Solo-Ish, An Experiment - Overview

I would lose my mind if I had to type in 65193 every single roll

This post and others like it was made possible by members of my Patreon, where you can see WIPs and Previews of future blogposts a week early! Thank you in particular to Suzy for your continued support!

Howdy, Farmhands

    I will occasionally Poast my regrets on social media. Nothing too deep or heavy, just whatever occurs to me as something I ought to change in the near future. Putting the thought out into public for others to read acts as a motivator to take action, lest my audience think me a waffle (derogatory). One such regret I've poasted about time and again is my lack of experience with Solo Games.

    Solo Games are Games you Play Solo. (lol) Usually, they're designed from the ground up to be a Solo experience, while more frequently in recent years, additional rules for Solo play to multiplayer or gm'd games have become the norm. Lots of people want to play the games they buy, but organizing a dedicated table of players is difficult. Playing by yourself, in whatever free time you have, is a very tempting prospect. But it's a space I've largely not engaged with. Until right now.

    I run two separate campaigns at the moment, each taking up my Tuesday evening slot on alternating weeks. This usually takes up most of my available free time set aside for gaming; if I'm not prepping, running, or facilitating downtime for one, I'm doing so for the other. This fell apart the moment a schedule changed. One player had vacation, another had a work event, then Halloween hit and there were parties to go to and Thanksgiving to prepare for, and here I am two months later having run... Nothing. The stars have aligned. 

    For this project, I quickly decided I wanted two things- first, I was going to host the game on a Discord Server I maintain. Not my brand server, but one of the Group Chats for buddies who've put up with my bullshit long enough to be willing to engage with me while I go on this journey. Secondly, I was not going to enforce the game remaining purely Solo, in the event anyone saw what I was doing and wanted to join in. This meant whatever system or tables I employed needed to be accessible and legible to Other People as well.

    For the basic resolution system, I chose to primarily handle things as if I were playing an Into the Odd hack, using Cairn as a base. HP, STR, DEX, WIS, d20, roll under. I looked for a couple of GM oracles, but settled on using a simple "Yes/No" table I found on chartopia, with the understanding that a good chunk of play would be asking clarifying questions of it instead of expecting it to act as a spark table for me to interpret. Luckily, Chartopia has it's own Discord Bot which can trigger and roll on any table on the site remotely.It even lets you give tables an alias so you don't have to memorize the numerical code for each table you want to roll!

    With the bot and tables handled, I needed to choose which tables I would be using. Lucky for me, a number of existing games, Solo or otherwise, currently are accessible via Chartopia. Scouring the website, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't about to play a standard medieval fantasy. I was envisioning a Stardew Valley sort of vibe, with chill, character and resource based adventuring on the overworld, with danger and mystery found inside adventure sites littered about. Lucky for me, there's already a Solo Game about playing in a Harvest Moon slash Animal Crossing setting, and all of it's tables are available on Chartopia.

    There was just one final thing I wanted, and I wanted it quite badly. A simple Yes or No oracle wouldn't suffice for NPC dialogue, so to google I went. What I've tentatively settled on is this; Let's Talk, by Dr. Gerald Ravenpie. It's a fairly robust system, with a couple moving parts that might be hard to grok by others who join, but since everything else is very simply Yes/No questions and basic Stat checks, a little chunk might be what this project needs. The immediate change I chose to make, was to take the "sometimes" emotions and permanently add them to my deck, as well as label the emotions 1 through 13 so I could "draw" them from a standard playing card deck. I'll report back if further changes need to be made.

Here then, are the RULES for Farmer Gadda's Solo-ish Play By Post!

How to be your own GM

• Ask clarifying questions: The Y/N bot can be questioned multiple times about the same thing, it won't get annoyed with you. If you want more details about something, feel free to keep asking yes or no questions; just don't try to make the bot un-answer something you don't like. 
• Be neutral when writing reactions: Its easy to say "well, I dont need to hit my character THAT hard" and never really face adversity. Let consequences happen, and respect the Y/N bot; it will create problems you then can have fun trying to solve! 

CONVERSELY 

• Be a fan of your own work: The best DM's are the ones that put things they know the player will enjoy in front of them. When generating or interpreting positive answers, indulge and let your silly ideas happen.
•  Only Roll when there's Risk: You can spend paragraphs JUST writing what happens without using the Dice at all; it's just you here and nobody can judge you. What you do or do not engage with in your fiction has no requirements to follow, follow your heart and inspiration

Dice Math

• Roll 1d20, Under your Stat to succeed
  
  
• If your HP hits Zero, take any further damage from your STR, and roll a save with the new value. Fail, and you fall unconscious.
  
  
• 1d4: Fists, Generic Damage from Environments, 1d6: Weapons, Actually Aggressive individuals, etc etc
  
  
• You are free to ignore or add as many or as little rulings as you see fit, so long as you're having fun

    And that's pretty much it! Armed with as much prep as I was willing to make, I set out into the wild unknown as Gadda, the Human Farmer. What will come of this experiment is a series of play reports regaling the adventures I get up to and those of anyone who decides to join me.

