Apocalypse’s Oracle (Part 2)

When we last left off Zero, he infiltrating the Horakthy, a hoverbarge. He noticed that its owner, Ra, has turned it into his own personal kitchen and cooking up humans. Ra kicked Zero’s ass and has left him to be cooked. As I said before, this will launch the next phase of the playtest, which explores the four tables I didn’t touch previously.

Two of these tables are for Dungeon and Hex Crawling, while the other two generate NPCs and Plot Points. For the context of this game, the Dungeon is the Horakthy and the Hexes are everything going on outside of it.

Apocalypse’s Oracle (Part 1)

I’m going to be testing out the Apocalypse Oracle (made by archon1024 from Reddit’s Solo Roleplaying group) by using There Is No Spoon, much like how I used it to test CRGE. The idea I have is a hovercraft that’s operated by only two people. They’re a vigilante group seeking to discourage people from abusing the Matrix to their whims and desires. This is set sometime before the Matrix and perhaps around the time of the There is no Spoony Veteran game.

My character creation is simple. Two points to the Matrix Stat for 3 and four to make the Katana skill a 6. Zero’s Deal will be determined by the Oracle, which I shall now go into detail talking about.

The Oracle is designed in a sleek, ergonomic layout that echoes that of katamoiran’s RPGs. There’s only four pages and two of them are needed to use and play a game. The overall intent is to minimize as much flipping through pages as possible and compared to using Mythic or CRGE, it works efficiently.

For Mythic, I had to flip a page or two to get to Actions and Descriptors, but for Apocalypse Oracle, I just need to glance to the right side of the first page. It’s card-based resolution for the complex categories had me puzzled at first, but as I noticed how it ties in the suits to mean different things on top of the rank, it started to click.

There Is No Spoony Veteran

Alright, let’s begin this Remembrance Day special with the opening scenario.

For those who don’t know what the Matrix is, it’s a franchise of movies set in a cyberpunk environment contained inside post-apocalyptic world. How this works is that machines have humans live in small pods that keep them in a comatose state, effectively keeping them active while they “farm” them as batteries.

In this comatose state, the humans go through a simulation of real life: The Matrix. They go about their day, knowing nothing of the true nature of their world. However, some do. And when they do find that something isn’t right, they end up finding a way out of that world and into the real world, now named Zion, where they join a resistance army. From there, they operate Hovercrafts that are armed with programs that allow them to re-enter the Matrix with what is basically a cheating device (you can ask someone to give you guns or teach you Kung Fu on the fly, for instance) whenever they wish to try and free other people from it.

Of course, this isn’t exactly easy. The Machines have what are basically administrators in the Matrix known as Agents, who can possess people and have extreme combat expertise. To face them is to dice with death. However, there is hope. The Resistance is given information in which one person will ultimately end the world and save Zion. This person is known as the One.

Our story begins during this search for the One. Many Hovercraft crews are told of the One and they all want to be the crew that says, “we found the One!”. Some of them even pretended that they already found them. Such is the case with our Hovercraft crew, the Somnambular.

Stat It: The Matrix/WWII Crossover

I begin this post with some sad news: Zach Best passed away a month ago. Zach has changed my tools for solo roleplaying for the better and I have mentioned how that is in another post.

A tradition on Solo RPG Voyages is for me to play a war-themed game for Remembrance Day. However, I’ve decided, in tribute to Zach Best, to play a game of There Is No Spoon, the first game I tested out the CRGE on.

Though I am not completely forgoing the theme of war. The scenario is that a Redpill is in a WWII simulation and that the crew is assigned to go rescue him, give him the pill, and obtain him. His war skills are desirable for fighting the Machines.

But, who are our Hovercraft Crew? Well, I’m going to be using a combination of UNE and possibly BOLD to flesh out five characters, then create them for the game. Yes, this will be a Stat It. We’ll be doing the classic 6 point rule.

Test Driving The CRGE Engine

Hey everyone. This is going to be a bit of a special playtest, since it’s literally a playtest. Conjecture Games’ founder, Zach Best, asked if I can test out the Conjectural Roleplaying Gamemaster Emulator, or CRGE for short. I agreed and here we are. The RPG I’m playing with this is another movie-based title: There Is No Spoon, by Steve Darlington. Unlike Ghostbusters, I do not have a starting scenario in mind, so any story I have will be generated by CRGE.

One thing I will note right now is that there is a section that addresses the paradox of solo RPG being more of a GM’s job than a PC’s job and makes a suggestion of how to separate GM knowledge from PC knowledge, which I give kudos for. One thing I also found interesting was a section devoted to multiplayer Play-By-Post RPGs. I am actually a veteran of PbP RPGs and that I believe is where I got my start to roleplaying. There’s a lot of nice information regarding what to do when solo roleplaying, including whether to ask a big question or ask smaller questions revolving around a bigger one.

Perhaps the most important is the advice of always asking “why” after your questions are answered. Most games I played never tell this to me, but instead say “conclude from there your answer”. For example, if I were to ask Mythic if this door is locked and it says yes, it will just tell me “the door is locked. What do you do?”, but if I ask CRGE the question, it will instead say “Yes, but why is it locked?” It’s pretty thought-provoking and I like it for that. In fact, that is actually how I’ll begin this game, by asking why.