Cap & Co., part 1

on the road to NewMarket

Trying Something New

For the past several months, I have been “researching” solo RPGs, games that you play by yourself. I followed

Castle Grief

through a solo experiment with the Arthurian game Pendragon.

Croaker

posts a lot to Notes.

Skeleton Code Machine

covers gaming more broadly, but spelunking their lists leads me all sorts of places. I also poked around a bit at Patrick Beuchner’s

The Soloist - an indie RPG newsletter

and

Wyrd Science

.¹ There were a couple of random YouTube tutorials in there as well.

During this Christmas break, in between writing syllabi and updating my CV, I will be trying out this new flavor of role-playing to see if I like it. Eventually, I will also be testing whether this approach might be useful in building out Pyrite’s current home base, the city-state of Chimeria, either by myself or potentially in collaboration as a shared-world exercise.

What I settled on for my first experiment was a PDF of the Mythic emulator (2nd edition). It asks me as the player to frame an expectation in the form of a Yes / No question.

The 2nd edition doesn’t look quite like this, but you get the general idea. I grabbed the image from Cezar Capacle Talks Game Design.

It has rules for confirming or denying that expectation with percentile dice rolls and for injecting random events into the flow of questions and answers. With a little practice, it’s a smooth as Mickey Rooney’s procedure for moral development.

What? It’s Christmas!

Just in case, I also grabbed a couple more PDFs:

• a setting called Scarlet Heroes, which some online person compared to the old Oriental Adventures, because it supposedly had good action tables, (and — you got me — because I was thinking ahead to Shuro’s eastern island homeland from Delicious in Dungeon).

• Castle Grief’s very brief mass-combat game KILLCHAIN, based on the original Chainmail miniatures combat system that started this whole avalanche of gaming nonsense.

I already had a PDF of Rick Barton’s enormous mega-dungeon The Halls of Arden Vul, and while I hadn’t read the whole thing for fear of spoilers, I was comfortable in that world. I also knew there were many parts of the world that our playtest group had never seen. I would never have to go to the damned dungeon if I didn’t want to.

I Am So Done with Dungeon Crawls

Since I already had three characters I definitely wasn’t done with, it was also convenient and cheap to continue using Necrotic Gnome’s Old School Essentials, which is the system they were made under. OSE also has a good online rules reference and multiple third-party character creators for generating quick NPCs. If I continue in this direction I might invest in Shadowdark, which now has a solo version. I think I like SD a whole lot better, given my limited experience with both systems in group settings, but spending another $30 for a PDF can wait.² I may not enjoy the process at all.

Dramatis Personae (fancy!)

You can also find these same write-ups at Johnny of Greensboro’s Old School D&D site on Obsidian Portal, though I am rebooting the characters in a different direction (from their original, un-boosted stats) for purposes of this experiment.

Cap Doffer, aka The Goblin Gourmet

1st level Goblin (2º skill Animal Trainer: Birds)

Strength 14, Dexterity 14, Constitution 7, Intelligence 10, Wisdom 5, Charisma 10³

Cap is a civilized Imperial Goblin, traveling the realm and working on his book, The Goblin Gourmet: an Adventurer’s Guide to the Edible Empire.

Cap’s family back in Narsileon owns the profitable Pigeon Post trademark. Their avian couriers fly all over the city and surrounding countryside. Cap has been tasked with expanding the network, but he has never really cared about the family business. He’s spent his whole life around birds, but his interests have always been more in racing them or eating them.

To the great embarrassment of that family, Cap is something of a throwback to his wild goblin ancestors. He speaks Wolf fluently, and loves their gruesome hunt stories. Whenever he is in a wilderness area, he makes a point of contacting the local pack and at least trying to establish friendly relations. He has fostered multiple wolf pups over the years, but always returns them to the wild.

As part of his wolf affinity, Cap hates and fears lycanthropes (that particular curse being invariably deadly to non-humans in OSE). He always tries to have some silver on him, and he insists his retainers do as well.

Laudanum, his secretary

1st level Drow (2º skill Butcher)⁴

Str 8, Dex 16, Con 7, Int 15, Wis 9, Chr 7⁵

The dark elf currently calling herself Laudanum hangs around doing errands and research for Cap Doffer. Highly intelligent, she can read and write and is also a talented artist, a perfect partner for his book, skill-wise.

