It’s been almost a year and a half since I picked up my copy of Shadowdark and started my solo roleplaying journey. Now that I’m slowly revisiting those early entries in my ongoing adventure, I can’t help but notice all the ways my game has evolved, both for the better and, unexpectedly, away from some practices and priorities that I’ve long since forgotten about that I might want to bring back into the foreground.
My solo game has lost a bit of its deadly edge.
The introduction to Shadowdark states that “Speed, danger, and simplicity,” define the game. “Magic is perilous, and battles are fast and deadly.” This idea is consistent with the broader OSR movement, in which it’s not uncommon for late-game characters to get absolutely stomped out by a pretty basic enemy mob. Players are advised against getting too cozy with their PCs; in fact you ought to show up with one or two backup character sheets just in case you get TPK’d in the first ten minutes of your session.
In my earliest sessions, I did my best to stay true to this philosophy. A random encounter in Campaign 1, Session 13 (“The Earth Opens”) saw multiple rounds of bad news from the Oracle, getting bucked from horses spooked by deep rents of lava bursting open beneath their hooves, and CON checks for environmental damage like choking to death on volcanic ash. One of my characters was downed (but stabilized), and the others didn’t fare much better; it was totally a Close Call. Just five sessions later, I came within spitting distance of a grippingly dramatic TPK that I’ll never forget. It was incredible, and took the story in a stark new direction. Several months later, in my second campaign, I experienced another gut-wrenching loss, and roleplaying through its consequences set the stage for one of the major plot threads for the entire campaign. Crazy!
Then, something seemed to shift. I’ve had the same four PCs in my party for over a year now. We get into some crazy stuff, to be sure. My elf priest experienced a spiritual near ego-death; we’ve talked our way into an uneasy alliance with a lich; my dwarf fighter stalked an alicanto through a mountain pass, only to be ambushed by a tribe of angry drow; the list goes on. Despite all our varied and unexpected adventures, they’ve had remarkable staying power. Over these many months, there are some trends that quietly elbowed into my practice that contributed to the very long lives of my characters.
I got gud. When I was newer to the game and still learning the rules, I took fewer procedures for granted, and must have been a stricter GM as a result. I also had much squishier characters, and gosh were they easy to kill, even by accident. But as I gained experience running my game, developing a sense for how to set effective DCs for some skill checks while hand-waving other entire mechanics for the good of the narrative, my characters gained literal experience points, becoming incrementally tougher and more capable. Even with the trappings of OSR deadliness in play, creating appropriate challenges for a party that keeps gaining new advantages is a much more active effort than I appreciated.
I largely ignore almost all of the game’s light management mechanics. I do not combine torches to make a campfire each night. Lighting a torch does not cost an action, because I forgot that was a thing until I revisited the rules to write this post. With my GM hat on, I do not “attack the light.” I am, in fact, rarely in particularly dark places other than outside at night (although I try to bring my party into the Shadowdark for any plot point that demands a dungeon crawl). Somehow, even with my limited inventory space, I have never run out of torches. This basically short circuits what makes Shadowdark so deadly.
My Random Encounter procedure may not be fully baked. Shadowdark’s rules call for a d6 roll for each random encounter check. On a 1, you get an encounter. Once I started using Mythic GME, I thought it would be tidier to move my checks over to its Fate Question system: roll d100 and consult the Fate Chart, assuming odds of Nearly Impossible. The Nearly Impossible odds line up roughly with the odds of rolling a 1 on a d6 at a Chaos Factor of 5; and it meant that higher Chaos would result in more random encounters, so I thought this would add an interesting level of messiness to my play. Trouble is, I’m just not rolling as many encounters as I used to. Part of the problem is GM laziness: looking back through my logs, I was far more strict about turn order and travel time/distance within settlements. Tracking turns diligently is what makes each location’s Danger Level—how often encounter rolls must be performed—an effective trigger for action. This isn’t only a Shadowdark encounters issue, though; I also don’t roll as many Mythic encounters as I think I ought to, either. A while back, I stopped adjusting my Chaos Factor at the end of every scene because too many of my scenes got stuck in a low-chaos rut; perhaps locking in a high Chaos Factor will keep the drama going while also allowing more random encounters to appear. There is also a chance my dice are cursed; good thing I backed the latest round of Honest Dice, I guess!
Shadowdark’s random encounters sometimes feel too random. When I do roll an encounter, the prompts I get from the Shadowdark core rules don’t always serve my story, and I’ve found myself taking pains to avoid playing out scenarios that feel too out-of-left-field. I think I’ve subconsciously come to want random encounters to operate more like plot twists—surprises that create interest and drive the narrative forward—rather than an unpredictable death-from-above scenario that interrupts my story. Mythic’s Random Events spoil me in this way, with their intrinsic connection to evolving lists of Characters and Threads, but that system almost takes the concept too far in the other direction, where nothing can happen that doesn’t directly serve the story. I think the best path forward is to learn from my past: in The Earth Opens, that near-TPK event was rolled from Shadowdark’s encounter tables, but I put in the extra elbow-grease to interpret the event into something relevant to my narrative. Thanks, Past-Jared, that was a good idea and I’ve got to be less lazy.
