Fourth Wall Break: August 25, 2024 Edition

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This last week or so has been the "Welcome Back" week for the college campus where I work so my ability to spend time working on anything game related - solo or otherwise - was somewhere less than zero. It was a good and positive 10ish days, overall, and got to meet a lot of students at various library-related events and such but I am bone tired (unfortunately literally, ouchies). 

Hoping to resume in the next day or two and finish out some threads I have typed up here or there but also felt it might be good to take a moment to do a "fourth wall break" and just drop a few things here... for this first one we'll keep it simple: a new tea I'm enjoying a few RPG products I picked up to add into my solo games. 


A New Tea Blend I Am Adoring

Despite tending to like black and green teas more on the strong and plain side, I picked up Ahmad's Paradise Blend from a local market and have actually been really enjoying it. It has bergamot and orange blossom and it works really well as a decently caffeinated cup with a lot of floral notes. Not sure I'm into enough to make an absolute staple but way better than a lot of flavored teas I have tried. 

Most Recent Solo & RPGs I Have Snagged

I am putting some brakes on my picking up any- and everything approach to solo RPGs, oracles, and systems I could play solo but there are a few things I wanted to try. 


Not a solo system (or even a solo-first system) but I know TinyD6 is a system that a lot of folks consider to be a great go to for solo play in the same way I am pretty addicted to running Tricube Tales so after The Dungeon Dive namedropped Tiny Cthulhu as his favorite solo-able Lovecraftian RPG in the comments on a recent vid I figured I'd give it a try. I have it and read through it and I think I am just going to see how it plays. It adds a few definite mechanics while being fairly rules sparse. I kind of like its blend of elements while not being a clone of Call of Cthulhu but it might be a bit tricky for me to not default to Tricube-isms since the base dice rolls are so similar. 

In that same light, I also picked up The Gamemaster's Apprentice Deck: Weird Horror. I have tried a couple of GMADs in the past and never quite gelled with them like some other things but I would like to take something definitely flavored after the kind of horror I most prefer to play and see how it goes. 


My final recent purchase is Cezar Capacle's Triple-O. It is a "player" emulator though it says, right on the page, that it "is designed to emulate characters, not players," so take that however you want. It has a few working pieces. The primary concept is the "triple O": Obvious, Option, Odd. You essentially assign a most likely action, a less likely action, and then something unexpected and roll a d6. It gives a few rules/suggestions for how to apply this to individual actions and group actions. Then gives some simple but thorough spark table covering things like Actions, Dispositions, and Motivations. The idea being that you can use these to generate the three Os or to add twists to the three Os, etc. There is some duplication in some of the word pairs ("Destroy" and "Break") but at a glance I would say the slight semantic differences will give some different flavor to the outcomes. 

Note: Capacle's Random Realities remains my favorite solo oracle to use and it still shows up in pretty 100% of my games. 

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