Solo Blueholme session #0 (chargen etc.)

A number of weeks ago I posted regarding my intention to run Stygian Library solo. There's a link right here but for some reason they aren't showing up as such, so please scroll to the end to read the comprehensive list of pages linked in this post. I've since already run a party of adventurers through a delve in the Stygian library, and had some thoughts about what the survivors (spoiler alert! some of them survive!) do next. However, before writing that up I wanted to go into a little more detail about how I'm using BLUEHOLME as the "operating system" (OS, Really) for Stygian.

The 1977 Dungeons and Dragons "basic set" by Eric Holmes, aka. the Holmes Basic can be thought of as the "missing link" between OD&D and B/X (or perhaps even B/X and AD&D 1e), and it is not without its fans (particularly popular blog The Zenopus Archives). Blueholme is a retroclone of that ruleset by Michael Thomas, and seems to have emerged following conversations on the Dragonsfoot forum.

Gangs of Titan City (solo) session #4 (2nd cycle)

So... the inevitable has happened: I have postponed the City of Ghosts Friday Lunchtime Sandbox... indefinitely. It became too disheartening waiting each week only for it never to happen. I'm going to blame the format for this: thanks Luke Gearing!

Anyway, I DO hope to get the same sandbox (basically a PARIAH version of a dungeoncrawl) up and running again soon, maybe over longer sessions and at more sociable hours? Let's see... anyway, in the meantime I've made use of my long Friday lunch break by test-driving Soul Muppet's Gangs of Titan City, and so far have found it to be ideal for solo play. You can read all my reports  (as well as other posts related to the game) at this link, which may not be visible on your screen (so scroll to the end).  

Some of Ben Brown's very fun art found in GoTC

In case you don't know, Gangs of Titan City is a sort-of mash-up between Necromunda and Blades in the Dark, in that players control gang members ("gutters") in a grimdark hiveworld (the eponymous Titan City). It's narrative-focused, though probably more on the story game end of the spectrum rather than the rules-light end (though the mechanics are pretty light). It's closer to PBTA than 24XX. I play solo with a notebook, pencils and real dice and write up the sessions from those notes at a later date. So far I have not felt the need to use additional oracles or solo tools with the game book, but that could change.

Read on for more!

Developing Pariah's Dawn Realm (the influence of Scavengers Reign)

Last year I returned to the untied loose end of the Dawn Realm (crudely, Pariah's equivalent of the feywilde) with this slightly long, sketchy post. It's been fermenting since then with a great deal of reagents added following conversations on this blog and elsewhere, of which many were with Max Cantor of Weird and Wonderful Worlds. It took watching Scavengers Reign for me to take this pot of potent brew off the flames and let it cool, let the residue crystallise, and then snort a big hefty old line of the stuff.

This is not a post that includes a Scavengers Reign hexcrawl... but I've robbed a few of the details, because the big breakthrough that show provided was to really show how the world interacts with not just the explorers, but the elements within it.

If you wanna someone with real OSR chops talk about this show, please go and bother Patrick Stuart's substack, linked here. This post is extraordinarily long and I don't finish it properly: there's at least one further post before I get all the ideas down, and then 

Blueholme & The Stygian Library, solo preparation

I've recently been playing Gangs of Titan City as a solo game, but you may have noticed various other RPG luminaries engaged in this dark practice. Indeed, it was friend-of the blog JFUR who first inspired my return to the labyrinth alone with her Into the Odd solo campaign. While ludic onanism has long been a staple of the frustrated forever GM, seeing Skullboy aka Better Legends transform his own game into an entire comic book, Delvers felt like something of a shift in the sands. Why, even friend-of-my-idealised-higher-self Semiurge has been at it—as this write-up of Grant Howitt's Big Gay Orcs (CW: butts touching one another) can testify.

Where's this suspiciously professional introduction headed? Into the Stygian Library, that's where: because when I'm not already writing about playing RPGs by myself or reading RPG books (all by myself) I like to play RPGs about books. By myself. And then write about it.

A crop of just about the first illustration in the book, by Alec Sorenson