Solo Review, Part 2: Continued Exploits on the Island of Nesila & testing out HexRoll even more [Old School Essentials] [SoloDark] [Recap ish]
Continued Exploits on the Island of Nesila
I figurd it would be fun to go around and use my realizations about how I would play with HexRoll learned from last time and keep the story going for at least a little bit longer. I have not fully explored the island, yet, but were already starting to see several coastlines. That being said, I had not yet set foot in a dungeon and that is the point of OSR style play, especially low level play. I am going to need to do some delving since no matter how well the town and wilderness hexes do or not work, in principle those are mostly flavor to explain why a dungeon is there.
First, the Conversion
Looking at the monster stat blocks, the stat blocks were derived from Old School Essentials so I sent my poor six heroes through the painful process of being converted. I did not use any kind of "official" SD → OSE converter sheet. I just went, "They have +2 to STR, they get +2 to STR." The exception was the Thief had +4 DEX and so he lost that like tears in the rain. Sad, really. Then, to guarantee they would live long enough to justify making a second round of the same characters, I gave them max HP for first level (and will roll here on out) but balanced that slightly by taking their existing kit as Shadowdark quickstart characters (lots of leather and starter gear) and bringing it right over. I did make a mistake in the conversation because I calculated up the XP earned from the rewards and the fights and the kobolds and proceeded to give each and every character the full amount instead of dividing it up and did not notice until I had already started doing things as Level 1-2s. Whoops.
I do not really care because this is less a campaign than a playtest and I also do not care because who cares? Level 1? Level 4? It's just a word to describe a type of story you can tell and optimally whatever level they are barely matters because the challenges and concepts they face get bigger as well. Also, there were a lot of little bonuses and capabilities that the SD characters had that would be lost already, so accidentally speed running level 2 kind of helped to cover that—like giving the clerics the ability to cast Cure Light Wounds, which was already used in a battle.
Realizing the Major Difference Shadowdark Versus Other OSRs
It was in this process that I became aware that while a Shadowdark might have a bit of a power creep, but not really, versus some other OSR style characters; the biggest difference is that the SD-character has way more fiction than the OSE-character. The B/X Dungeons & Dragons-derived Fighter, for instance, just hits a little bit better and takes maybe one more hit (an average of +1hp at level 1 and the possibility of having better armor if they rolled lucky on starting gold). By comparison, the Thief and the Magic User each have a chunk more fiction but are heavily punished for it. The SD-Thief gets advantage on doing thieving-type things and encouraged to go all out on searching for traps and unlocking doors in a way that does not bog down the flow of gameplay. The OSR-Thief gets the kind of percentage values to do the very core of the Thief class that would make a Call of Cthulhu character look competent.
Everyone in OSR knows fewer languages, has less they can do—on paper, in reality us Dungeon Masters have been allowing folks to do stuff like sing and jump dramatically out of windows for decades—, and there is so much concern about ephemeral one-for-one balance that every hint of actual story impact is locked behind DM-caveat or mid- to late-level improvements. Proper old-school OSR-derivatives are still a lot of fun but the fiction is more codified into interesting rolls and character concepts in Shadowdark.
A Couple of Minor Tweaks and One Major Tweak
To kind of balance OSE to fit the sort of characters I would like to play, I did make a couple of optional rules not meant to one-for-one things but just to level out some things and then made one fairly major change that was several minor-to-major changes.
- The 1st-level Thief starts out on the skill-line for 5th-level Thief and improves from there (e.g., a 3rd-level Thief would be using 7th-level values for skills). This still only puts the Thief into the 30% range for most things, give or take, but means there is a reason why someone with an average of 2.5hp and locked to unshielded, leather-armor-only combat might be considered worth the trouble (15% chance to actually find the party-wiping trap is not it). In principle, this could be locked to starting DEX (+1, +2, +4 bonus) but let's skip that right now.
- Magic Users do not get additional spell slots but they do start with Read Magic and Detect Magic being available as well as one other spell. They will still need to use those bonus spells as their spell-of-the-day at level 1 but it just gives them more ability to impact a few things unique to them. In principle, this could be locked to starting INT but eh.
- I also am using a modified version of 3D6 Down the Line's House Rules for Combat. 3D6DTL, like I, use the classes' base HP to determine the die used in combat and like me this improves over levels. How I improve it is a bit different and I have multiple combat phases (partially to playtest that here) and a few combat maneuvers to stop combat from eventually becoming forever hitting a 10HD monster with the same 1d6 per turn on repeat:
- Each character has an Attack Strength and Attack Power. Attack Strength starts out as the same dice as their hit dice. Fighters get d8. Clerics get d6. etc.
