Solo Gaming Fiction: Bad Medicine (pt.1)

One of the things I make a point of doing any time I am reviewing a TTRPG is to play a couple of sessions of it in solo mode so that I can get a feel for how it plays at the table. If I am going to share a game with you, I want to make sure I am doing my best to have good information. It is not enough to describe the mechanics of a game; I want to have a sense of game play.

This unfortunately slows down my reviewing process - a lot.  Recently, one of my kids has developed some pretty extreme issues related to the way his autism expresses itself. I have had to drop everything - including work - to take care of the little guy. Finding the time to sit down and take a trip into a dungeon or into outer space has been hard as of late. And when I do, it has been more for the joy of playing than for the purposes of the blog.

 But I wanted to relate a cool story from a recent solo game. I decided to sit down and play a round of the 2022 Mongoose edition of Traveller so I could have a better basis of comparison to Cepheus Deluxe and Stars Without Number, which I want to finally review properly in the near future.

This is the first adventure of my home Traveller campaign; and I will present it in four parts to make it more digestible than last year's Death in Space story. 

Game Review: Cepheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition

Author(s): Omer Golan-Joel, Richard Hazlewood, Josh Peters, & Robert L. S. Weaver 

Publisher: Stellagama Publishing

System: Classic Traveller / Megatraveller

Marketplace: DriveThruRPG

 Cehpheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition is a retroclone that mixes elements of Classic Traveller with Megatraveller and a few more modern upgrades to make it play a little more smoothly.

About two years ago I ran a campaign using White Star: Galaxy Edition as a base set on a starship called the C.H.V. Natani, and posted play reports here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It was meant as a short game to give us a little break while some of our players dealt with life issues that made dedicating time to our heavier more involved Silver Gull campaign was difficult. While I was playing White Star with my friends, however, I kept running up against the limitations of the system.

My players didn't find starship battles in White Star as exciting as they wished they were. A couple of players wanted to dabble in mercantile endeavours, which White Star wasn't built for (heck, one of my players was a gmae dev' on Elite: Dangerous and was hoping for a game experience like it) And while they enjoyed some of the silliness of space-faring rockstardom and jedi powers to an extent, they ultimately preferred the adventures where the characters' odd superpowers didn't come into focus. In other words, they really would have been happier playing Traveller.

And so I looked for a Traveller-based game that I could grab in hardcopy at a reasonable price, because I am fed up with .PDFs. Ideally I wanted something I could get both physically and digitally, and so I settled on Cepheus Deluxe and I am glad that I have.

Apellomancy

 I am co-writing some adventures with my son for his schoolmates in Basic Fantasy RPG. We decided to design a style of magic based on names and nicknames to play a role in the early adventures. This led to us designing five spells created by the feared Appellomancer, Ngo-Gua whose tomb the PCs will be raiding in search of a book of the True Names of evil spirits (the Numaomicon). 

I thought I might share the spells here to offer up some humour. 

The PCs might be able to find Ngo-Gua's spellbook and thus acquire and these for their own nefarious purposes. 

Making a Zine Accessible to the Incarcerated

Okay, fair warning, I am going to go a bit out of character here and speak my mind on a topic that isn't gaming. I keep my blog apolitical because getting involved in discussions of the Political with strangers on the Internet is exhausting, fruitless, and these days attracts bullshit gestapo behaviour from illiberal assholes on both sides of the spectrum. 

Shortly after I made Drakken in 2022 I was approached by an organization in California that was dedicated to promote literacy in prisons. Apparently, Dungeons & Dragons was their most requested reading material from inmates at the time. D&D being expensive as it was at the time was simply not possible, but the potential benefits of TTRPGs for inmates was too good to pass up. They were hoping that I would be willing to let them, for a modest fee, distribute Drakken, remixed a bit to meet their requirements.

I told them they could have it for free.

Channeling My Inner 10-Year-Old

My last two articles (pt. 1, pt. 2) covered the creating of a cozy campaign I had intended for my family for slow and rainy days. It was a response to the spell that the game Stardew Valley seemed to have over my wife and kids.

Personally I am quite proud of the creation, and thought it could be a lot of fun. But, sadly, its reception was, at best, lukewarm. Serves me right for jumping into a project before getting the buy in, I suppose.

So I asked my kids what they wanted in a role-playing game, and the best answer I got was "I want to do awesome stuff!"

"What kind of awesome stuff?" I asked.

"You know! Awesome!" was sadly as far as the answers got. 

So, I sat down and thought about what my kids seem to think is "awesome."

The Journal of Agatha Fizzyflask -- My Cozy Campaign Experiment (pt.2)

Created using HiDream I1 fast

In my last post I described how I created a tool that let me create a series of magical maladies, their cures, and adventure locations where the important ingredients to those cures would be found.

(I decided to skip the poisons in the end, because the material I already had was more than enough for what I needed.)

The next step was to put it all together! I envisioned a campaign where a few strangers to the Dommar valley would be stopping as their caravan waits for a rock-slide to be cleared from one of the passes through the mountains, and find themselves suddenly called to action to help on the basis that they are bored strangers, intelligent, and literate. The local witch, a she-gnome named Agatha is missing, and one of the villagers has come down with a perilous case of Frostbite Fever. They can't wait for Agatha any longer, so they beg the PCs to read Agatha's book and help them make the cure.

And this would be the core basis for the campaign. The PCs encounter some peril in the village that one of Agatha's cures or potions could resolve, and so the PCs find themselves replacing Agatha as the village herbalist, alchemist, and witch... at least until they can learn of her fate.

The Journal of Agatha Fizzyflask -- My Cozy Campaign Experiment (pt.1)

Stardew Valley is © Concerned Ape Games

My wife has been playing Stardew Valley a lot this summer; a game where you play a young person who has just inherited a farm in a fantastical world that sits at something like 1980s technology. It's what the video game industry, and more recently the TTRPG industry refer to as a "Cozy Game." Meaning it is focused on a small area, the stakes for success are failure are small: you might save a community, but the world is in no danger, and the relationships you build with the characters in the community is very much the focus.

Cozy games are not my cup of tea at all, but the game has sort of cast a spell over the rest of my family. My boys are excited to hear what has gone on in the farm and see the strange new fantasy farm animals and the useful item that my wife's avatar brings up from the dungeon. 

Well, if you want to run a good scenario the key is to figure out what your audience likes, and I got the feeling that something like Stardew Valley might make an appealing draw for a few weeks as we ease back into the school year.

So I sat down and asked myself "How can I make this interesting for me, so that I can get myself into the game enough to make it interesting to them?" 

 As I sat and pondered, my mind drifted to a concept that I have been spending a lot of time considering lately: the idea of prep as play.