My control of tension and pacing mirror my rizz at parties.
I’m calling the game I’m playing right now my second campaign, but really it’s just a second chapter of my first campaign. That’s right: one story, over 150 sessions, spanning almost a year and a half. I’m not fully in control, and I struggle to find effective ways to butt into my own conversation with this campaign. New threads sprout up and demand my immediate attention, derailing me thoroughly from the task I was already working on. And are there consequences for my PCs’ fleeting attention spans? Absolutely not—everyone in the corners of the world farthest from my current hex is perfectly content to hold their horses while I galavant around in the woods on some other little mini-quest. The result is a sprawling world that would be really rich and alive, if any of it knit together.
My first campaign was tidy as hell. It was just thirty-one sessions over a couple of months, and it told a totally full and satisfying story. I’m still trying to figure out how I managed it, considering it was my first bumbling try at anything remotely like this, but among other possible causes, I think a major factor was my world map. Campaign 1’s entire world was a roughly 7x7 hex circle that was mostly rolled up in advance, complete with settlements and points of interest. I decided that my characters were foreigners and would discover the lay of the land as they went, but there were well-defined invisible fences surrounding them. My second campaign, by contrast, started as an experiment in more of a “sandbox” approach. The map was bigger, but totally blank, save for one wee hex with a settlement in it in the far east. Every location I’ve visited in the many months since the campaign began has been generated on the fly, either by Shadowdark’s overland map generator or by some narrative necessity (e.g. the exiled King found refuge in another settlement, therefore I guess there’s got to be a settlement around here somewhere). The next time I spin up a fresh campaign, I might try going back to my first technique to see if it actually gives me some control over the length of my quest, or if that’s just a coincidence.
In the meantime, I’ve got a very long story to wrap up, so I’ve been experimenting with Clocks. Borrowing from the Cyberpunk RED rules, when something needs a bit of tension, I make a d6 dice pool, define one or more Triggers, and finally define an Event. The dice pool can be anywhere from three to six dice, depending on how long of a “fuse” the clock needs. Triggers can be narrative or mechanical, from “every time the party explores a new room” to “every failed Stealth check.” And the Event is simply what happens when time runs out. So far, this hasn’t caused a ton of trouble for my party, but the practice does add a level of structure and consequence to my party’s actions that helps a bit with this feeling of my GM being totally out of control. My hope is that, with more brutal use of clock mechanics, my characters will be forced into difficult (read: interesting!) situations where the only path forward is the lesser of multiple evils. It doesn’t mean “sprint past all potential side quests,” but it does introduce situations where narrative doors must close whether I’m there to see them through or not. We’ll see if it helps keep broader storylines alive, or if the world leaves me behind.
Choo Choo: ding dang but I railroad myself a lot.
A constant theme in my metagame is mitigating my tendency toward railroading: just freely writing down everything that unfolds in my imagination, and forgetting to actually play the game. While I have yet to accidentally roleplay through something explicitly mechanical like a combat encounter, I am serially guilty of conducting long, consequential conversations with NPCs without a single thought to the Game of it all. It’s one thing when all I’m doing is adding depth and flavor to a scene, but it’s another thing entirely when I’m developing canon about the world and the consequences of my actions within it without consulting the rulebook.
I place a fair amount of blame on Mythic for these regular lapses in my attention to the game. The system’s core concept is “leading with expectations,” i.e. the thing that’s most likely to happen, probably does happen. Mythic’s procedures step in to add chaos (literally; a Chaos Factor is part of the system) to those expectations, but it’s only invoked when the player chooses to ask the Oracle a Fate Question about what’s going on. Allowing such a subjective, loosey-goosey trigger for the system’s core procedure makes it pretty easy to get into the flow of the narrative and just write a dang fantasy novel, instead of playing a game.
There are also a lot of situations where it’s not clear which—if any—procedure at my disposal is appropriate to invoke. A real example: while searching for clues in a mystery, my characters find a bundle of letters. I can use Mythic Fate Questions or d6 yes/no oracles to come up with some facts about them: the handwriting looks adult, not childlike; it seems more masculine than feminine. Random tables give me some flavor: the tone of the letters is reverent, and a complication they discuss is that “one of two things is required to advance: balance, or trust.” This is all great stuff, but what the hell do the letters say? I’m trying to resolve a mystery here, and I know this is an important clue. I also know what I want the clue to be, because despite my best efforts, I am always writing this story’s expectations a little bit ahead of where I’m actually playing. But I need to discover something here, something specific but potentially surprising, and it’s not always clear how to get there. There are plenty of tools out there for generating NPC behavior and simulating conversations (UNE, Triple-O, etc), but none seem to fit this situation in the way I’d like. Mythic’s rules for running mysteries basically say, “Welp, these letters are the Clincher Clue, so just vibe a justification for why they’re the answer,” and if I allow for that then it gets me out of the rut. But in that moment I’m still left feeling like I’m making up a story rather than playing a game.
