This will be a hybrid mechanics discussion and playthrough, where the bulk of the fiction will come from excerpts from the Company’s campaign log. I won’t display all the rolls, but I will discuss those that introduce new mechanics or otherwise result in interesting (or deadly) events.

NOTE: there will be mechanic changes exhibited in these posts as issues arise and require fixing.

“The portal into the Burning Lands was a whirling vortex of orange, yellow, and red. Were it not for Commander Griffid, I sincerely believe young Ryderch would have turned tail and ran. But such is the Commander’s innate charisma, even the terror-filled eyes of the pikeman settled at his speech. He was the first to step into the portal, leading the four of us with courage I couldn’t muster even after my decades of campaigning.”

— Excerpt from Morfel the Hammer’s campaign log

Bright Crescent Company is, at its core, a dice generated dungeon crawl. So, as the Company enters the portal into the Burning Lands, we have to roll up the chamber they find themselves in. The basic gameplay loop is:

• Roll a chamber on 2d6

• Roll number of exits on d6

• Roll the contents of the chamber on 2d6

• Resolve the content roll via combat or skill check

Chamber Shape/Size - 2d6: 9, corridor 20’

Exits - d6: 1 exit

Chamber Contents - 2d6: 7, a seemingly empty -> d6: 2, empty

For the first chamber in hell, this was a fairly benign experience. As you can see by the Chamber Contents roll above, the seemingly empty chamber has a chance to actually have something in it and requires an extra d6 roll. Another important note: corridors always have one “exit” even if you were to roll a zero on the exit table since corridors logically have an outlet wherever the hall ends. You may choose to forego an exit roll in a corridor, or see if there’s more than one. In this case, I decided to only use the “logical” exit.

“The relative normalcy of the corridor we landed in was quickly displaced by the second chamber. Piles of flesh filled the small space. Some of it was fresh, with blood still seeping into the stone beneath our feet. A demon, its form concealed beneath a cloak of stitched together skins snarled as it raced to attack the Commander. He had little problem dispatching the foul thing with but two swift swings of his sword. The spectacle filled us with a mingled concoction of sheer terror and awe at Griffid’s composure in the face of such debauchery.”

- Excerpt from Morfel the Hammer’s campaign log

Each level of the Burning Lands (of which there are nine, plus the final boss room) has a theme. The first level is known as the Darkstone Tunnels. These tunnels are crudely bored Darkstone, a type of hell-stone that absorbs light. The denizens of the Darkstone Tunnels are all comfortable in dim light environments.

Once we pass the first chamber in a level, we can begin rolling to see if we find the stairs down to the next level. This is a simple d6 roll, with a one indicating the stairs have been found. The Cartographer unit, one of eleven different options for filling out your Company, increases this chance to 2-in-6. I rolled a 4, so no stairs.

Chamber Shape/Size - 2d6: 4, square 15’

Exits - d6: 2, one

Chamber Contents - 2d6: 8, piles of flayed skin line the walls → Flayer attacks.

Stairs - d6: 4, no

We also landed in our first combat of the game against a disgusting flesh-cloaked Flayer. This is a great time to give an overview of the combat system. Each enemy possesses a stat block displaying their Danger Rating (DR), Hit Protection (HP), and Armor (AR), as well as any attacks they have. Danger Rating is the number that you must beat on a roll of 2d6 + Strength in order to hit. On a hit, you roll your weapon’s damage dice, in this case my Commander is using his weapon with one hand and rolls a d6 for damage.

If you fail to roll equal to or higher than the enemy’s DR, you miss and roll the enemy’s damage dice. This is the only time enemies roll. You either hit and do damage, or you take a hit. It reduces combat from the four rolls of the original Oathbound combat loop to two. It also makes things a bit more survivable for a single character.

DESIGN NOTE: After playing through this level, I realized that combat was too easy. This prompted a return to Oathbound’s Attack and Defend rolls for combat. If you meet/exceed the enemy’s DR, you do damage. Otherwise you move into the Defend phase, where the enemy attacks. Here, roll 2d6 +STR (if blocking/parrying) or +DEX (if dodging). Meeting/exceeding the enemy’s DR means you take no damage. Otherwise, you roll the enemy’s damage dice and subtract the Commander’s AR to determine the damage taken.

In the case of this combat, I rolled a hit on the first attack round, doing a measly one damage, then double sixes on the second round. Double sixes on the dice results in a critical hit, doing the full damage of the weapon (in this game, that’s always 6) plus a roll of the dice. I did enough damage to take out a small army of Flayers with that hit. Flayers don’t give treasure, so we move on to the third chamber.

Attack: 2d6 + 3 STR vs DR8 = 10, hit → 1 damage

Attack: 2d6 + 3 STR vs 8 = 12 (crit) → 6 + d6 = 5 → 11 damage

“We never saw the oversized bat-thing that dove on the Commander within moments of entering its lair. The only warning we had was a high-pitched screech that threatened to put us all on the floor. The Commander, disoriented as he was, struggled to bring down the flapping, screeching bastard. My eyes may have deceived me, but I swear I saw Griff glow green as the creature sank its razor fangs into his shoulder. It seemed to be rejuvenated after that, but, fortunately for us, Griff struck it down with a lucky blow that sheared off a wing and allowed him to pierce it through the keel.”

— Excerpt from Morfel the Hammer’s campaign log

The third chamber presented the Company with their first Skill Check against a high-pitched screech. Skill Checks are listed on the Contents Table by a Danger Rating alongside an Attribute. In the case of this screech, it was a DR10 WIL check.

Griffid failed the check, and was confused. The entry also says that on top of being confused, the Company is also ambushed by a man-sized bat creature. You generally do not check for surprise in Bright Crescent Company, and the Commander attacks first. In some cases, such as the Chiroptyrant result, the enemy can ambush the Company. In this case, the Attack roll is considered an automatic miss, and the battle begins by rolling the enemy’s damage dice.

On top of being Ambushed, Griffid has also succumbed to confusion, one of several conditions in Bright Crescent Company. Conditions impose penalties that are not easy to get rid of. In the case of confusion, there is a 2-in-6 chance that the Commander will injure themselves instead of the enemy during combat. Basically, when confused, you must roll an extra d6 alongside the normal attack roll. If it turns up a 1 or 2, the Commander is damaged instead of the enemy. Fortunately, I rolled 4, 5, 5, and 6 on each of the four checks I had to make.

The Chiroptyrant, like most enemies in Bright Crescent Company, has a standard attack (d6 bite) and a special ability. The Chiroptyrant’s drain ability allows it to do d3/a damage and restore it back as HP. With its low HP (4), this isn’t too broken of an ability. Armor doesn’t decrease the amount of damage from abilities, so the Chiroptyrant managed to take 3 HP from Griffid and restore itself to full health.

“The stairs appeared surprisingly fast, and they weren’t even guarded. I don’t know what kind of security the Demon King has, but they need better leadership. Griff spotted an oddly shaped, and poorly hidden, lock box near the stairs. Where the demon filth discovered an enchanted rune I’ll never know. Afdan, the chirugeon, identified it immediately as a vitality rune. Will likely be useful the deeper we go into this hellhole.”

- Excerpt from Morfel the Hammer’s campaign log

Finding the stairs, as I did in the fourth chamber, does not mean you have to immediately descend to the next floor. If you have other avenues of progression, you may continue exploring. This is balanced by the fact that your resources (health, bandages, unit abilities, etc.) may become drained. Unit abilities, like the Chirugeon’s Heal Wounds (2x) and Restore (3x), don’t reset even with a rest.

Even when the stairs are discovered, you must roll for chamber contents. In this case I rolled a treasure chest and got lucky that it was neither an Imitator (think Mimic) or trapped. A roll on the treasure table resulted in a Rune of Vitality. Magic in the Oathbound world, and by extension Bright Crescent Company, is limited to Runes. Runes do a specific function (like restore HP, cure a condition, or give resistance to certain enemy types) and have a limited number of uses. In the case of the Rune of Vitality, it heals d6/a+3 HP and has three charges.

All in all, the first level of the Burning Lands didn’t prove to be too deadly. Commander Griffid is sitting at 13 out of 16 HP, and has acquired a healing rune. Things only get more difficult from here, though. The lower we travel, the deadlier the enemies, traps, and environment will become.

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Video Game Character Overview

In Morrowind, mechanical bonuses and penalties derive from Race, Gender, Attributes, and a selection of Major and Minor skills (five each). Race and Gender determine Attributes, with certain Attributes (such as Strength) being lower for females. Race also provides bonuses to a selection of skills (such as the Wood Elf’s +15 to Marksman, or the Imperial’s +10 to Speechcraft). Attributes, through a series of mathematical formulae, determine the resources of Health, Fatigue, and Magicka.

My go-to character has always been a Wood Elf with the preferred Attributes of Agility and Intelligence (base 60 Agility and 50 Intelligence). My Wood Elf would always have Marksman, Short Blade, Sneak, and Light Armor as Major Skills. All of these skills, bar Short Blade, gain skill bonuses from Wood Elf. As an example, my Wood Elf would start the game with a Marksman skill of 50. Using the formula, my Wood Elf’s resources would equal 30 Health, 150 Fatigue, and 50 Magicka.

There’s a lot to making a Morrowind character in a video game, though much of the crunch is done on the back end by the game’s programming. Still, your choices matter and will determine the level of difficulty your PC has at the beginning of the game. Let’s see how we might translate this to a TTRPG.

TTRPG Character

There are at least three options to convert the Morrowind character experience to a tabletop game, each with varying degrees of complexity and fidelity to the source material. I think it’d be useful to discuss each of the ideas and go from there.

• 1:1

• Skills Only

• Attributes + Skills but condensed

1:1 Character Option

This would be the most extensive option, requiring us to keep all eight Attributes and twenty-seven Skills from Morrowind. It would also go a long way toward emulating the Morrowind experience accurately, though this presents some copyright issues if this project was to be released into the wild. In this case, we would need to gather up the Racial Attributes from a source like the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Wiki (UESP) and use them as the base line for creating our character.

[INSERT WOOD ELF RACIAL ATTRIBUTES IMAGE]

Next, we’d need to use the Morrowind classes, of which there are twenty-one, with their major and minor skills, as well as the option to make a custom class. We can use UESP again to get the information we need. Finally, Racial Skill bonuses have to be considered. We can, once again, use UESP to gather that information. This only gets us the basic Attributes and Skills of a character. There’s still the derived attributes of Health, Fatigue, and Magicka, as well as Racial Abilities, Powers, and resistances to the various elemental magics and disease. This is all doable through the use of internet resources like UESP or a tool like the Morrowind Character Planner.

The 1:1 option will absolutely get us closest to emulating the Morrowind character, and there are benefits to that. However, this option presents us with several difficulties as well. Chief among these is copyright. While there are at least two unofficial Elder Scrolls TTRPGs, attempting to put something directly connected to such a large and legally protected Intellectual Property out for the public is unwise to say the least.

Secondly, this option is the exact opposite of simplicity. My design philosophy is shifting these days from verbosity and complexity to conciseness and simplicity. I don’t want to have fifty pages explaining the ins and outs of creating a character. You could absolutely do that, if you had the mind to, of course. But I don’t think it’s within the purview of this experiment.

Condensed Attributes + Skills

This leads us to our next option, Condensed Attributes and Skills. Though Skyrim simplified things to the disappointment of many fans, there was some real reason behind the simplification. There are twenty-seven skills in Morrowind. Several of these skills have conceptual overlap, such as Speechcraft and Mercantile, Security and Sneak, as well as Athletics and Acrobatics. The same can be said of Attributes. Strength and Endurance could be combined, as could Agility with Speed and Intelligence with Willpower. Luck could be dropped completely (or turned into a boon/bane system of some sort).

In this version of the character creation system, you’d only have four Attributes: Strength, Agility, Personality, and Intelligence. In this case, we would take the condensed attributes, add them together and average them out (then round up). Our Wood Elf example would start with 30 Strength, 50 Agility, 40 Personality, and 35 Intelligence. Most of this is very similar to what they would have in the 1:1 system, with the exception of Intelligence (because Wood Elves have an INT of 40 and a WIL of 30).

Strength: 30

Agility: 50

Personality: 40

Intelligence: 35

The derived resources would come from a combination of various Attributes (Strength x2 for Health, Strength and Agility for Fatigue, and Personality and Intelligence for Magicka). In the Wood Elf example, we would have 60 Health, 80 Fatigue, and 75 Magicka. That’s a fairly respectable amount of resources.

Health: 60

Fatigue: 80

Magicka: 75

In terms of Skills, we’d combine several to bring the number of Skills down to a more manageable level and root out redundancy. The difficulty here will be determining how racial skill bonuses are applied if we combine skills, though I think it’d be too much trouble. The graphic below will show the condensed skills list.

Weapon Armor Skill Magic Arts

Axe Heavy Armor Smith Healing Arts

Polearm Light Armor Alchemy Illusory Arts

Blades Block Enchant Summon Arts

Bludgeon Unarmored Speech Anima Arts

Marksman Stealth Transformative Arts

Athletics

The biggest strength of this method is that it is still relatively close to the source, while being somewhat simpler to manage. In terms of weaknesses, it does require us to condense things down and that might lose some of the variability that the 1:1 option offers.

Skills Only

In Morrowind, Attributes are the gauge of how capable a character is overall while Skills are representative of how capable a character is at a certain thing. Ultimately, besides the derived resources, Attributes don’t really make that big of a difference in the context of a TTRPG. It would further simplify things to nix Attributes all together, with the biggest challenge presented by this being how to determine the derived resources. With this option, we could maintain the twenty-seven default skills present in Morrowind, or condense them to make the game even more user friendly.

A deeper discussion of Health, Fatigue, and Magicka will come when we finalize the character creation rules.

This is the simplest option, but does bring us a few more steps away from the source material. It will still require figuring out how to assign Skill bonuses for condensed skills (if we opt for that), and maintaining a reliance on information sources like UESP to build the character.

Resolution Mechanic in Brief

Regardless of what option we choose to run with, the resolution mechanic for any action would be as follows:

• Determine what you’re going to attempt,

• Decide on which Skill best fits the action and roll the d100,

• A result equal to or less than the Skill’s level is a success, otherwise you’ve failed

• Imagine how you succeed, or what complication(s) arise from failure and resolve them

Using Morrowind as Inspiration

For a game that would require a fair bit of work, should we decide to take this from experiment to full release (as several of you seem to want), I think I’d opt to use Morrowind as inspiration for the setting and mechanics while not being beholden to the IP. The strong points of Morrowind as a setting are the alien nature of the flora and fauna, the rugged, unforgiving landscape, and the threat of a variety of natural and divine forces. What we create could be used to play within Morrowind as presented in The Elder Scrolls III or The Elder Scrolls Online, but wouldn’t be dependent upon that IP to work.

