SoloDark Pt. 1: Session 0 - Setting Up

System & Setting, Campaign, & Characters

A Brief Introduction

I've been playing table top RPGs for the past 23 years (with a few breaks around college), and for the last 15 or so years, I've been a “forever GM”. Don't get me wrong; I love being a GM, but every now and then, I wish there were more surprises and that I could experience the different character perspectives. On top of that I don't have a frequent enough playgroup to experiment with many different systems even though I would enjoy it. My group and I love epic, multi-year-long campaigns, so we often pick a system and stick with it. This has been 5e for quite a while now.

I wanted to try a different system and I’ve always known that people play TTRPG’s solo but I wasn’t ever really sure how. When Shadowdark came out, I was highly interested and when the solo rules were released, I decided to give it a go. Quickly, I felt overwhelmed and confused. While I could find rules for how to play solo tabletop RPGs, I couldn't find much guidance on the actual process. I watched many videos and slowly figured it out, but I found myself wishing there was something reminiscent of Matt Coville's "Running the Game" but specifically for solo RPG play. So, I decided to give it a shot myself.

This blog isn't just another play-by-post because there are tons of those out there, many far better than mine will ever be. The goal here is to show what I'm doing to build the world, what I'm rolling, and how to use an oracle system to find answers. Hopefully, this will help or inspire someone to try solo gaming because I've had a lot of fun with it, and it really gets the creative juices flowing.

Setting and System

I'm going to use the Shadowdark system because I've been itching to play an OSR-style game without a ton of rules, and its relative simplicity will be easier to manage. For anyone who wants to follow along, I'm using rules from the core system and all three Cursed Scrolls. I'm also using the Solo Dark Oracle that Kelsey put together because I'd like to stay within the Shadowdark system as much as I can, at least in the beginning.

The Shadowdark Oracle is simple: when you have a question, ask the Oracle the question in a yes or no format. If you can, phrase it so that "yes" is the better option. Then roll a d20. On a 1 through 9, the answer is "no." On a 10, there is a twist, and then you roll a d100 for a prompt or two. On an 11 through 20, the answer is "yes." Additionally, all odd rolls except for a 1 have a "but" attached to them, so "yes, but," and 1s and 20s are considered extreme "yeses" or "nos."

I know people love the Mythic generator, and I've looked into it, but I found it overwhelming for a new solo tabletop gamer. I want to keep things simple for now. There are other systems I'd like to try in the future, and if all goes well, I might explore a different setting and system later.

Campaign

I've decided to play the Shadow Keep on the Borderlands as my campaign/adventure. I've chosen this for several reasons. First, I think it's harder to understand how to solo play a prepared adventure, so I'm hoping my advice and insights might be helpful. They were what I tried initially and I just couldn’t figure it out, so my successful games turned into blanks slates where I generated every hex, room, and NPC randomly. It was fun, but it's not hard to figure out. Anytime I tried to run a prepared adventure, I felt overwhelmed and lost, so we're going to give it a shot.

To prepare for the campaign I read through the introduction and the section on Dulwich (the main starting town) skipping over any random/rollable table (like rumor tables). Shadowed Keep has an amazing single page that has the Notable Locations and Notable People so I can see that in review and then learn more about it when characters visit.

As I read through it I made note of any specific NPCs that even a newcomer to the town would quickly know about (if you want to see how I’m doing this you can click the link to see my Notion notebook). I also sort of just made some mental notes on things that could develop into plots later (like the Blacksmith’s guild potentially splitting) but I’m not really ready to get into that yet.

I also really love that each location has several options for who is there, what’s going on, opportunities, and rumors. These look very easy to roll on if the characters decide to visit a location.

Creating Characters

Last up is character creation. I rolled all four characters using the traditional Shadowdark methods, just as if I were going to be a player. The only major difference is that I scrapped one character because it quickly turned into a duplicate of the first fighter. Since I'm running all four characters, I didn't want any to feel too similar. From a storytelling perspective, I paid close attention to anything odd or exceptional about each character and built out their personalities accordingly. Here’s what we came up with.

Gol’Shruk a male half-orc fighter (S +3, D +2, C -1, I +1, W -1, Ch +0). Interestingly I rolled his background as a wizard’s apprentice which I found a little odd. I decided to keep that in mind as we continue creating characters. My gut reaction here is that he couldn’t cut it as a wizard but found himself naturally athletic so decided to pursue is fighting skills. That said I want to get them all built and then go back and fill in details in case things come up that make the characters easy to connect.

Shiori a female, elf, witch (S -1, D +0, C -1, I +1, W -1, Ch +4). I got another wizard’s apprentice background and I feel like maybe Gol’Shruk and Shiori know each other from that experience. I think I may lean into the beautiful witch for her rather than the traditional creepy hag style witch.

Quibel a female, halfling, seer (S +1, D -2, C -2, I -1, W +2, Ch +1) the thing that jumped out about Quibel are her stats, not only are they kind of all around poor but -2 to Dex and Con is interesting. Makes me think something happened to her.

Strika a male, human, wizard (S +3, D +2, C +1, I +4, W +0, Ch +1) and here we have the opposite of Quibel. These stats are crazy and why is the wizard so freakin’ strong? There’s got to be a story there.

With the skeleton of the characters created I want to flesh them out a bit more, and one thing that helps me with that is to come up with three traits that would help define who they are and how they act. To help with that, and to maybe fill out a tiny bit of background on them I rolled a few times for each of them on the solodark prompts list for some inspiration and came up with:

Gol’shruk - [Kind, Untamed, Protective]

Shiori - [Hopeful, Strong Willed, Cunning]

Quibel - [Wise, Integrity, Slow to Act] (I also think Quibel is probably very old)

Strika - [Power Hungry, Self Critical, Cynical] (maybe he failed out as a war mage?)

After this I spent some time sort of just pondering the characters until I landed on a rough story for each of them.

Gol’shruk spent some time studying at a wizards college but found he was more athletically gifted and the classes were too frustrating. While there he met Shiori and the two of them became friends, and might become more. Eventually he finally decided to persue training as a fighter rather than a wizard and when Shiori was kicked out of the college the two of them left together.

Shiori went to the same wizards college as Gol’shruk and was doing will but she always wanted to twist her magic in other ways. Nothing dark or evil, just not the same old boring rote spells that teachers wanted. She decided she would do magic her way, and her drive for uniqueness eventually got her kicked out. Which the college behind her she and her “friend” Gol’shruk set out for adventure and glory.

[I decided to mess with a mechanic for a growing romance between these two. I rolled a d4+2 for each of them to see how they felt about the other on a scale of 1-10. Gol’shruk got a 4 and Shiori got a 6. I’m thinking that when they do something that might increase that I’ll roll and see if it increases or decreases by a point or two based on the circumstance.]

Quibel is an exceptionally old halfling that had spent most of his life in his village helping the people there. As the years went on he trained an apprentice that took his place as the village seer. In his village’s custom, he has set off for one last adventure, and a week ago met Gol’shruk and Shiori in a tavern and they all decided to work together to persue rumores of a bandit threat in the not-too-far-off town of Dulwich.

Strika had plans for his life, he trained from an early age to become a war mage and serve his country. He was exceptionally talented and everyone knew he was going places. He joined the martial forces young and was set to be one of the best, until he found out what they wanted him to do. Refusing to wage a war that he now knew his country stared out of greed he fled, deciding to try and put his exceptional talents to work for good somewhere in the world.

I think that’s it for now! Next time I’ll pick up with our characters in Dulwich.