Solo Playtest Report - The Fleeting First Foray of Romulus Malamute et al.
To test my OD&D house rules & Antarctic hexcrawl before inflicting them on my friends I decided to try playtesting them solo. I haven't done solo roleplaying before, but I was inspired by session recaps from Vdonnut and Castle Grief, so I decided to give it a shot. Where needed, I used a simple d6 oracle, where 1 is 'very bad', 2-3 are 'bad', 4-5 are 'good' and 6 is 'very good' relative to the PCs interests. Aside from that, I tried to rely on established procedures for reaction rolls, encounter distance, etc. This session didn't really go anywhere, but was surprisingly enjoyable. More to follow.
Start date: April 26
End date: May 1
In April 102,024, shortly after the dawning season's equinox, four adventurers assembled by the gates of the city Jouissance in Weirlund's Folly Prefecture. The expedition was initiated by the Medium Romulus Malamute, whose adjunct professorship with the Jouissance Philosopher's Guild had been terminated after the city was conquered by the Warlord Krang the Cacogen. Recognizing that the city's brief age of enlightenment was likely over, he decided to reinvent himself as a treasure-hunter & put out a call for companions to seek out Murdicog's Manse, an ancient (and allegedly treasure-filled) castle somewhere in the Psouthern mountains.
Answering the call were Indica Plinth, an unlettered Acolyte who had served with the shrine of St. Alanthe, Carbon Limberger, a handsome but awkward young Warrior from a renegade Armiger clan, and Milicent Blunstrable, a tall, garrulous Ruffian who had been known to loiter around the foreign quarter.
Without access to precise maps of the prefecture, they embarked more-or-less blindly into the Xeroian shrublands, relying only on a vague understanding that the manse lay somewhere to the Psouth.
On April 26, they followed the road out of Jouissance Knortheste around the Bay of Ambivalence to 261;270, crossing the River Flea. They took their luncheon at a crossroads where a dusty signpost thricely pointed: back toward Jouissance, in the Knorthweesterly direction of Squamous Demise, and Este towards the Erebus-Yao rail line. In the afternoon, they followed a smaller trail and proceeded Psoutheste to 261;271 where they found the characteristic cubes of a Seventh Gorth enterprise zone. Over an otherwise unadorned iron gate, an anodic sign flickered in the sun's carmine light: "STREAMLINED PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS". Noting that the miserly tendencies of the 7th Gorthine culture would make lodging costly, the impecunious foursome camped under some nearby olive trees.
On April 27th, they left STREAMLINED PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS & proceeded due Psouth to 262;271, continuing to skirt the the Ambivalent shores. It was here that they met with their first trial, for along the rocky strand was a nest of ten silver skrogs.1 The party and the skrogs spotted each other from a distance of 110 yards whilst the party was emerging from a thicket of bitter lemon trees. The skrogs were immediately enraged at this encroachment upon their territory and trundled threateningly toward the adventurers, uttering atonal whistles that presumably signified some flavor of invective. When the distance had decreased to 30 yards, Carbon took aim with his pistol and wounded one of the skrogs. He was able to take two more shots before the hirsute creatures made contact, and managed to fell one. After an initial melee clash in which Carbon was zapped and one more skrog was bludgeoned to death by Indica, the party decided to break and run, quickly outpacing their opponents.
Their flight took them Psoutheste to 263-272, where they found that the terrain throughout the entire canton was perfectly level and no vegetation grew taller than knee height, the flatness broken only by a large cylindrical column at the approximate center of the canton. Here, they crossed paths with a certain Xerxes Steerpike and his veiled, oddly pallid paramour Bethany Rhizome, who explained that they were traveling Knorth seeking a magic circle somewhere along the River Morgenstern. The two travelers seemed put off by Indica's evening prayer, but the hierodule was too focused to take any note thereof.
Regrettably, Romulus let curiosity get the better of him and started poking around the cylindrical column. At his touch, the column fell on its side, began emitting a horrific bellowing noise, and extended two harsh white floodlights from either end. Slowly at first, then faster, it began to roll toward the interlopers. After a panicked flight over the featureless landscape, the bodendrucker construct broke off pursuit at the canton's edge. The adventurers were exasperated to find they had been chased right back into skrog territory, but thankfully the skrogs were in a better mood and suffered the adventurers to skirt around their territory.
On April 28th, the party rested and recovered after having their sleep interrupted the night before.
On April 29th, the party realized they had committed a grievous folly by attempting to take this route, as the River Aleph did not seem to be fordable at any point along the length they had so far scouted & they did not have access to a boat. Realizing this, they decamped back to Jouissance to seek out a less perilous route to Murdicog's manse, arriving dejectedly back at the city's gates on May 1st.
Foes encountered: 10 silver skrogs (2 killed)
Experience awarded: 0 besants recovered for 0 xp, 2 HD of enemies slain for 100 xp, four new hexes visited for 200xp, split 4 ways for 75 xp awarded each
Reflections
On the Setting & Key
- In terms of usability, the map and key are pretty good! Looking up information was about as frictionless as I could reasonably expect.
- I'm going to add more roads & paths for players to follow; it's a lot of wilderness to just go plunging into.
- The map is currently not very accessible to low-level characters. This is arguably in the spirit of OD&D, but I think I want to have more small, easy dungeons/ruins scattered around to help newbies gain xp more easily.
On the House Rules
- I fixated on evaluating the hex key and forgot to implement some of my hexcrawling rules (mainly weather & navigation rolls). Before any further playtesting, solo or otherwise, I'm working on compiling a 'GM screen' reference of my current procedures for combat, dungeons, and wilderness travel.
- Character generation involves rolling random starting equipment. This was fun but I think I want the starting packages to be more generous with weapons & armor, or to grant more starting money per character.
- I need better rules for ranged combat if I want to focus on overland travel. I had to sort of fudge how many shots Carbon could fire before the skrogs closed in, and RAW I guess the party could have kited them indefinitely (speed 9 vs. speed 6).
- I'm liking my combat rules, but as-is they're pretty lethal. I'm kicking around the idea of bumping all HD up by 1, or using d8s for HD.
- I need a better way determine if/when/how a lair encounter is triggered -- can you skirt around a lair hex and avoid an encounter? Is it tied to the normal random encounter roll for the hex (say, encounter on 1-3 rather than 1)? What about hidden lairs? Delving Deeper didn't have much guidance here. With 10 mile hexes, I think there ought to be space to pass through a hex while avoiding the encounter, perhaps for an appropriate cost(?). Will put some thought to it.
On Solo Roleplaying
- I haven't the slightest idea if I'm 'doing it right' but I certainly had fun despite not really getting anywhere. All the procedural generation has paid off insofar as the setting feels impartial enough to make exploration satisfying. Even so, it helped to approach it as a whimsical dice-guided creative writing exercise rather than 'gaming'.
- It's a deeper level of engagement with the procedurally generated key than the 'fleshing out' I was working on previously -- I kind of like the idea of prepping future campaigns by running a few solo-play adventures to force me to take a 'PC's eye view' of the setting.
HD 1, AC6, speed 6", 'Hirsute, anodic, and visceral'↩