- Missile weapons do one die-step less unless used in short-range (where the wielder is a bit more vulnerable). This is the weirdest part so far and I might change it after a few more tests of combat.
- There are three main attack phases: Missile, Melee, Magic. They go in that order. There are two sub phases: quick-Missile and slow-Magic that would be a sort of 0th and 4th phase.
- Inside of each combat phase and sub-phase, you go in initiative order per side with individual initiative bonuses or penalties deciding the difference in cases of ties and such.
- Slow-weapons such as two-handed swords go one phase later (same with Magic in practicality) but increase the Attack Step by one die-step. d8 becomes d10. d6 becomes d8.
- Quick weapons (which do not really exist in game but I am kind of going with common sense: a loaded cross-blow, a rapier) do one die-step less but go one phase earlier. An exception to this is the crossbow which instead of losing a dice requires an extra round to load.
- Dice steps are d2 → d4 → d6 → d8 → d10 → d12. In the case that you go below the d2 somehow (a quick non-crossbow missile), it defaults to a single hp damage. In the case it goes above d12, you get start over with a second die that begins at d2 and increases.
- Attack Power is equivalent to the steps increasing THAC0 (every 3-levels for Fighter types, 4-levels for most others, 5-levels for mage types). Each step of Attack Power gives you an additional attack (another die equal to your Attack Strength). This can be used on the same enemy or split among multiple (which must be called before the attack). Either is without penalty.
- Characters with multiple Attack Power can burn one or more attack power to increase penetration and instead roll that die (or those dice) to add it to their attack roll instead.
- Characters may use their Attack Die (or Dice) to deflect attacks as long as it is reasonable (cannot block a breath attack with a sword, for instance). If there are no attack dice left, the entire turn was spent in tank mode. Each die "spent" in this way is subtracted from the attack roll of a single opponent's single attack. If multiple dice are spent, this can again be applied to a single enemy or multiple attacks but it must be declared to start. Enemies are not beholden to attacking the person trying to tank so use this reasonably.
- Because this makes weapon power a bit more abstract, there are essentially no real limits on what weapons a class can use outside of story ones. For instance, Magic Users can use a staff which is d6 for them but Slow.
The combat especially is a different kind of experience but it gives the Fighter a few additional steps of fiction. By 4th Level, they are getting two attacks a turn. They can use their superior fighting to better tank damage more than a single additional (average) HP per level. Higher level characters can take out more lower level opponents without relying on Magic User fireballs and such.
There Will Be HEXROLL on This HEXROLL Tour
All that out of the way, let's get to my next few sessions of HexRolling.
Returning to Sinister and His Box
The kobolds have the medicine in hand and some help recovering from the plague and making plans to reclaim their village. They have no reward to offer [characters share XP related to "beating" 33 kobolds and a chief] but the characters don't mind. Kobolds were essentially the first friends they made on this island full of angry widows hiding out in isolated chateaux.
After this, they returned to Ecrean and I worked out a whole backstory for that 700gp delivery mission. "Sinister" is more a nickname than an actual one, because he is black-eyed and white-haired and looks a snivelling villain. His locket has a small sketch of Janis Yorn [yes, this is a Doctor Who joke] who died in the last year because of the plague. Evangeline Thatcher has been making the cure but charging high rates for it and denying people she did not like so Ortgar (who lost a brother) and Sinister have teamed up to torment her. Ortgar hired the goblins that attacked. Sinister got ahold of a basilisk baby for Ortgar to train and they will find a way to sneak it into Thatcher's estate. [All of this came out of various SoloDark and other oracle rolls...from this point just assume that everything I said is a mix of HexRoll's usualy one-to-two prompts plus enough oracle rolls and tests to make a story.]
Sinister refuses to explain so the PCs backtrack to Ortgar but find that he was no good at training such a dangerous creature and his shop is "abandoned," food going to waste, and a shocked-faced Ortgar statue inhabits the backroom. It was exactly the sort of scene that might have played out in a Baldur's Gate game. The PCs have no experience with such a creature so have no idea there is a fairly dangerous beast now roaming the desert near Ecrean.
Digging a Well
Looking for more things to do, they head over to the fortune teller and find the fortune teller has business with a dwarf fighter (who is not in town and exact location is unknown). The fighter had agreed to help the fortune teller to dig a well at his house/farm in the desert but has since taken half the money and gone off on quests to solve Nesila's problems. The fortune teller, Thalassarionus, will give the other half payment to the PCs if they help but they will have to find the dwarf to get the full payment.