To that end, I think the strongest choice would be a Condensed Attributes and Skills game that uses a skill list inspired by, but not taken from, Morrowind itself. This would permit people to play on the island of Vvardenfell or take their adventures to any of the lore-rich territories of Tamriel if they so chose, but would also allow for player creativity and worldbuilding not beholden to a set legendarium.

Let me know what you think? Do you want a Morrowind clone in TTRPG form? Or something that would allow you to play in that setting or in a setting of your own making (using provided tools)? Which form of character building would you prefer? 1:1, Condensed, or Skills only?

Your thoughts matter here!

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This will be a hybrid mechanics discussion and playthrough, where the bulk of the fiction will come from excerpts from the Company’s campaign log. I won’t display all the rolls, but I will discuss those that introduce new mechanics or otherwise result in interesting (or deadly) events.

NOTE: there will be mechanic changes exhibited in these posts issues arise and require fixing.

In Bright Crescent Company, character creation occurs in two parts. First, you create your Commander. The Commander is the player character, whose Skills are used to make attacks and skill checks throughout the game. The second component is the Company. There is a list of eleven different units and you choose four of them. Each Company unit provides the Commander a bonus, usually to attack rolls against specific demon types.

Before I wrote the prologue, I sat down with the play test version of the game and got to rolling. Bright Crescent Company presents two 2d6 name tables to roll on. All of the names were adapted from The Old North’s “Brythonic Personal Names” list to keep that post-Roman Britain feel that pervades both Bright Crescent Company and Oathbound. I rolled a 7, giving me Griffid.

Note: A while back I did some genealogical research into my paternal lineage. My great-grandmother’s paternal line—Griffin— goes all the way back to Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the only Welsh king to unite all of Wales (ca. 1055-1063 CE).

Commanders begin their mission with 16 Hit Protection. There’s no rolling for HP here. Sixteen HP provides a decent buffer between survival and death for a single character in a very dangerous environment. I want the game to be a challenge, but I don’t want it to end in three rooms because of terrible rolls.

Next up, we determine our Skills. There are only three in Bright Crescent Company, and instead of going with the more knightly oriented skills in Oathbound, I opted to use the familiar Strength, Dexterity, and Willpower. The game presents three stat arrays, keyed to present some level of difficulty selection. I opted for the default stat array (“Warrior” difficulty), and assigned the 3 to Strength, the 2 to Willpower, and the 1 to Dexterity.

While DEX is an important skill, especially in the many skill checks (both to avoid a hazard/special attack, and to sneak), I knew that I wanted Griffid to be a heavily armored Commander, which would make him struggle with DEX checks anyway. To that end, we can discuss the next stage of character creation: Equipment.

I chose to take a versatile weapon (a longsword). Versatile weapons can be used with either one hand or two. Using it one-handed gives it a d6 damage dice, while using it with two hands allows you to roll two d6s and take the highest (d6/a). The downside to the higher potential damage is that you can’t carry a shield and use the two-handed attack.

I also opted to give Griffud “heavy” armor. Like weapons, the kind of armor you wear in Bright Crescent Company is mostly about the fiction, or your mental image of your Commander. The type of armor (i.e. leathers, chain mail, scale mail, etc.) doesn’t really matter. What does matter, mechanically, is whether it’s “standard” or “heavy.” Standard Armor gives 1 Armor Rating, allowing you to negate 1 point of damage from most sources. Heavy Armor gives an Armor Rating of 2, but also a -2 penalty to DEX checks (as it’s cumbersome and loud).

You always start out with a Shield, which provides another 1 Armor Rating, assuming you have it “equipped.” For the beginning of Griffud’s descent into the Burning Lands, he carries his shield and uses his weapon one-handed, giving him a total Armor Rating (or AR) of 3. This, I hope, will increase his survivability.

That’s it for Commander creation. It’s a quick process that requires only one roll (for the name), and a few choices. Next up, we get to choose our four Company units. These units do not have stats, HP, or inventories. They are, for all intents and purposes, character modifiers. If you choose to play the game with a more narrative focus, they also serve as someone for the Commander to communicate with and can add dramatic flair.

Each of the eleven Company unit options provide some kind of bonus, whether through advantage against certain demon types, or spells for healing, providing light, or curing conditions. These units are presented on a 2d6 table, so you can randomize it if you want. For this play test, I did a mix of rolling and choosing. My first playtest, which used a completely different dungeon content table (that didn’t work well), I used the Ranger, Cartographer, Shield Warden, and Archer. In this play test, as you might have noted in the prologue, I am using the Champion, Chirugeon, Hydromancer, and Pikeman.

And that’s it! Getting started takes all of five minutes. There’s no inventory management, no torches to track, no rations. Next time, our brave Company will descend into the Burning Lands’ first level—The Darkstone Tunnels. This won’t be a traditional actual play. Instead, I’ll be mixing some bits of fiction with mechanical discussion, showing how the game is played.

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A couple weeks back, posted a note about video games they’d like to play as TTRPGs. Morrowind, the third “mainline” entry in the Elder Scrolls series of RPGs, was one such game. As an avid, and long-time, fan of The Elder Scrolls, I have also often wanted to play in the world of Tamriel in TTRPG format. There’s already a Skyrim board game, and at least two unofficial TTRPGs: TES: GURPS and the Unofficial Elder Scrolls TRPG (UESTRPG). There’s also a ShadowDark Skyrim setting by Chubby Funster called ShadowRim. Moreover, Ken Rolston, the lead designer of Morrowind and Oblivion, stated in a 2011 interview with the French Elder Scrolls site Wiwiland, that the mechanics of The Elder Scrolls were based on RuneQuest and Tamriel on RuneQuest’s Glorantha.1 As a d100 system, RuneQuest would make a great base for an Elder Scrolls TTRPG, but it is a hefty game and I am more inclined to want a simpler system. We’ll be trying to come up with such a system in these Mechanics Experiment posts.

Though I haven’t played it, it might be possible to emulate Elder Scrolls using Modiphius’s Fallout game as well.

Discovering Tamriel

I discovered the masterpiece that is The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind around 2005 while scrolling the GameFaqs main page in the computer lab at the community college I was attending. I immediately left school and went to the local game store to pick up a copy. As luck would have it, I was able to get the Game of the Year Edition that came with the base game plus the Tribunal and Bloodmoon expansions. I played it obsessively for a long while, but I never actually finished the story. This is a recurring trend for me with Elder Scrolls titles. I didn’t finish the Oblivion main quest until 2025! Anyone who’s ever played an Elder Scrolls game knows that the main quest-line isn’t remotely close to the best bits of the game. I remember creating my bald mage whose sole purpose was to find the Daedric artifacts scattered throughout the island of Vvardenfell and, with staff in hand, traveling the wierdly wonderful island for hours.

While I’ve played substantially more Skyrim at this point in my life (~1200 hours), owning the game on basically every system it’s on (yes, I’m part of the problem, I know), there’s no beating Morrowind for setting. The alien flora and fauna that call Vvardenfell home set the vibe for the game in a way that the more European settings of Oblivion and Skyrim just can’t accomplish. The resonant howl of a silt strider waiting patiently beside its dock defines this otherworldly experience in my mind.

Necessary Elements

In order to create a TTRPG that emulates the experience of Morrowind, I’ve narrowed down the core systems we must have to three. These three elements—Character, Adventure, and Combat—will provide the foundation for crafting a game that is fun, easy to pick up, and, hopefully, inspires the sense of wonder Morrowind always has.

The Character

The core component of Elder Scrolls, and the thing that many players spend hours on, is character creation. The Character is our avatar through which we experience the sights, sounds, joys, and pain of life in Tamriel. The same is true of any attempt to play in that world via table top games. If we don’t get the character and its intrinsic properties right—by which I mean producing a workable analog between the character sheet from the video game and the TTRPG version.

Let’s take a minute to look at how Morrowind deals with player characters. In game, a character possesses eight Attributes (Strength, Intelligence, Willpower, Agility, Speed, Endurance, Personality, and Luck), as well as a whopping twenty-seven skills linked to those eight Attributes. Attribute levels are determined by the character’s Race, Class, and Gender. Resources such as Health, Fatigue, and Magicka are determined by a mathematical formula based on various Attribute ratings. Skill levels are determined by the character’s chosen Race, Class, and Major/Minor Skill selection.

There’s a lot going on here both in terms of player choice (with Major/Minor skills, race, class, gender, etc.) and behind the scenes in terms of equations used to compute the various values. A TTRPG that emulates this really must be simplified. When we discuss Character, we’ll look at ways in which we might simplify character creation without losing the sense of build and choice that Morrowind, Oblivion, and to a much lesser extent, Skyrim are known for.

Of course, we can’t forget character progression. There’ll need to be a way to determine how a skill levels up, as well as how the character levels up. I have ideas for this, including having a system similar to Dragonbane where you mark skills for level up for either rolling really well or really poorly and roll against your current skill rank to see whether it goes up by 1 point or not.

Adventure

Existing within the world of Tamriel as a hero such as the Nerevarine, Hero of Kvatch, or the Dragonborn presumes adventure. In this section of the experiment, we’ll discuss everything from travel mechanics, discovering landmarks, and delving into caves and tombs—with my primary objective to have a playable Andrano Ancestral Tomb by the end of the experiment.

Traveling in The Elder Scrolls is free-form. You can go anywhere, at any time, and have an experience. In the case of Skyrim, this even includes jump-running up a sheer mountainside…it’s a feature not a bug. Whether you travel along the roads of Morrowind or across the alien wilderness, you’re as likely to encounter nothing dangerous as you are to be accosted by bandits or beset by dive-bombing Cliff Racers. You’ll discover tombs, caves, mines, shrines, and camps as you explore the rich island of Vvardenfell. Translating that sense of freedom of movement, danger, and discovery is a large ask for a pen-and-paper game, but one we must answer if we want a workable emulation of the Morrowind experience.

Combat

The greatest departure from a traditional Elder Scrolls experience will be found in the combat system. Elder Scrolls is an action-oriented combat experience, allowing you to move freely while engaging enemies—including running for your life. By necessity, a TTRPG version would be turn-based to some degree, even if we made all rolls player facing. And that’s only talking about melee combat. Trying to capture the diversity and power of Morrowind’s magic will be a challenge that might just be beyond the scope of this experiment—not saying we won’t try, but I’m not saying we will either.

The transition from action-oriented to turn-based combat may be a challenge to get feeling like Elder Scrolls, but the actual act of combat shouldn’t be overly difficult. Using a d100 roll against a Skill rank where lower is better should do just fine and emulates the combat decently well, as early game fighting is a series of stabs at a Mudcrab where three-quarters are misses.

A Group Effort

While I wholly intend to make this a solo-focused gaming experience, the experiment itself doesn’t have to be one. I welcome any and all input on this, and the future entries of the Mechanics Experiment series from the readers. Creation is best done in a group, where weaknesses can be shored up by the strengths of others.

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Ironsworn Legacies is the next iteration in Shawn Tomkin’s exceptional Ironsworn RPG family of games. It is currently in alpha and only available on the Ironsworn discord. The alpha playtest, as of 5 June, 2026, has been archived on the Discord server and may not be accessible any longer.

On 31 May, the alpha playtest documents went up on the Ironsworn discord server and, of course, I spent the rest of the afternoon reading and running a short playtest of the new material. Much of the familiar gameplay of Ironsworn and Starforged is intact, with the real changes being found in the Moves and resolution components.

Shawn has mentioned several times in the Ironsworn Legacies discussion threads that this version would come with Action Codices and he did not fail to deliver with this alpha playtest. The playtest gives us access to the Action Codex, which is currently limited to Journeys and Fights, and the Encounter Codex, which presents a single type of enemy, the Undying. The focus of the playtest was primarily to test out the Journey mechanics, which aimed to expand and enhance the journey rules of earlier titles.

Jorun, of Krakhold’s Seaguard, has been tasked by the sea fort’s commander to escort a seer who recently landed on the island from the relative safety of Krakhold to the fishing town of Whalon on the eastern coast. The journey should take the two of them around (d6 = 4) four days along the northern coastline.

The two set out early in the morning. Silence hung heavy over the pair as they started along the rocky beach away from the safety of Krakhold’s stone walls and alert guards. Jorun was familiar with this section of the coastline, having gone on several patrols and combat exercises in the area during his training, and didn’t foresee any major obstacles to impede their progress.

The seer seemed completely unfazed by the towering sea cliff they passed by around midday, despite it being the only known ancient settlement on the island. Scholars, what few there were these days, postulated that it was the earliest homes of the first Ironsworn to sail north from the old world, others that a people predating the Ironsworn had built it. The seafarers who docked at Krakhold claimed there were walking terrors of bone and tattered armor roaming the halls of the sea cliff ruin. Nothing moved that Jorun could see, so he chalked it up to superstition and academic imagination.

The Action Codex

The first thing I noted when reading through the Action Codex is that all challenges (whether a journey or a fight) is set to formidable by default. The codex provides a list of potential modifiers that move the challenge rank up or down (including distance, terrain, and weather for journeys, and objective importance, combat position, or enemy strength for fights). In my play through, I maintained a formidable rank for the journey because, while the terrain was relatively easy, the destination was about four days away. The single Fight was a dangerous challenge because the goal wasn’t to defeat the enemy but to escape it.

A thick bank of sea fog rolled in on the second day, when the sun should have been at its zenith. Jorun was instinctually on alert, and saw the threat before it had fully materialized. A humanoid form shambled from the fogbank, brandishing a rusty sword. Jorun shouted for the seer to run in the direction they were headed and engaged the Undying. There was little to be done against the undead creature without flame, and his weapon barely kept the creature back.

The seer stumbled in the fog, giving the Undying a chance to catch up despite Jorun’s repeated assaults. With nothing else for it, the sea-guard fan full on into the skeletal warrior knocking it to the ground. Jorun raced for the older man, pulling him to his feet and half dragged the seer up the coast. By the time Jorun allowed them to stop, both men were panting for breath. The Undying was nowhere to be seen, but the sea-guard didn’t trust that the undead monster wouldn’t follow.