A fun balance between crunch and momentum is elusive.
I love rulebooks. I own about a dozen different systems, and I’m waiting on the Shadowdark Western Reaches and Dragonbane Trudvang Kickstarters to wrap up and ship on top of that. The crunch—procedures that seek to gamify or simulate open-ended roleplaying scenarios from romancing a bog hag to managing the political dynamics of half a dozen interstellar factions—is a big part of what drew me into TTRPGs in the first place. It tickles the same thing in the back of my brain as rigging an illustrated character for animation, or building a procedural shader system for a 3D render: I just love the idea of setting up a Rube Goldberg machine that accepts any old input I throw at it, then watching what comes out the other side. But as much as I love that stuff, as a game, gosh it slows things down to spend two-thirds of my session time sifting through rulebooks. My grasp on the balance between adopting rules robust enough to support an exciting game, and getting the mechanics out of the way of the sensation of immediacy, is tenuous at best.
Using mechanics to minimize my railroading problem seems like an appropriate use of crunch. Systems designed more specifically for solo play, like Ironsworn or Astroprisma, do a better job than all my gooned-together resources at proceduralizing play. But too much of that kind of crunch can be a liability, too. In Shadowdark, for example, while procedures for combat strike a good balance between speed and detail, I find that the rules for tracking money and hexcrawling all become pretty tedious to execute as a solo player. In many cases I’ve organically made house rules around those points without even realizing it, and that tells me I’m not vibing with the crunch in those areas.
Currency and shopping, in particular, are a pain point for everything but Carousing. Blowing my party’s entire net worth on XP through Carousing is quick and mechanically useful—absolutely love it, no notes. Beyond that, though, there isn’t enough worth buying (nor enough inventory space) to make money management engaging. I don’t knock the official gear list for being too short; it’s functional first and keeps things moving, which is nice. When I imagine the idea of sifting through any number of supplemental gear tables just to make a town bazaar feel full and interesting, I’m grateful that Shadowdark keeps it svelte. I think this is probably a situation where I’ve just got to pick and choose a cocktail of mechanics that keeps my sessions interesting and leave the rest by the wayside. In this case, I wonder if my play style demands a transition to abstract wealth, or a tweaked approach to shopping.
A draft for my solo roleplaying procedure.
Warts and all, I am for the most part pretty happy with where I’ve landed in my solo practice. Here are the resources I’m using right now, and the parts they play:
Shadowdark RPG for the core rules: character creation and advancement, magic (I love the slotless “cast til you fail” concept), combat (including gear and monster stat blocks that balance well with Shadowdark-created characters), and other foundational mechanics. In the absence of other resources, I defer to Shadowdark.
Mythic GME 2E is my Game Master. I use its Fate Question system instead of the Solodark oracle and tend to start here if I’m looking for a random table to clarify oracle results. I like its Scenes and Random Events, and, by extension, the Characters and Threads Lists make for terrific scaffolding for a narrative. I’ve also used the Mystery system from Mythic Magazine Volume 6 with some success; it’s the same DNA as the main book, but with some guardrails that prevent an open-ended investigation from meandering too much.
Prima Materia by Man Alone has quickly become my go-to oracle whenever I need to generate something to interpret that starts with a little more meat on the bone. For example, its Complications and Spin the Wheel tables create very concrete results without feeling too limiting. Prima Materia’s core mechanic, the 2d12 + 1d6 “Portent,” is an absolute winner whenever I need to gauge something squishy about the tone of a situation. It’s even very helpful for generating discoveries out of thin air, for example, seeding NPC conversations when the NPC is giving me information I haven’t yet been privy to myself.
Triple-O is fairly new in my arsenal but I’m so glad I have it. It’s a very lightweight little procedure for determining a character’s behavior, actually intended for use as a PC emulator, but I think it’s just all-around useful when I’m not sure how any particular person might act in a given situation.
The Monster Overhaul by Skerples comes out literally every time I think I’m about to enter combat. With narrative relevance in the driver’s seat of my entire practice, this book provides so much incredible context for a wide range of fantasy-coded TTRPG monsters, and gives my characters opportunities to navigate encounters creatively without always resorting to combat.
Cyberpunk RED is only in play for its clock system, so far. The rest of its [dense, arcane] content doesn’t translate super well outside of an actual CPR game, so far as I can tell, but the clocks are great, and I’m hungry to solo a CPR campaign to take the rest of the rules for a spin.