Rather than go off and try and find the dwarf, they instead head into the desert and find Thas's house [Note: I used the kind of useless text hex with rattlesnakes into wights into something called a thoul and rerolled it with a dwelling instead]. Turns out that Thal and his brother Aginteus are trying to grow a special tobacco here but Aginteus needs the well to properly water this season's crops and also, like every other dwelling on this entire island, is convinced that there are invaders at night. This time, it turns out is geckos. The giant lizard types. From OSE: "5’ long, carnivorous, nocturnal lizards. Light blue scales with orange spots." Makes sense why he thinks he is being stalked at night. They are coming to the farm because they are trying to eat something, here.
PCs spend the next five nights (too hot to dig during the day) digging this well and twice they have to fight off geckos that attack. They handle themselves pretty well in these fights but do take some damage.
Aginteus does not pay the PCs extra for this lizard killing duty but does give a couple of pouches of their tobacco crop. Turns out, it is magical due to being planted on the tomb of some great wizard. Smoking it or chewing it allows the user to resist confusion and charm type compulsions.
They thank him for the boon and then head back into town to sleep at Sinister's bunkhouse. All this tripping back and forth found a dungeon entrance in a dormant volcano one hex from town. After chatting with a few other townsfolk they set off.
Let's Talk Repetition
There is one legit flaw showing up in HexRoll that is even more severe than I realized. I had joked previously about the multiple abandoned inns having hidden entrances into dungeons. This time, I found another 2 hexes that had this issue.
Talking to townsfolks, quite a few have a hook or two to bounce some roleplay opportunities off. In many cases this hook was either just a brief description and a few things to pickpocket with a most having one to three adventure tie-in elements. These elements all follow one of these five patterns (which seems to be the only five patterns, given here in rough order of how frequently I saw them):
- Someone they know is missing and the missing person is in some dungeon. A reward is offered.
- Some signfificant item has been lost in a dungeon and the character is describing at as a less significant item. Characters could either turn it in for the reward or identify it and keep it (and it looks like keeping it is always the better option value wise but of course: the RP stands for "roleplaying").
- A shop with completely random loot inside.
- NPC A needs something delivered to NPC B which is some number of hexes away. Said number of hexes can be 0. The player tends to have to come up with some justification because the rewards are all pretty hefty no matter the distance.
- NPC A has a relationship of [TYPE (examples include "beef with..." | "is attracted to..." | "has a vendetta against..."] with NPC B and it's up to the player to generate any and all backstory or events related to this.
There is no problem with an OSR-themed game basically giving a paper-thin reason to go into dungeons or travel but one town having multiple missing people starts to feel a bit silly. I even rerolled two of them but I will probably go and roll them back to missing people because the RNG gods have spoken.
At this point, I have only two real wish list items for this app and both are basically the same: increase the out-of-dungeon templates by a factor of at least 10. Then, have some sort of "hook" limiter so that these prompts only show up more than a couple of times if something is triggering them (like, a bandit-raid event). There is a third wish list item, and it shows up while I am exploring my very first HexRoll dungeon. Speaking of...
Look Ma, I'm Exploring a Dungeon in the Dungeon Exploring Game
On the way back from helping the kobolds, the PCs had found the entrance to the "The Shrine of the Furious Skeletons" which sounds like a great place to visit. Now, there seems to be a bunch of old abandoned inns on this old volcano so the great and powerful Doug used the text editor to change that to three different entrances. They take the first of these down.
There's a locked door with a trap. Martin is able to unlock the door but does not find the trap (however, the trap only seems to activate if you remove a "certain object" [how it is worded] but no "certain object" is described so I guess someone removed it? I can add something in but to start I am trying to kind of play the dungeons more precisely as they are written unless I see a strong reason to intervene. One is coming, don't you worry!
After this, they enter into a room that has rotted food, some knitting gear [like, yarn and needles], and cultist corpses. Chanting can be heard to the south. Unfortunately, the door cannot be unlocked. The group backs out and tries a different path down. After a couple of hours of searching, they find a different path in the dormant caldera. [Skip to the end of this replay section to see how I read this all wrong and came back to it while trying to figure out what a certain locked door icon meant later...and it went...silly]
After getting past a few rats who were just vibin', the PCs try a new path. They find a mirror reflecting some other space. At the time, they do not touch or otherwise interact with this mirror. I proceed to forget about this mirror ever existing so, oops. It might have helped all the weird issues with locked and secret doors needing precise solving.