Alas, this girl got problems.

One, there are no dark elves in this world (at least that anyone knows about), so most people assume she’s some kind of demon or djinn. Sometimes she even gets ghoul, which is extra-insulting. It’s not her fault her eyes shine a spooky green with reflected light like an animal’s.

Two, she’s kind of addicted to whatever narcotic poison / drug is going around town right now. This partially accounts for her low CON and single (1!) hit point.

• Cosmos has been helping her with this.

L is a very reluctant combatant, but she’s pretty good with a bow and a competent tactician, when she’s not high. L is also an excellent researcher, highly creative if somewhat antisocial. Again, when she’s not high.

Cosmos the Barbarian, their guide

1st level Thorcin Barbarian and psychonaut (2º skill Thatcher)

S 8, D 14, C 13, I 14, W 8, Ch 8⁶

Colmund Thatcher is a Thorcin who has wandered the back roads of the north for several years, meeting the local tribes (human and otherwise) and learning their psychedelic rituals. He knows a lot about medicinal plants, including mushrooms, and basically anything else people use to get high. He speaks to spirits and gods regularly, whether he can see them or not. Sometimes he says he is a god. Sometimes he says that we are all gods.

These behaviors have made him unpopular among the more hierarchical churches, who want to keep their mysteries secret, only for their paying members. These people mock him with the name Cosmos (“an ordered, harmonious whole”). Sometimes they do more than mock him, and he is forced to defend himself. Though not a violent person by nature, he had the normal rough-and-tumble Thorcin upbringing, with a pile of siblings, cousins, and clan-mates, and he is more than capable of cracking a few heads when necessary.

The Setup

We open on the road from Cap’s home in the local capital of Narsileon (off the map) to the much smaller town of Newmarket.

From the map file for The Halls of Arden Vul, drawn by Andreas Claren. I added the blue for the watercourses myself with a highlighter to distinguish them more from the roads in dark gray. This is the players’ map, which leaves off less obvious locations like the bandits’ camp. Photo by Jennifer Reall.

This early I did not bother to detail the merchant caravan that Cap & Co. are traveling with, not even to the level of automating its regular route as suggested by fellow SubStacker

GnomeSatan

, because I hadn’t read that article yet. I can already tell this is going to be a continual learning process.

Because I happen to be home sick with some kind of a cold this weekend, I’m also not in this first installment going to go beyond transcribing my notes — no dialogue or descriptions beyond the rolls and any gamey interpretations I made of those rolls.

Leaving Narsileon — can we hook up with a caravan?

• Very Likely, especially if we wait. 31 Yes

• roll d8; weather cloudy but no rain

  • L likes that: as a dark elf (Drow) she’s at a -1 penalty to most actions in direct sunlight

• 90 miles to go → 5 days for Cap walking (as a Goblin, he has the shortest legs)

• no wandering monsters

  • in OSE, during wilderness travel (not exploration but traveling through) a monster appears if you roll a 1 on a d6, which means I missed the 1 five times in a row (lucky, for 1st level characters!)

Do the bandits accost us?

• Unlikely. 35 Yes

• we are not surprised

  • in OSE, surprise in a wilderness setting only happens if you roll a 1 on a d6

Before or after the road to Castle Burdock?

• 50/50. 80 No, interpreted as after

• roll d4; this happens on day 4, nearing NewMarket but not there yet

These banditi were actually rebels against the Archontean occupation. From Rick Barton’s description:

Bandit Camp: The Thorcin Recovery League has established a permanent encampment here, at the southern edge of the New Forest. The TRL bandits mostly attack imperial trading missions and have begun picking off the patrols of Lord Burdock’s men.

Cosmos happens to be a Thorcin, so he was the most logical person to talk to them.

Does Cosmos make his Reaction Roll / Charisma check?

• Not a Mythic Fate Roll but jumping into OSE → 7, uncertain, confused

• which makes sense because Cosmos is weird

• no attack, then, but are they following? I did not check this and just assumed that they would.

Can Cap find some wolves?

• Unlikely, on the road. 43 No

Can Cap fake some wolf howls?

