means you have a discard pile, a successful scene pile, and a failed scene pile. You can arrange them with the successes going to the right of the draw pile, the failures going to the left, and the discards going either above or below.

-- Karma to Draw a New Card --

Besides some of the new options for spending Karma below, Karma might be used after a card draw for any purpose (scene, oracle, relationship) to cancel that card and draw another. 

This framework favors using Karma more continuously to control the flow and therefore players are encouraged to play off Quirks more often to build up additional Karma. 

- Optional: Increase Starting Karma - 

If groups wish to have more control, Karma's default value can be increased from three (3) to four (4) or five (5). However, it should be balanced and not made much higher than the default value. 

--Additional Materials Needed --

While all of this is optional, some additional tools for using this framework are 

  • A number (3-4 maybe) tokens per character to represent tasks, locations, NPCs, and events/plots/elements to which that character is currently committed. Note, I did NOT say "meeple" even if we all thought the m-word.
  • A small stack (maybe 10-20) index cards of a logical size (3x5, 4x6, whatever your local equivalent is) and slightly less small stack (maybe 20-30) "note cards" of a logical size (2x3, 1.5x2, your favorite sizes).  
  • One deck of cards is probably plenty but if you have a larger group (more than 4) you might want to shuffle a second deck in to start just to reduce the amount of reshuffles. 
If you are playing digitally, you can obvious ignore all this and just use tokens as appropriate.
NOW! On with the changes and the Framework! 

-- Card Based Yes/No Oracle --

When asking a yes/no question, pull a card:
  • 2 to 7 = No. 
  • 8 to K = Yes.
  • A or Joker = There is a shift to the question. Follow the procedure above. If resolving this shift does not answer the question satisfactorily, then an additional card might be drawn.
In this system, the suit of the card might indicate an and or but:
  • Hearts = "And..." 
  • Spades = "But..." 
In this way, you can have "yes, but..." "yes, and..." and so forth. 
This can be expanded for Likely and Unlikely results as follows:
  • Likely means 2-5 = "No" but 6+ = "Yes". 
  • Unlikely means 10+ = "Yes" but 2-9 = "No". 
When it doubt or debate, treat it as the default setting of (2-7 & 8-K). 

-- Other Basic Card Based Oracles --

There are other basic card-type oracles. 
In all cases, these three general notions are true
  • For card value:
    • High numbers tend to represent more (usually more "yes")
    • With vibe style checks, numbers on the end (2, 3 and Q, K tend to represents the extremes of the vibe)
  • For card suit:
    • Hearts = relationships and working with someone/something
    • Diamonds = objects/transactions
    • Clubs = skills/actions
    • Spades = conflict, interactions, or working against someone/something

- Simple Value/Vibe Check -

In this oracle, if you are trying to figure out how much of something there is (how many people, how strong is the storm, how cluttered is this house, etc) then simply pull a card and treat higher as more. Again, Aces and Jokers represent shifts as above. 
If you are trying to find how the vibe is going for or against the characters, consider, as a baseline: 
  • 2 to 4: Negative
  • 5 to 10: Neutral
  • Jack to King: Positive
This can be adjusted or read as more of a spectrum as needed. 
For value/vibe checks, Hearts and Spades can be taken as 
  • Hearts --> The value/vibe is increasing in its direction: growing more negative, more positive, etc. For neutral vibe results, this might be interpreted as being apathetic to the characters' actions or the general flow of the campaign. 
  • Spades --> The value/vibe is about to change. Perhaps do another check later in the scene or in a follow-up scene. 
One particular variation of this check that is frequent in hexcrawls and outside games is a weather/conditions check. In this case, lower values point to worse conditions and higher values point to more favorable conditions. Shifts and Major Shifts point to the weather/condition being particularly out of the normal (dust storm in the desert for a shift, thunderstorm in the desert for a major shift) but use the Twist oracle for ideas. Hearts/Spades can show if the conditions are holding steady, growing worse, or improving, etc. 

- Determining Relationships -

If you are trying to find out how a person, location, character, or event is related to another person, location, character, or event then draw a card and consult the suit. There is a lot of overlap here so a coworker might be someone transactional or task-related or personal depending on the vibe:
  • Hearts = personal relationships (family, friends, personal enemies, places of personal interest)
  • Diamonds = transactional or object based relationships (store owner, coworkers, banks, something paid for)
  • Clubs = related by a task, action, hobby, etc (people who share a hobby, a place where the task takes place, an event involving the action)
  • Spades = related to a specific event or conflict (somewhere who was there when something happened, the place it happened, an event caused by the first). 
The value of the card can be used to hint towards intensity. A 3 of Spades means the connection between the event is fairly faint while a Queen of Hearts might hint the personal relationship is very strong. For obvious reasons, ignore Heart/Spade for "And"/"But" type responses.
Aces/Jokers mean there is unusual characteristic and/or a recent change in the relationship. The Shift Card can give more details about this. Draw again if it is still unclear.

- Determining Types of Scenes -

If you need some inspiration for what type of scene or type of specific task this is, suits can also be used to generate a type of event/scene/task (again there is some overlap):
  • Hearts = interpersonal or personal scene/task (probably involves talking or settling an issue with someone, could involve dealing with a personal issue)
  • Diamonds = transactional or item-based scene/task (the classic "market/shopping" scene, but can also be about finding a specific item, a specific clue, etc). 
  • Club = action scene/task (this involves using a specific skill, performing a specific practical action, or generally applying to some external, non-personal consideration)
  • Spades = conflict scene/task (scenes and tasks of opposition: this scene involves a fight or a struggle, it could also be something like sneaking past guards or climbing a wall definitely meant to keep you out). 
If you draw a numbered card (2 through 10) then you can use the value to decide the general intensity of the problem or the vibe, however you wish to interpret it. 
If you draw a face card then it means effort is needed. Jack = 1 effort per committed character, Queen = 2 effort, and King = 3 effort. 
Obviously, in this case, as above, Hearts/Spades do not generate "And"/"But" answers. 
Aces/Jokers represent scenes that are interrupting are altering the main story. Roll the dice as instructed in the base rules to try and figure out what is happening. For Aces/Jokers, the shift card can help give a focus or draw again if it is unclear.
For more inspiration, draw two two scene-type cards and treat duplicates as an increased intensity (two Spades might mean 3 effort instead of 2, two Diamonds might involve a more complicated transaction or search). Non-duplicates show how the types overlap, a Heart + Diamond might involve finding an item related to a personal quest while a Spades + Club might be a conflict where you are trying to complete a task to win the fight rather than directly confronting someone. If you use the two-card method, only count the first Ace/Joker pulled. 

