Solo Dragon Warriors

This random encounter lacks balance

Currently I have time for one campaign. Prep time and play time enough for one session a week which is on a Sunday evening. As many of us would I would like to have more gaming time. My friend Alex is an advocate of playing solo RPG. I have been aware of this. For example The One Ring RPG has Strider Mode which is a supplement for you to play alone. 

Playing this way, as both player and GM, flies in the face of my preferred play style. I’m a traditional sort of gamer, I like the GM to provide the setting and the PCs to explore it. Having control of both sides of the equation is to have total authorial control of the game and we’re into the territory of the types of story games that are not to my taste. However I’m firmly of the opinion that unless you try something, your opinion on the matter is fairly inconsequential. For example when I was trying to get a game of BECMI D&D going at an RPG club in the city almost about ten years ago, I struggled for players. So instead I ended up joining a table playing FATE Accelerated every week for fourteen weeks. So I can unequivocally state: I despise FATE. 

So how does this solo thing work? I always want a Legend based game on the go. Dragon Warriors is in my blood after all. I mean for so many reasons, not just because it was my first RPG but the pull of nostalgia is strong. Also this is a setting that lives large in my brain, so imagining myself into it is less of a stretch than something more esoteric like Tékumel. 

In order to get started I took a lot of inspiration from Ironsworn, which is good and free; and conveniently also depicts a downbeat, pseudo Dark Age, low fantasy setting. For solo play Ironsworn uses Oracles, or random tables as I prefer to call to them, to provide prompts from

which to construct the scenario which your character is going to experience. I have conveniently created my own Spark Tables which will come into play here  Also as the themes on Ironsworn are somewhat similar to Dragon Warriors the tables therein don’t require much adaptation for Legend. Random Encounter tables and B/X D&D style reaction rolls are going to be extremely useful as well. 

For mechanics I’m intending on taking a fairly FKR approach to resolutions. There will already be potentially quite a lot of dice rolling involved in consulting tables for scenario construction and developing the environment. I don’t want to get bogged down with mechanics. Ironsworn uses a PBTA approach but fortunately the tables are system agnostic so I can divest myself of those rules and use my own. 

Basically I’ll keep everything to a 2d6 (with bonuses) roll as much as possible and add relevant rules as they come up. 

I’m going to journal the adventure as it transpires. It won’t be literature, or even a play report just recording what happens in whatever format suits at the time. The whole point of this is to be flexible, having short spells of gaming in random slots of free time and seeing where it goes. There is definitely space in my psyche for a game that doesn’t require too much thought or worry. I’m excited to see what happens. 

Grim Sorcery

Like sorcery but grim, and northern…

The rules for Grim Sorcery are constantly subject to review. This is because I’m trying out various things to get the feel I want for magic in the Grim North, that Conan-risqué Sword and Sorcery vibe that is essentially missing from most versions of Dungeons and Dragons if we’re going RAW. 

In the Grim North we want magic to feel like something ancient, powerful and if we’re honest; something us mortals should probably leave well enough alone. Player characters are not generally renowned for their sensible approach to such things however so, let’s face it, they’re going to steep themselves as deeply as humanly possible in the darkest, most foul sorcery they can find. 

Good. 

So grim sorcery has spell lists. Each relates to one of the much vaunted (admittedly, only by me) thousand dead civilisations that the Grim North is built atop the ruins of. Each long dead culture has its own ancient language in which its magic is written and if you speak that language then you can learn the spells of said ancient civilisation. Hence we don’t need artificial constructs such as Read Magic spells; if you can read Sepulchral, the grave tongue of accursed Xidia then you can acquire the secrets of those ancient death magicians. Although clearly there is some small risk attached. Folk can’t simply go stomping all over the Grim North turning up forbidden secrets and expect those secrets not to stomp back. 

So it might be that OSR D&D isn’t going to cut it or maybe it will. We’re playing online where simplicity of rules seems to be king. So keeping it sorcerous but simple is probably the way forward for now. One of the players has rolled up a wizard as his reserve character do we’ll see how it works out in the game should that come to pass. Theorising will only get us so far after all, the proof is in the play. 

DW Yamato: Ki and Sumo

 I have, so far,  added two house rules for my Dragon Warriors Yamato campaign. DW is such a light system that it’s easy to modify to your taste and there’s nothing unified about the rules, so changing one bit isn’t going to affect anything else. As we’re going for an pseudo Japanese feudal feel I’ve gone for some basic Ki rules and a bit of sumo. 

Now these are both complex and interesting subjects that definitely deserve a more in depth treatment than I’m going to give them but this is two small adaptations to an old rules light system for my home game so I’m not prepared to massively go to town on this. 

Ki

For game purposes this is grossly oversimplified as spirit energy and quantified by Ki points. Player Characters have a pool of these, starting with one, that they can spend to gain Advantage on a dice roll (ie roll twice and take the best result.) Characters who entirely deplete their Ki reserves will recover one following a good night’s sleep. Otherwise Ki is awarded by GM fiat for positive supernatural interactions and play rewards. Eg all my players revived a point of Ki for freeing a lake spirit that had been imprisoned by someone believing themselves to be the servant of a demon god. 

In narrative terms this represents a character’s ability, through martial/meditative/magical training, to focus their spirit into mundane tasks to achieve exceptional results when the pressure is on. As a feature they are required to state they are spending Ki before they roll.

Sumo

Dragon Warriors has no official rules for grappling or wrestling of any kind so in order to resolve a bout of sumo with a boisterous Yamawaro (a type of mountain yokai) I dug into my memory for old rules from other systems that I might be happy with. In general grappling is hard to get right in RPGs. Either the author of the rules doesn’t understand it or they understand it too well giving rise to the situation that grappling is usually abstracted too much or present led in unnecessarily granular detail. Also a sumo bout has very specific rules that don’t necessarily apply to wrestling with an opponent under life and death conditions. Sumo rules therefore do not follow the standard combat rules of DW but instead I settle for the following gross oversimplification of this ancient and complex martial sport:

Each participant calculates a sumo score. This is the average of their Strength, Reflexes and Attack scores. To simulate the fast pace of a sumo bout an opposed roll under the sumo score is made with the highest success on the die showing an advantage. Two consecutive advantages result in victory, and you can narrate this however you like such as pushing your opponent directly out of the competition ring or throwing them to the ground in spectacular style. Any roll which is exactly equal to the sumo score is a critical and results in instant and overwhelming victory, unless the opponent also rolls a critical in which case there is a tie....

In my game Khasan, a shipwrecked Khanates barbarian, was soundly thrashed by the one eyed, hirsute mountain spirit but did earn a point of Ki out of it.