• Unlikely. 32 Yes

Do the howls forestall the bandits?

• Likely 41 Yes

Can Cap & Co find their camp?

• In the rain, Unlikely. 70 No

Do they get lost?

• Likely. 75 No

Do they make it to NewMarket by dark the next day?

• 50/50. 37 Yes

This was interesting in terms of learning the process but narratively a little slow. I decided to stop there and switch my focus to the bandits themselves, just to see what would happen.

Are the bandits attacked in the night? Yes

• switching to OSE → by Gnolls! Used the swamp table because of the rain

• random system note: where OSE makes some argument about the word gnoll being a linguistic hybrid of gnome and troll, therefore the creatures are too, I went with the in-world assumption that gnolls are hyena-headed humanoids whose females are physically larger and socially dominant.⁷

16 bandits AC 6 averaging 4 hit points + 1 leader 3rd level 12 hp

11 gnolls AC 5 averaging 9 hit points + 1 leader 16 hp

• bandits not surprised and get initiative, but it’s dark

At this point I switched again to

Castle Grief

‘s mass combat system KILLCHAIN, as I did not want to be rolling the same d20 twenty-seven times each round. Because the gnolls had twice as many hit points and better armor, I treated them as cavalry units who would require 2 hits to kill and made 6s into 2-hit criticals. If the gnolls got a 6, that means one of the humans was captured to sell as a slave without killing him. This allowed me to do 12 rounds of combat (left to right) with 24 rolls instead of 27 x12 (to hit) x2 (damage) = 648 rolls. The record below doesn’t show those individual d6 rolls directly but only the final results of hits taken per side.

bandits 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 → 5 bandits killed, 1 taken

gnolls 0 1 0 0 2 0 2 2 0 0 1 0 → 3 gnolls killed, 2 injured

Was the bandit leader the one taken?

• 50/50 16 Yes

Does he escape / get rescued?

• 50/50 60 No

Why does it matter what happened to them, off-screen, when I was supposed to be following the heroes? Because I saw a slide show by one of the scholars of this sub-sub-subculture, who wanted us to explore storytelling that was not so obsessively focused on the idea of those special characters, the “hinges of history,” who matter more than other characters for no reason other than that they are the named protagonists. In a way I was following up on that Narcissus in Dungeon joke from last week.

Survival Quest is a fantasy about having a hyper-immersive MMO, with a multi-billion dollar budget, played by millions of people all around the globe, being all about me.

Which is absolutely the vibe of game animes like Sword Art Online or Bofuri. Usually the protagonist is the one person out of the millions playing the game who is most consistently an out-of-the-box thinker, the one person who comes up with simple ways to circumvent the rules of the game that the genius programmers never considered.

As a game and as a potential writing tool, that first experience felt promising, much more fun than the Choose Your Own Adventure board game House of Danger I tried the week before. I took about two pages of direct dice-rolling notes in less than an hour. The whole first adventure, played over the course of 5 or 6 days (2-3 hours per day) took up almost 30 pages, hand-written at roughly that same level of detail. There were some unexpected twists and turns, and some drama that I will definitely want to expand upon literarily (assuming that’s a word).

Thanks for reading, and seeya next week!

1. All of this in a failed attempt to reconstruct the pathway to an online slide show where the author was exhorting us to get off the Hero’s Journey already, to start writing to broader horizons, and to use games to do it.

2. And paying $60 to put a print copy on back order until February is just not happening, at least not this Christmas.

3. One of my peeves about OSE is they put the stats out of order.

Come on, y’all — three physical, three mental!

4. which reminds me a little too much of Felicia Day’s assassin character Tallis from a not-great web series set in the Dragon Age game-iverse, which I have seen on Tubi, but hey, that’s what I rolled.

5. Data compression!

6. Even more data compression! I am so lazy. But seriously, if this is confusing let me know and I’ll spell everything out.

7. For further background, see Roman Holiday’s journal entries from Rick’s home campaign, set in the same world and in roughly the same time frame.

https://arden-vul-1.obsidianportal.com/adventure-log/the-bonecrushers

https://arden-vul-1.obsidianportal.com/adventure-log/an-impressive-roar