- OPTIONAL: Weirdness Checks - 

For certain types of campaigns (horror, paranoia, mystery, surreal) it can sometimes be interesting to know if something is going strangely. A Weirdness Check is a variation of the value/vibe check. 
  • Number cards (2-10): the event, person, object, or task (aka, subject) is as expected given the context of the scene, session, or campaign [note: this can still be fairly weird by default]
  • Jack: the subject has a minor but distinct weirdness from its base type. 
  • Queen: the subject has a notable weirdness from its base type.
  • King: the subject has a major weirdness from its base type.
  • Shift (single Ace/Joker): the subject is massively weird.
  • Major Shift (double Ace/Joker): the subject is extremely weird to a degree that the base type is mostly just a suggestion that people might use to give it some explanation. 
In this system, the standard suit distribution might give some idea of how it is weird
  • Hearts --> something is off about the people/creatures involved
  • Diamonds --> something is off about the objects/aesthetics involved
  • Clubs --> something is off about the actions/procedures involved
  • Spades --> something is off about how the subject interacts with the characters or world around it. 
One variation could be to draw an additional card for Queen, two additional cards for King, and three/four for Shifts/Major Shifts and read only the suit if you need inspiration for how to upgrade the values.
This can be used to find out if a creature fits the general type (zombie) or is something different (a raging, screeching zombie) to add some creature inspiration more on the fly. 

Example

In a horror campaign, there is a festival going on and a parade is going down the street. A Jack of Diamonds might indicate the people are wearing strange masks. A Queen of Hearts might be the people in the parade having unusual appearances (too tall, too thin, etc). A King of Spades could have the parade floats having folks in cages while the crowd cowers and looks afraid. An Ace might combine all these elements into one. An Ace followed by a Joker might involve all that and also the day shifts into the night, strange voices are heard shouting from somewhere down the side streets, and the the ground quakes and shakes as the city takes on a different vibe as the parade passes.

-- Main Scene Task vs Side Tasks --

Most scenes still has a Main Scene Task determined by cards (aka, the Main Scene Card). As in the base game, draw a card to determine the main task for that scene. This highlights the general focus of the scene, a task that must be completed to face. Face cards equal a shift while Ace/Jokers add an alteration to the scene, as above. One or more characters might work to solve this (or be required to individually solve it). If the flow of the story has reached a point where this main task is more disruptive (example: players need a scene where they discuss strategy, take a break from the main plot, or elsewise) this can be considered more indicative of the flavor of the scene but a card should be drawn since there might be shifts and/or progressions in the plot. 
This main task can be solved either before, during, or after the Side Tasks. Construct the fiction at the table to reflect this: is this something blocked by the side tasks, something that enables the side tasks, or something happening at the same time, et cetera. 
Characters not tackling the main task of the scene can have a side task. State the intentions for these characters and then decide to either pull a card for a completely random tasks (which can help to add a few twists and unexpected interactions) or decide the Trait used in the tasks and pull a card to determine the difficulty:
  • 2, 5, 8, Jack = Easy (4+ to succeed)
  • 3, 6, 9, Q = Standard (5+ to succeed)
  • 4, 7, 10, K = Hard (6 to succeed)
These two methods (purely decided by cards or using cards to determine difficulty) should be considered the default way to determine side tasks outside of letting fiction decide. If not every player agrees on the fiction, then a card draw can be used.
If an Ace/Joker is drawn, this side task is somewhat related to a shift in the scene. Proceed with the Scene Shift rules as above.

In some cases, the relatively difficulty of the tasks might be obvious (example: an early scene trying to get into a nightclub when there is no real obvious conflict, yet) but the Trait might be in doubt. Or, figuring out the trait might be a good clue as to how difficult the task is. In that case, you can use this chart:
  • 2, 3, 4 = Agile
  • 5, 6, 7 = Brawny
  • 8, 9, 10 = Craft
  • Jack = Agile/Brawny
  • Queen = Agile/Crafty
  • King = Brawny/Crafty
Treat the face cards as if either is applicable but flavor the task in a way that makes sense. Multiple characters approaching these tasks might use either of them or in cases of effort being spent, a single character might switch. 
In either of these, Aces and Jokers still result in an alteration that adjusts the task. 
When using side tasks, only the main scene card is added to the success/fail pile and only the main scene card is counted for the suits to determine the flow of the adventure. 
OPTIONAL: If this last detail means the session goes on too long because of the number of characters, you may treat all task cards for the determination of story flow. However, with 3+ characters, this might conversely make the session go by too quickly to actually resolve the story. 
In that case, you can set up a limit of scenes (6-8), instead. For a great six-scene structure, see the Tricube Tales Micro Edition. 

-- An Optional Way to Determine Effort/Conflict Scenes -- 

Besides drawing scene-type cards and getting face cards, an optional way to determine if a given Main Scene Task is the sort of conflict that requires effort you can use the discard pile. Keep the top three cards visible. If the suit of the main scene card matches two of the top three cards in discard pile, it requires two effort per character (or per character present, whichever makes sense). If it matches all three, then it requires three effort. 
As in all cases, fiction is the cornerstone. Some scenes are just naturally lead to a task that will require effort. Likewise, sometimes effort does not make sense. Play to your table. 

-- Locations, NPCs, Details, and Elements --

This is a framework that establishes the fiction at the table in a more controlled manner. It is partially inspired by some games such as Microscope but is not in any way bound by that structure. It is recommended you use both index cards and smaller note cards (or the digital equivalent) to handle some of this. 
First, decide the mission being faced by using the micro-setting of your choice or through other methods. The main details are things such as main tasks (the main *required* detail), side tasks, general location, and complications. Outside of rolling, you might let players take turns deciding on these details. Add these to an index card or multiple note cards with enough basic details to start but leave room for more. 
Next, create locations. 