As a bit of a recovering TTRPG design maximalist, I really appreciated the presentation of dials that could increase or decrease the challenge rank. In the past, I based the challenge rank of most things on how much focus I wanted to put on the activity in the fiction, or how long I wanted it to take me. Often, for the purpose of actual play fiction, I chose to go with dangerous as it provided a nice balance between focus and speed. For new players, especially, having these dials presented in this way is especially helpful.

The Codex also presents helpful tips and tables that can be used to flesh out, expand, or spark ideas. One of my favorites is the Journey Rumor table. I decided to roll on the Rumor table before beginning my journey with Jorun and the seer and got “factions clash over disrupted lands.” These rumors are meant to be used to provide potential events for the journey, and, in the case of Jorun’s adventure also provides some future quests.

Cresting a rise, Jorun gazed down into the small valley between mounds. He quickly dropped into a crouch, tugging the seer down with him. Scattered all over the hills were sea-weathered barrow gates. Each hill seemed to have at least two, others more, pock-marking their otherwise gold-green facades. In the valley, a group of smugglers lugged crates toward one of the barrow gates, which had been broken open.

Jorun quietly led the seer back to the beach, as far away from the disturbed barrows and foolhardy smugglers as he could manage. He drove the old man hard that day, putting more distance between the potential threat of both the disturbed Undying and the smugglers.

Journey Rumors (d100): 83, factions clash over disputed lands → interpretation: Undying have set upon a smuggler camp

Take Action

In previous iterations of the Ironsworn system, there are a variety of moves such as Strike, Clash, Secure an Advantage, or Face Danger. In Ironsworn Legacies this has been simplified into a catch-all move known as Take Action. When you Take Action, you envision what you are attempting to do, how you are attempting to do it (with edge, heart, iron, shadow, or wits), and then roll the dice. Legacies continues to use the d6 action die (now called the “fate” die) and 2d10 challenge dice. Strong hits, weak hits, and misses are familiar and haven’t changed.

What has changed are the outcomes of the move. Instead of the familiar “mark progress” or “gain Momentum” or “Pay the Price,” Legacies uses advantages and misfortunes. For a strong hit, you get an advantage for the success as well as potentially more advantages (for a potential total of three) if you had favored position (more on that shortly) or “tempted fate” (again, more on that shortly).

Advantages are things like marking progress, gaining momentum, finding an opportunity, or making a discovery. Each of these various advantages require a number of advantages, with marking progress and gaining momentum needing one advantage and making a discovery requiring three. As far as I can tell, advantages don’t stack, so you have to spend them as outcomes of the move you gained them on. If, for example, you gained three advantages on a strong hit, you could mark progress three times for that one move. Three advantages of the same type is the limit for a single move.

A weak hit generates an advantage and a misfortune, as it has always indicated a “success with complication” outcome. Misfortunes range from minor negatives like losing momentum, increasing tension in a scene, or facing a setback as well as major ones such as encountering a peril. A miss, of course, is all misfortunes all the time and can, in fact, produce three misfortunes at once depending on certain factors.

The advantage and misfortune system is one of the elements I struggled with the most in my play through. It is incredibly easy to want to mark progress for every advantage, at least it was for me. In fact, most of the time I did mark progress with the advantages. So much so that I don’t think I ever had more than +3/10 Momentum at any time.

Position

One of the new elements in Legacies is the inclusion of Positions. If you’ve read or played John Harper’s Blades in the Dark you’ll be familiar with this concept. There are three positions in Legacies: desperate, pressured, and favored. Position provides advantages/misfortunes you gain when making moves. If you Take Action from a desperate position and miss you’re going to accrue more misfortunes than if your position was favored. Position changes only as directed by the outcomes of Take Action. A strong hit will raise position (if applicable), a weak hit will only lower position if you tested fate, while a miss will always lower position one level (to desperate).

I don’t recall seeing whether position begins at pressured or favored, so I started at favored simply because my character started out from a place of safety and was traveling through familiar territory. I was fortunate in all of my rolls to never lose position (I don’t think I rolled a single miss, the dice gods favored me indeed!). I plan to pick Jorun’s tale back up at some point when I have some free time, so I’m sure this will be remedied.

Test Fate

This is one of those components that I didn’t really understand. I apparently missed the text that describes what testing fate is, and once I saw it, it made more sense. Basically, any time you take action and that action has a high-stakes outcome, you tempt fate. Scoring a strong hit on such an action gains you another advantage, while a weak hit provides you with both an advantage and a misfortune. It isn’t something that I used in my game but I can see it being important in more tense situations.

Final Thoughts

As someone who absolutely loves Ironsworn, this new edition is shaping up to be a largely promising step forward. With only two elements of the Action Codex provided in the alpha play test, there are still a lot of things we don’t know about how the game will play, and how it will differ from existing Ironsworn games, but it is a promising start.

All in all, my first experience with Legacies is positive. I maintain some reservations about positioning and, especially, the advantage/misfortune outcomes as opposed to set outcomes (such as “mark progress,” or “lose Momentum”), but I suspect those will be assuaged in future play tests and updates.

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This will be a hybrid mechanics discussion and playthrough, where the bulk of the fiction will come from excerpts from the Company’s campaign log. I won’t display all the rolls, but I will discuss those that introduce new mechanics or otherwise result in interesting (or deadly) events.

NOTE: there will be mechanic changes exhibited in these posts issues arise and require fixing.

Griffid fidgeted with the hem of his commander’s half-cloak while the Archmage known only as the Eagle droned on and on about the coming mission. He was honored, truly, to be the one to lead the small team of fighters into the depths of the Burning Lands. It was left unsaid that they were not expected to make it back, even still the reality hung like a heavy cloud over the gathering.

Lun’s magnificent round table was crowded with lords, dukes, generals and strategists from every kingdom and duchy within traveling distance. Usually a reserved space, where all were treated as equals, today it was awash with anxiety, tension, and, on occasion, outbursts of frustration. Griffid could relate. He itched for more action, less talk.

“I think that is enough for today,” the Archmage finally said, clapping his wiry hands together to silence any further discussion. “Commander Griffid knows his company’s part, Lord Lun is prepared to descend by way of the back gate I have devised. The rest of you know your roles. Tomorrow is a day of reckoning. We will put a stop to the incursions of the Demon King and his minions. Dismissed.”

Griffid waited for the gathered lords, dukes, and generals to depart before he forced himself to his feet, suddenly weary. His armor, heavy chainmail burnished to a bright sheen by his man-at-arms, clinked with each step toward the front of the room where the imposing Lord Lun stood gazing up at a portrait of his family: the infant daughter, Arcaria, in the arms of her mother, Ifined, and the young heir, Daron posed nobly alongside the mighty Lun.

“We do this thing for our families, and the families of our people,” the burly warrior said out loud. “Do you have a family, Griffid?”

“Yes, milord. A wife and daughter, not much older than your youngest.”

“Have you spoken with them? I know the mission we send you on may well end in death, and were there another way, I would not ask it of anyone—least of all a young father.”

“I have, milord. My parents will look after them if I do not make it back.”

“Good lad. Family is the most valuable treasure we have. It is worth fighting for.”

“Have faith, milord. We will return, and you will be victorious. There is no greater warrior.”

“Great strength, and skill at arms may not be a match for the Demon King.”

“I do not believe that, sire. Nor does the Archmage.”

“Quite right, quite right,” the Eagle said, appearing out of thin air to stand beside Lun. “Our commander here is a bright lad, and knows the truth of it. You will prevail, my friend, and I will be there to aid you.”

Lun offered his old friend a weak smile and returned his attention to the portrait.

“Commander, I have taken the liberty of appointing one of my most skilled hydromancers to your unit.”

A pinprick of watery light glowed in the space between Griffid and the Archmage, growing brighter and larger until a woman clad in blue robes materialized. Water seemed to flow off her fingers as she brought her traveling spell to an end. The Table Chamber smelled faintly of a woodland stream for a moment, or so it seemed to Griffid.

“Well met, Idril,” the Archmage said with a crooked smile.

The mage turned her gaze to Griffid and bowed, sending her loose silver hair cascading like a waterfall over her shoulders.

“I am Idril, apprentice to the Osprey of the Feathered Circle, at your service.”

“And I am at yours,” Griffid replied with a slight bow of his own.

Mages held no noble rank, yet they were afforded much the same deference as any noble on account of their mystical skills. Griffid had only met a handful of such folk in his time, and respected their abilities in the same way he respected a skilled fighter or archer.

“You will need a few more companions, but I shall leave that choice up to you, Commander,” the Archmage turned to Lun, effectively dismissing Griffid and Idril. “Lun, we must speak before the evening meal.”

Griffid led the way down the wide corridor in silence. His mind was pulled toward thoughts of his beloved wife, Ingrid, and his young daughter, Yscold. There was very little chance that he’d make it home from this mission. He knew that. Ingrid knew it. But that didn’t make the reality any easier to bear.

“I suggest we approach a skilled chirugeon,” Idril’s calm voice interrupted his thoughts. “There’s to be no shortage of skirmishes in the Burning Lands, and being able to patch ourselves up will raise our chances of survival.”

“Well said, Lady Idril. I know just the man. Come along, I am certain we will find him at the infirmary.”

The walk out to the infirmary tents was a short one, and Griffid quickly located the deep voiced Afdan by sound alone. The two men had known each other since serving under Lord Dyfrrd in the border skirmishes with Mortarigan of Godsbeam, and Afdan had saved Griffid’s life on a number of occasions.

“What brings you ‘ere, boy-o?” Afdan rumbled, slapping Griffid on the shoulder.

“You’ve heard of my mission, yes?”

“Who hasn’t. Sending you into the Burning Lands as a diversion, eh?”

“That they are.”

“Then ye’ll be needin’ someone what can put ye back together ‘gain af’r the demons get ‘hold of ye?”

“Indeed. What say you?”

“Count me in, ol’ friend, count me in.”

“Well met, Afdan. We leave at dawn.”

“I’ll be ready.”

They left Afdan to finish up his tasks at the infirmary, and set out toward the castle’s training grounds where Griffid knew he’d be able to find the last two members of his company. He had an eye on a young officer with great skill with a pike, Ryderch of Redfield, and a grizzled veteran warrior he’d served under during the border campaign, Morfel, the Hammer of Houndon.

Morfel was serving as Master-at-Arms for the Army of the Moon. Griffid could hear her shouting orders at trainees as he and Idril navigated the rough-hewn steps leading down into the bowl of the training field. Ryderch, he was glad to see, was also among a group of soldiers sparring in the rings scattered around the field.

“Morfel the Hammer! Ryderch of Redfield!” he called from the edge of the training yard.

Ryderch was nearly knocked to the ground by his sparring opponent when he turned to look. Morfel cursed the interruption, but, upon seeing who disrupted her drills, called a halt to the day’s training and trotted over to where Griffid waited with the hydromancer.

“Commander Griffid,” Morfel said, pounding a fist against her chest in salute. “What brings you to the training yard this dreadful afternoon.”

“I believe you already know, ma’am,” Griffid fell back into his accustomed address of the stern warrior, despite technically being her superior.

“You don’t serve under me anymore, Griff,” she said with a small, and uncomfortable looking, smile. “Morfel is fine. Or Captain, if you must. And yes, I do know. You want me to go into hell with you.”

“What say you?”

“It will likely be our death.”

“It will.”

“But it could be instrumental in ending the demon threat,” she paused, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “Very well, I’ll follow you into hell.”

“That…was easier than I expected,” Idril whispered.

“I’m bored, mage. Training recruits is important and all that, but it’s dreadful boring.”

Ryderch trotted up, somewhat winded from ending his sparring match and the jog across the training field. “You summoned me, Commander?”

“Indeed. Ryderch of Redfield, I’ve heard much about you. You are said to be courageous, dedicated, and skilled with that pike.”

“Your words are kind, Commander, but I could not speak to the truth of them. Only that I do my duty to the best of my ability.”

“The lad’s humble too, Griff,” Morfel interjected. “He’s a right demon with that spear. I’ve seen him fight.”

“Considering where we are going, fighting like a demon might be the best recommendation you could have,” Griffid said, trying to fight off a smirk at Morfel’s comparison.

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I have been tasked with leading a small force into the Burning Lands as a diversion. Idril, Master-at-Arms Morfel, Chirugeon-Master Afdan, and I will be delving into the demon’s hell at dawn. I would like you to be among our ranks.”

“Way to sugar coat it,” Morfel muttered. “Boy will piss his codpiece.”

Ryderch shot the Master-at-Arms a surprised look. “I suspect we won’t make it back?”

“Odds are not in our favor.”

“But we would be doing a great service to our people.”

“We would be a distraction, drawing out the Demon King’s minions so that Lord Lun can challenge him.”

“I’m in.”

“Just like that? Oh to be young and stupid once more,” Morfel muttered again.

“We leave from the Kirxelene Stones at dawn. Say your goodbyes and settle your affairs.”

“Thank you, sir. I will be ready.”

Griffid dismissed the three, and wandered the grounds of Caernlun alone until the sun dipped behind the horizon. His family were a two dozen leagues away, safe for the moment from the demonic incursions. He hoped his sacrifice would mean they would be safe from the threat of demon invasion forever, though the cost was high. He took small solace in knowing that his father would protect Ingrid and Yscold for as long as he possibly could if the mission should fail.

At some point after moonrise, he found himself in front of his tent. He knew sleep would not come easily, but went inside and took off his armor anyway. A gulp of mint liquor from the flask he kept under his cot sent a warmth through him that helped chase away the gnawing cold of fear long enough for him to settle into the lumpy, grass-filled mattress and fall into a restless sleep.

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My first attempt at a TTRPG was a rough experiment called LoreQuest all the way back in 2015. I had zero TTRPG experience and was simply trying to make a game for telling stories. I don’t have any of the original work on the game, though I recall playing the game with my wife and a friend at our kitchen table. It didn’t work as well as I had hoped, but was functional. Since then, a part of me was always keen to make a real TTRPG for myself.

I discovered solo games in the fall of 2021, coming off a traumatic work experience that sent me into several different spirals of identity and purpose. I found Ironsworn, and it, quite literally, saved me. Since then, I’ve designed several games, whether based on pre-existing ones or built from the ground up. My first TTRPG release was a Caltrop Core (by titanomachyRPG) game called Feyroam, where you controlled a patrol of faefolk scouts as they went on missions to thwart the rise of the evil Rot. To this day, Feyroam is my most downloaded game on itch.io that isn’t based on or designed for Ironsworn.

