The Doug Alone

    Finally Returning to The Bleak + The Pearl The last time I posted The Bleak + The Pearl content was December 29, 2024 . The last time I played The Bleak + The Pearl was actually early January. It is mentioned in Fourth Wall Break #7 . At the time, I thought there was going to be "a week or two" before I tried playing it again [around three weeks after the last posting]. In reality, it has been six months. Why? The simplest answer is that the "one campaign arc at a time" — replacing the old system of playing through two-to-four campaigns at the same time and posting once from each around weekly — ended up working well. And all the other stuff I have talked about impacting my solo play time schedule this year. Those things combined and I just got busy (in general) and specifically got busy having fun doing other things. Had The GLOW 1996 not taken five-plus months, we probably would have seen Bleak + Pearl back in March. All things considered...

  Happy birthday, Doug Alone, you are now one year old [officially].  A bit over a year ago (maybe 1 year + 1 week) I had come up with the idea to play a solo campaign that could be entirely played on my oldish smart phone . I didn't need a lot of apps, per se. A PDF viewer to view a Tricube Tales  micro-setting (I chose Guardians of the Shadow Frontier ) and the Tricube Solo  PDF. A dice app. Then Google Keep to track the short scenes.  Here is what the original playthroughs looked like: As you can see, I misunderstood how scenes worked with Tricube Solo  and thought you had to draw an Ace/Joker to move on to the next. It made a fairly action oriented episode played out over a few set-pieces.  After playing out a "session" over a few short bursts, I would recap it to this blog . It was nice and relaxing. For the blog version, I would type as many or more words than my initial notes. Sometimes I would add in dialogue and side scenes. A simple piece of ...

As said in my recent debrief from The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont , I want to do a quick-ish list of all the various campaigns, campaign arcs, mini-campaigns, and one-shots that have occurred to me over the past few months but as-of-yet not realized. This is kind of a bookmark of sorts. A place for me to go back and say, "Hey, I was thinking about playing that!"  Chances are, absolutely nothing from this list will actually make it to the final product (i.e., actually posted to this blog). Better chances are that some of these will make it and others will get added to other stacks. Some things thought to be long will be short. Some things thought to be short will be long or even kick offs into whole meta-campaigns. Quite a bit of stuff will be altered before it begins and then altered even more before it is finished [I'm good at that!]. Any one of these might inspire a half-dozen more things that take the place of the others. To keep it kind of simple, I'll list...

    The Recap Section Was Its Own Post The Two Campaigns that Were Not The Future of The GLOW Things I Liked Things I Did Not Like So Much Lessons Learned Things That Might Be Fun to Do Different Up Next for the Doug Alone is... The Recap Section Was Its Own Post Usually when I do these debrief interludes, I tend to include recaps/trivia and such all rolled together (e.g., The Bloody Hands REBIRTH: Stone Crack'd recap . It gives me a sort of all in one sandbox to kick around a few hefty footfulls of sand as I muse over the game I had just played. However, the extended nature of this one meant I did the The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont recap [with trivia, sort of...] as a separate post. Essentially, it was a long enough time difference from the start that I knew I would forget things. I will write this with the assumption that whoever is reading this has a rough understanding of the campaign arc OR of...

    Going Back Over the Posts The First Five Episodes, The Story That Was Magnus Odinson and the Story That Would Become The Death of Eustace Delmont and the Third Pivot And the Rest of It Going Back Over the Posts As I sort through the brain space to sum up this quite long campaign — the longest by word count and episode count, though Bleak + Pearl will quite soon over take both titles since it is maybe half finished at best — I figured I'd go back some episodes and discuss some notes and ideas that occur to me. And while doing that, I'll fix a few minor errors while leaving the larger ones in place. It's a living, fairly organic game. Stuff shifts. Let's blame the Witches Three. Also, this won't be a complete list of every episode and interlude. More just a few highlights as things come to mind. Then, after this I'll do a general debrief. With the more philosophical and technical stuff. The First Fi...

    "Previously..." and Campaign/Arc Summary The GLOW 1996: Psychic Eustace Delmont Episode 21 — The Nurse House Calling the Doctor The Final Advance The Waiting Room For the Final Time Tumbling Down The Death of the Witch-King The Nurse's Choice NOT the GLOW 1999: Transporter Jani Blum Doug's Commentary Credits Previously, on The GLOW: 1996 Psychic Eustace Delmont The team has fought their way to the top of the Rambler — Dr. Roman Patel's floating skyscraper. Nemesio Jones has gone back downstairs to help people evacuate. Varvara Clean has stopped to destroy all the data she can find in the communications hub. This leaves Genny, Hitomi, and Eustace to confront The Doctor himself as well as his two elite bodyguards: Yori and Ambra. The "siblings." No matter the outcome, the Patel empire is going — quite literally — to crumble. And once the Witches ...