Solo expeditions, part IV

Wisely deciding to leave the tomb and the monstrosity they discovered, the band retreats to the outside of the tomb, catch their breath and take stock of the treasures they have uncovered. Then they trek back to Lakefield to celebrate and sell their wares.

Back in the small town, Ish visits the temple and make a donation/sacrifice to the building of a new chapel for Saint T, while Hobbs and Bree hit a lucky streak and sell everything for a windfall of profit!

Hobbs & Bree head to the Blade & Tankard, hoping to get some info on the mining operation they had heard about before leaving town. Instead, a new NPC notices they are flush with gold and approaches them with an idea. Over the course of the next six days, they come to an agreement with Rei, and then strike a deal with a local inn owner that is looking to retire! Suddenly, we find ourselves to be co-owners of The Stabbing Dragon inn!

Now, I don't know about you but this is something I had never come across in gaming, the players opting to purchase a complete inn! So I went searching the web for ideas, keeping an eye on something simple but logical. I came across these after a little searching and decided to use them.
https://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2011/02/construction-rules-for-classic-d.html

Rob will enjoy this part....nitty gritty mathy part.
I figured out the cost to build an inn, roughly 700gp using the readily available forest to pull lumber from. Then I figured out a rough idea of how many rooms with would have (10), how many would be utilized on a daily basis (3 on average), what the resulting annual total that would result in. 1,095gp. Having been involved professionally in the purchase of a company, I decided to use a little of that knowledge here. To determine the selling price of a business, my CEO used a process of adding existing capital (ie the value of the stock in the warehouse, in this case I used the 700gp cost to build the place) and the average sales total for the year, he used 1.5 times.  (I have no idea if this is 'correct' but that is what he used).

Here, I used 1.5 and 2.5 annual sales to get a rough range for the sales the place generated over time, 1642 and 2740. Adding these to the cost to build, I get 2,342 and 3,440 as a range of asking price from the existing proprietor. With that, I went to work.

I determined that Rei had 1,000gp to put forward, along with another 200gp in start up and operating funds. My band could put together 1,600gp towards the purchase along with matching the 200gp in operations funding. Using Mythic to simulate haggling for the price, I ended up with the final sale price being 2,600, just at the top end of our capital. Leaving us 400gp in operational funding.

For the image, I found an image I liked on Google, then used it as a 'seed' for Midjourney to create an image to use for the inn. I think the image ended up being larger than I had planned or calculated, but maybe the seller was motivated. :-)

The band now has a base of operations, they are keeping two rooms to use for themselves and will get some revenue from the operation of ol' Stabbo.

PDF of the entire game so far:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17kG9IJn-V_fWh_vNmdnSkC-2Q6TzNtL2/view?usp=sharing

Side note: I realized I had used the wrong hex number for the location of the Shelin Hill, that has been fixed now.

Solo expeditions, part III

Continuing adventures of my little band in the solo West Marches campaign. I have improved my MidJourney skills over the course of the week, and I have really enjoyed adding thematic tones to the game through the AI generated images. 

After lucky rolls and avoiding a trap that would have likely killed one member, the band stumbles in a very cool room. “Treasure room” was the randomly generated purpose of this room, and so I threw that text into MJ with excellent results. This was quite a departure from what I was picturing in my head with a trashed and devastated room that was just a shadow of its former self. One thing that caught my attention in all of the randomly generated images was small, humanoid forms amid the squalor.

One bit I wanted to quickly comment on:
One thing I thoroughly enjoy about running games for others is while I may have an idea or overall idea of the game, the players’ creativity and actions will frequently create a very different picture from what I was expecting. Solo uses random tables and has always given me a similar feeling of excitement of discovering the unknown. Using MidJourney produces an almost identical benefit, in many ways even better. This room is a perfect example. In my mind I pictured a 20 x 20 rectangular stone room with a couple shelves or tables with random mundane items that the band could collect as treasure. Instead MJ provided me with a far more dramatic room that was multiple levels and introduced a completely different thematic tone. It also provided me with the opportunity to add an interesting NPC for role-playing!

This page actually took me two days to get through. I struggled coming up with not only who or what Terez was, but his personality, goals, and even why he was there. I also realized that my low level  PCs could walk away from here with massive amounts of treasure, I did not want to do that, and so it took me a while to come up with reasonable treasure and reasons why they could not walk out of here billionaires. You also might notice that I decided to start voicing my characters speech. Though I did not spell it out previously, I have been thinking about their speech and personalities in my mind, but I decided to start documenting their thoughts and speech in hopes that it would make it a more engaging read.

