The newest season of Me, Myself, and Die (or Season 3 if you’re reading this sometime after this is posted) had been a pretty good rollercoaster of mystery as both Trevor and the audience piece together what happened to Edbert that landed him on a deserted island with pirates chasing him. It recently concluded on an amazing note that gave Egbert the closure to his character arc that began all the way back in Season 1 and is a testament to just how high a quality campaign people can make their solo games.
Running the mechanics for the third season is a rather obscure RPG. Whereas Savage Worlds had some popularity and Ironsworn is the quintessential soloist RPG, Dominion Rules is obscure to say the least. Without specifying the RPG, you might end up finding rules to the Deck Building Game Dominion. In fact, googling Roll20 Dominion gets me results for exactly how one were to make assets for said card game.
This essentially means that Roll20 and Foundry don’t have the sheet programmed in. Foundry has improved quite a bit to the point where there’s a few systems that allow you to make your own system, but you still need to figure out how to maneuver the programming, which is doable, though I simply want to create a character for Dominion and not an entire system for it.
While Astral would be able to patch this problem up, it unfortunately died at the end of August, so that brought me back to square one (not that I really enjoyed playing it since I found it to be resource intensive compared to Roll20 or Foundry). This means this will be one of the few times I’ll have to make the sheet by hand, something I will show at the end of the Stat It.
In keeping in line with a sort of world I’m building, the potential Dominion Rules game will take place in the Oldlands, long before the Skulde invasion that forced the Oldlanders to depart for the Ironlands. Dominion Rules is one of those games where there is no specific setting to speak of, but the cover art and examples of play seem to imply a medieval English setting. In keeping in tone with how I loosely based the Skulde off of Viking history, it’s only natural to loosely base the setting off of English history.
Timeline wise, this game would be chronologically first, followed by the Ironsworn game, and then the Savage Worlds game.
However, I think I want to hold off writing that for now, and instead wanting to get a feel for how the character is created, since then I know where exactly I can strike in the story.
The Attributes in the game are straight forward, most having parallels to the classic D&D stats, though Luck is different, acting more akin to bennies or Fate points. This means that there are only five sets of skills for attributes. There’s also Composite Stats essentially combine two Stats to serve as a baseline for unique sets of skills.
There’s three sets of them which implies a class system: Warriors (though everyone is required to use the combat Composite Stat since combat is a necessary part of the game), Priests, and Witches. There’s an unofficial fourth set made by Trevor Duvall called the Social Composite which is made for diplomatic skills, who I will build a character for. So, that’ll be my characters for this. The game asks me a set of questions to get me started on thinking up characters.
What is your character’s background?
I kinda want all of them to be within the same village. The idea would be that the Priest and the Witch are at odds with each other, especially since they live within a stone’s throw away from each other. I do want to ask CRGE Kai…
[Q: Is it to the point where the Priest tried to lynch the Witch? Purpose: To Conflict. A: 24, no, SC becomes 1]
Okay, so it’s not come to that point yet, so it seems more of a wacky next door neighbor situation. Meanwhile, for the Warrior, I’ll do BOLD.
- Noun: 9 & 6, myth.
- Modifier: 20, regimental.
- Solution: 11, favored ability.
Alright, so my idea is that there was some sort of enforced fable among the villagers…
I got it!
So, the Warrior was rational enough to not buy into the enforced myth that witches are magical and can cast hexes. To prove this, he uses his favored ability, Vigor, to disprove a myth that witches make people weak. He’s quickly able to deduce that while the concoction made him drowsy, it was in no way affecting his actual strength or muscles.
[Q: Does he convince the people? Purpose: To Knowledge. A: 75, Surge making it 77. It’s a yes which means SC goes to 2]
And we get a random event to get us started.
- Random Event: 76, ambiguous event (this is perfect since this can help us get a plot going)
- Event Meaning: 8 & 67, Oppose Ambush
So in the Kingdom itself, the Skulde are planning on invading the Oldlands, so already we’re close to the end of the Oldlands. The Oldlands, meanwhile, seek to put an end to it before people come to harm.
[Q: Do they know why they’re here? Purpose: To Knowledge. A: 78, SC goes to 82]
Alright, so they know why exactly the Skulde are here and they’ve allied with them to ensure they get pacified as soon as possible. Time to borrow from good ol’ history!
So, there’s this king from a rivalling kingdom, right? And he’s a bit of a douche. He doesn’t hide the fact that he’s a douche. And he’s recently killed a rather powerful Skulde figure. They didn’t like that, so they sailed forth wanting revenge.
Just so happens that our kingdom is feuding with their kingdom, and so it stands to reason that they have a common enemy. You know, let’s just give them names because we’ll need to figure out who we’re facing:
After much consideration, I decided to personally give the names rather than scour the internet for name generators. This rival kingdom will be known as Snacaholt while our kingdom is Cwénland. These kingdoms, alongside a few others, make up the greater Oldlands.