- Locations - 

Start with a Positive Location unless the set-up makes it unlikely the characters have a place to treat as a home base. In that case, make a starting location which is either Neutral or Negative. 
Then, for each character (not player) add a location based on the details of the mission (a place where the main quest might happen, a place related to the complication). If there is only one or two characters, then have two or three per character. You want, besides the "home base," there to be four or five places to start. Decide if each location is Positive (a place with no initial threats to the characters), Neutral (a place that might have threats, but no immediate or inherent ones), or Negative (a place where threats are active). 
Write a name and a couple of basic details for each location on an index card per location and place it on the table in whatever order makes sense (rough geographic order, a relative scale of Positive to Negative, etc). 
Then set aside roughly the same number of index cards to represent possible future places. 

- NPCs, Non-Player Characters - 

Start out with at least a couple of possible NPCs (at least two to three are good, but four or five might make sense). These can be people related to the known details (such as main quests, side quests, complications), people that make sense for certain locations, or people that might be interesting to the story. They are not guaranteed to show up in any scene but they at least provide a background fiction. 
These go on the smaller cards. Like locations, these non-player characters have some basic details (name, occupation, demeanor) and are graded Positive, Neutral, or Negative. Apply these character cards to a location to start or set them at no specific location if it is unknown (such as tracking down the main villain). 
Again, set aside a small stack of character cards for additional characters. The general table flow might determine this but a rough start would be no more than double or triple the number of player characters (again, around 4 to 5 extra). 
MINOR NPCs might not get a character card and instead be a detail showing up on another character card (a sidekick or goon type) or a location (a bartender or barfly at a tavern, for instance). 

- Events and Elements - 

For this last type, think if there are any overarching events (festivals, disease, things related to the main/side-quest or the complication) and add in event cards on an index card somewhere to one side of the location cards. If this event is at a specific location, attach the card. Like above, write a couple of basic details about it. 
Element cards are a kind of catch all for anything that does not fit into one of the other categories. It might be a ticking clock condition, an aspect to the adventure, a personal consideration, an overarching force, or some similar element that needs to be called out. These should NOT attach directly to a specific location, character, or event: these are more generalized than that. 
For both Events and Elements, determine if they are Positive, Negative, or Neutral again and mark them as such. 
There may be no starting Events or Elements or there might be several. 

- Adding Content to these Cards - 

As a Scene starts, first draw the main scene card from the card deck and then determine which location, NPC, event, or detail it might impact. Attach it there. Then as player characters determine their intent, assign their token (or note it somehow) to whichever of these locations/npcs/events/details they must engage with to perform their task or scene actions. Those not attached to the main scene task will then figure out their side tasks related (in some way) to the location/character/event/etc they are attached. 
At the end of the scene, a character attached to one of the above (and likely multiple of above) will have a chance for their player to add in a detail or two based generally on the following principle:
  • Fiction always takes precedent. The story ultimately decides details. Start with this principle to decide a detail or two to add as exposed/explored in the scene.
  • When the fiction does not necessarily dictate the detail, the player may add one detail either chosen by personal choice or through an oracle role (should likely be a mix of both). 
  • No more than one or two details should be added at a time by a player. Leave room to keep developing. 
  • New details should only conflict with the given fiction IF some shift developed or the tone of the session changes or some time has passed to allow it. In all other cases, new details should consider all prior notes on the table as in-canon. 
  • When a player is adding a new detail, other players should give them space and avoid actively collaborating except in cases where assistance is asked or if questions need to be answered.
  • When in doubt/debate, a player may spend one Karma from a character to force a detail. Even then, it should not conflict great with the prior details or general vibe of the session unless it makes overall sense with the current fiction (spending a single Karma will not create a comic-relief unicorn character at odds with the hardboiled detective story, for instance). 

- Shifting Positivity - 

At the end of each scene, an attached character's player may also decide to shift the positivity by one step (negative place made neutral, neutral NPC made positive or negative). The above considerations should be taken in mind. 
The success or failure of the task might be a good indication (a failure might shift a relationship more negative, a success might shift it more positive). 

- Adding Locations/NPCs/Events/Elements - 

There are three main ways to add more:
  • The fiction requires something new to make sense.
  • Ace/Jokers generate new locations, characters, or events.
  • A player spends one (1) Karma from their character. 
Once all the possible cards are used up, this final cost should increase to two (2) Karma at least or be avoided. Permanent cards should not count against this limit. 

- OPTIONAL: Splitting Locations/Events/Characters/Elements - 

Once any of these Locations/Events/Characters/Element cards have accrued more than 4 or 5 details, consider possibly splitting it into two cards. A hotel might get a lobby and a rooftop nightclub. A person might get, well, themselves but also a relative or sidekick. This is one way to generally reflect the weight applied to these foci in actual play. A location with multiple sub-locations shows other players are interested in using/exploring it. 

- OPTIONAL: Making Locations/Events/Characters/Elements PERMANENT - 

At the end of a session, the table should have a good number of these cards in play. It will be tempting for certain campaigns to try and retain many or all of these. Instead, it is suggested that the table decides a few (one of each per player at the most) to be turned into a Permanent version (events will likely be the odd duck in this case, they tend to stick around or go away based on what they are). If players wish to choose more than one, two (2) Karma should be spent unless other players agree this is obvious. Players may also choose to add none to the pool. 
As always, fiction takes charge. If a particular place is baked into the campaigns fiction or a particular person needs to show up over multiple session: that can be a freebie. 
If the fiction decides a place or person should be removed from the campaign, mark off its permanent status. Likewise, a player may choose to remove one of each from the permanent pool. This should never be used to get rid of a place newly chosen by another player. If this choice is in contention, a player can spend two (2) Karma to force it unless the fiction absolutely disagrees. 
It is recommended to only have 1-2 permanent places and NPCs per player on the table to keep the framework loose. For excess of this, consider placing several into a sideboard and only add to them to the main table when needed.
Not all permanent locations need to be considered to in play at all times. The sideboard can also be used to store those chosen to be permanent if it makes no sense for them to be in place (home town locations when characters on a road trip, etc). 