    Until next Time,

        Farmer Gadda

Ol' Gadda's Pirate Game

 

y'know what, sure, why the fuck not?

Howdy, Farmhands.

    As of the time of writing, it is the release day for Dicegoblin's "Block, Dodge, Parry" (and thus, "Cairn") supplement, "Sail, Swab, Scurvy." The document is available on itch for half off during release weekend, and is apparently only 5 dollars full price once the promotion is over. BDP is one of many Cairn hacks that I return to for inspiration while collating my own personal preferred ruleset, and while I don't yet own it in physical, it's near the top of my To Buy list for a good reason.

    But I'm not actually here to talk about BDP or it's new supplement. Because as it turns out, I've been running my OWN odd-like pirate game for the past 6 months, using it as a testing ground for whatever nonsense I decide to try and put into the Sanic Hack. The first iteration was made of me doing copious amounts of googling to see what other people who wanted to sail the seven seas in an OSR-y fashion had done before me; cobbling together their concepts and roll tables until I had something CLOSE to the vibe I expected. Every change since then has been seasoning to the taste of my actual players. So color me surprised when, at the very end of SSS, there's a short list of credits and references Dicegoblin used while writing the thing.

    - Enthusiastic Skeleton Boys by Sam C.
    - Lilliputian: Adventure on the Open Seas by Manadawn Tabletop Games
    - This series of blogposts on Wavecrawls and Pirates by Skerples

    This is list is, I shit you not, the exact same 3 sources I used to cobble together the first few iterations of my ruleset. Not for a lack of Other, equally impressive sources, mind you. They were simply some of the most immediately obvious results to read from, and so I did.

     I found this happenstance very funny, but it also made me wonder. If two completely separate people could approach a similar project, around the same time, using the same core texts as inspiration, and come out with two different systems, then there's got to be other people who will inevitably try as well. So here's the point of today's post. I could let what I've got fester in the word document I keep it in, polishing it off and on over the next 10 years until it's PERFECT and ready for public consumption. I could dripfeed individal rulings and concepts out as some sort of retroactive design documentary, for you to piece together. Or. I could slap what I've got down here, in the hopes that it becomes useful to the next person wanting to craft their own bespoke Pirate OSR NSR POSR D&DIY Elfgame Mark of the Odd Odd-like Wavecrawl Sailing TTRPG experience. At the very least, I've linked like, 6 different games they might not have found in their search yet. To those future people I say welcome. 

    Quick disclaimer: This is only the player facing rules my table needs to reference; character creation item data, and monster statblocks use standard Cairn notation. We also play in a Shounen Furry Waterworld with Sanics and rubber people and stuff. I hope this helps you, despite this, lmao.

Brace yourself for whatever This is
- Sonic Prime, available on Netflix

Until next time,

    Farmer Gadda

Sherbet Forest Clearing

(An Adventure Site for your Fantasy Elfgame of Choice)

"Forestmen’s Hideout 6054", TLG 1988

This Adventure Site was written as a thank you for a generous monetary donation that arrived during a moment of need!  Thank you so much for your support, Anonymous Farmhand!

    Deep within the dark woods of Sherbet Forest lives the jolly gang of misfits known as The Forestmen. Beloved by the peasantry and begrudgingly tolerated by royalty, these free spirits spend their days carousing in search of food and song. But one should never forget that the Forestmen's autonomy was hard won through their talents with sword and bow. They are a genial folk, but only as long as your respect their freedom.

 Slip-Wreck Rock 

(An Island Adventure Site for your elfgame of choice.)

"Island of Dragons Bones" by Zhang Li

     A simple jut of stone and sand, upon which the fossilized bones of some great beast lay. The water surrounding it feels oily and smells revolting. A small pit-stop of a village has been built here, with little to offer but cheap grog and the barest of supplies.

This Adventure Site was written as a thank you for a generous monetary donation that arrived during a moment of need!
Thank you so much for your support, Nebulabash!

Camping! A Save System and Repopulation Procedure for Heroes of Cerulea

"Pokemon Base Camp" - Pokemon Legends Arceus, Game Freak

Howdy, Farmhands!

    Heroes of Cerulea by Blackfisk Publishing comes with 3 separate campaign styles printed in it's rules. The first, Dungeon Campaign, allows Players to skip all overworld travel, teleporting them from entrance to entrance of the main campaign's 3 Dungeons in whatever order they like. In the second style, Overland Campaign, the map is placed before the players with the Dungeon's locations clearly marked, with overland travel being used to fill in the space between them. The final, and most expansive style, Screen Crawl Campaign, is the focus of today's post.

    My current game is run in Screen Crawl style. The map is entirely whited out, with the contents of a square only being made known to my players as they choose to enter it. NPCs will mention the names and general direction of landmarks, but until the players choose to head in that direction, they know nothing about it. Sure, both of my players have access to the PDF with the full map included, but ostensibly, they're traveling blind. Rules as written states that "completed" squares can be ignored for fast travel purposes once the obstacle within it is solved, be it a puzzle or a fight with Monsters. I've decided this is too easy, and have seasoned the game to taste with the following homebrew.