Back to the story, the king of Cwénland, Brand, has essentially drafted the villagers to help the Skulde, saying how if we help them claim their revenge, we can get a cut of Snacaholt’s treasury. The warrior’s proof that he could withstand even a witch’s hex is enough to get a Brand’s accompanying Skulde, Bjorn, convinced that his mettle is enough. The Warrior pledges his allegiance provided that the rest of the civilians are spared from the draft.
[Q: Does the King accept? Odds: Very Unlikely. Purpose: To Conflict. A: 8]
No, and the King warns that he may have impressed Bjorn, but it will take far more than that to impress him. The King gets everyone forced into the role of soldier, including the Priest and Witch, to which the Warrior is now burdened with needing to protect them…
Damn, we already established a pretty good plot. Alright, all that’s left now is to stat these puppies up. To start with, I’m rolling on the character generation table to see what each of the characters start with. Brand is gonna be Experienced (meaning he starts with 10 Advancement Points), as he is an experienced King, while Bjorn is going to be Gifted with +2 to his Vigor, as he is a Viking. As for the others…
[Roll: 1, 9, 5]
Our Warrior, Drengwulf, gets Favorable Rounding, which means he rounds up when combining composite stats rather than rounding down. Our Priest, Aelfric, gets Tough, which means he gets a starting Withstand Injury of 4. And lastly, our Witch, Wicce, gets Talented, which means one of her skills starts at 6.
The next phase is to roll 3d12, divide by 3, and then spend the resulting points to buy stats. I actually like this method of buying stats, it feels like an advanced version of the 4d6 drop the lowest method from D&D. These stats then combine to create the composite stats mentioned earlier. One other interesting aspect is what to do with the remainder, because rather than rounding them up or down like what you would do with the composite stats, you instead keep the remainder reserved.
With that in mind, we roll the stats:
Drengwulf gets an 8 (remainder 2) which he spreads evenly across his stats. Aelfric gets a six (remainder 2), which he dumps most of the points into Stamina and Intuition, with Intellect and Luck being secondary. Wicce gets a perfect 11 (no remainder) which she uses to buff her Intellect and Luck to 4, keeping everything but Intuition at 2. Bjorn. This results in a straight up 10 with no remainder. His spread will be 6 Vigor, 3 Agility, 3 Stamina, 1 Intuition, 1 Intellect, and 3 Luck. Lastly, Brand rolls a 5 (Remainder 2), enabling him to get Favorable Rounding right out of the gate despite not getting it. He’s gonna have a very capped build of 1s in everything but the Social Composite stats, Intelligence and Intuition, which will be at 3’s and Luck at 2.
The next step is Advancement Points. Everyone starts with 45 Advancement Points and by everyone, I mean only Wicce and Bjorn because Drengwulf and Aelfric get a bonus 2 because of their remainder and Brand gets a bonus 10 Advancement Points plus the two remainder. It’s pretty easy to understand, there’s a table of how many points it would be to get from one point to another and then you spend them, however, it’s advised to leave a few points aside to obtain weapons and armor.
Armor and weapon list doesn’t look too bad, so we’ll breeze through this. Surprisingly, I didn’t need to spend much.
- Bjorn spent the least. He spent nothing on armor (he’ll rely more on withstanding injuries) and instead bought some axes. Totalling 4 points.
- Brand is the opposite, invested heavily in armor, with padded armor, chainmail underneath (well, a hauberk), and a great shield, with only the bare minimum of a dagger, totalling 7 points.
- Wicce, being a spell caster, spent the least, investing in leather boots and armor and a quarterstaff for a total of 5 points.
- Aelfric balanced himself out by buying a mace, a crossbow, and the basic padded armor, hauberk, and a hood for his face and neck, for a total of 8 points.
- Drengwulf spent some good points on Brigandine armor, a helm, and a great sword, totalling 8 points.
Now that we spent the points on armor, now comes the fun part: Skills! Unmodified Skills start at the attribute stat and it costs a certain amount of points to bump them up. I’ll cut the nitty gritty and tell you how many points they spent. I’ll try to make an effort to leave spare points because they’re needed to spend what are known as lucky breaks, which are basically the fate points/bennies I was talking about before.
- Drengwulf spends 4 points on Muscle, 4 points on Timing, 5 points on Alertness, 5 points on Heraldry, spreads out three points on all defensive moves, 7 points on Strike, 2 points on Withstand Injury. This leaves 5 spare points left.
- Aelfric dumps his points into bumping his Priestcraft skills to 4, leaving his AP to 6.
- Wicce does the same, but dumps a bit of points into Withstand Magic as well. Her spare AP is 2. Her talent will be Medical Lore, which will be 6.
- Bjorn will dump a lot of points into all the offensive combat skills, a lot of points into Withstand Injury (to reflect how a Viking is often made of iron) and a few into Withstand Magic, giving him three spare APs.
- Brand spends 35 points on social skills, and 3 points on stealthing, dodging, and reading, getting 4 spare APs.
And with that, everyone seems ready to go. As promised, I will leave the character sheets published below and as a bonus, I will also publish a blank version of the sheet I used so you can make your own Dominion Rules character, either for group play or solo play. Well, bon voyage, gamers!
Solo RPG Voyages 