-- The Final Scene --

As recommended in the Tricubes Tales Micro Edition, the final scene will be a task that requires effort. The default is two successes per character with resolve lost due to failure. 
An optional rule to make this more variable is to look at the failures and success for the Main Scene Task cards. If the table has zero (0) failures: one (1) effort per character is required. If the table has failures equal to or less than the successes: go with the default two (2) effort per character. If the failures outnumber the success, then it takes three (3) effort per character. If there are no successes, then it requires three (3) effort per character and the scene difficulty is locked in on Hard. 

- Optional: Gauntlet Scenes - 

"Gauntlet" scenes can be thought of as mini-bosses or montage scenes where the team gets get together to prep a house for a zombie invasion or to build a ship to attack the dread pirate or such. With the above structure, they are used to "burn off" failures by having a collective scene task related to all  characters which is called before the scene starts and takes the place of a normal scene. It might be used as the penultimate scene. 
Count up all the failure cards. Using the same rough ratio as above determine that much effort per failed main scene task, not per character (if there are no failures but the table would like to play out one, go with the default of two per player). Then, go around per character and rapid fire draw a task card. It is recommended that the cards are used as is (3 of Hearts = Standard Agile). Resolve may or may not be lost depending on the fiction (a mini-boss fight will lose resolve, a gathering supplies will not). Success earned for these gauntlet tasks are applied to gauntlet effort, not to the individual tasks. 
At the end, remove a number of failed cards based on how many successes were generated, rounding down (two-per would mean five (5) successes = 2 failure cards removed). 
Gauntlet scenes are fun rapid fire kind of scenes but should only be used maybe once per session and should not be a default. They apply an in-framework-way to representing wrapping up loose ends if the session is coming to a close but things feel unresolved.

The Bleak and The Pearl (SoloDark): Part 4, The Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur Delve 2

By

On 2024-07-03

In Actual Play, ShadowDark, Solo Campaigns, SoloDark, The Bleak and the Pearl

 

This week's dive into The Bleak & The Pearl starts out with our four Blue Grove Boys facing a room with four sets of pillars, each in a vibrant hue, and a burned-to-a-crisp ettercap! As last time, I'll focus more on a highlight recap rather going into super specific, step-by-step decisions. I will also talk about how I changed up some things (especially towards the end) to make the vibe more B&P specific. If you ran this yourself, some details will clash with what you see. 

- The Four Pillars and the Six Bowls - 

The upper right (most north-east on the map) room is our starting spot this time. In it are four pairs of pillars: red, blue, green, and purple. Unbeknownst to our boys, each one has a negative effect [fire, drowning, etc]. They do have the burned corpse of an ettercap in front of them (which they may not even really recognize as a specific ancestry as opposed to just "burned out humanoid body"). And then a long, relatively empty room in a place where long empty rooms have things like The Scarlet Minotaurs and bull statues ready to pounce. 
DC15 check passes and Rance is sure there is *some* magic here but cannot really place it. Tom gets a success in to check for traps roll (there is no traditional trap, which he notes). So...the team gets into a bit of a debate about checking this room out further. After a couple of quick debates, Grusk decides he is going to risk it and starts walking past the first set of pillars, which the game says will set flammable stuff you are carrying on fire...

A quick note about my "Vote Dice" mechanic

Part of the way I run this game is to use a kind of vote-dice style oracle. The basic way is to choose a die (from the traditional pool) to represent each character's general willingness: d4 means they do not want to do it while d10 means they want to do it a lot. 1-3 is a no. 4+ is a yes. A 1 means a hard no (that dice is frozen if it goes into follow up decisions about this topic) while a 6+ tends to be a hard yes (ditto). The default die is a d6. d10s are basically only used when someone is absolutely sure (and that someone, in this campaign, is almost always Grusk). The intended swing is d4, d6, and d8. 
A lot of the crawling and how they approach certain rooms is based on a series of these with a bit of a back and forth. The general "triggers" for each character are:
  • Grusk (Half-Orc Fighter) likes physical challenges, tests of might, and generally like be aggressive and pushing his limits. He does not like letting people go and will chase down people who start fights and then flee. He is not necessarily prone to starting fights but is absolutely ok with keeping them going. All that being said, he is very practically minded about the team and tries to shield the other people as best he can through brute force.
  • Inar (Halfling Priest of Gede) likes playfulness, pranks, and general silliness. Prone to talk and ramble first and deal with the considerations going forward. Does not like risks. Takes the shortest possible path to get things done but concedes the shortest path is sometimes taking a long way around an obvious threat. Will always try to charm people (his CHA of 14 is the highest in the team by several points). Kind of a terrible priest in a lot of ways but a decent friend.
  • Tom (Goblin Thief) feels compelled to help others. Likes challenging his own prowess. Sometimes goes for the longer way around if he thinks it will be more fun. Has no qualms about taking risks if it seems interesting. Likes taking charge when it comes to certain puzzles and traps. Will absolutely risk his neck to try and save people, especially people in captivity, but will not always stick around if the people refuse to help themselves. He thinks things should be fair. 
  • Rance (Human Wizard) is the most cowardly of the group, but also the most dedicated to the cause. The others are generally following his lead. He tends to go slowly, think things through. Is really good at sensing the bad-stuff about to happen (in his defense, the bad stuff usually happens to him). Once the goal is in sight, will nearly never diverge from the course. Almost always at the back of the group but also shouting lots of information and ideas. 
When first started the campaign, I used dice to see if they would chase down an escaping cultist, if they would try and stop and save prisoners, if they would try and explore a side area. The above descriptions are basically making sense of those first couple of sessions worth of dice rolls. As it keeps going, it helps me to decide the set up for future dice rolls. After a few more sessions, it will likely be obvious for a lot of actions which character would do what. I'll still use the dice to decide which path down tunnels they take.
Oh, if there is no consensus after 2-3 rolls, then I just default to the above. Grusk might push his luck with Tom backing him up while Inar hangs back, laughing, and prepping the healing magic and Rance is lecturing everyone about being foolish. 
Back to...