Soon after, I released Order of the Falcon, an Assassin’s Creed inspired hack for Ironsworn. It is my most successful release with almost 1,500 downloads. The hack introduced a handful of new moves that brought in familiar mechanics from the AC franchise (such as the ability to assassinate an unsuspecting foe in one move, called Strike from the Shadows).

Since then, I’ve designed a roguelike tower fighter inspired by video games like Die in the Dungeon, Slay the Spire, and Dicey Dungeon. Rogue Tower challenges the player to climb the tower using a pool of attack, defend, and heal dice that you use to fight and survive a variety of enemies on your way to the top. It’s probably my most unique game to date, and also my least adopted. But it was fun to make, fun to play, and scratched an itch I had at the time.

The Ironbound Adventures series of Ironsworn adventure modules are my latest releases, with two entries so far in Hadley’s Beast and The Bloody March. These adventure modules are designed with the goal of getting new players into Ironsworn by offering ready made character archetypes, vows, and settings that let a player jump right in. While not officially counted in the Ironbound series, the first foray into this kind of adventure module for Ironsworn was Escape. The idea was born by some discussion on the r/Ironsworn subreddit and the Ironsworn discord about the difficulty of starting a game, especially as a new player. From that foundation, Ironbound Adventures was born.

Of late, I’ve been interested in non-narrative dungeon crawl games in the vein of Dark Fort. While putting off the layout for Oathbound—my first large scale solo narrative game—I started drafting Bright Crescent Company. This game is a larger, narrative-optional, dungeon crawl through a hellscape filled with demons that want to eat the Commander and his Company. Through nine levels of this world’s version of hell, the Commander, aided by three other support units, fights through demons, traps, and environmental hazards in search of the way down to the next level…where they’ll do it all over again. Their goal: the Dark Fortress, where the Demon King’s chief lieutenant protects the Chaos Shard. I procrastinated Oathbound’s layout so hard that I created another full game complete with ninety-nine thematic, random table entries spread across nine levels of hell with sixty-two individual monsters to fight. Who knows, maybe I’ll make another whole game while laying out Bright Crescent Company…

In all of this, there’s one constant: I make the games that appeal to my interests at any given time. Money was never, and will never be, the motivation for designing and releasing TTRPGs. I do it because these are the games I’m interested in, that I want to play and can’t find. If no one else wants to play them, that’s fine by me. My tastes are varied but will never be shared by a wide variety of players, and that’s perfectly ok. There’s actual thousands of titles out there for the solo player to choose from, mine are but a few in that library of potential fun. They’ve already been fun for me, whether in the process of ideation, writing, or playtesting/playing, I’ve had my fun (and can go back to have fun again). I make games for myself, and hope they find likeminded people once they are released into the world.

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If you make games, why do you do it? If you don’t make games, but enjoy reading and playing them, what is it that makes you want to pick up a game?

The first stage of creativity, at least for me, is coming up with ideas. The “art” of ideation—or generating ideas—is often messy and wild. Inspiration can strike at any time, any place, for any reason. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, taking all of my focus until I’ve written down the idea. This, I think, is my brain’s way of preserving the idea, preventing it from getting lost in the ebb and flow of creative energy.

I said in my article on the “Highs and Lows of Game Design” that “at any given time, I have ideas for at least five games,” and this is absolutely true, if perhaps lowballing the number. So, it makes sense to talk about how to generate ideas—or, at least, how I generate them. As with all things creative, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. It’s a process of trial and error. I hope that the…ideas…I present here will at least get your mind rolling. Let’s jump in and see where the current takes us.

The Idea Generator

For me, ideas often come from the various media and art I consume. Of late, I’ve been most inspired by video games. I’ve played a fair bit of Intelligent System’s Fire Emblem over the last six months (five titles to date). There’s a whole article about the differences between a TTRPG that leverages strategy like Fire Emblem, Tactics Ogre, and Unicorn Overlord and wargames, so I won’t get into that here. Suffice to say that, while playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses, one of the ideas that became Bright Crescent Company was born. In Three Houses, your fielded units are often limited in number (usually around 8-12), while the number of units in the army is much larger. One of the ways this is circumvented is by assigning inactive units as adjutants. Adjutants offer bonuses based on their class, such as follow-up attacks, damage negation, or healing.

In Bright Crescent Company, your Commander leads a small company of four other units that offer similar bonuses. The Pike unit gives attack advantages against 4-legged and serpentine enemies (inspired by real-world pikes and art of St. George and the dragon), while the Chirugeon can clear conditions (like poison) and restore hit protection. This mechanic simplifies combat to the Commander’s rolls (hit and damage), while still allowing the company units to have important functions.

Of course, Fire Emblem and Jake Zemeckis’s AP of Blackoath Games’ Over War also gave me ideas for a more tactical solo TTRPG with a bit more focus on individual units and/or squads. Over War does a great job of emulating Tactics Ogre/Unicorn Overlord style gameplay, but I wanted a more grounded set of units and more streamlined mechanics. I spent all the waiting time at a recent appointment jotting down ideas and play-testing them on my phone. It produced something I think could be fun with a bit more refinement.

Ideas can also come from conversation. Recently, SolumProtocol posted a note about wanting to experience feelings from a variety of video games in their solo TTRPGs. In the comments we discussed how one might create a TTRPG that emulated the experience of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The ideas immediately started flowing in. There’s a lot to be said about creating in community. At least for me, having someone (or multiple someones) to mutually bounce ideas off of not only produces new concepts but helps to sharpen and clarify existing ones.

Toward a Morrowind experience: A d100 roll-under skill-based resolution mechanic would be the foundation for a game like this. Travel wouldn’t require a roll, though encounters and encounter likelihood would. Combat would be tough to emulate from the video game (since it’s active and not turn based) and would definitely be crunchy. Expect a post about this sometime soon.

Clogs in the Machine

Ideas can come from almost anywhere, but one of the quickest ways to clog up the ideation machine is consuming the wrong things. In this modern world of smart phones and social media promoting short-form content designed to generate views, doom scrolling is a perpetual problem. I know that I struggle with it, especially on days when my motivation is flagging or I’m tired. It’s so easy to open up an app and scroll the inanity of digital existence.

Now, I’m not saying all social media is bad, or that it prevents or restricts creativity. I’ve been inspired plenty by watching creators on the apps make art, paint miniatures, build terrain, or discuss various historical and scientific events. Finding those creators takes a fair bit of effort, though. I think one could argue that there are better things to use your time on. The real take away is that whatever media you consume, whether it’s playing video games or reading novels, scrolling social media or watching tv, you should consume those things that feed the creativity.

If consuming the wrong kinds of content can slow down the creative engine, overthinking is all too often going to burn it out completely. Just like any other kind of work, being creative can lead to burn out. I’ve been there more times than I can count. I’ve worked so hard, put all of this energy into developing ideas, creating a thing, and then, before it’s finished my brain decides that it’s just not capable of doing anything else. I’m starting to venture into this with Bright Crescent Company after the first playtest led me to the conclusion that I needed to rework the encounter/contents tables (expanding from one table with 34 potential outcomes to nine tables with 11 potential outcomes each).

Creativity demands sacrificing your need to be productive.

How do you combat this feeling? By doing one of the hardest things ever: let yourself take a break. Do things that let your brain turn off a bit. Take a shower, go for a walk, take a drive, read a book, or anything that relaxes you. I have a hard time allowing myself to rest, but once I do, the ideas begin to flow again, often triggering even more potential projects or mechanics to work on. Don’t expect it to be an instantaneous thing though. Sometimes you need a prolonged break—a week, a month, maybe more. That’s ok. Creativity demands sacrificing your need to be productive.

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This weekend I played the second Pulp Dreadful pamphlet game. Assault on Castle Nachtenthal brings the vibes of the Wolfenstein series of video games, as well as a touch of Lovecraftian horror, Ravenloft terror, and Dark Souls doom. In this entry in the Pulp Dreadful Solo games by Aaron Best, you play as a city watch detective on the case of missing children. The clues have led to Castle Nachtenthal where Cardinal Malvezzi sacrifices the innocents to summon an army of demons. The question isn’t “do you know what’s going on,” its “will you survive long enough to put an end to it.” Fortunately, with the favor of the dice gods, I did survive to put an end to the Cardinal’s dastardly plot…with 4HP left.

The Pros

• Easy to pick up and play

• d20 versus target number resolution

• Easy to follow gameplay loop

• Satisfying (and deadly) combat

• Enemies and flavor text are evocative of the setting

Easy Pick up and Play. Because the game comes complete with a character sheet, point-crawl style map, and all the tables built in, it takes all of a minute to create a character and get to engaging with the game’s mechanics.

Resolution System. Like the original Pulp Dreadful, which I played and reviewed a couple weeks ago, Assault on Castle Nachtenthal (AoCN) uses a d20 to resolve actions—in this case, combat and the occasional save. Unlike the first game, AoCN does not use a roll under system. Rather, it evokes Mörk Borg by having a target number to meet or exceed. In fact, this little game could easily be ported into Mörk Borg with very little change.

Easy to Follow Gameplay Loop. The loop in AoCN is simple: choose where you move to, resolve at least one encounter, move or roll another encounter, repeat. From the beginning of the game, you have access to 4 out of 6 points on the map. You can move between them at will, but must resolve at least one encounter at each point when you arrive. Encounters are primarily combat based, but there are some Ability Tests and non-combat encounters. Each combat encounter, and some of the Ability Tests, give experience points. To unlock the fifth node on the map, you must accumulate 30xp. The sixth, where the final boss resides, requires a cumulative 60xp to unlock.

Satisfying and Deadly Combat. The comparison to Mörk Borg holds true especially in combat. While the player character begins with a hefty amount of HP (15+d6), you begin with no armor. It took me 11 turns, and eight combat encounters, until I finally rolled a merchant in the Great Hall and spent my shillings on leather armor (-d6 damage). And proceeded to forget that I had it for another three combats! The final boss almost proved to be too much for my detective, bringing me to 4HP before a lucky 19 on the attack roll allowed me to put him down.

Calan stumbled through the macabre great hall, blood coagulating in myriad wounds as she made her way deeper into the massive chamber. The Keep loomed high overhead through the glass ceiling, an ominous and foreboding specter. “You look like you’ve seen better days, lass,” a bone-thin man in voluminous rags said at her elbow. She jumped. The man hadn’t been there a moment before. “I’ve much to sell if you’ve the shillings to buy…”

Evocative Enemies & Flavor Text. The game is replete with descriptions of locations and enemies that perfectly evokes the haunting theme. In one encounter, you might find a grave inscribed with your own name. Another boasts a swollen, pulsing blister in the wall. Enemies, such as the Witness Unblinking, is described as an eyeless, spindly monstrosity with waxy skin that sees everything. Its disgusting, dreadful, and altogether awesome.

Calan’s sword flashed bright in the candlelight, cutting into the waxy skin of the eyeless monster towering over her. Her midsection burned from the razor-like barbs on the things tongue. She hoped to never feel as trapped as when the beast’s tongue wrapped around her like a hot, spiky tentacle. Her blade sliced through the tongue, severing it. It wiggled on the floor like a headless serpent, while she leapt and drove her sword where the creature’s eyes should have been. It fell with a wet thwack.

The Cons

• Repetitive gameplay loop

There’s a lot to love about Assault on Castle Nachtenthal. Its evocative, easy to play, and dangerously fun. But its also repetitive. It took me a full 20 turns to reach the final boss, with a lot of backtracking, fighting, and traveling again, just to garner enough experience to unlock the Keep (requiring 30xp). While the Keep offers enemies with the greater experience (at 5xp), there’s only two such encounters on the table for that node—and you need 30xp more to reach the final boss. There is one enemy that offers more than 5xp, but because you roll a d6 for encounters you can’t grind that enemy reliably.

I played for about an hour and a half. About midway through, the repetition fatigue began to set in. I took a break and came back to it with renewed vigor. The Cardinal fell about twenty minutes after that break. Its not a deal breaker, at least not for me, and I love the idea of gating access behind experience points. But I can see it being an issue for some people.

The Verdict

All things considered, Assault on Castle Nachtenthal is an exceptionally fun game with risk and death in abundance. I nearly fell to the denizens of the castle on more than one occasion and the tension was addicting. Even though the gameplay can get a bit repetitive, I’ll cut it some slack for a cool mechanic concept in locking areas behind experience gain. If you like Dark Fort-style games or deadly castles with disgusting and dangerous inhabitants, then Assault on Castle Nachtenthal is one to check out!

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Leela gathered the hefty tome and slipped it into her satchel. Mondrich’s form never wavered as they left the ruined structure and set off a short distance to the north where the remains of the wooden stables were clear against the bright blue sky.

“I’ve not been out of that old house in so long,” the ghostly tactician said joyously.

“I can’t imagine how boring it must have been.”

“It took some time for me to realize what had happened. I don’t even remember how I perished. Only that, clearly, I must have. There was a ferocious battle, but I was not a frontline fighter. The camp is in too good of shape to have been sacked. Perhaps an assassin? Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

Leela didn’t interrupt his rambling, and let him continue to prattle on about his time as a ghost and his life before. And what a life it had been. The man and his wife were adventurous in a way that Leela had only ever dreamed of being. They’d fought bandits in the northern wastes, where the dry tundra met the ice-fields. Once, he recalled, they’d held off pirates on the south sea for two whole days during a tempest that nearly sank both ships. Of course, Leela didn’t know how much of the tales were fact and how much were just that, tales.

They reached the stables, now only a few dilapidated stone stalls with rotting wood and piles of wind-blown dust sitting inside where horses once pawed the earth. Leela concentrated once again, pushing her way through the veil. The forces that held the two planes of existence apart fought harder this time, recognizing her and wishing to deny her entry. She pushed harder, straining her will to the point that the vein in her forehead throbbed and her vision began to swim. Still, she pushed—past the discomfort, past the fear, and past the veil.

“She’s there,” Leela whispered, pointing to where a beautiful woman clad in chainmail burnished to a bright silver beneath a tabard of royal blue was pacing back and forth between the stableyard fence and the edge of the riverbed.

“Delin!” Mondrich called out, rushing past and through Leela to reach his wife. “Delin, it’s me!”

The warrior woman stopped walking, as if the sound of Mondrich’s voice pulled her back from some unseen precipice. She turned, revealing the other side of her face and the wicked scar that ran from her hairline to her chin. Mondrich stumbled to a stop and held out his arms to her. She walked over slowly, as if she didn’t believe what she was seeing.

