The Doug Alone

  One of My Other  Campaigns The Bleak and the Pearl is one my other two main campaigns I am running solo. It is uses the SoloDark rules addon to ShadowDark . The slight tweak/experiment to this campaign is to divide into delve sessions like this one that use SoloDark  to handle the general oracle and settings and then civilization sessions that will use Mythic GME 2. This gives an interesting variety of play. All the big threads and characters and such are handled in town, while the delves are simpler.  I started the campaign before I started the blog and originally the idea was that this blog would cover it but I never got around to doing the "full" recap (being only a single delve session and a single civilization session). Rather than type up multiple pages of stuff I played a few weeks ago, I will instead just bring up the main beats as they go, but let's start with these three quick pieces: The Bleak and the Pearl 300 years ago, the Barthic Federation was a gra...

  Reminder: You can read the synopsis of this series under The Bloody Hands label. This is a Tricube Tales Solo game of The Guardians of the Shadow Frontier (with some additional backstory by me) and the guinea pig test of an oracle I am working on that involves shifting yes or no answers. Links to the products used and first draft of that article is here: The Bloody Hands Part 0 .  Warning: this one is longer than the earlier ones because it was 2+ sessions. I have even trimmed it down but still this is around 3 hours of playtime in a game format that goes quite quickly.  Prenty's Quest The first episode dealt with Arden. The second with Jalmar. It seemed pretty natural to me to have the third focus on Prenty and the broader case of the missing people (his family included). My intention  was to have this be another establisher episode. It ended up changing the campaign around. It also made me have to rethink some ways I was going to handle things like the persona...

Doug's Notes: Eventually I am going to run out of rihaij's soap bubble photos and might have to actually make art for this campaign. Heh.  Reminder: Set Up and Recap If you found this post and are curious about the context, there is a discussion about this solo campaign's set-up and  first episode . To sum up: it is a solo rpg campaign played in shorter burst episodes using Tricubes Solo for the general engine, The Guardians of the Shadow Frontier as the scenario, and a homebrew oracle of my own design based broadly on the I Ching coin flip method.  Considering Jalmar Dax I mentioned in the previous post that I wanted to have an episode dedicated to Jalmar Dax since he had the roughest time of it. While thinking out what that might mean, I realized that if I stuck true to the 90s genre TV that inspired this campaign, the nature-tuned, woods-living, beast-master character would 100% be Native American . Maybe not played by a Native American actor. Maybe not actually base...

To see the set-up of this campaign: " The Blood Hands part 0: Campaign Background and Thoughts ." I also include some Players Notes and a Vibe Check down below to discuss how some of these details were generated, my thoughts, and so forth. If I can figure out a logical way to attach it, I'll include my raw notes to give a sense of that.  Scene: Night-time Arrival YARLKIN is a medium-sized mining town a few miles east of Hub. It is known as a generally hardworking, friendly place, and one looking forward to the Merger about to happen: Yarlkin's resonant Bubble is about to merge with those of Hub. Folks are excited and pre-celebrating, but a few odd activities have started to mar the festivities. What's more, the sign of the Bloody Hand has shown up on the Mill that processes the ore.  Our team arrives at night to investigate the mill without being spotted and hear a scream. Prenty recognizes it and shouts "I know that voice!." Jalmar dashes forward and fi...

The idea cooking in my head was simple: could I start a solo game that I could play fairly simply on my phone in small bursts (a few actions at a time) or slightly longer if I had time? Chewing over the idea of what that might look like, some ideas settled into mind: A game that can be played using simple mobile tools such as a dice roller and draw-a-card app. Journaling and note-keeping kept simply enough that  Google Keep  (or a similar notes app) would suffice. A game where I might be able to make a few moves before bed, waiting at the doctor's office, or on a lunch break without a lot of build up or take down. There is a bit of irony that this idea initially grew out of the concept of playing a solo game entirely inside the Mythic GM Emulator App  but as I chewed on the idea more I thought it might be fun to use Tricube Tales and I settled on Tricube Solo for the general engine (but not exactly the oracle, as I will discuss). This meant the Mythic app that started it...