- The Four Pillars and the Six Bowls (part 2) - 

[Doug's Note: At this point, I make an oracle roll: "Do rations burn?" I know his torches will catch fire. Most of his other stuff is made of metal, though. The only one I was not sure about was...rations. They are a kind of fuzzy concept in Shadowdark. And I got a 10: a twist. Now what in the hell would this twist be? I thought about maybe salt somehow negating the pillars. I though about maybe something in there catches fire earlier and acts as a warning. I went to the SoloDark oracle and got 69,62: "Flee Pain". Here's how I run with it: Grusk can see the body of the ettercap. He can feel the hairs on his arms start to heat up as starts to cross the pillars. He can even hear some of the food in his pack start to sizzle and suddenly he thinks, "Why burn good food?" and turns around. Because like the others, Grusk has this sort of non-specific connection to destiny that is driving the campaign forward but in his case, Grusk mostly hears it as a kind of hunger. He might be willing risk the quest to prove he is not scared but he is not willing to waste food in the meantime.] 
He takes a torch (starting to be a fairly precious resource after this much continuous delving) and tosses it past the pillars and watches it burn it. Then they leave with Rance chiding the entire crew about not listening. 
After this, the team makes their way into a room with a six bowls on six black plinths and basically just go: "Nah". Tom pokes one. Everyone braces. Nothing happens. They are ready to keep going.

- The Beastmen and the Bugs in the Bathhouse - 

[Doug's Note: Here comes a fun coincidence. Right as I enter into the bath house (rough center of the east portion of the map) I get a wandering monster roll for 2d4 Beastmen arguing over centipedes to eat. Now, in the room, there's a mechanic that if you unplug the basins that scarabs might come out. I rule that the beastmen aren't arguing over centipedes, they are actually "farming" the scarabs. This is a task they are not great at: there are half devoured and desiccated beastmen corpses in the room. As the team enters, though, they witness the argument where a leader type is lecturing the others for not holding the sack correctly while taunting scarabs to come out and then I played out a combat sequence with the beastmen, five in total, bashing the scarabs.]
The team is in a bath house with six basins and a large statue of a snakewoman up on a raised dais. As they enter though, they see a group of arguing beastmen coordinating...something. They hold back as the beastmen thump on one of the basins and then yank back a drain plug and admit a stream of angry scarab bugs into the room. The beastmen start walloping the scarabs and clearly have an upper hand...this time. 
After the beastmen down the scarabs and start scooping them up into the sack the leader turns and sees the team standing there in the door way and screams that these folks are here to steal the food. A fight breaks out that goes...ok. Grusk takes a few hard hits. Doug learns that Magic Missile is always cast at advantage (neat!). Healing spells get used. Eventually the beastmen are downed and the team search the room. Tom can clearly hear the scarabs in the pipes and absolutely ignores pulling at any more plugs. But the snakewoman statue intrigues him. He does not find any traps related to it so he pulls on it and barely dodges get scorched by scalding hot spa water. He lets it run for a few minutes and notes the water is clear. It smells of sulphur and old iron pipes but it it is safe to consume. It might be worth noting if the team is stuck here for another day. 

- The First of the Marius Dead and the Key - 

[Doug's Note: Here is my little retcon at this point. Since this is not merely a random dungeon but one related to the meta-quest of this campaign, I decide that the red armor of the skeleton of this room is actually a known "signature" of House Marius. I go back to that door with the sun symbol and decide that the door's symbol is a sun either setting or rising over a body of water: the sigil of Mad Del Marius. However, while asking if this corpse might be the actual Del Marius I do an oracle roll at disadvantage and get a second twist. This time the oracle comes back 100, 45: release ambush. Rather than a fight with some random enemies I rule there is a psychic backlash as you approach the corpse and the robes. This is why none of the various factions in the citadel have ever just snatched the spear or the clothing.]
The team comes to a room largely empty except for a skeleton pinned to the wall by a spear with four ceremonial robes on the wall nearby. This skeleton of a soldier or person clearly marked as of House Marius. However, as they approach the body (and the robes beside it), a wave of psychic energy washes over them. Grusk and Rance manage to make their DC15 saving throughs but Tom and Inar go down. All four are assaulted by images of the spreading Darkness and the symbol of the sun trying to burn through. 
After a couple of rounds, the unconscious pair wake back up and the team tries, again, to search the area and find the the key marked with the same sun-over-water symbol as before. At this point they debate (see "Vote Dice" above) and clearly decide to fast track back towards the door. 

- The Return to the Sun Door and Face to Face with Del Marius - 

This part was mostly bookkeeping with the exception of the darkmantles the team had put to sleep before. This time around the 'mantles are more amiable but Rance's attempt at a second sleep spell fails. Instead, the team tries to just gently walk past the beasts. However, the 'mantles eventually become agitated by Rance's twitchiness and attack. 
Darkness takes out Rance's lantern and the first round goes a bit south with lots of whiffs while Rance struggles to get the lantern relit. Once they have light, the team manages to kill a couple of 'mantles and the others flee off down the hall. 
After this, the team finishes the somewhat long loop back to the door and try the key. Seeing another of these ceremonial skeletons, this time sitting in a throne, they go very slowly. Grusk and Tom offer to approach and once more Grusk overcomes the psychic blast while Tom once more crashes to the floor (this time for 5 rounds). 
This is no mere corpse. This is Mad Del Marius himself. Sitting on the house throne, wearing the Marius Diadem, and holding one of the family's legacy weapons (+1, prevents surprise). This is the answer to the decline of House Marius: Del and at least one other member [head canon, I'm going to say his youngest son] sacrificed themselves to become a barrier to power and protect the diadem. Over time, the citadel became overran with beastmen and ettercaps and the careful balance gave way. 
Grusk takes the spear in the skeleton's hands and brings it with him. He wants to use it to try and show the remaining House Marius members what went down. The Lighthouse needs allies and this might be a rallying cry. 
While this is going on, Rance investigates the pillars in the room and realizes that they depict the lighthouse and the five fuelstones. They knew there was an "eye" related to House Grunkheart, a mask from House Bittermold, a mantle from House Harucam, and this diadem. Now they know that House Mistamere's focus object was a lens. Rance makes note of the missing portions and the team decides it is time to go home. [Doug's Note: people might have spotted a couple of clues in the names, above]. 

