An Unnerving Solo Game I've Played

So, decided to play some more AI Dungeon 2 now that it’s been fixed and I decided to play the mystery theme as a patient. What I got is some of the most unnerving stuff that I ever played in a game…

Attack of the Dans

So, I came across this cool AI-driven GM emulator and decided to try it out. Below is the blind run of the thing and after the line will be my overall thoughts.

But first, a little more context: I played in a fantasy setting with a noble role.

Tales of the Winter Alien

So, for my Memorial Day game, I decided to go back to the very first one I did: Winter. This time, with all the tools I had learned over these past 5 years, as well as the devices I was given. Now, instead of choosing from one of three lines, I’m going to make up a new line using the BOLD.

• Waylay Problem: 8 & 9, otherworldly.
• Waylay Modifier: 21, harsh.
• Waylay Solution: 5, Enemy Help.

Hmmm… This might be interesting… Alright, let’s do a five-minute freewrite.

The 100th FATAL Session

Let’s get the elephant out of the room here.

I’m going to be playing the most infamous RPG in all of history. The reason it’s so infamous is because of its excessive nudity, violence, racism, sexism, and other such dark themes, all handled with the same maturity as a fart joke. Most every reviewer that’s tackled this game have brought it up time and time again about how bad it is.

But the gameplay is seldom touched upon except if it’s related to the aforementioned themes, such as gender-specific stat boosts, jobs involving… erm… hiding the weasel, or even spells one could find better versions of in the Book of Erotic Fantasy. I heard bits and pieces of how bad the gameplay is, like how the levelling system is broken, as it gives you XP depending on what mundane activity you do. For melee-style classes like the Gladiator, it’s via how much damage you do. Get three of these classes and you can level up faster than an average character in D&D.

Part of the reason I’m doing this is to see if the RPG can be stomached by removing these dark elements. The other part? Gotta mark the 100^th session with something.

Actually, my character doesn’t start at base level 1. He’s 56 years old and began roughly around the age between 7 and 10. I then calculate the square root of the years he’s been in the job and I get my level of 7…

… Why did I need to do complex math to figure that out?

So, now I gotta quickly level up my character six times. Thankfully this just means skill points to distribute. This means I roll 7d10 to get the number of points to put in. This is on top of the skill points I get from my race (a d8 minus 1) for a grand total of 45 points.

… It turns out I gotta roll that dice 55 more times… What. The. Fu-

Can’t Catch Me, I’m The Gingerbread Man!

Now, originally I was gonna do Marvel Superheroes as my penultimate 99^th game, but then I saw that there’s a new Once Upon A Time expansion. You know what this means. Another Once Upon A Mythic Time game. Which is rather fitting because one of the very first sessions I did on this site was Once Upon A Mythic Time.

The premise this time around is Fairy Tale mashups, so instead of generic characters for our story, we’re going to be encountering established characters like Snow White, Cinderella, and Goldilocks. Same rules as before, assuming you have read them, and let’s go about this.

My character is the Gingerbread Man, his aspect is Full (I’m assuming he’s stuffed with some fondant) and his three items are beans, a beanstalk, and herbs. Herbs are an Interrupt. Our ending is…

That Time I Ended My Campaign, but Everyone STILL Died

The next four sessions I had with the Zombie Survival RPG were pretty much one, straight and narrow path to the endgame. Starting off the finale is a personalized session where it has the ulterior motive of getting a sixth member of the team from the five newly introduced NPCs.

That Time I Played Maid RPG in My Zombie RPG Campaign And Completely Changed The Story

For the next session of my zombie survival campaign, I focused on the social table and figured I would change the system to better reflect that. Enter Maid RPG, the first Japanese RPG to be translated into English. This also marked the first time I’ve done a cross-game stat change, where I take characters from one game and restat them up in another game. The only other time I tried that was when I took multiple OSR characters and plopped them into Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

The game is practically a treasure trove of new content to discover and so, at one point, I’ll have to return to this game. But for now, I should get to the basics of what happened with this gameplay shift.

For one, it’s similar to Ghostbusters in that an attribute determines a D6 result. However, whereas Ghostbusters determines the number of dice you roll by the attribute you have, Maid RPG only multiplies the single dice roll you make by the attribute you have. There’s two more attributes for this, but I managed to do the exchange rather easily. Unfortunately, I lost the sheets I made, so… Yeah.

That Time I Ran A Zombie Survival Campaign And Got The Hang Of It

I think I’ve stated this before, but the reason why I’ve fell in love with Solo RPG games is not only does it mean I get to play all these interesting games by myself, but also because they serve as a great writing tool most of the time, but on those really rare occasions, roleplaying solo turns into… less of an RPG and more of a TV show or story you’re reading as it unfolds.

While A Flower for Mara will always be my Solo RPG darling for having a huge, unnerving narrative about grief and revenge, I want to reminisce about a campaign I played solo that felt like its own television mini-series. I even gave it a name: One More Day Before the Storm. The premise was that, taking place after my D&D 4E game where Malareth had defeated the heroes and uses a powerful skull he has to zap me to parts unknown.

I said in the last post that my writing style had become similar enough to my current writing style that I could switch between what I had said already and what I wanted to say. For this, though, I could just as easily copy-paste the entire campaign onto this site, I feel like recapping the events would make this nine-chapter story brisker. Though, if you ever wanted to read the original text on this site, feel free to request it. If I get enough (about 5 sounds good), I’ll do just that.

The major purpose of this campaign was to play with Mythic again after not being able to use it much for the 4E game. This was before I recently found out how to twist the module so that it can be used with a solo engine, but that’s another story for another time. I also wanted to test out the Mythic Variations tables, which has different random event tables for different genres. The first one was an example, involving Zombies.

That Time I Played A Module And STILL Got Everyone Killed

At some point when I was playing D&D with Mythic, I was walking around a mall when I came across a calendar shop that sold board games on the side. One of them was a D&D Starter Box. Back then, D&D was in it’s fourth edition, the one where people agreed that it played more like an MMO than it did an RPG. I was unaware at the time, but D&D’s fourth edition was in its twilight years, as the version that would eventually become fifth edition, D&D Next, was in production.

Regardless, I bought the box, took it home, and realized its solo capabilities. Almost as soon as I was done doing the Mythic D&D experiment, I was right back into the fray. Rereading the liveblog I made so many years ago, it definitely falls in line with the writing I do now, to the point where it might be better for me to copy and paste snippets of the blog. So I will, but it’ll be in quotes so you get a better idea of where the old blog ends and the new blog begins.

I Try To Become Mayor!

Just when I thought I saw the smallest RPG in the form of One-Page RPGs, along comes Clones, An Arnold RPG made by Erika Chappell of Newstand Press. How small is it? Well, the rules are all explained onto one business card.

Yes.

A business card.

I knew I couldn’t pass soloing this game, so here we go. The plot is that I’m a clone of a person and that I’m wanting to take over the world. Now, the game is meant to be played with multiple people, as each of them would give a list of skills for you to do, but since I’m playing solo, I’m gonna change it up a bit.