The Doug Alone

Arden is having a morning. He went first thing to the Mayor's office and has been trying to work out a deal to retrieve the material to finish the resonance towers. It has been hard going. It will take a good number of boats to get the materials back or they would have to spend some time rebuilding the boat. Without an absolute guarantee of safety, both seem like bad ideas to the riverfolk. Anything that could take out a dozen of the Order's people is a threat.  To this, Arden agrees. "This is why we go right now, this morning, and we get it done in a hurry. That ship may or may not be left like that as a trap but from experience  I can say that giving the people who did it any more only makes things worse for all of us. Besides, if you let them start telling you can and cannot go along this river, they will only take more and more." Eventually a few agree and this brings in a couple of others. As word gets about that people are going to help the Order, more and more

Arden hears Natalia gasp and can imagine what is going through her mind. Even serving the Order on missions with Arden, she has largely gone from Veil to Veil, rarely lingering outside. Sometimes seeing the worst. She has discussed the Outside only as rubble and collapse though Arden knows this belief will fade in time. How could the diaspora of the Old Empire survive if everything was forever wiped out as fast as we could build it? How could the researchers at Hub have lived long enough during those Five Generations to make the towers? To start the Veil?  No, there are places in the Outside that have held on. Some have thrived. Basinghall is one of those places.  Franco steers the boat through the outer gate and inside they see the town proper, the aftermath of the passing storm evident as water drips from gutters and against stones. Lights on are. Houses have been rebuilt. A few shouts can be heard here or there from various buildings but they are happy shouts. At least not panicked.

The man speaks to himself. "Your name is Arden Ulet. I am Arden Ulet." He walks along the dark rock, a blood red river flowing at his right. Heading in a direction he considers "north" though no direction makes sense here. "I am Arden Ulet." He has been walking for hours. For days. For years. For centuries. Time is meaningless. Self is meaningless. The mountains and the rocks and the river is meaningless. This is a space between other spaces. He is no one. He cannot remember if he breathes. When did he last eat? When did he last sleep? Where did he start? Why did he start? "I am Arden Ulet." The river is either a few feet across or a few miles across. Often in between. On the other side walks someone else. Even staring at the stranger, the man cannot form a mental image of what he is seeing besides the sense of a person much like himself only pale enough to seem like a bright light in the dark, red hue this place bathes itself inside. Does the st

Solo play is a spectrum and in that spectrum you tend to have different pieces that make up your engine:  some kind of yes/no style oracle, a series of prompts, some random content generators, a level of situational framework, and/or a base game that the above pieces are placed upon. When learning to play, oracles in the broad yes/no sense are "easy". Is the door locked? Does she know what the secret is? Is the monster still following me? Yes. No. Yes, and... Maybe. Etc.  Asking the question is usually the hard part of the yes/no layer  but that is a different blog post from this one.  This one addresses a different sort of problem that creeps up from time to time. In your prompts and random tables of events/people/dungeons/colors/clouds/whatever a lot of those seem definite in a way that yes/no + and/but are not. By this I mean, if I ask "Does she say yes?" and get a "Yes" then she says yes, sure but if I roll a random event table and get, "A farmer

 [A Few Baseline Checks] Doug, here.  At the start of these "Monolith" sessions, there will be (currently) three basic checks to establish the flow of things and to add a little tension and uncertainty: Repairing the Flow: D20 + # of Rooms *Cleared* + Rance's INT bonus vs DC36 Secrecy of Project: Monolith Activity Level Die (currently d4) vs City Activity Level Die (always d20 unless something big happens). Barrier Check: Barrier Die (currently d10) vs Threat Die (currently d10). In the above, a failure/fumble does not mean the quest is loss while a critical success will not mean the quest is won, etc. An extreme result will be baked into the story. Likewise, a failure of the barrier check does not mean the barriers are just reset, just that they require extra work/activity/cost to keep up. Right now, Marius is covering that. Fact is, let's say that House Marius has 30 House Points. Each failure will do 1d6 damage to those house points. Each success will allow 1d6 Hou