- Wrapping Up and in Praise of Kelsey - 

That basically wraps up this adventure. There were a few wandering monster checks (nothing happened) and some rolls to sell of gear and such. All four hit level 3 at the end so there was a bit of bookkeeping to pick new spells (Inar got Bless, Rance got Acid Arrow) and some new talents (Grusk is better at wearing Plate Mail, Tom is better at landing attacks). 
The next delve will be the tunnels under Grunce and the returning of the diadem. Before that will be a short "civilization vignette" to figure out how Marius reacts, to see how the power struggles in town are going, and so forth. 
It is funny to look at the map and realize the team missed around half the dungeon. Maybe more. The only ettercap they met was the one dead one. They had no run ins with the undead. All that being said, hats off to Kelsey Dionne for this adventure. There is a lot to digest here but a lot of the rooms have something worth doing. Stuff like figuring out the pillars or finding out about what to do with the the bowls is the right amount of game-y, I think. I cannot imagine running this anything less than 8-10 hours, but it should be a good time (maybe not the labyrinth, but most of the rest has *something* to do).  

Steal This Rule: "Death is primarily a narrative conceit"

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On 2024-07-01

In Design Philosophy, Reconsidering Fairness in Solo RPGs, Solo Musings, Steal This Rule

Imagine this: you have spent some time kicking off your solo campaign. A few sessions in, you have backstory and lore. You have an entire chart of threads and characters. You have a hexcrawl with a dozen notes. And then, your second level wizard springs a trap and you roll on a table and get poison. The effects say, "Make a saving throw or die." And you roll a critical fail. What happens next?

It is a fascinating aspect of the tabletop sphere that out of all the many genre hobbies - comic books, movies, novels, videogames, etc - that really only tabletop games, including role-playing games, consider the death of characters (or, in the case of many board/card games: depletion of a life point type pool of the player) to be a primary driver of narrative tempo. 

In books and movies, death is side story reserved for plot twists and big reveals and mostly impacting side characters and NPC types. In videogames, while you have a dedicated fanbase of hardcore runs,  you still have restarts and save points and resurrection deals and campfires so that the vast majority of lost run are generally, cognitively, the start of a new one that is very similar to the old one, immediately with little pause. 

In RPGs, including solo play ones, death is an outsized driver for the way we conceive of story beats. A side effect of RPGs being rooted as modular expansions to war-gaming means folks sometimes ask how a relatively deadly game like Shadowdark can be more deadly[Reddit]. and you find cases of people trying to nerf things like fudge/fate/hero/luck tokens or resurrection because, for a certain mindset, death justifies all the AC and the HP and the XP and the STR and the GP. Characters overcome death to face higher level death down the road. Time is a flat circle. 

Searching Google/etc can bring back a host of articles about how to handle character death ranging from "get over it" to "maybe don't kill off characters possibly". It is so baked into the baseline assumption that people who come up with reasonable responses to how to handle it (see Dealing with Character Death [Youtube Video] and How to Handle Character Death in Dungeons and Dragons [DnDBeyond]) still have to dance around whether or not there should be some mitigation for the inevitability of 0HP (usually now some -XHP) in a way not unlike how we would talk about grieving and dying in the real world.

Yet, outside of RPGs, these discussions are almost nonsensical. Batman and all the various Robins have clocked up multiple deaths, each. Many fantasy novels have characters fail battles but the outcome is retreat, imprisonment, or some other safety rope tossed in by the author. These stories are not necessarily about trivializing loss but more finding a way to make 0HP a narrative increase rather than a cease. 

In a recent response to a r/solo_roleplaying thread about lowering lethality to avoid character death, I wrote: 

In a lot of novels, movies, and so forth the main character "dying" is usually just a phase: they wash up face down on a beach, they get rescued by a new ally, they get imprisoned/have to escape, or they wake up in a hospital with no good explanation how they got there.

For this look at Steal This Rule! I want players, especially but not just solo roleplayers, to consider this:

Death is primarily a narrative concept...

That is taken verbatim from many of the micro-setting/scenarios for Tricube Tales ([DriveThruRPG], link goes to the one I've been posting on this blog: "Guardians of the Shadow Frontier"). When I first read this, I merely nodded. As I've played more and more, I realized how it allows the players (including the GM) to regain a piece of power that roleplaying games have traditionally removed from them: to decide what 0HP means. A few bad dice rolls (especially at early levels), a particularly unfair trap, an oracle going a bit awry, or just a side-effect of players not really actualizing the world in the way that characters might: all can lead to a death that was completely unseen or unexpected a scene prior. 

That's partially why I am suggesting to players to go with...

0HP can mean the character is unable to act, not necessarily dead. 

Rather than threating 0HP as perma-death, treat it as a temporary inability to drive the story forward. A 0HP character is knocked out, captured, lost, injured, retreating (painfully), or just generally unable to engage in elements like combat or controlled mobility for a time. 0HP means the character is "at the mercy" of the game world at large (and the enemies that caused the HP loss).

What this means can be a number of things. In a truly-Solo game (one character only) this might involve a time-out of sorts as they regain some HP. During that time, the world goes on without them. In a party style game, the 0HP character might be out until healing spells or items can revive them. At least until the Total Party Wipe occurs. 

Whether captured by enemies, rescued by an ally (or a new character), or generally forced to wake up weak and alone on a dungeon floor, the total loss of HP does not end the story but offers up new avenues to add to their story. 

0HP can be a narrative increase rather than a cease

Who rescues them? What does being captured mean? Are they tied up? Tossed in a cage? Left in a pile of rubble? How do they overcome washing up on shore? How do they survive on a hostile planet after being marooned from a crash? If 0HP is a loss of ability to engage in the narrative then what story beats can you use to return that ability to the character?

Death is still an option if it suits the current story.

