Sunday, May 28, 2023

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 ***

8 comments:

  1. Rly nice note taking

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    1. I am thoroughly enjoying this. The different tools all seem to compliment each other well and make playing a breeze. I am simply blown away by what Midjourney can do and how much immersion it can add to the game by developing images on the fly. Simply stunning.

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  3. This is very cool. I like that you're explaining your flow for how you're doing it.

    I recently got an iPad, and after your April "month of mapping" I got GoodNotes to try and use it for doing some solo roleplaying. Although I'm planning on using White Box (with your character cards) and starting with Axebane's Deck of Many Dungeons. Trying to ease my way into it.

    So thank you very much for your inspirations.

    PS: Your handwriting is much much better than mine, so don't beat yourself up about it.

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    1. Thanks Freddy! I am glad I was able to inspire you, while I play because I enjoy it, I post these to help others who want to solo. I had such a struggle when I started, once I ‘broke the code’ I knew I needed to show others! Good gaming, my friend!

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  4. Looks really good! I love how vivid the world you created is depicted. Must really inspire the roleplay. Might I ask what you are using for your world map generation? I would love to add this to my solo stuff.

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    1. Thank you. Actually that map was made by the guy behind the solo co-op campqign over on Legendkeeper. I think he me tioned he used Inkcarnate.

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