“Mondrich?” Her voice was quiet but strong. “Is it really you?”

“Yes, my dear. It has been too long.”

“So, so long.”

“This young woman has promised to reunite us with our Greta! She’s a seer, and needs to find your tether.”

“It will be something of considerable personal value to you,” Leela interjected. “Perhaps your helm?”

“It is there,” Delin said, pointing toward the riverbed. “Where I…fell.”

“I shall retrieve it, then we can go to Greta.”

“Beware, seer. The bloodlings dwell within.”

“Bloodlings?”

“Spawn of the Bloody March. Weaker but no less deadly. Be mindful of them.”

Leela walked to the edge of the riverbank and looked down at the pile of bones that would have dammed the river if water still flowed through its channel. Dog-sized blobs of a deep red covered the far side of the corpse dam, but seemed to be sleeping or otherwise lethargic. Leela crept down, using the rocky protrusions of the bank to descend slowly. The bloodlings didn’t seem to notice her, and, fortunately, the orange feather of Delin’s helm was clearly visible against the brown and tan backdrop. She only had to move a few bones, some still clad in weather-rotted leathers, to draw the helm out. Delin appeared beside her, as if touching the tether summoned her to it.

“Well met, seer. Come, before they awaken.”

Gather Information: 7 (+3 wits) vs 8 | 5 = weak hit

Endure Stress: 9 (+3 spirit) vs 10 | 7 = weak hit (press on)

Vow Progress — Reunite Greta with her parents (Dangerous): 10/10

The trek back to the ritual site where Greta waited was uneventful. Mondrich and Delin talked and walked hand in hand a few paces behind me, reliving old memories and buzzing with excitement to reunite with their daughter. I felt the buzzing power of their tethers resting inside my satchel, and never before had I experienced such strong relics. They would need to be stored carefully, wherever the family decided to settle, else risk treasure seekers finding them and separating the family once again.

Greta was watching from the small pedestal in the midst of the stone circle as the group crested the low rise and began the final descent into the dusty bowl beneath the ominous tower. The girl stood and raced forward, until she hit an invisible wall and buckled under the impact. Delin shouted in surprise, and raced forward. Leela ran after her so that mother didn’t experience the same bounds as the daughter.

“You’re here! Oh my Greta!” Delin shouted happily, falling to her knees and wrapping the girl in her arms. “I thought I’d never see you again, my sweet girl.”

“Mama?” Greta whispered, as if she didn’t believe her eyes. “Is it really you?”

“It is! Your seer friend did as she promised.”

“Greta!” Mondrich said happily as he trotted up to his family. “I have missed you so!”

“Papa!” The girl reached out a hand to her father. “You’re here too!”

“I am, child. And we won’t leave you ever again.” Mondrich turned to Leela and said, “Thank you Seer Leela. Your efforts here have reunited my family after so long. I can never repay you.”

“No payment necessary. I am just glad to have reunited the three of you.”

Leela didn’t feel the need to add that the reunion had relieved her of the burden of the vision. She had fulfilled her vow to Greta, and accomplished the task the universe had placed upon her when it first showed her the vision of the crying girl. She could leave the battlefield behind with a clear conscience.

“Greta,” Leela asked. “Where is your tether?”

“Tether?”

“Yes, an object that keeps you bound nearby. Your father’s was his strategy book, and your mother’s was her helm. Where’s yours?”

“My body lies there,” she said, pointing down to the pit within the ring of stones.

“Did you have anything that was very valuable to you?”

“Yes, my memories of my parents. But nothing else.”

“The skull is the cavern of memory, bear it as a treasure,” Leela muttered the old adage. “Would you three like to travel with me, away from this place?”

“Do you know how to take Greta with us?” Delin asked.

“I believe I do. I’ll retrieve her skull, the skull is the cavern of memory. If her memories of you and Mondrich are what bound her, taking her skull—no matter how macabre—will allow her to travel with us.”

“I will show you,” Greta said, releasing her parents and moving down into the pit.

Leela felt the old magics permeating the stone wash over her, like a vat of tar had been poured over her head. It was a terrible sensation, and left her feeling dirty for days after the ordeal. Greta stopped beside a small body buried beneath the skeleton of a massive four-legged creature.

“Here I am,” the child said somberly.

Leela picked up the skull and slipped it in her satchel, then followed Greta back up the embankment and rejoined her parents. Without so much as another look behind her, Leela began the trek back to the Outpost. Satisfaction washed over her, partially cleansing the taint of the old ritual site. The burden of vision would return, she knew, but for now, she was relieved of the terrible weight of destiny.

Follow a Path: 6 (+3 wits) vs 4 | 3 = strong hit

Fulfill Your Vow: 10 progress vs 7 | 2 = strong hit

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CHARACTER SHEET

Name: Leela

Role: Scryer

Stats: 2E, 3H, 2I, 4S, 3W

Health: +5/5

Spirit: +4/5

Supply: +5/5

Momentum = +8/10

Assets:

• Scry. When you look into flames to study a remote person or location, roll +shadow. You or someone with you must have knowledge of the target. On a strong hit, you may Gather Information through observation using +shadow or +wits. On a weak hit, as above, but the flames are hungry; choose one to sacrifice.

• Companion: Raven (Luma). When you Secure an Advantage or Face Danger +shadow using your raven to perform trickery (such as creating a distraction or stealing a small object) add +1 and take +1 momentum on a hit.

• Shadow-Walk. When you cloak yourself with the gossamer veil of the shadow realms, roll +shadow. On a strong hit, take +1 momentum. Then, reroll any dice (one time only) when you make a move by ambushing, hiding, or sneaking. On a weak hit, as above, but the shadows try to lead you astray. You must first Face Danger to find your way.

I first discovered through the solo gaming subreddits (I don’t remember which one). When she began posting on Substack, I immediately dropped a follow and have been keeping up with her updates, analyses, and actual plays. When she released her overview of the new edition of Rift Town, based on the system she developed for Mighty Marvelous, I was immediately drawn to how similar to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion bits of the lore and potential activities in the game seemed. That, it turns out, was on purpose. In the comments of that post, she revealed that Oblivion had a huge impact on her as a kid. You really do get the sense of a sandbox filled with possibilities (excuse me while I go play sixty more hours of Oblivion before I finish this review…)

Ok, I didn’t actually play Oblivion, but I want to! I’m sort of waiting for the Switch 2 edition to release later this year. But I digress. On to the review!

Pros

• Skill system reminiscent of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

• Interesting resolution mechanic

• Evocative and inspiring setting makes for easy story development

• Mapping the town is a fun exercise for map nerds like me

• Pseudo-Real World setting is new for me but made for some fun worldbuilding

Skill System. The old Elder Scrolls games had a much more in-depth and rewarding progression system than Skyrim (don’t misunderstand me, I love Skyrim and own it on pretty much every device one can). Sarah has absolutely captured the essence of those old skill systems in Rift Town. Its existence is worthy of praise, quite honestly. Assigning dice values (d4, d6, d8, etc.) to skills and having a plethora of them is far more satisfying than having a +/- modifier and rolling a d20.

Resolution Mechanic. Rift Town’s resolution mechanic is based on Ironsworn’s d6 action dice vs 2d10 challenge dice. Sarah takes this a step further, though. The action dice becomes whatever your skill rating is (so d4, d6, d8, etc.) versus 2d12. The action dice is modified by the skill’s governing attribute. In my playthrough, my PC had a +3 to Agility, which made skills such as athletics and firearms much more likely to score a hit than persuasion which received no bonus and was at a d4 skill rating.

Setting. I was immediately inspired by Rift Town’s setting. Likely, this is due to the similarities I saw between it and Oblivion. In this version of the real world (see below), pandemonium (chaos) seeks to break through via the titular Rifts. Rifts are scars in reality, where the space-time continuum has been broken and creatures crawl through. The job of the PC is to keep their community safe from the Rifts, even if that means going into them, defeating the boss and closing the rifts.

Mapping the Town. If you’ve been around my Substack any time at all, you’ll know that I love drawing maps, and TTRPGs with a mapping component easily leap to the top of my to-play list. Rift Town is no different. In the game, your PCs house is in the center of the map and when you go out on patrol you build the hex map. The events that occur as you travel serve to flesh out not only the story but the world as well.

Caperon Ashewick, known as Cap to his friends—the few that he had—protected a secret. His mother was a daemon, one of those ancient powers fueled by Pandemonium.. Daemon were shunned in most places, even the rare Rift towns didn’t look kindly on those with chaos flowing through their veins. Caperon was lucky that his daemonic half was mostly dormant, showing itself in the blazing green light that filled his eyes when life got difficult, dangerous, or overly stressful, and in the ferocity with which he felt all emotions. When he was assigned as the new Protector for the mountain town of Halcyon Falls in the western reaches of North Carolina, it was a relief. He was coming off a bad breakup—she learned his secret heritage—and was finding it hard to control the daemonic side of his nature. Halcyon Falls, despite its mysterious background, was a chance to start over. Outsiders weren’t immediately accepted, sure, but no one knew his secret there and he planned to keep it that way.

Real World Adjacent. Building on my praise of the setting, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the pseudo real world setting. I don’t think I’ve ever quite played in a modern day real world setting before. The closest I think I’ve come is my playthroughs of Ebon Wood Effigies, Wings of Rot and the finale “Grave Portals” and those were more magi-tech Victorian in setting. I really played up the real world element, moving my character into a made-up mountain town in Western North Carolina (where I’m from), into an old mill house (which dot the edges of every small town here), driving a worn down pickup truck (inspired by my grandfather’s truck when I was a kid). The vibes were everything I didn’t know I wanted.

Cons

• Layout of the game is difficult to navigate while playing, particularly as it pertains to finding necessary tables

• The difficulty in scoring even weak hits at times

• The oracle was easy to use, but I prefer slightly more granularity than yes/no

Layout. This criticism is, by no means, meant to come across as harsh. Layout is, in my opinion, the second worst part of game design (the first being the pain of releasing into the void). It’s taken me a long time to even come close to having something resembling a clean layout for my own games. Ultimately, layout should make play easier. What I struggled with in Rift Town was how often I had to flip back several pages to find the table that I needed. It made play slow at times. I think many of us indie creators, myself included, would do well to put an appendix with all the tables in one place. But that’s a topic for another type of article.

Difficulty. First off, let it be said once more that I love Ironsworn and everything about it. It’s my favorite TTRPG. However, one of the biggest issues I see, especially from new players, is that misses and weak hits are super common and can sometimes hinder the fun of the game. Now, there’s ways around this in base Ironsworn (usually by being less mechanically harsh and feeding it into the narrative), but Rift Town proved to be a bit more of a bear. This was largely due to the (still really cool!) skill system putting the majority of skills at a d4 at the beginning of the game, I found myself rolling miss after miss and getting a bit frustrated with it at times.

Oracle. I usually don’t like the simple d6 “yes/no” oracle, despite using a version of it in a lot of my games. Sarah goes a bit further than usual by having you roll two d6s of differing colors and determining one to be “yes” and the other “no.” The highest result is the answer. Its a very clean oracle, don’t get me wrong. Its easy to use, and gives clear results. I think I have come to prefer a bit more granularity in my oracle roll than a d6 oracle can offer. This is completely personal preference, and not at all a slight on the design. I prefer Sarah’s version of the d6 oracle to most that I’ve seen, or even used in my own games.

Conclusion

Sarah Solo’s Rift Town MMUGS Edition is a darkly delightful experience that I highly recommend to anyone who enjoys content like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Witcher, Twin Peaks, or Supernatural. There’s a ton of fun to be had in building out the world, solving mysteries (and murders!), and fighting off the creatures that claw their way out of the Rifts—and the human monsters that dwell among us.

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Sunday, as is my wont, I played another small TTRPG. This time, instead of someone else’s game, I played my own. Bright Crescent Company picks up on a small tidbit from the lore of the Chainlands, the setting for my (releasing sometime) knights on sky islands fantasy TTRPG Oathbound. In one of the first lore tidbits I wrote for Oathbound, I mentioned how the High Queen’s father led the offensive that defeated the demonic hordes threatening to overrun the realm. The lore of Bright Crescent Company is that your character is the Commander, leading his company of four, into the Burning Lands as a diversion (while the High Queen’s father takes the fight to the Demon King). The meshing of lore and my recent love affair with solo dungeon crawling in Dark Fort-style games absolutely fanned the flames of my creative bonfire.

“It feels good to create”

That fire drives me to create almost constantly. When I write the lore, craft tables fit for a particular setting, and determine the exact way the mechanics should work, I experience a heady sense of accomplishment. It feels good to create.

Sometimes it’s work, and sometimes it’s hard to find the motivation, but in the end it always feels good. In that first instance, just after the final period has been placed, or that last troublesome table is complete, the sheer satisfaction is unsullied. It’s pure. If creation stopped there, with that high, I think I’d create constantly and never stop. But, as all creatives know, the creative drive desires—even demands—to be recognized by others. And it’s here that the deep descent from the peak of creative ecstasy begins.

I hit both highs and lows as I played through my game Sunday and it made me think about why I design games to begin with. What’s the goal? It certainly can’t be to make a living off of the games. That’s a rare reality that only a few indie creators can claim. Even Shawn Tomkin, the creator of Ironsworn and Starforged, works a day job. So, what is it that drives me to create?

I think I’ve narrowed it down to three things:

1. Creativity for creativity’s sake. I enjoy the act of creation. Designing something new, even if it’s only new to me, is a high that is hard to match. I create because creating is fun, it’s personally rewarding. If it wasn’t, I’d have stopped when Feyroam, my very first game, wasn’t a huge success.

2. The search for my perfect game. J.R.R. Tolkien, in a letter to W.H. Auden, said “I wrote the Trilogy as a personal satisfaction, driven to it by the scarcity of literature of the sort that I wanted to read” (Letters, p. 211).1 Just as Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings in pursuit of the kind of story he wanted to read, I began designing solo TTRPGs in search of the game that I wanted to play: a game that catered to all of my desires, whether in roleplay, narrative generation, combat, crafting, or any other mechanic. The futility of such an endeavor is beyond the scope of this article, but is worth analyzing further elsewhere.

3. Striving for recognition. Perhaps it’s selfishness, the side effects of being raised in religion, or some other component of my psyche that would require at least a few PhDs to analyze, but I have always longed for recognition, to be seen as valuable to others. It is, perhaps, one of my most glaring flaws—though certainly not my only one.