And all that is not to get rid of death entirely. The character is not newly immortal. This is not about cheating death but about making the story rich and meaningful. There are times when it it is all said and done that that 0HP = narrative shift means that 0HP = death (at least for a time). This is not about making death impossible but about taking one of the three de facto assumptions of RPGs (random rolls, character abilities, HP/death) and saying we can do something different with it. 

Note that besides Tricube Tales, Fate has had this aspect (PUN!) in their SRD for some time [Fate-SRD]. And I think it is time that we apply it to other games to try and tell the kinds of stories we like without feeling like we are cheating.

Unless you really like 0HD = permadeath and then, as always, you do you, Boo. 

The Bleak and The Pearl (SoloDark): Part 3, The Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur Delve 1

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On 2024-06-30

In Actual Play, ShadowDark, Solo Campaigns, SoloDark, The Bleak and the Pearl

 

One of My Other Campaigns

The Bleak and the Pearl is one my other two main campaigns I am running solo. It is uses the SoloDark rules addon to ShadowDark. The slight tweak/experiment to this campaign is to divide into delve sessions like this one that use SoloDark to handle the general oracle and settings and then civilization sessions that will use Mythic GME 2. This gives an interesting variety of play. All the big threads and characters and such are handled in town, while the delves are simpler. 

I started the campaign before I started the blog and originally the idea was that this blog would cover it but I never got around to doing the "full" recap (being only a single delve session and a single civilization session). Rather than type up multiple pages of stuff I played a few weeks ago, I will instead just bring up the main beats as they go, but let's start with these three quick pieces:

The Bleak and the Pearl

300 years ago, the Barthic Federation was a grand collective of Human, Dwarf, Elf, Goblin, and Halfling kingdoms spread across the island continent of Barthus. The twin to Barthus was primitive and unbroken Silt: a place full of great beasts and massive wilderness. Outside of a few mining and limber towns, Silt was mostly ignored by the Barthic people, left to the Orcs who managed to tame some of the wilder reaches. At least until the Darkness came. It spread and devoured Barthus, corrupting and mutating the land. 

As the Federations was pushed further south and east, the decision finally came to cross the Gray Channel en masse and to try and make a new country in Silt. 

Now, three centuries later, the once great Barthic Federation are a series of city states spread along both sides of the Gray Channel. Civilization is crushed between the primal wilds of Silt and the devouring darkness of old Barthus. In common language, these two continents are now better known as The Bleak (Barthus) and The Pearl (Silt). 

The Blue Grove Boys

Four orphans raised by The Blue Grove, a Pearl temple of Gede in the Cerulean Forest, have crossed the Gray Channel lead by the apocalyptic dreams of Rance, a Human Wizard. He and Inar (Halfing Cleric) were rescued by the Grove from a cult dedicated to the Dark Lady (possibly probably some incarnation of Shune but I'm keeping it vague right now). They were raised alongside Grusk (Half-Orc Fighter, who had been beaten and abused as a sorcerer's apprentice) and Tom (Goblin Thief, abandoned as a baby at the Grove). 

Driven by Rance's dreams, they feel themselves pulled into a quest to stop the unknown upcoming catastrophe. They have found and recovered a strange cloak that drives the wearer mad while also shielding the user from magical scrying. Though they are unsure why they were led to this cloak (currently being housed and protected in the Grove's chambers), they still trust in the power of Rance. They have lately come to the city of Grunce.

[Doug's Note: All of them are currently level 2]

Cal Grunkheart, The Lighthouse Keepers, and Grunce's Troubles

The city of Grunce was the site the last major work of the then crumbling Barthic Federation. Five great families came together and powered the Lighthouse through now-unknown means. The Lighthouse's light drives back the Darkness and makes a barrier of safe passage for those seeking a life in the Pearl. This places Grunce as the greatest city left in the Bleak: a trading ground, a port of call, and a haven. Unfortunately, the Lighthouse is starting to flicker and threatens to collapse. 

Cal Grunkheart - a descendent of Jonias Grunkheart who founded Grunce and the Lighthouse - is trying to find a way to preserve the Light and to restore his family to power. He befriends the Grove orphans and the two groups - Lighthouse Keepers and the Grove Boys - are now working together to solve the mysteries of the Lighthouse. 

Cal has found there are tunnels underneath Grunce which act as a battery to power the Light. However, the Keepers have only gotten to the first fuel stone and have been able to go deeper due to the infestation of the tunnels. Years ago, when these five families had the tunnels constructed, they created a grid using five items of power. Now, as the Darkness presses in, these five items of power must be restored to the fuel stones to recharge them once more.

While all this is going on, two great houses of Grunce - The Marrs and the Allociuses - are fighting with each other and with the Free Merchants' Guild to gain the upper hand in the city. All three are ok with stopping the Lighthouse keepers because such catastrophe can be blamed on the other two.

The first fuel stone found by the Keepers is missing the Diadem of Del Marius. In his lifetime, Mad Marius turned his old family estate into a Citadel full of strange treasures and traps. His diadem was left inside and must be retrieved.

The Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, Part 1

Since you can read the whole adventure as part of the free Shadowdark Quickstart and Kelsey Dionne has made an overview video about The Lost Citadel on Youtube, I am not going to dive too deeply into the mechanics or layout of the dungeon. You can also get a glimpse of the map, above. Instead, I'll focus on a few highlights.

The Labyrinth

The team starts out in the Labyrinth, opting for the smaller side entrance than the the main front one. Early on, they meandered back and forth (I used 4d6 to have a kind of vote mechanic to determine direction). Once they became aware they were meandering back and forth, Tom light a torch and used it like charcoal to mark the places they have already been.

Towards the end of this section, a Cave Creeper waited around the final turn into the main Citadel. During that fight, Inar was paralyzed and two of the characters took decent injuries. They retreated back into the room you can see a bit north west of the letter "L" and camped down for 8 hours. They did discover some of the burial jars. Rance told them to touch nothing but Grusk pocketed some gold before coming across the small dolls and deciding it might not be worth it.

