Featured Post

Beginning to Migrate (some) Content to the NEW Doug Alone

Image
  Beginning to Migrate (some) Content to the NEW Doug Alone I have had the idea since early on in this blog to possibly move it from this sort of hosted/third-party set-up to something more owned by me. This past week, I started to make this a reality: https://www.dougalone.com There are a lot of reasons behind this but let us start with caveat. I have exactly one real complaint about Blogger/Blogger and otherwise most of the decisions are about my creative process itself.  The One Real Complaint The newer Blogger themes tend to be plenty responsive as they are but there is still some degree of back-end handling that tries to serve up a "mobile-friendly" version of the page [note, this is based on looking into the errors and messages sent, I could be wrong]. This is the exact same page but Google, itself, treats this as a website trying to share multiple copies of the same content and basically passes this off as a reason to not index the site.  After over a year of havin...
Post a Comment

Eustace & Hitomi


EUSTACE & Hitomi is a Tricube Tales Solo campaign based on the Maidenstead Mysteries microsetting and originally using a combination of Richard Woolcocks' Tricube Solo with my own extended framework. 

It has since been migrated to Mythic (by Tana Pigeon) to better keep up with evolving threads and characters.

Eustace & Hitomi and the Case of the Rambler's Inn

>> THE "...and the Rambler's Inn" STORY ARC PAGE <<

See the full story arc page for more details about episodes, characters, locations, writing process, and background.

Summer 1996. Amy Patel is missing. She was last seen staying at the Rambler's Inn, an overly large and overly complex resort in Maidenstead, Alabama. There are lots of ghost stories and other rumors about the place.

Enter Eustace Delmont. Mid-20s. Geeky. Overweight. Not sure what he is doing with his life back in his home town. He meets Hitomi Meyer. She is down and out and out of sorts and in Maidenstead as part of a VHS-by-mail Ghost Hunter subscription show and tired of life on the road. Eustace and Hitomi quickly become convinced they have just met the love of their lives, but both are bad at communicating this. Shady dog catchers, sexy times, poor decisions, hot cops, chainsmoking alt girls, and Betamax tapes with horrible secrets await in Maidenstead.

There is also the Final Thoughts, Recap, and Debrief for the story arc where I go into more details about some of the ideas and themes behind the series.

And a "Preview" of the most likely next chapter: Eustace & Hitomi and the Case of the Empty Promises.

The Campaign Background

In principle this campaign takes three story elements that are often part of my campaigns - humor, mystery, and romance - and then makes them the main focus. It's a challenge to myself to weave an at least adequate mystery with various twists and turns, to make things kind of funny and silly, and to have the central romance (between Eustace Delmont and Hitomi Meyer) make sense.

Originally I played at the idea of "trapping myself by the future" (hints of stuff to come that I had to make sense out of later) but over time that has dialed down. It also starts out in a kind of overblown faux-Victorian style but over time migrates to more of a traditional writing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sinister Semester X: Leftfield Takes another Bad Turn

Image
Content Warning: death amongst teens    -- Some Quick Background and Links -- A week or so ago, Brite Palette posted a version of Sinister Semester X  to the Solo_Roleplaying subreddit and asked for feedback . I played through it and gave feedback. The version on Itch (first link) is the final version with some additional tweaks and some nice graphics.  It is a cool little "experience" generator that emulates a kind of J-Horror inspired "bad semester"//horror movie. Winning is in the eye of the beholder. The idea is to mostly take the punches as they show up and have a good time putting the experience to journal. There are classmates that become marked or get killed, and rules for making allies and exploring the town and finding clues and such.  In my first attempt, I got really lucky playing as the Over Achiever and inadvertently had a speed run to get the "Light Ritual" ending.  Let's see how it goes...this time.  -- A Return to Leftfield -- Leftfie...
Read more

The Bleak and The Pearl (SoloDark): Part 3, The Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur Delve 1

Image
  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...
Read more

Expanding my Tricubes Tales Solo Card-Based Oracles and Adding Several Framework Rules (July 14, 2024 Edition)

Image
When I started playing T he Bloody Hands using Tricubes Tales Solo I used the system as is  except for tweaking the basic oracle to something a bit more complicated. That worked just fine through the first four "episodes" and I still like my little "Dice of Changes" style resolution. However, I played a TriSolo style game with my partner and have been trying to introduce some more friends to the concept of how solo playing works (yes, I understand the irony) and sometimes it takes a bit more of a framework to kick off some ideas. That got me thinking about how to expand on some of the inherent design choices in TriSolo to make something that could meet folks more half-way and could be adjusted/tweaked on the fly based on the comfort level of the player.  Here is my current working model. Like all things on this blog, I'm considering it CC-0 so take it and run with it. The OG Tricube Tales Solo materials are CC-BY 3.0 and this post in no-way-shape-or-form is me...
Read more