And this is where the dice decided they hate me. At first I expected the monk would be a simple zombie or perhaps mummy. Things did not turn out that way, and utilizing the tables in Perilous Wilds created something completely different. And again my expectations were utterly knocked aside. When I rolled that it was an aquatic squid my initial idea was a rather small creature. MidJourney thought otherwise and gave me this instead.

Needless to say, we quickly decided we were running. 

And for once the dice played along and allowed our little band to escape….

Until next time!

Solo expeditions, part II

 Again we delve into the solo west marches campaign ran on LegendKeeper! Again, I used Goodnotes on my iPad to track the adventure, Shadowdark as the ruleset, and Mythic GME as my oracle. I am using Midjourney to generate artwork on the fly for this. You can click any of the images to enlarge and attempt to read my chickenscratch writing. 

Our intrepid little band of adventurers have decided to head to the rumored Shelin Hill, to the newly discovered entrance to .... something. The band sets out from Lakefield.

The entrance (MJ generated)

As they approach the entrance, something moves...

Excuse me while I gush at that fucking amazing piece of art.

Holy shit Batman, that is kickass!

....and on with the adventure!

The battle continues...

I LOVE being able to reach into the Shadowdark PDF and snip the spells right into my notes. Since I am new to this exact system (yeah, it is OSR, but slightly different here and there), having the spells right there allows me to double check effects, ranges, etc. LOVE LOVE LOVE it!

I also took a moment to draw up a map (in my usual style and means) so that I had a clear idea of what it looked like. At this point I was not sure what we were going to find in the room. Recalling my notes from earlier, I had written "minor danger" in this room, so I quickly thought up a trap that made sense given that a troll lived here and likely came right through this area before we cooked it.

I also wanted to mess with MJ some more and see what it could dream up. Five minutes later, I was not disappointed. Frack me, I am loving MJ to create images to make the game more immersive.

End of "Session 2"

Solo explorations with Shadowdark and Mythic GME

 A bunch of cool people over on the Reddit Solo RPG community started up a co-op West Marches style world on LegendKeeper and I have started a new solo game using Shadowdark set in this world. You can see the original post here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Solo_Roleplaying/comments/13oxqhf/recruiting_for_solo_westmarches/

I have been using my iPad and the GoodNotes app to solo for about a month now, playing three different games and I think I have finally narrowed down a good process. I am not sure how I want to present this to folks (YouTube seems to be the cool kid way to do things these days, so perhaps I will eventually will put together a video in the future). For now, I shall provide screencaps of the pages on GoodNotes. First up are my character cards. I created cards for Shadowdark (see the previous post), these will contain enough details to play without being overwhelming and covering lots of unneeded details. The image was created using MidJourney (the guys running the world have MJ accounts are creating images for us on the fly....soooooooo freaking cool).

Next, I created a page with some screenshots captured from the LegendKeeper (LK hereafter) page. For those familiar with Mythic, the 1/5 thing is my note for tracking the scene - 1 in this case -  and the Chaos Factor - starting at 5 for now -. My PCs are starting out in LakeField, that's the blue shield-looking thing in the lower portion of the hex map. 

The way I am using GoodNotes has 'narration' in black ink and mechanics or oracle processes in red. Die rolls are the red circles. While probably not too useful for you, it helps me keep track of things easily. Names and important things are highlighted with yellow to help stand out from the wall of text.

My party split up as they entered town and some interesting things developed. We discovered why Torga the half-orc opted to NOT enter Lakefield, this could have some interesting implications down the line, thanks Mythic! That is one thing I am really enjoying about solo with oracles (versus scripted soloing like Choose Your Own Path books), the story takes interesting and completely unexpected turns. Before she was a boring half-orc, now she has an interesting backstory!

We also found some rumors about the wilderness that surrounds Lakefield, including one very interesting hilltop that we discovered includes a dolmen begging to be explored! Once I knew there was something interesting at this location on the map, I switched to Shadowdark's random tables to generate the details on the dolmen.

This was played out over the last three days here and there, usually after work for 15-20 minutes. I have been very busy and more focused on work and figuring out how I want to run this solo (structure, how to keep things organized, ruleset, etc). So now that I have this figured out, I think it will go a little quicker.

*** And yes, my handwriting sucks, most of this was done laying in bed instead of at a desk ***