Solo Blueholme: Second Delve (part 1 of...)

Illustration by Alec Sorenson

This continues the revived solo series previously explored in this post:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/11/solo-blueholme-first-delve-into-stygian.html

...with downtime activities detailed here:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/11/solo-blueholme-between-sessions.html

The game was originally begun in the summer of 2024 and has recently been revived. 

THE SECOND DELVE

In the Wake of a Fallen Goddess: Mark of the Odd Superhero RPG

I began this post last year, with a fairly clear idea in mind of how a Mark-of-the-Odd superhero campaign might work. Coming back to it after... 17 months? ...my ideas are less clear.

Some of the issues are discussed the end—genuinely interested in how anyone reading this thinks you can run a superheroes campaign with an OSR mentality... or a "thinking adventures" mentality.

Anyways, I'll continue with the original post, interrupting myself towards the end.

At some point in the mid 2010s a renegade group of Salafists accidentally released an ancient evil, setting off a cascade of increasingly cataclysmic events across the globe. Kaiju-like demons rose from the depths of the ocean, crawled from the dark corners of the earth and descended from the stars: an era of chaos began, and the timeline of this Other Earth diverged inextricably from our own.

Yet in humanity's darkest hour there shone a beacon of hope: a real-life super hero, The Goddess, stared down the daemons... and the daemons flinched. Her antiquated arms—the sword and shield of a classical warrior—struck trues while the modern marvels of the military machinery could not. With the forces of darkness on the back foot, new heroes joined her: humanity fought back!

I am fully aware that this is a picture of Wonder Woman 

But this triumph would be short-lived. In her humility, the Goddess entrusted herself to the powers-that-be; in their hubris, they sought to coerce, cajole and control the Goddess into following their short-sighted strategies. Alongside her ablest warriors, she was buried beneath millions of tonnes of lava released from an Icelandic volcano by the daemon Leviathan. 

What now for humanity? As the daemon hordes muster once again, will new heroes rise to once again face down the forces of evil?

OD&D/ Delving Deeper Weapon Variations

In a recent reddit post members of r/OSR were asked (probably for the one millionth time since that subreddit's inception) to recommend their favourite OSR "system". I used the invitation to reply as an opportunity to show my appreciation for Delving Deeper, the OD&D clone I favour. 

I've played in one play-by-post campaign and one discord-voice chat game using Delving Deeper as a base. Delving Deeper is also my current OS(R) of choice for the play-by-post game of Ruins of Castle Gygar (affiliate link) I'm running. It's proximity to the original LBBs gives it a particular flavour—a flavour I've come to savour... and part of that is the fact it uses D20s and D6s only.

The original Reddit poster picked up on this, pointing out that this means all weapons do 1d6 damage, and therefore have nothing to differentiate them: what's the point in spending more money on a more expensive weapon just for some flavour? 

Below are some reason why.

Alone in the Wilderness

Over the coming weeks I’ll be posting several write-ups of the various solo games I've been running (for myself) over the past few months. Whilst born of an absence of opportunity to engage in games with others, it's proven to be a far more rewarding experience than my previous efforts. Indeed: it's encouraged me to revive other games I'd previously abandoned as well as enabled me to test out some new ideas for Pariah, partly inspired by a solo game of Traveller (which I may link here at a later date).

What follows is a kind of mini-game which can be run as alternative to a session 0 and then later as an alternative to “downtime”. You start up by generating a band of outcasts, foraging resources from the wilderness, and seeing what happens along the way. 

It can also be played solo.

In fact, you can play along right now, I dare you.