They battle through some insects and then Martin does spot a trap but also hears some strange sounds behind a door. Martin attempts to open the door quietly (succeeds but does not personally know this) and sees four warp beasts. [Note: I had no idea what this was, so I had to look it up and ooooooooooh, crap. THOSE. That's a party wipe waiting to happen and we are quickly running out of ways to enter what should be a starter dungeon. Let's...displace them...so I rerolled until I get a more manageable encounter while still having some possible challenge]
Martin reports seeing four warp beasts three gargoyles inside. Morgatha specializes somewhat in chatting nicely with terrible monsters and the gargoyles are semi-intelligent. She does not really get them to friendly terms but they at least listen to her. Asking questions about the dungeon, they tell a story about a strange, dark beast that hunts humans and snicker. [Note: this is a lie]. The party reluctantly rests here while under a temporary truce. Morgatha shares some food with the gargoyles which they take but they do not really warm up to her any more (or get more hostile). Martin pulls a lever and hears a sound in a distance. In Neutral, there are the words "Hopeless Goblin" written on the ceiling.
Jasper unsticks a door. They enter into a room with a corpse inside. Martin fails to notice the trap. Jasper triggers it and gets struck for 5hp of damage (the most taken all campaign). Martin goes to disarm the now exposed trap and finds that it jammed up and no longer is a threat. They search the body and find 10gp and 2 gems worth 2k-gp in total! Through a broken door they enter into a small passage that ends at a fresco. It's a secret door. Since this is the only way to go, I do an oracle check to see if there is any obviousness aspect and get an exceptional yes. I say they find the door on a 4:6 chance and they pass through. Another room with a another hidden trap that only happens when something is moved but now a random encounter happens. There are none given for the specific room that I immediately see (I did find a way to find them later) so I use the general one: spitting cobras. The cobras are pretty neutral to the party and there's a dead body near by so they loot that (more gems and gold). The party pockets that and heads north.
This room has two different secret doors to leave by. One involves the "Hopeless Goblin" passphrase. Only now it just wants "Goblin" [turns out I read this wrong but I understand better this shape of a puzzle now, it showed back up in some other test dungeons I ran through]. Oracle test: Is this in any way obvious? Answer: Yes. I rule that the word Hopeless, in neutral, is written on the wall. Someone shouts the whole phrase, door opens. The other secret door was not found.
Around this point, I go and look at the original entrance I entered and realized (now that I had some practice) that I had read that wrong, too. Martin had already gotten through the first locked door and they had already stumbled into the "Acolytes" chanting only it was just one guy. Dude, in a robe, living his best life sacrificing folks. We back out and go to beat him up and then plan head to the other dungeon which is a cavern and less prone to having a 2:1 locked or secret door to just normal or stuck door ratio.
Not only is a single acolyte. He has 1hp. He is preparing a sacrifice (I got that it was human with a couple of checks). The knitting needle and thread is on the altar. These additional room details are peak random and repetitive but let's blend it in. This jerk-face is about to sacrifice either a) someone's granny or b) a liberal arts major.
We walk in, he demands to know who we are, Jasper says he is going to punch the guy, acolyte is going to go run off but Thyria just flings her spear at him and drops him as he fumbles with the door. And now we have a new kind of problem. This 1hp encounter has 6500gp in loot! I am handwaving all optional encumbrance rules right now just to keep things moving more quickly, but Six. Ty. Five. Hundred. Gee. Pee. In Loot.
That's...silly.
I know of 5 possible places—Ecrean, Old Woman 1, Old Woman 2, the Caravans, Willya (the other town I haven't found yet). I throw in the kobolds to make it 6 and roll and get that she is from Willya and was kidnapped because everyone on this island has a roughly 70% chance of being kidnapped (10% chance of dying from a plague) at any given time. We are on the way to Willya.
I don't think it takes a lot to pick up my frustrations at this point. I am running with a lot of opportunities and having fun getting to actually explore a OSR dungeon but the encounters are absolutely ignoring the rough difficulty for the island (I do not know how HexRoll handles this, there is likely some logic behind it). The frequency of locked and secret doors and things hidden in cracks is what is bugging me. Each of those is taking up 10' searches of rooms in a way that is not unpleasant, but keys and levers require a lot of back and forth to solve here and there does not feel like a logic. I kind of did a sprint through some rooms I am skipping to see if there is a flow to this kind of large sized dungeon that would allow a perfect solution and the answer largely seems to be "maybe."
Also, where are my furious skeletons?!
