Reviewing All The Engines I Used In The Past

Back when I started Solo RPG Voyages, there were only a few available Engines one would normally need to play solo. There was at least five that most people pointed to, to which I made one of my very first posts a five-day marathon of playing the same game, same setting, same story, but the difference was how the Engines worked.

This was what I called the Solo Engine RPG Battle Royale Week and it was a means for me to get out of my comfort zone with the Mythic GM Emulator and try out Engines in a controlled environment so I could look exclusively at the Engines and not let any outside force like how the game plays or a plot point causing the game to drag and distract from the Engine’s overall quality.

However, as soon as I made that, I was given the request to review another solo Engine called CRGE. One month later, I find another solo RPG Engine for me to play with… and another… and another… Eventually, I wanted to do a second Solo Engine RPG Battle Royale Week, but I kept doing other things that occupied my time.

Now it’s almost impossible to pick just five Engines for a sequel. With solo gaming becoming more mainstream than ever before, more and more Engines are made to cater to various degrees of player. There’s even one author that creates Engines tailor made for certain RPG systems. What adds to this increase is how easy it is to make solo Engines.

For instance, I can take dice from the Genesys RPG system and use the symbols to interpret yes and no answers. Easy. I even made a system using the lowest numbered dice called the Coin, Tumbler, and Caltrop system or CTC for short. A coin is used for yes and no, a d3 (a tumbler) is used to see if it’s a “but”, “and”, or neither, and a d4 (a caltrop) would be a controller to see if a plot twist would be coming.

So now I have the situation of having so many Engines to try out and not enough games to pair them with. Granted, some are easy to pair, like PPM’s Engine or even cases like Ironsworn where the Engines come packed with their own games. However, it’s come to a point where it feels more pragmatic to read the Engine and make conclusions to how it plays rather than devote entire sessions to playing around with it.

Earlier, I made a review scale for RPG games based on how soloable they were, under the idea that any game can be played solo. The problem was that I had way too many variables and scored it on a ten-point rating. Worse still, it shot my own ideas and mission statement down and even made the system as a whole feel like more busywork than a two-paragraph review.

So, with this, I feel like it should be a little more restrained. Instead of numbers, I’d bring the Engine into a few categories based off ease of use, if the Engine is focused on mechanics or story (more on this later), and whether the game has a twist system. Rather than grading it, I feel like it’s more appropriate to see what sort of people would enjoy the Engines.

I’m not going to go into all the nitty gritty details like the odds of getting yes vs. no or how often you trigger an event, since that’d be edging towards reviewing and I’m only making recommendations for this list.

Let’s Test Out Yurei World!

So, I ended up creating a Powered by the Apocalypse game that wasn’t Jurassic World. The long story short of it is that, after playing After School Curse Club, I took a look at the mechanics of the game and realized how similar to Powered by the Apocalypse it was.

Eventually, the idea struck me to more or less take the base premise of the game and remake it into a full-fledged RPG. The end result is Yurei World. After expanding the base game into a standard PtbA game (as well as add a system to just make generic moves), I ended up deciding to add Playbooks. Originally, I didn’t consider it and just had it be the standard “pick one stat that gets +2, then pick another that gets +1”, but I soon felt as though I could give the game a bit of personality and customization by adding the Playbooks.

I only completed three, though I feel as though three is just what I need to test this out.

Midnight’s Shadow

Well, it’s the end of the year. Man have we gone through a lot lately. A town got overrun by rats, a farm got destroyed by the Bliss, I saved a prince from a vengeful god, I wrote a letter to someone regarding their deceased sister, got a bunch of people killed, engaged in a lot of war, made a lot of NPCs, fought giant Kaiju, infiltrated a church, comically killed everyone by playing Jenga badly, became a superhero, secured my black market standing, and just recently saved a spaceship from anarchists.

For a lack of productivity this year, I did quite a bit. And now I’m gonna kick off this year with the game Six Hours to Midnight. Keeping in tradition, I’m gonna go into this game blind, reading the rules as I play it and hoping it presents the rules sort of like instructions. With that, let’s play.