I would like to say that 1) and 2) drive me far more than 3) does, but that would probably be a lie. Instead, they jockey for position constantly, always seeking to out pace the other. Sometimes I feel like I’m just along for the ride, without any real say in where it takes me.

The Highs of the Creative Act

Ideas are easy to come by, at least for me. At any given time, I have ideas for at least five games and a couple of writing projects. I’m sitting on a novel that’s nearly 20k words that my wife and I have worked on together, but time and motivation are seldom on my side at the same time. There’s also no less than two ideas bouncing around for LitRPG-style novels, one of which I have put down the first couple paragraphs of. I have another three Ironbound Adventures roughly summarized or outlined, and Oathbound is waiting for a final playtest and layout, with another solo dungeon crawl also formulating. As you can see, I am positively drowning in ideas.

Ideation is the first stage of creation and is often one of the most entertaining—and frantic. It is from the foundation of ideation that the true joy of creation springs. Seeing the ideas slowly form into an actionable document feeds the soul in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve also experienced it. Writing the thing—whether game, short story, actual play, or novel—is the pinnacle of the creative mountain for me. Little competes with the sensation of accomplishment when a new section is complete, and even more so when the last period on the first draft is placed.

With Bright Crescent Company, I wrote the bulk of the game in about a week and a half. Granted much of the mechanics are pulled from Oathbound, to which this game is connected in mechanics and lore. Even still, I found myself refining the mechanics, trying new ones, and all around enjoying the process of building another game. That nova of positive feelings that swell to bursting when experiencing such a thing is addicting and is clearly one of the reasons why I continue to design games and write fiction.

Once the draft is complete, it’s time for play testing. Usually, I will test a game a handful of times, editing it as I go on my iPad, until I think it is in a viable condition to pass on to a couple of friends or trusted associates here on Substack for reading and play.

I spent a couple hours play-testing Bright Crescent Company on Sunday. It was a mostly enjoyable experience, with a couple issues that I’ll have to work on before letting others test it out. My character, the Bright Crescent Company Commander Cynin and his unit consisting of a scout, cartographer, champion, and pikeman managed to make it to the final boss in the depths of the Burning Lands. After a slug fest, the boss was defeated and the game was complete. I battled poison and darkness nearly the entire descent, which was, in many ways, more dangerous than the enemies I fought. Managing my hit protection and resources became incredibly important and, fortunately, I found a condition cleanser item (the Rune of the Blessed) about two rooms prior to the final boss.

It was gratifying to find my systems working almost exactly as intended, and even more so to experience the risk of poison and darkness. That whole element was largely unexpected even if I did design the game. Moreover, it prompted several ideas (!) for other games using those mechanics as the primary danger. My wife, who’s only real context for TTRPGs is listening to me ramble and a few sessions of Curse of Strahd years ago, is all in on a game where you race against the clock (literally) and the disease/poison/what-have-you coursing through your veins. Her idea, not mine, she’d be cross if I didn’t give her credit. But I digress.

The full experience, from ideation to implementation, is personally satisfying. That high of accomplishment is, ultimately, the reason why I continue to design games (and write fiction) despite the limited audience of solo gaming and the difficulty of getting eyes on my work.

The Lows of Creation

While creation is full of highs, it is also rife with lows: mechanics don’t work how you wanted, gameplay loops are unsatisfying, repetitive, or otherwise boring, laying out a game is a time consuming and frustrating endeavor at times, or you get very little traction once the game is released into the world. Any one of these are demotivating, at least to me, and take real effort to overcome and continue to climb out of the creative valley back to the heights.

Sometimes it takes a long time. Part of the reason Oathbound is still sitting on my computer, despite being play-tested relatively thoroughly, is that I fear that my biggest game, one that I’ve sunk so much of myself into, will be dead on arrival. Doing the dragon-y thing and hoarding the treasure instead of letting others see it feels safer.

The high of play-testing—seeing your hard work pay off in a satisfying play experience—is a double-edged sword. On one side, it’s gratifying. But with a single movement, the blade cuts the other way and it’s demoralizing.

Bright Crescent Company’s mechanics work, but not all of them are fun. The depth mechanic, where it is supposed to get more dangerous the deeper you go, proved to be incredibly repetitive. I rolled the same chamber contents and encounters so often that I started giving myself a +/- 1 just to get different outcomes. This is, obviously, not an ideal situation. It’s certainly not a thing I’d want to release into the world. If I’m not enjoying it, I doubt others would either. Of course, as my wife is fond of pointing out, I am my own worst critic. Fortunately, she’s brilliant and helped me with a solution (spoiler: it’s more tables).

While the experience of playing the game while managing my Commander’s dwindling hit protection did inspire ideas for other games/mechanics, it was also the only real danger I wound up facing in the ten levels of travel through the Burning Lands. I took approximately one damage from enemies the entire run—including the final boss.

When I wrote Bright Crescent Company I was trying to experiment with having less dice rolls in combat. In Oathbound, your character attacks by rolling 2d6 + modifier against a target’s danger rating (DR). Meeting or exceeding the DR is a hit. Then, the character defends against the enemy’s incoming attack in the same way. On hits, there’s the extra roll of damage dice (which can explode for the PC), equaling, at minimum, four dice rolls per combat round. That’s a lot. So I simplified it for BCC: PC rolls attack against DR, meeting or exceeding is a hit and the PC rolls damage. Rolling less than the DR means the enemy does damage instead. That’s two dice rolls (attack + damage). On paper, it should work out well. In practice, it becomes easy to bypass taking damage at all, except against specific, more difficult enemies.

Interestingly enough, while writing about the combat mechanics, I think I’ve come to a bit of a solution (that isn’t going back to the old combat mechanic). Enemies have a DR of 8 unless they are specific types of enemies that should be more difficult to hit for lore reasons (shades, ghosts, etc.) or are bosses. The final boss and one or two others have a DR of 12, which, in Oathbound: Trials of Caernlun (my first foray into the Dark Fort-style dungeon crawls) was incredibly difficult and often run-enders. The change to combat makes it less so, I think. Thus, the solution might be to raise the default DR higher. I’m going to test that out before I go back to the old mechanic.

I also wanted to talk about the difficulties of releasing a game, getting eyes on, getting people to play…but this has gone on longer than I intended. Releasing the game to the world, the highs and the lows, probably warrants its own article. I will say, here, that recently getting views on my posts has been difficult. Most of my posts have dropped 50 views below my average and I haven’t the slightest idea why. Suffice it to say, I have trepidation over releasing games based on how difficult it is to get seen now.

In the End, Does it Even Matter?

When mechanics don’t work how you expect, it can be absolutely demoralizing and demotivating. For me, depending on my mental state when the realization hits, it can make me want to give up completely. That’s honestly why I wrote this article: to remind myself why I love making games. Despite the difficulties and setbacks, the joy experienced in the creation of a game far outweighs the lows.

“Its the joy that matters most”

I am working on changing my mindset—its hard, I’m stubborn and prone to bouts of self-doubt. I want to hold on to the creative ecstasy that comes from ideation, writing, and realization of my games because, in a world filled with the tragic, awful, and horrible, you have to take the sunshine where you can find it. Whatever you find yourself doing, whether it’s making games, writing novels, making art, or what-have-you, in the end, it’s the joy that matters most.

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Leela rolled over, trying to remove the sharp pain from her back only to find another waiting to meet her. The ground was covered with pebbles and stones and her threadbare sleeping blanket was no defense against their digging points. Finally, deciding she’d never get back to sleep, she sat up to find the ghost girl, Greta, sitting near her feet.

“Your sleep was fitful,” the girl said in a hauntingly sad voice. “I miss sleeping.”

“Its the rocks,” Leela grumbled, rubbing the painful spot on her back. “It’s impossible to get comfortable.”

“Dawn’s almost here,” Greta said. “You slept most of the night.”

Leela yawned and ground her knuckles into her sleep-filled eyes. “Hard to believe with how tired I feel.”

Packing up her meager sleeping gear didn’t take long, though it certainly hurt every muscle in her body. By the time the first rays of morning crept into the dark sky, Leela was marching across the barren wasteland toward the old military camp. There wasn’t much to see between the tower and the old camp, except for the tell-tale sign of the great bloody abomination’s passing. Fortunately, its amorphous form was nowhere to be seen. Leela was many things, but a fighter wasn’t one of them. She knew her chances of facing off with the Bloody March and coming out alive were south of none.

The sun dragged itself languidly into the sky, illuminating her final approach to the old encampment in bright yellow light. It was, if she was honest, almost blinding the way the morning sun reflected off the dirt and rocks. Even Luma landed on her shoulder and buried her head beneath a wing to escape the brightness. Howling stopped her in her tracks on the near bank of the dried out riverbed bordering the camp site. Two mangy creatures climbed out of the riverbed and snarled at her.

Follow a Path: 6 (+3 wits) vs 5 | 9 = weak hit (danger at destination

Ask the Oracle: Is the danger the Bairnslayer? 50/50 = 41, no

Vow Progress — Reunite Greta with her parents (Dangerous): 4/10 progress

The dogs, if one could call them that, were disgusting to look at. Large swaths of their dull brown fur had fallen out, leaving putrid, scarred and blistered skin the color of raw meat exposed. Leela would have turned away and wretched if the beasts hadn’t clearly been intent on making her their next meal.

Leela didn’t need to speak for Luma to know what to do. They’d played this trick many times before to great success. The raven launched itself into the air, and swirled around behind the ravening creatures before speaking in an almost human voice. One turned its attention to the raven, who lighted on a large boulder on the far side of the riverbed. It started to climb back down into the ravine, intent on making Luma its breakfast. The second watched its companion, leaving itself open to Leela’s strike. She pummeled the beast hard with her short club, crunching its squat muzzle into a mess of blood, hair, and broken teeth. It tried to yelp as it crumpled to the ground, kicking its legs frantically. Leela felt bad for it, and finished it off with another fierce blow to the temple.

She swallowed the bile threatening to force itself from her throat and turned her attention to the second hound. At the sound of its companion’s thrashing, it left off its hunt of Luma and clambered back up the riverbank and right into Leela’s swinging club. She caught it beneath the jaw, whipping its head back with a gut-wrenching crack. The beast fell to the ground and didn’t move. Leela followed it down, throwing up what little hardtack she’d eaten for breakfast.

Luma screeched from the air as it flew across the riverbed and landed next to Leela. In a very human way, it stretched out a wing and patted Leela gently on the back. She reached up to stroke the raven’s soft chest, grateful that her friend was there in this moment of horror and disgust. Luma had always made the worst of life bearable.

“Thank you,” Leela croaked and wiped her eyes. “I can’t stay here anymore. Let’s go.”

Battle: 10 (+4 shadow) vs 9 | 9 = strong hit with match

The encampment was surprisingly well preserved considering it had sat in the midst of a sun-baked battlefield for over a century. Tents, while sun-baked and ragged, still sat in the regimented rows of a well-0rdered military camp. There were fire pits that could have housed campfires only days earlier, but probably hadn’t been used in living memory. A stone structure, partially ruined, perched on the edge of the ravine where the dried riverbed curved to the east overlooking the old battlefield. Standing out starkly against the faded stone and sun-bleached linen was a deep blue campaign-style tent. Leela immediately recognized it as the one from her scrying vision. There could be no doubt: this was Greta’s parent’s tent.

“We’ll start there,” she said out loud for Luma’s sake.

The air was heavy with ancient tension as she walked through the camp. In her periphery she was certain she saw gauzy forms moving about, ghosts of those poor souls who perished in the war. When she turned to look, there was nothing to see. Luma, however, saw them in full and croaked an affirmative when Leela tried, and failed, once again to catch a full glimpse of the ghostly figures.

“Glad to know this place isn’t making me crazy,” she muttered to the raven. Luma answered with a chitter that sounded surprisingly like a laugh.

The inside of the campaign tent was like walking into another world. The whole place looked untouched by time. Even the dust so pervasive in the battlefield failed to settle on the polished campaign map table, or the various chairs and stools surrounding it. The single, large cot was made up as if someone was planning to return to it after a long day of strategizing or battle. She searched, hoping to find some kind of remnant among the various possessions and material that filled the tent, but the auras were faint suggesting that there was little about the tent that called to the spirits of Greta’s parents. With little reason to remain, she left the tent and turned her attention to the stone building.

Gather Information: 5 (+3 wits) vs 3 | 6 = weak hit

Vow Progress — Reunite Greta with her parents (Dangerous): 6/10 progress

A shield, emblazoned with a dragon grasping a spear in one of its talons, hung crooked on the wall next to the door. The shield would fetch quite the price among collectors, Leela was certain, but she wasn’t interested in artifacts unless they bore a powerful connection to Greta’s parents. She stepped inside and immediately felt the pull of a powerful presence. With a little focus, she was able to see the source: a large, leatherbound tome resting on a table near one of the two windows in the squat structure. It glowed a vibrant blue with silvery edges.

“This is it, Luma,” she whispered to the raven who swooped into the building and perched on a chairback.

Leela stepped up to the table reverently and cautiously reached out a finger to trace the binding of the book. She knew that the tome bore the strategic notes and plans of Greta’s father, the Lancers’ chief tactician. Of course it would possess a strong connection to the man. She focused harder, willing her vision to see beyond the mundane and into the spirit realm. She felt the strain on her psyche, forcing her way through the veil wasn’t something she did lightly—and the spirit realm demanded a payment. She was, however, practiced at the act and was able to open her vision without too much risk to herself.

A man in long blue robes and a breastplate of hammered silver materialized before her. He was regal in bearing, with swooping brown hair tinged with gray around the temples. His steely gaze took her in, and in that moment she feared perhaps she’d awakened something terrible, but the eyes calmed into a warm welcome and the man’s mouth curved up in a smile.

“You come on behalf of Greta, my beloved daughter, yes?” he asked. The man’s voice was deep and powerful, authority echoed in every syllable. Yet kindness flowed out of him like a gentle spring.

“I do. She awaits you and her mother,” Leela replied.

“I cannot leave this place,” the man’s face fell. “I have tried many times to find her. Sometimes, I think I can hear her call out for me or her mother, but I cannot go to her.”

“Your spirit is tethered here,” Leela explained, gesturing toward the book. “Your book. It’s the source of your continued existence. I can take it to her, if you permit it.”

“You would do that, stranger?”

“I vowed to Greta that I would do all within my power to reunite her with her parents.”

“We must find my wife first. I have seen her roaming between the stables and the river. She does not hear me, though I have called out to her for so long.”