Brell, the Ochre Jelly, and the Door

They made their way into the room full of murals and found Brell knocked out on the floor. Inar went over and tended to the beastmen's rooms but Brell's reaction roll was very, very negative so he lunged forward to slash at the halfling before Grusk chopped him down in a single blow.

They did find the secret door and the hidden cache here, but opted instead of go west first. Here they stumbled upon the ochre jelly (who once again targeted Inar, because the poor halfling is having it rough) though the team kept the upper hand for all of this fight. Rance realized the jelly was splitting as Grusk chopped into it so they went into a more careful attack and were able to defeat it.

They examined the door with the sun engraved upon it, and Tom twice tried to pick the lock. Failing both times they noticed the door getting hotter and glowing brighter so decided to leave it alone.

The Beastman Slaughter

They tracked back to the secret door and opened it up to find a surprised young beastman inside. Hoping he hadn't noticed the sound of them scrapping with Brell right outside the door [note: oracle said no] they again let Inar take point and try and befriend them. Through guttural primordial, they make something of a curious peace and the team goes to meet Rogarth, the beastman leader. He praises them for making it past the dragons outside [Doug's note: the beastmen are convinced the outside world is full of dragons hunting them, so do not leave] while also lamenting the terrors of the Scarlet Minotaur.

[I made an oracle check here to see if Rogarth was really going to work with the team and got a 1 which is SoloDark terms means "extreme no". Not only is going to betray them, he is going to do so right now.]

The beastmen have been spreading out for an attack. The plan is to knock the team out and use them to trap the minotaur (it is not a good plan). Tom, noticing the beastmen getting ready to leap [Goblins can't be surprised] gives a shout but the beastmen win initiative and....proceed to have the worst attack rolls I have ever rolled. Rance and Grusk take a couple of minor hits. Rance, still very much ok, casts Sleep and knocks everyone, including the other members of his team, out. He wakes up the other three adventurers who proceed to slaughter the hapless tribe. Gede is a faith of tooth and claw, after all.

While gathering up the bodies and thinking up a plan of what to do with them, the beastmen from the lookout room have snuck in and one downs Rance with a stab to the back. The quick fight goes about as well for these two beastmen as it did before. Rance manages to crawl back up to 1hp and the team go around and spike the doors while gathering up materials from the beastmen layer to make a fire and campout for the second time.

The Minotaur Sleeps (and Dies)!

Doug, here. So...the next encounter starts with a simple question: what time is it? The team has been in the citadel for hours. They have made two camps and done a lot of wandering. I decide to roll a simple "clock" oracle: d12 + d2 for the hour and am/pm. I get 3am. This leads me to ask a simple question: is the minotaur asleep? A 20 shows up on the oracle: exceptional yes.

The team is aware of the minotaur from the beastmen. They have been listening and clearly heard the bullman smash stuff around, punch pillars, shout out taunts, and so forth in the courtyard. But now it is quiet, and Tom is a decent thief. Tom goes out, finds out the minotaur is asleep, and comes up with a plan. The rest take off armor and jangly bits. They creep out, and surround the minotaur and get ready to Murder on the Minos Express him. Here's my ruling: each gets one attack, at advantage. They have to land the attack (minotaur does have armor on, and it's night time even it if it is not pitch black due to moon and starlight). A hit is treated as critical. Tom gets backstab AND critical bonuses. After this, they will be in the thick of it and I was already planning to have them dash back into the secret area and try and use beastman bodies as traps and barriers.

They rolled a combined total of 36hp of damage! They kill the main boss of the dungeon in a single series of blows without there being an actual combat.

This made me think really hard. Was it FAIR? Frankly, yes. One of my main adages of solo roleplaying is treat yourself as if you were a player at your own table. Outside of outright breaking of the rules, what things would you do for another player to make sure they were having a fun time playing their character? The time of day was a fluke. The "is a minotaur asleep" was kind of a fluke baked off the first one but it makes sense that this raging beast must pass out some time. All the rest is how I would play out a combat against a sleeping foe. Actually, that's not true, Normally we would just rule, outside of dragons, that the attack was insta-death. I gave the minotaur a chance.

Remember that: soloplay is about exploring your own fun and finding what sparks joy for you both as the GM-stand-in as well as the player. Knocking out a room full of beastmen with an indiscriminate Sleep spell and killing the main boss who was taking a deep nap are both things I would allow for other players if they gave it a shot and it made sense. I have a feeling that other solo players might have felt it was required to make the fight harder than that. It is not required.

After killing the minotaur, Grusk takes Bloodlust and starts using it. Grusk does notice the crushed skulls on the bull statue and wants to give it a try but the rest of the team deeply outvote him and stop him. They find some treasure and then try out doors. After finding doors back to places they have already been, they set out to the northeast.

They leave the beastman lair as is, more or less. With some doors spiked and the last shut and hidden. That will be their new camping spot as long as they remain in the citadel.

The Darkmantles and Their First Bull Statue

After navigating a few bits of tunnels, they stumble upon 4 chittering darkmantles. Rance sees no need to fight these animals who are just trying to protect their lair so sleeps the lot. The team goes past and ends up finding their first of the bull statue rooms.

Rance gets a deep inkling not to go into the room [Doug Note: DC check INT 15 to note the grooves in the floor and the statue + smashup against the opposing wall]. Tom decides to use his smaller goblin frame to inch against the wall and get close. He crawls up the stature [DC 12 Dex] and notices the Emerald attached to it might be a trigger [DC 18 INT...rolled NAT 20 for both of these]. As the statue operates, Tom clings to the back and starts trying to pry the emerald out. Grusk tries to leap out and help his friend but gets walloped. Tom shouts at the rest to stay back as the statue smashes into wall. Tom holds on and keeps trying to pry the emerald out, eventually getting it out and turning the statue off.

The End of Session 1

Which brings us to the end of session 1. The team are now outside the room with the colored pillars and next time will feature them trying to work that out. They have been battered and bruised multiple times but have managed to think ahead of the curve and keep taking elements out. They still have not found the Diadem of Del Marius (which is behind the sun door) but they do have something of a stronghold. Of course, let's see if the Ettercaps go any better than the beastmen. And let's see if Grusk ends up getting cursed with all this trying to push his luck.

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