The Doug Alone

On the Nature of Calendars and the Geographic Location of an Insignificant City Growing in Power Imagine, if you will, we are floating a mile or so over a relatively insignificant place, geographically speaking. Below us, there is a decently sized island at least a week of sea travel from the various centers of Allansia's society.  By Allansia's calendar, it is the Month of Reaping of the year 288 AC. Earthsday to be precise. Night time shadows the Forest Ick.  It is a time where across the ocean, great heroes have overthrown mighty villains like Zagor and the Lizard King while others then go on to let loose ancient stone giants to ravage the lands east of Blacksand. However, where we currently are, floating over the Island of Phillia, the War of the Wizards had only the slightest of impacts. There was no "Chaos" for there to be a "After".  The Bad King Phillic and his rebel kingdom was for sale and no one bought it. At least his inability to gather dark fo...

  In part 2 of this big recap , I discussed  some  of the various characters and elements that had shown up over the months of playing and the general BIGGITY [technical term] of playing out a campaign so deeply decided by random dice rolls. I also hinted that I was needing to parse some things and get back to the Barston Bakersfield core.  Barston and company had cracked open a big conspiracy. I wanted to do one last dive into the Humb-issue quests and solve the problem of the missing people so I could be freed up to dial a few things back. But, before I could really do that, I had an issue inherent in the whole "always expanding" campaign world: what was meant to be the first or second quest, destroying the red warlocks, had never been attempted. It was time. By the lore of the campaign world, the warlocks were entangled with some of the missing people (*cough* zombies *cough*) but also controlled the northern paths.  By returning to the campaign roots I would...

  In Part 1 of this Big Recap , we saw how a simple Harper's Quest 2  story blended with a too-large  Troika campaign to become something in the middle: a simple-beginnings but unknown-endings Advanced Fighting Fantasy campaign. In this part, I will recap some of the ideas and sessions that began to set-up all the threads that I am still working on to this day...almost entirely in ways that I thought would go differently.  -- Step One: Advanced Fighting Barston -- How to take a character from one system - Harper's Quest 2 uses the a similar STR/DEX/WIS loadout as Into the Odd 's STR/DEX/WILL - and convert it into another: AFF's Skill, Luck, Stamina, and Magic? I handled this mostly by starting with the basics. I made a character in the default way and then looked for ways to tweak and update him. He had been pretty good in fighting groups of enemies so he got the Combat Tactics talent that meant he had training in facing multiple foes. He had absolutely sucked  ...

  I think now is as good of a time as any to discuss the kind of odd origins of the campaign that took me from a long time dabbler in solo roleplay and made me into a solo-first roleplayer, from a person with a couple of solo/oracle type books to someone with a massive shelf of books and tools dedicated to the hobby.  This is the story of a book printer turned warlock hunter Barston Bakersfield, whose story started out as an absolutely bog standard adventure romp: avenge his uncle's death and kill an evil wizard. But first, we go back a whole generation.  -- Harper's Quest 2 Era & Shellyton Bakersfield --  In August, 2023, I launched a Harper's Quest 2 game after watching The Lone Adventurer play through it on his channel . It sounded fun, the price was right (just $2.50 for the pdf although I did get a physical copy later on), and I wanted to expand out a bit after being on a bit of a Fighting Fantasy  kick (about once every two or three years I tend to d...