“We must find her tether. She wore a plumed helm, did she not?”

“Aye, she did. How would you know that?”

“I…saw it in the flames.”

“You’re a seer!?” the man exclaimed. “An honest to the gods seer?”

“It is not a welcome gift where I’m from.”

“What changes time has wrought on the world outside this dusty prison!” he lamented. “In my day, seers were honored. Feared, yes, for they brought the gods’ proclamations, but honored nearly as highly as kings.”

“Come, good sir, let us find your wife’s tether and reunite the two of you with your daughter.”

“Very well, Seer.”

“Leela will do fine.”

“Leela? Is that a name?”

“It is,” she smiled at the confused look on his face. “My mother gave it to me herself.”

“A fine, if odd, name. I am called Mondrich, First Strategist of the Lancer Company.”

“Well met, Strategist Mondrich.”

“And you, Seer Leela.”

Gather Information: 6 (+3 wits) vs 3 | 7 = weak hit

Spirit = +3/5

Endure Stress: 4 (+3 spirit) vs 3 | 1 = strong hit (-1 Momentum, +1 Spirit)

Spirit = +4/5

Momentum = +8/10

Vow Progress — Reunite Greta with her parents (Dangerous): 8/10

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CHARACTER SHEET

Name: Leela

Role: Scryer

Stats: 2E, 3H, 2I, 4S, 3W

Health: +5/5

Spirit: +4/5

Supply: +5/5

Momentum = +8/10

Assets:

• Scry. When you look into flames to study a remote person or location, roll +shadow. You or someone with you must have knowledge of the target. On a strong hit, you may Gather Information through observation using +shadow or +wits. On a weak hit, as above, but the flames are hungry; choose one to sacrifice.

• Companion: Raven (Luma). When you Secure an Advantage or Face Danger +shadow using your raven to perform trickery (such as creating a distraction or stealing a small object) add +1 and take +1 momentum on a hit.

• Shadow-Walk. When you cloak yourself with the gossamer veil of the shadow realms, roll +shadow. On a strong hit, take +1 momentum. Then, reroll any dice (one time only) when you make a move by ambushing, hiding, or sneaking. On a weak hit, as above, but the shadows try to lead you astray. You must first Face Danger to find your way.

Ycelan tried to question the survivor, but found that the man’s ravings had worsened and all that she could glean from him was that the beast had been surrounded on a low hill. Fortunately, one of the villagers knew of the place. To the southwest, near the southern Chains, a single stony hill rose from the forest. The ruins of an ancient beacon tower crowned the hill, and legends had long claimed that there was something beneath the tower. With this information, Ycelan knew enough to begin her pursuit of the wicked beast and set off immediately.

Seeing Stones - Does anyone in the village have information? d6/d = 4, 5 —> yes, but

Ask about the hill: 2d6 + 2 Virtue vs DR8 = 10, success

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Development Insights

• The Seeing Stones oracle uses a simple d6 resolution to answer questions about the world, character motivations, etc. I added a bit of variance to the oracle roll through using an advantage/disadvantage mechanic for questions where a “yes” is more, or less, likely. Whenever a “yes” is the probable outcome, roll two d6s and take the highest result (d6/a). If a “no” is the most probable outcome, roll two d6s and take the lowest result (d6/d). If the chances of a “yes” is about 50/50, simply roll a d6 and take what comes.

• DR or Danger Rating is the game’s way of denoting how difficult something is to do vis-a-vis the Knight’s skill. In combat, it reflects the enemy’s skill at blocking or dodging attacks. In social situations, it reflects how difficult someone’s mind is to change, or their particular outlook on a situation that the knight must overcome. The standard DR is 8, though easier tasks can be lowered (to a minimum of 5) while more difficult tasks can go all the way to 12.

• Virtue is the Knightly Tenet that applies most often to social interactions. It represents the knight’s ability to deal kindly with others. In this case, Ycelan is attempting to interact with someone who’s mental state has been dramatically altered by their encounter with the evil creature.

Last weekend (26 April), I played through Aaron Best’s Meanwhile…Somewhere in the Dark Caribbean and enjoyed it immensely. I very much enjoy Dark Fort-inspired games, and MSitDC is in that vein. Since I enjoyed it so much, I went searching for more of Aaron’s games and discovered Pulp Dreadful: The Puritan, a Gothic Horror mystery point crawl that plays very similarly to ’s Eleventh Beast. The game is pay-what-you-want and is well worth spending an afternoon playing—I finished my run in about 30 minutes. All you need is the play sheet (comes as a triflold), a set of polyhedral dice, and a piece of scrap paper to track enemy health.

The Pros

Easy pick up and play

d20 Roll Under resolution

Easy to follow gameplay loop

Satisfying Combat

Thematic enemies and other encounters

Easy Pick Up and Play. There’s a lot of great stuff to be said about this game. Its incredibly easy to pick up and play. There’s no preparation necessary, you only really need the trifold and dice (or dice app) to play. This is something I look for in Micro RPGs, and something that I am trying to implement and practice in my own TTRPG design. Set up consists of rolling your character’s two abilities (Physical and Wit), logging gear, and rolling a d12 three times to place Leads on the map. There’s no HP, damage takes away from your Physical or Wit scores. These can be healed with bandages, laudanum, or a doctor’s bag if you have them. Once could draw similarities with Cairn in the way that stats take damage (though Cairn also has Hit Protection).

d20 Roll Under. Overall, I do not like the d20. Its so swingy, and makes for some really immersion breaking rolls in so many games that use it. Of all the dice in my dice bag, the d20 and the d4 get the least use. Pulp Dreadful uses the only d20 resolution mechanic that I actually enjoy: Roll Under. When you create your character, you roll 4d4 (drop lowest) for Physical, and 3d6 for Wit. The sum of those respective dice rolls give you the value you must roll under when making ability tests. While its still swingy, I think of roll under systems (like Dragonbane, my favorite d20 game) as rolling within the span of your skill. If you roll too high, the thing your trying to do is beyond your capability. It adds a bit of narrative to the roll all on its own.

My character got lucky on the Physical ability roll, scoring a 6, 6, 5, 2 for a total of 17. I never missed once in combat. My Wit ability score was more modest at 10. I failed a couple rolls looking for clues with that 50% success chance.

Easy to follow Loop. The game follows a very simple and clearly stated gameplay loop. Each Map Turn, you move from one point to any adjacent point, roll on the encounter table, resolve the encounter and, if there’s a Lead at that point, you make a Wit test to see if you find it. Rinse, and repeat. If you fail to find the Lead, you roll a d12 and move the lead to the point indicated (I had to reroll sometimes to keep leads from reappearing in the same point, where I already was).

With my middling Wit score of 10, I failed the first two Wit checks to find the leads indicated on my map. Fortunately, the three subsequent times I succeeded with rolls of 9, 5, and 2. One of the encounters was a phantasmal laugh, which forced a Wit check or face d4 Wit damage. The dice gods were on my side, and I managed to withstand the mental damage with a roll of 5.

Satisfying Combat. Best uses a combat resolution that I find to be incredibly satisfying and simple. Whenever you are in combat, you roll a d20 against your Physical stat. If you roll equal to or under, you hit and roll your damage dice. If you roll over, you roll the enemy’s damage dice instead. There’s no defense roll, though if you have armor, you subtract the armor value (either 0, 1, or 2) from the damage roll. Enemies do not have armor. I may have had a better experience with combat since my PHY was 17, and I hit every attack. Mileage may vary there.

In the final battle with the murderer, my character rocked a leather coat (2 armor) and a shotgun (d12 damage). The shotgun was a lucky roll on an item encounter, and was absolutely busted. I took down the murderer in two attacks, opening with a heavy blast of 6 damage and finishing him off with a 10. A bit anticlimactic, but also so bad ass.

Thematic Enemies and Encounters. The game has a d20 encounter table that has everything from empty streets and dead bodies to crazed brutes and frenzied mobs. In my mental theater, there was a lot to fear from the maddened citizens of the Gothic town the game is set in. I will confess to rerolling several encounters, not because they were “too dangerous” but because I’d already fought the enemy once (or twice in some cases) or experienced the event and I wanted a more varied experience.

My character ended the game with three unused bandages, a shotgun, a leather coat, and fifty-seven shillings (the game’s currency) despite spending 20 shillings for the armor about midway through the game.

The Cons

Clues had very little narrative impact

Clues. The only real con I could think of was that, unlike Exuent Press’s Eleventh Beast which is this game’s closest comparison, the clues had no impact. There’s no clue table, and all finding the three clues does is unlock the encounter with the murderer. Now, that’s fine for a game that’s less about the story and more about the gameplay. Its not a big deal, honestly, though I would have liked something to flesh out just what kind of killer we were hunting, what kinds of things they took or didn’t take from their victims, etc.

The Verdict

Pulp Dreadful is a fun time, and I’m glad I gave it a go. It rolled a solid 5 on the Review Oracle. That’s a “straight yes.”

I’m a big fan of Aaron Best’s game design, and both Meanwhile…Somewhere in the Dark Caribbean and Pulp Dreadful—while completely different types of games—are well-made, concise, and have great settings and mechanics. Next weekend, my plan is to play another Pulp Dreadful adventure called Assault on Castle Nachtenthal.

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The sun was sinking behind the hills to the west as Leela set about building a small fire. Greta warned her against it, fearing that the flames would draw the attention of the hungry hounds that roamed the wasteland or, worse, the Bloody March. Leela accepted the risk, knowing that if she was going to be able to help find the spirits of Greta’s parents, she would need to make use of all of her esoteric abilities.

“Now, look into the flames with me, Greta,” Leela said after stoking the fire and sitting cross-legged beside it. “Envision your mother and father as you last remember them. With luck, the flames will show us where their final resting places are.”

After a few minutes, the ghostly child’s patience ran thin. “This isn’t working.”

“Just a moment, I can see something. Can you not?”

“Just fire. Is it supposed to be gray and white?”

“No, it’s the colors fire is supposed to be,” Leela replied, turning her attention to the child.

“Strange.”

“What color is my cloak?” Leela asked, curious.

“Gray, and your skin is slightly lighter.”

“Do you only see grayscale?”

“I…guess? I’d never paid attention before, everything here is so bland and I’ve been here for ages.”

“Oh!” Leela said, returning her attention to the flames. “I see something. There’s a ruined stone building…a symbol of a…dragon? It’s holding a spear.”

“That’s the sigil of my parents’ unit!”

“There’s a…book. Large, leatherbound with the same symbol on the cover.”

“My dad always carried around a book like that. It was his…strat-gee book.”

“Strategy? Was your father a strategist?”

“Yes! Strategy. What else do you see?”

“A stable. There’s no horses there now, it’s mostly in ruins. I see an old helmet. It looks like it once had a plume, maybe an orange feather but it’s hard to say for sure.”

“My mother’s helmet had an orange feather!”

“There’s also a blue tent in the midst of plainer tents. Does that mean anything to you?”

“My parents were leaders, maybe that’s their tent?”

“Could be. Do you have any idea where this place is?”

“Not really. Somewhere that way, I think. I sometimes hear a voice calling out. It sounds like my mother.”

“That’s as good a place to start as any. I’ll head out at first light.”

The ghost was quiet for a while, then flickered out of sight. Leela didn’t search for her, and instead set about warming some strips of beef she’d bought in the Outpost. Luma hopped down from its perch on a nearby rock and pecked at a small loaf of bread.

“What do you think, Luma?”

Luma eyed her with a tilted head, then chattered.

“I agree. I think we’ll find something that will bring this poor girl peace. At least, I hope so. You keep watch. I’m going to try to sleep.”

Scry: 6 (+4 shadow) vs 3 | 5 = strong hit (gather information +shadow)

Gather Information: 8 (+4 shadow) vs 5 | 5 = strong hit w/ match (+1 clue for strong hit, +1 clue for match; +1 clue for weak hit on Vow → 3 clues)

Clue Table: 2, father’s last known location; 1, mother’s last known location; 4, parents’ campaign tent

Vow Progress — Reunite Greta with her parents (Dangerous): 2/10 progress

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CHARACTER SHEET

Name: Leela

Role: Scryer

Stats: 2E, 3H, 2I, 4S, 3W

Health: +5/5

Spirit: +4/5

Supply: +5/5

Momentum = +10/10

Assets:

• Scry. When you look into flames to study a remote person or location, roll +shadow. You or someone with you must have knowledge of the target. On a strong hit, you may Gather Information through observation using +shadow or +wits. On a weak hit, as above, but the flames are hungry; choose one to sacrifice.

• Companion: Raven (Luma). When you Secure an Advantage or Face Danger +shadow using your raven to perform trickery (such as creating a distraction or stealing a small object) add +1 and take +1 momentum on a hit.

• Shadow-Walk. When you cloak yourself with the gossamer veil of the shadow realms, roll +shadow. On a strong hit, take +1 momentum. Then, reroll any dice (one time only) when you make a move by ambushing, hiding, or sneaking. On a weak hit, as above, but the shadows try to lead you astray. You must first Face Danger to find your way.

Ycelan had traveled far with only her beloved steed, Aldvale, to keep her company over the long miles of forest, meadows, and the magical chains that connected the myriad islands of the Chainlands. Her search led her to the forested village of Oakvale, where rumors she’d collected along her path said one such craftsman dwelled. It was, sadly, not to be. An ill-fated encounter with a beast, she was told, ended the bowyer’s life aught but three days before she arrived.

The creature, whatever it was, had been attacking merchant caravans and travelers for weeks. The bowyer, an accomplished hunter in his own right, had set out to track down the beast and end its tyranny. Only one of the hunting party returned, badly wounded and raving about a deer with fangs and human eyes.

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Development Insights

• Generating quests in Oathbound is as easy as asking “what do I want my knight to do?” When I started Ycelan’s story, my goal was to travel—mostly because the whole point was to test the travel mechanics—so I established a quest that required some level of travel through the wilderness. To that end, I set up the beginning of her story to set that in motion: she wants to help these people plagued by the creepy deer-man thing because that’s what knights do.

• Quests also have a ranking, and work similar to how Ironsworn’s challenge ranks do. Quest rank is intended to abstract the amount of narrative focus you want to expend. A simple quest, or one that you want to be over quickly, might be trifling. An epic quest in search of a sacred relic might be arduous or even perilous (the highest rank available). Rank also determines the amount of Renown (Oathbound’s dual currency and experience) the knight receives for completing the quest. The higher the rank, the more Renown a knight earns. Ycelan’s quest is set to average, which provides three renown upon completion.