Returning Liberal Arts Grandma
The party sets off back through the jungle and up the other side. Grandma knows the way back some so we are following the "road" [it is dotted lines, maybe more the suggestion of a road]. Climbing up the next mountain, the party meets 6 hobgoblins. Morgatha chats with them and they really, realy like her (14 total on the reaction, 15 is max). Everyone sits around for camp and chats about war stories. Party tosses over two of its smaller gems and the hobgoblins provide watch for the night.
Going through the caravan, where people recognize Granny, the party goes through a few more mountain hexes that day but avoids any encounters. Willya is found in a hex full of floating boulders and another bottomless chasm via rope bridge. Kobolds miraculously refrain from sleeping on lava for this one.
I randomly roll to find out that Granny belongs to Galanthar the blacksmith. She's returned. We collect a massive reward (the loot from above). Everyone heads to the tavern. Gets drunk. Parties hard. Granny knits a scarf.
That two day excursion with around a dozen rooms + corridors ending in a series of locked/secret paths has just netted everyone 1686xp each. There's no way to carry this much gold so, um...they buy a boat and set sail to some foreign land, leaving behind this plague infested island undergoing a kidnapping marathon [just FYI, Willya also had multiple missing people].
The dwarf can keep the 40gp. Sorry to all the wives, nephews, and others trapped in the caves. There's a level four dwarf who refused to dig a well because he was sorting you out. I believe in him.
A few days later, they land in a swampy region in the town of Askin in the marshes better known as Karla's Hammer.
My favorite part about Willya is I found someone who had a beef with Aginteus. Sold some bad pipe weed I guess.
I had originally planned to finish a full dungeon before posting this but the goofy aspects of the RNG combined with the large sizes of the dungeons makes it kind of inconvenient for my time constraints and such. I instead opted to generate a new region entirely and then move on to a "Third Impression" with everything exactly default except for dungeons sizes being marked as "prefer smaller."
I was at one point frustrated enough with the experience of the dungeon I thought about heading immediately to the Patreon page and marking my subscription as cancelled and letting it run out next month. I gave it some thought and I realized there is instead something of an opportunity, here. The best times I had were digging a well, curing a bunch of sick kobolds, finding about that stupid basilisk plot, and saving liberal arts grandma. The goofy-as-hell RNG has a lot of potential for a proper Doug style campaign but I am going to have to punch a few things through the rough outright. Fewer kidnapped nephews kink-chained in basements of abandoned inns and more kidnapped nephews working with cults. Etc.
Here's a thing about the way I play certain "convenience apps" while solo playing. I had a similar experience with d100 Dungeons as an app. I started out confused by the interface. Hit a honeymoon stretch where I figured out the flow and such. Then I hit a stretch where I got into a habit of kind of speed clicking through things and got a lot more frustrated than happy. Along the way, I lost the whole OG solo play vibe of taking my time, writing down stuff, poking at things, and turning it into my campaign where spending thirty minutes sketching a couple of room is a perfectly reasonable and relaxing thing to do, etc.
I consider my complaints about the repetition of quest types [and other things], lack of balance, and occasionally broken/nonsense scenarios to all still be valid. The product is worth free and worth, to me, the couple bucks of month as they keep adding stuff to it. You probably will get a better value if you were a GM who used this to salt a few ideas and then had the chance to rip out about half of the generated content and rebuilding stuff with just a few kidnap plots and missing items. I can be that GM for myself with no problem.
Therefore my Third Impression will actually be more like other solo campaigns on this blog. My group of level 2-3s will be exploring a new kingdom. Why? I am not sure right now. I will roll on three to four quests and maybe a meta-quest. I will blend these elements right into the interface, including in the dungeons, and then play it out with my adjusted OSE rules. Get the maps, overwrite around every third room to be more Doug-style using existing tables, etc. Use digital miniatures to run the battles. Go at a slower more leisurely place where the only real canon is something I allow to exist.
BUT also...embrace the goofiness HexRoll creates. Five people lost magical swords pretending they are rusty daggers? Maybe try and find out why that might be and build stuff in.
By the way, exploring the interface while planning out this "Third Impression," I did find there is an overview screen for the dungeon where I can see the full map, reroll it, edit some details, find the wandering monster table I didn't spot earlier, and...well, see the treasure:
That is a ridiculous amount of treasure. Hah.
In that same exploration, I found out I can reroll the dungeon as a whole if I like. I don't think I am going to be doing that too much since it breaks the quest lines associated even more than I am going to with my own tomfoolery. Still, it is an option.
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