Solo Blueholme: Second Delve, Part 3/3

This concludes the write-up of a solo-game exploring the Stygian Library, using BLUEHOLME as operating system.  The previous post can be read here.

Aged philologist and wannabe wizard POLSTRUM had organised a second delve into the STYGIAN LIBRARY after previously failing to retrieve MAZIRIAN’S GRIMOIRE. In addition to his faithful servant, MAREK, he has enlisted the aid of the following adventurers:

• Larkin (Eliza Larkinkis), fighter 1
• Sirka, changeling fighter-mage 1/1
• Bastien, fighter 1 (a hired retainer)
• Emmeline, fighter 1 (follower of Larkin)
• Schmidt, Cleric 1 (a hired retainer)

Additionally, thief-for-hire Kurdt fled following his death and subsequent resurrection. After a series of bruising encounters the party may have finally reached their goal...

Illustration by Alec Sorenson

Solo Blueholme: Second Delve (Part 2 of 3)

This continues the previous post:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/12/solo-blueholme-second-delve-part-1-of.html

Illustration by Alec Sorenson

The Road to Perdition Could Also Be a Handy Shortcut

It has taken me a very long time to internalise the concept of dungeon as "mythical underworld" but now it's so internalised there's not much space left for alternative ways of understanding subterranean adventure spaces.. except as spaces that sit alongside the mythical underworld, one way or another...

Interior made with sketchup

A dungeon is a dimensional rift. Or rather, a Dungeon is an incursion of Chaos into the Wilderness of the Known World. It can be a castle, a cave or even... a dungeon.

The deeper you go, the weirder it gets. This weirdness connects rifts to one another.

All dungeons are connected.

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?

Solo Blueholme: Between Sessions

Initially I planned to write-up the second delve in my solo game of Stygian Library using Blueholme as my OS(R) of choice but realised I hadn't actually finished it, and recording experience and downtime activities was taking longer than planned. The previous delve can be read here:

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

Some Stygian Librarians by Alec Sorenson

All of this took place in June/July of last year (2024) and has been sat in my drafts for a while: I can't stand clutter! Let the posts be SEEN!

Solo Blueholme: First Delve into the Stygian Library

Continuing on from my previous posts about the Stygian library & Blueholme, this is an Actual Play report of my first solo session in the library June 2024! Related posts can be found here:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2024/06/blueholme-stygian-library-solo.html

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2024/07/solo-blueholme-session-0-chargen-etc.html

...both of which detail the minor changes I made to Blueholme (a retroclone of the first D&D introductory basic set) before starting the campaign.

This particular post was inspired by Technoskald's series of reports upon multiple delves into the library:
https://solo.technoskald.me/tagged/stygian-library

Emmy Allen's Stygian Library, cover image by Alec Sorenson 

You can purchase a PDF of Emmy Allen's Stygian Library from DTRPG at this affiliate link or a beautifully produced hardcover print edition from Soulmuppet Be aware that there will be a new edition of the book released relatively soon, to coincide with the re-mastering of Gardens of Ynn. The new edition appears to be an update to the cover only, but if you're planning on buying the Ynn remaster it might be worth holding out for the new print edition of Stygian as they appear to form a rather elegant pair...  the new print edition has been out for a year or so now, the previous remaster (with the Alec Sorenson cover) having been superseded. Otherwise the two book are identical.

In defence of false rumours [#deadbird]

I'm not a huge fan of RPG Design discourse. I know what I enjoy in tabletop games and my openness to embracing new ideas extends to adventures and rulesets rather than abstracted diatribes and forge-era "theory". I love hearing about the obscure media and radical thought that inspires the brilliant worlds practitioners of this weird hobby continue to create, but for the life of me I can't recall an occasion where anyone's Appendix N included a patronising twitter thread.

So let's keep this brief.

False rumours can be bad. Exhibit A:

RUMOUR: 

The Bewilderbeast can only be harmed by ROOT VEGETABLES

CONSEQUENCE:

Player 1: My fighter attacks the Bewilderbeast with a carrot.

GM: Roll to hit. 

Player 1: 15... hits AC3! Am I good?

GM (makes performatively furtive eye movements, giggles etc.) uhhh... yeah. I mean.. you HIT the beast... with a CARROT! The Bewilderbeast remains unharmed!

TPK ensues. Sad!

But they can also be FUN (if not GOOD):

RUMOUR:

The colonialists plundered the Old Kingdom's mines, loaded their wagons and headed to the hills. They were set upon by Winged Terrors near CREEPERS CREEK and the wagons of gold were never recovered.   

CONSEQUENCE

The party head to Creeper's Creek to recover the lost gold... but the legend is false, the gold was recovered long ago. Nonetheless there's a weird druid guy, a cool place to build a fort and a cave network that they can go and check out now that they're here. 

Why not just post a rumour that Creeper's Creek has a cool place to build a fort and a cave and a druid?

Because uniformed idiots are part of what makes a world seem real, and the promise of gold that isn't there will compel them to continue to explore in a way that vague notions about a weird druid will not. 

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.

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

THE WEEKLY R/OSR BLOGROLL

 This post was originally a note on substack.