The roiling mass had no discernible face, but Leela was almost certain its gaze turned toward her a moment after the shadow cloak flickered. The sun glinted off of several metallic objects—swords, spears, and even the handle of a cavalry lance—buried within the creature’s awful body as it moved. In its wake, the ground steamed as if superheated. Leela quickly calculated the most likely path of the creature and realized that it was coming her direction.

She froze, trusting the shadows to protect her against whatever arcane vision the amorphous creature possessed. Her instincts proved true as the monstrosity veered to the left and slithered a steaming path along an old riverbed. Leela didn’t move until the evil thing was nothing more than a black shape in the distance. She dropped the shadows, and whistled for Luma.

Face Danger: 7 (+4 shadow) vs 1 | 9 → Shadow-Walk 7 vs 1 | 3 = strong hit

Luma settled on a boulder and cocked her head. Leela reached out and gently stroked the iridescent feathers of the bird’s head.

“I don’t know what that was, but it was evil. More evil than anything I’ve ever seen before. Come, I want to look at its trail.”

As the pair approached the still-steaming earth, the stench became almost unbearable. The smell of decay, rot, and phosphorus filled Leela’s nose causing her to pull up short of the blackened path and cover her nose with the sleeve of her tunic.

“Whatever that thing is, it smells almost as evil as its aura looks,” she muttered to the raven, whose sleek black head was now buried beneath a wing. She could feel the bird’s agreement in the shutter that traveled through its tiny bird body.

“That’s the Bloody March,” a small, quiet voice broke through the tense air.

Leela jumped, spinning toward the voice and clumsily drawing her dagger. Luma croaked in surprise and fluttered into the air, whacking Leela in the side of the head with frantic wing strokes. Leela’s chest heaved, sucking in still rancid air, as she searched for the source of the voice.

“You shouldn’t follow it,” the voice spoke again.

“Who’s there?” Leela asked, her voice barely a whisper.

“Just me,” the voice replied, and, as if out of thin air, the form of a small child materialized a few feet in front of Leela. The child’s form was gauzy, almost fully transparent, and rippled in the sunlight.

Gather Information: 4 (+3 wits) vs 7 | 1 = weak hit (complication; +1 Momentum)

Suffer Stress: 7 (+3 spirit) vs 6 | 5 = strong hit (shake it off, +1 spirit / -1 Momentum)

Spirit = +4/5

Momentum = +8/10

“I…know you.”

“I shouldn’t think so, miss. I’ve been trapped here for so long. You’re the first person I’ve seen since…” The girl brushed her long hair from the left side of her face, revealing a broken mass of flesh, bone, and blood. “Since this.”

“It’s you!” Leela all but shouted. “Who are you?”

“You know me?”

“Well, no. Not really. But I’ve seen you. Every day for weeks.”

“You are a strange person,” the girl said, tilting her head so that her hair fell back across her wounded head.

“I’ve heard that before,” Leela laughed. “I’m Leela.”

“My name is Greta. Or it was.” The ghost girl’s face fell, ethereal tears pooled in her one good eye before streaming down her translucent cheek.

“How did it happen, Greta?”

“I was searching the battlefield for my parents. I know I shouldn’t have. They left me at home, but I ran away from my grandmother and hid on a supply cart. Turns out it was going to the other side. I managed to get away before anyone saw me, or so I thought. Some massive warrior followed me out onto the battlefield and…”

The girl gestured at her hidden face and sniffled.

“So you never found them.”

“I didn’t. But I hear my mother’s voice sometimes. Or I think I do. It’s hard to know for sure. There’s so many voices, especially when that monster is around.”

“The big blob?”

“The Bloody March, yes.”

“That’s the Bloody March? It’s real?”

“As real as you or me.”

“No offense, Greta, but you’re a ghost.”

“And you’re talking to me, and see things,” the ghost replied.

“You’re…right,” Leela said, and smiled at the girl. “I’ve seen a lot of things since I was a child, but I’ve never seen anything that evil before.”

“You should hope it’s the last time you see it. There were soldiers not long ago, they came over that wall in the distance. The Bloody March devoured them. I saw it from up there.”

The girl pointed one hazy finger up to the rise where the old tower kept watch over the badlands. This close, Leela could see the aura of the place in stark detail: it radiated crimson, like blood, but thick with the taint of dark magic. The Bloody March possessed a similar aura, as did the pit not far away.

“What’s that?” Leela asked, pointing toward the pit beside the ruined ritual site.

“That’s where the Bloody March was made. I saw the evil man start his ritual before I ran. The magic tried to pull me into the pit, too.”

“He made it with human souls? That’s an unheard of level of power.”

“Things were different then, I guess.”

“Perhaps,” Leela shivered at the thought of such unrestrained power. “Not much I can do about that now, but I am glad you were able to get away.”

“Why are you here, Leela?” Greta asked softly.

“I came to find you, actually.”

“Why me?”

“Sometimes, when I have a very powerful vision, or if the vision is recurrent, I have to seek out the source and try to bring peace to the situation.”

“What happens if you don’t?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never ignored a vision before.”

“Maybe you should’ve ignored this one.”

“Why are you still here, Greta?” Leela asked, ignoring the girl’s morose statement. “What holds you to this place?”

“The curse, I think. At least that’s what some of the others say.”

“Others?”

“Other ghosts, like me, and some that are more physical. The walking corpses, the remnants of the old armies. Though they don’t talk much.”

Gather Information: 8 (+3 wits) vs 7 | 9 = weak hit (+1 Momentum, +complication)

Momentum = +9/10

“In my experience, ghosts are tied to a place because of unfinished business.”

“The only business I had was finding my parents.”

“What if I found them for you? Even if you can’t move on, even if the curse is real, at least, maybe, you could be with them again.”

“You would do that for me?” Greta’s voice quavered, and more ethereal tears rolled down her hollow cheek.

“I would. I think that’s why my visions led me here. To help you find your parents.” Leela felt the rightness of her words in her chest, like a warm, comforting weight on her heart. “I swear to you, Greta, I will reunite you with your parents.”

Swear an Iron Vow: 7 (+3 heart) vs 2 | 8 = weak hit (+1 Momentum)

Momentum = +10/10

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CHARACTER SHEET

Name: Leela

Role: Scryer

Stats: 2E, 3H, 2I, 4S, 3W

Health: +5/5

Spirit: +4/5

Supply: +5/5

Momentum = +10/10

Assets:

• Scry. When you look into flames to study a remote person or location, roll +shadow. You or someone with you must have knowledge of the target. On a strong hit, you may Gather Information through observation using +shadow or +wits. On a weak hit, as above, but the flames are hungry; choose one to sacrifice.

• Companion: Raven (Luma). When you Secure an Advantage or Face Danger +shadow using your raven to perform trickery (such as creating a distraction or stealing a small object) add +1 and take +1 momentum on a hit.

• Shadow-Walk. When you cloak yourself with the gossamer veil of the shadow realms, roll +shadow. On a strong hit, take +1 momentum. Then, reroll any dice (one time only) when you make a move by ambushing, hiding, or sneaking. On a weak hit, as above, but the shadows try to lead you astray. You must first Face Danger to find your way.

Ycelan of Meadowgate considered herself a capable tracker, hunter, and, most especially, a crack shot with the longbow. Many of her fellow Selkyrianes eschewed the yew and arrow as cowardly, or, at the least, unfit for those who follow the tenants of the Codex. Ycelan’s father, the lord of Meadowgate Caern, often told her stories of his ancestors who served alongside the High Queen long, long ago. The Knight of the Gate, her many times removed grandmother, was one of the Selkyriane’s closest companions and was also the most effective archer in the entirety of the High Queen’s army. Those tales resonated with something deep inside Ycelan, and she swore to herself that she would one day take up her grandmother’s mantle as an archer-knight.

That vow is how Ycelan found herself on the remote isle of Yewicke.

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Development Insights

• Ycelan of Meadowgate is the second play-test character I made to test the travel mechanics for Oathbound. You might not notice it in the ensuing entries, but the travel mechanics changed mid play-test. I’ll talk a bit more about travel in later entries of Oathbound Chronicles.

• Ycelan also happens to be the first character I’ve played who’s primary focus is the tenet of Coursing. In Oathbound, tenets are the knight’s stats or attributes. There are four, and each corresponds to one of the major tenets of Selkyriane Knighthood. Coursing covers things like riding, hunting, tracking, and shooting a bow.

Enter Ironsworn. Everything in my TTRPG experience ultimately comes back to that game. It was the first time I had ever heard of solo roleplaying games, and, like some, I wondered how you could play by yourself while maintaining the potential for surprise. Of course, Ironsworn comes with a built-in oracle. While I love Ironsworn, as anyone who’s been around my content for any length of time knows well, it doesn’t scratch every itch. At least, not without some homebrewing (which I also love, but I digress). I quickly found myself wanting to play D&D and other traditionally GM-led games on my own.

To that end, the first non-Ironsworn TTRPG content I purchased was Tana Pigeon’s Mythic Game Master Emulator (GME), then in its first edition. I read the GME twice and was absolutely and completely overwhelmed. I was still new to the hobby, and the sheer amount of bookkeeping to use the GME as intended was just too much. So, I began to shed things I didn’t like, couldn’t keep up with, or otherwise made my gaming less fun.

Eventually, I started a D&D 5th Edition story using Mythic’s Fate Chart. It worked well combined with Elminster’s Guide to Solo Adventuring (used primarily to set the DC of skill checks), but I was definitely not using Mythic rules-as-written (RAW). I didn’t keep track of scenes or maintain lists of characters. I didn’t even use random events or altered scenes. The Fate Chart, with its complex (and pleasing) matrix of modifiers and likelihoods, along with the subject and action event meaning tables were the only two bits I made use of.

> Riley, a 1st level Bard, and her companion, a 1st level Rogue Gnome named Alvyn, are traveling through the forest in search of a bandit hideout where Alvyn’s friend has been taken captive. I rolled up a wilderness encounter (d20 = 13, a cabin), and then asked the question: Is the cabin occupied? Setting the likelihood of a yes at 50/50 and a current Chaos Factor of 5, I rolled the d100 and scored a 41 → yes, the cabin is occupied. I then asked: Is there a story element here? Setting the likelihood of a story element also at 50/50 scored me an extreme yes (8). Now, having rolled up a wilderness encounter and discovering the cabin is both occupied and possesses some kind of story enhancement or addition, I was able to develop a new story element: a murder, perpetrated by a high-level magic user.

The Fate Check

When Mythic GME 2nd Edition released, I questioned purchasing it, based on my usage history of the original version. But, eventually, my insatiable greed for TTRPG books won out and I picked up the digital version. And I’m glad I did. Besides the plethora of new random tables for all manner of things, the second edition introduced the Fate Check: a scaled down version of the Fate Chart, making use of Chaos Factor, odds, and 2d10 to answer questions. I have used the Fate Chart in every game I’ve played that isn’t in the Ironsworn family since its release. My recent review of Fari RPGs’ Breathless: Frightmare Edition utilized my modified method of using the Fate Check to answer story questions, while trying to take my survivors from a burning apartment building to safety through hordes of oxygen-hungry zombies.

> Mythic’s Chaos Factor is a numerical value from 1 to 9 that abstracts how in control the character(s) are of a scene. It is used rules-as-written to add to the likelihood that random or altered events will take place (more likely the higher the chaos grows). If the character(s) is in control of a scene, the Chaos Factor drops by 1, if they are not in control, it goes up 1.

The Fate Check simplifies the older Fate Chart considerably. You have two sets of modifiers, one for the odds of a yes and one for the Chaos Factor. Once you’ve determined the modifiers, you roll two ten-sided dice and add (or subtract) the modifier from the result. The Fate Check also has an “answer chart” that ranges from exceptional no for the very lowest of rolls to an exceptional yes for the very highest. No and yes fall in the mid-range. Rolling doubles below the Chaos Factor triggers a random event. It’s such a neatly packaged chart that provides just enough complexity to truly randomize results and enough simplicity to make it easy and intuitive to use.

As I mentioned earlier, the Mythic GME has always been a bit overwhelming for me. Even now, years later and with significantly more TTRPG experience under my belt, I find it to be too cumbersome for me to use rules-as-written. To that end, I’ve been modifying the Fate Check to suit my needs. I have the Fate Check page of the Mythic 2e book printed out and at hand anytime I’m playing a non-Ironsworn game. It has its own clipboard. Whenever I begin a campaign, I set the Chaos Factor to five—the rules-as-written default. Play flows normally until I need to determine something.

Often, a story plays out with clear scenes or events that make it easy to modify the Chaos Factor either up or down. Maybe I’ve had some really great rolls and my character is doing great. The Chaos Factor will move down. But then, I’ve rolled really bad for a bit and the Chaos Factor goes back up. I don’t adjust it in the middle of the action, but any time I’ve come to a lull, a scene break, etc., I’ll evaluate it. If I forget, that’s not a big deal. I’m not using the Chaos Factor to set up altered events, as one would do rules-as-written. Essentially, I’m using the Fate Check as an oracle the same way I would the Ask the Oracle move in Ironsworn. The Fate Check offers just a bit more granularity than the Ironsworn oracle, and I really like that.

I’ve also been toying with getting rid of the Chaos Factor all together. This is largely because in the heat of things, I forget to modify it. I also often find having a low Chaos Factor is less fun, and less impactful, than having it higher. Setting it to five for the purposes of using the Chart and never adjusting it gives you a relatively even distribution of yes/no answers, with the occasional outlier of exceptional answers. This is all for the purpose of simplicity. It may be too simple for some people, and that’s perfectly fine. Homebrewing things to fit what works at your table is intrinsic to the DNA of tabletop games, perhaps more so when you’re the sole occupant of said table.

Conclusion

As my routines and preferences in TTRPGs continue to change and grow, I find that I’m often looking for something simple and easy to use. This is true whether we’re talking game design, game rules, or oracles. It needs just enough granularity to make it interesting (this is why I’m not a huge fan of d6 oracles), but enough simplicity to prevent it from becoming tedious. Modifying the Mythic Fate Chart has been revolutionary for me in playing TTRPGs that aren’t purposefully designed for solo play. I’ve used the Fate Check in D&D (both 5e and AD&D), Cairn, Knave, Dragonbane, Four Against Darkness, and a host of other games (like Breathless) to great success. Whether you make use of the full Mythic GME suite of tools or just the Fate Check, you’ll find no better tool for playing traditional TTRPGs solo.

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