Tuesday, September 17, 2024

[ShadowDark Solo] Rufus & Silas, session 01

 

I have discovered I think about gaming far more than I actually game these days. As such, I have determined that I am just going to shut up and do it all random, no preplanning, no thinking about it, just make it as I go sort of thing. I do not want to do too much 'prep as play' as it was, I just want to play. Two adventurers so it is easy to manage as well. So I rolled up two quickly and got a decent dawarven fighter and a really good halfling thief.

I am using three books as primary sources for this session:
ShadowDark RPG (link)
SoloDark (link)
Five Leagues from the Borderlands (link)

With the two characters I still needed a wee bit of prep, a sort of ‘why the F are we here’ kind of thing. A friend recently shared the Five Parsecs game and it got me looking at Five Leagues from the Borderlands. It has some really great tables for generating campaigns, as in the setting, reasons for there being a campaign, prompts, etc. it may not gel perfectly with an RPG, but a decent GM can make it work.

I used the tables to get a general setting where my game would take place:

Then a little set up to figure out why we are here and I kick off actual ‘playing’ Rufus & Silas. I dug a little into the background of my characters and discovered they stole from their employer. Here I used my oracle to determine results. Next I used the Dungeon Names table on page 7 of SoloDark to get the name of the hook that brought them here: The Forge of Dendor!

Using the information on the previous page, I feed it into Midjourney and got some cool, and more importantly, inspirational images that spark a little creativity in me. I was set to use the tables in ShadowDark to get the local tavern and inn names but they just came to me and I went with it, it is weird how that happens some times.

For the social interactions I am using a combination of my oracle and the NPC reaction table in ShadowDark. For many oracle questions it ends up being a 50-50 roll but that is great because it drives unexpected directions for the narrative. I love that Silas tries to get the server to loosen her lips with a wine and she is suspicious of him, perfectly natural! I used the NPC Qualities table on page 125 of ShadowDark to get the result "Six Fingers" and I thought it was a fantastic quality that could drive the entire character, so he became Sixfinger Sorak the barkeep. The drinks came from the Drinking table on page 137 of SD.

And that was session 1. I thought it went pretty well and has a great set up for further adventures and with a little fleshing out of the village and surrounding area. I can already see the potential for plenty of seeds for numerous adventures popping up. I ended up playing this 'session' out over the course of three days, playing a little here and there, some at work when the night got slow, etc.

PDF version of the session:  
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ef_zR4BfkDcsLsUh9HLPunpvgVUblWXq/view?usp=sharing

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