So, apparently nobody is who they appear to be, including my Rival and Lover. And I seem to have a Purpose in this scenario. I am dutiful, shrewd, wanton, and I am wearing someone else’s mask. Seems my goal will be to deliver my own brand of justice in this kegger party.

So I guess we’ll start with me rolling up to the front entrance as two bouncers stand outside a house. They look at me and just grunt.

Swords, Six-Siders, and Suicude Squads

Alright, so we’re going to begin playing Swords & Six-Siders. I have my character sheet ready to go and my dungeon is made from Wizardawn. So, without further to do, let’s just go ahead with this dungeon delve!

So, allow me to bring up the basic idea of this game: Orcs kidnapped party members, it’s up to Bartholomew to kick ass and chew bubble gum.

We begin in Room 1, where we find some writing in ancient dwarven. I’ll take advantage of my character’s wildcard language ability and have him read it. It says that there’s a treasure hidden somewhere.

Let’s Turn Attack On Titan Into Jurassic World

I went out to see Jurassic World a month ago and it was an enjoyable ride. However, when I was watching a scene, I couldn’t be helped but think “this would make a good session for Titan World”. A team of hunters who fight against giant man-eating dinosaurs just makes sense for me to play Titan World with this flavour, and it’s closer to the source material than what I have for Greek Titan World. So while I’m playing Titan World again, I’m playing it with a different coat of paint.

There’s a game called Legend, which is Dungeons and Dragons if the multiclassing was a main, easy to use feature. On the blog, there have been tutorials on how to add new classes to the game by simply changing the flavour text, so your barbarian can become a super soldier or have your ranger be more in touch with nature. I decided to take the advice from those articles for use in Titan World. However, most of the Playbooks are good enough without heavy editing. Just replace all mentions of Titan with Dinosaurs.

Here’s the problem though. How do we translate the Titan Shifter over to Jurassic Park? We certainly didn’t see Chris Pratt bite into his hand to become a T-Rex for that final throw down, now did we? Now, the easy way out would be to have it so that the scientists are like “Hey, we made this chimera dinosaur and cloned dinosaurs from some old DNA that should have been expired, I say making humans transforming into dinosaurs would be easy.” But… I have a better idea:

Change Shifter to Velociraptor. Yes. As in we play as a Velociraptor. The only basic change is that Titan Transformation is changed to Bloodlust. It doesn’t transform the Velociraptor, but instead makes it more crazed and determined to kill. The 7-9 downside is mostly retained, but “body partially forms” is replaced with “you accidentally injure yourself while invoking Bloodlust.”

… Yeah, I’m gonna play a Velociraptor. And I’m gonna stat up her leader too. First, Velociraptor…

One-Die Twist For Tiny Solitary Soldiers Engine

So I figured, because Tiny Universal has no twist system, I figure that I’ll transplant the twist system from Tiny Solitary Soldiers. The idea being that the twist’s use of two dice would fit perfectly with Tiny Universal’s two dice system. To replace the twist system, I figured to make a simple one-die version. Instructions on triggering the twist will remain, though.

1. New NPC/Thread
2. Positive Thing Happens
3. Goal/Thread Changes
4. NPC/Thread is killed/closed
5. Negative Thing Happens
6. Scene Ends

Simple stuff. I apologize for not putting out a new session this week. I had a bit of a busy schedule and wasn’t able to complete it.

Let’s Try Tiny Universal

Continuing on from Lasers and Feelings, I’m gonna do another simple to play game: Tiny Universal by Sophia Brandt. In a shocking twist, Tiny Universal is an Engine RPG, much like Tiny Solitary Soldiers or Oculus. I didn’t even realize that TSS can be played as an RPG. Tiny Universal follows a bit of an Apocalypse World style where two six-sided dice are rolled instead of one.

The other difference between TU and TSS is that TU has a slightly deeper character creation. You use three sentences, and of those three sentences, that’s your character. Hey, I actually have something just for this situation: Three Line NPCs. As it turns out, the generator already has 450 premade NPCs for me to use. Though, I’m gonna edit a bit of the NPC I’m about to use…