THE WEEKLY OSR BLOGROLL

If you have a  podcasts, mailing list or blog related to old school (or old school adjacent) TTRPGs please post on the r/osr blogroll linked below, and have a look at other links shared as comments on that post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/15jgtd7/weekly_osr_vlogblogroll_round_up/

Pariah character classes for OSE or Basic Fantasy

Made by Igor Gadreaud 

If you prefer to explore the implied setting of PARIAH with a more faithful old-school system (as hinted at in my previous post, a design analysis of my own game, it's perhaps worth giving the players something they can sink their teeth into. I'm more than a little wary of doing this, but in the words (paraphrased) of Skerples of Coins and Scrolls:

Writing a... class is easy. It meets what I'd call the "minimum creativity threshold". To write a wizard you just need about 20 decent ideas. To write any other kind of class you need between 4 and 10. It's not difficult to make a class based on any random idea you've ever had. It's also a lot easier to think of elements of a class than it is to, say, a fill in a d100 table or write a dungeon.  

It is known.

PARIAH HEXGEN #15: TEMPERATE BROADLEAF FOREST

Part of an ongoing series last update with MANGROVE:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/11/pariah-hexgen-14-mangrove.html 

...we now come to TEMPERATE  BROADLEAF FOREST. I feel like I'm making genuine strides towards a comprehensive proto-neolithic psychedellic animist hexcrawl, more than two years after making this initial post.

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PARIAH HEXGEN #14: MANGROVE

I originally included this generator with a continuation post concerning GENIUS LOCI REACTIONS AS ENCOUNTERS but I like it too much to leave languishing as a footnote. I like the revisions to the generator enough to give them their own post. 

Besides which, I should continue on from the series which last covered TROPICAL FORESTS:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/09/pariah-hexgen-13-jungle-tropical-forest.html

...we now come to THE MANGROVE...

* * *

Spirit of the Wilderness: Second Look at Genius Driven Loci Encounters... and a new hex (mangrove)

Previously I've posted two posts about random encounter generation, both of which within the framework of PARIAH (but easily adaptable to your old school game of choice blah blah...). The first attempt was inspired by Goblin Punch's encounter stew, but modified to accommodate the skills system I'd built into PARIAH (this version was included in the zine). I wasn't entirely happy with it, especially when playing it online and started to think about how I could move things around and create something more coherent but also thematic. 

I googled "Nature spirit - scary" and got this

What then emerged was something based around the Genius Loci reacting to the PCs as they enter and interact with the place in question, usually (but by no means always) imagined to be the local 6 mile hex. A poor reaction leads to more lethal encounters, ba weather, and shitty foraging; the inverse is true of a a good reaction roll. You can read it all here:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/07/genius-loci-linking-encounters-hazards.html

That post has become one of the most popular on this site, no doubt due to it being featured in an edition of The Glatisant. Nonetheless what was presented was somewhat incomplete. 

This represents an attempt to grant that post a little more polish.

Ulysses

I used to think the DIY old-school scene needed to take more inspiration from James Joyce* than Ulysses 31. I have since revised that opinion.

Characters L-R: Yumi; the eponymous hero, Ulysses; Telemachus and finally the robot Nono

Ulysses 31 was a Japanese-French anime released in the early 80s, charting the voyage of the titular hero through space after being cursed by the Gods of Olympus. You don't need to have studied classics at a posh English school to recognise that this children's cartoon was a sci-fi retelling of Homer's Odyssey. The (literally) epic storytelling, stylish animation and (figuratively) epic soundtrack (U-le, U-le, UlySSEEEEES!/Flying through the ga-la-k-SEEEE!)would insure that the cartoon would have a lasting impact on young Gen Xers and older millennials around the world.

My question is this: would it make for a good campaign?

Generic Adventure Game: HIT PROTECTION & HIT DICE

Let's cut to the chase- this is another "0 HP" post, but I've been thinking about it while putting together this GENERIC ADVENTURE GAME  by working backwards from monster stat blocks.

You don't have to read any more if you don't want to. No one will think any less of you.

But if you do, let me know what you think.

CHERRY -FLAVOURED CHARGEN

Follow-up post to a concept  https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/08/cherry-coloured-funk.html: an Esoteric Enterprises campaign where a party of down-at-heel artists and performers, all tied to the same unscrupulous agent, carry out magical crimes in the esoteric underworld of H-Town. 

What follows is a simple character generator... grab one of each of the standard dice-set (D4, D6, D8, D10, D12) and roll....

Reverse Engineered Adventure Game

This is a post was originally made on 27th September and then removed. Revisions have been made since then. To lay my cards on the table: the objective is to create a gam without the standard attribute array..

When I first put PARIAH up on DTRPG I received a comment accusing me of advertising the product falsely and misusing the OSR label. I made sure a full preview was available and asked the commenter to take a look and see if they were willing to revise their opinion. To my surprise... they did! Not only did they take a look, they also revised their opinion!

By their definition, a game is OSR compatible if a character created can be run-through a B/X , 1e or BECMI adventure module with minimum effort. It's not a definition I agree with, but it did get me thinking: what kind of gaming system could you run through a B/X module with minimum effort?

PARIAH HEXGEN #13: JUNGLE/ TROPICAL FOREST

Continuing this series of hex posts by terrain type, following the previous posts about temperate plains...

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/09/pariah-hexgen-12-temperate-plains.html

...we now come to TROPICAL FORESTS...

* * *