This month my moon challenge was to play games that were created for multiplayer. I got in a session of my Legend of the Five Rings, 5e campaign, multiple sessions of Be Like a Crow, and a ton of time playing Old School Essentials. Overall, I would mark that as a success, not that this was a hard challenge. Let’s take a closer look at what I did this month and start to talk about what next month will look like.

Back in December I started a Legend of the Five Rings, 5e campaign. I grabbed all of the titles of Usagi Yojimbo comic books and created a table with them. I then created a character modeled–a little bit–on the main character, Usagi Yojimbo. My character is a Dragon Clan of the Mirumoto Family. He has been given a mission by his father to learn more about Rokugan by acting as a ronin and exploring the land. Then for each segment of travel and each town I roll on the titles table, find a title, and research the story related to it. Then using the Challenge, Focus, Strike method I lay out a rough plan of the scene or side quest. (Challenge, Focus, Strike is a way to easily develop a scenario. Challenge is the hook, focus is what happens, and strike is the conclusion.) After that I was using GEMulator–but have recently started using it combined with Mythic–to see if the scene changed or how it has. After that I play my way through the situation. It has been super fun but so many other shiny things keep grabbing my attention.

It was my plan to play L5R, 5e throughout the month, but those plans got waylaid by the solo RPG book club pick of Be Like a Crow. I’ve played numerous sessions of this game and even started to create some characters using corvids native to North America and not England. I was able to select Common Raven from the core game which happens to be in both locations. I then selected Fantasy Crow. There are a number of different settings you can choose from, but I wanted to plug this into my developing fantasy world. My Common Raven was given a number of objectives and spent his time dealing with them each in turn. I did find after a number of sessions that the game started to get a bit repetitive and didn’t really have any stakes. Nothing seemed to be able to stop me as I cruised through one object to the next.

Somewhere along the way I pulled the trigger on Old School Essentials. I grabbed the rules book, created a character, and then did a deep dive into both how to play OSE solo but also how to play published adventure modules solo. Using a “frankencobbled” method made of mechanics from various blogs, Mythic, and GEMulator, I found a method which worked for me. I tried it out on an old adventure called “Dovedale” from Dungeon magazine. It is an adventure I’ve run as a DM and so I was very familiar with it. But playing it solo and tweaking so many parts of it made it feel fresh and new. I’m still working my way through it but overall I’ve been very happy with the method and will probably write something about it later down the road. Speaking of modules, if my character survives I have a couple published modules that I haven’t read which I would like to take him through. So I’ll probably use a slightly different procedure for those kinds of modules.

Quick side note, I’ve started to print out some of my pdfs and am dabbling in bookbinding. So far I’ve only done the saddle stitch binding, but I’m going to give a coptic binding a go. I have 1000s of pdfs and a few real books, so I will try my hand at binding up the ones which I use the most. We’ll see how it goes.

Next month’s moon challenge is to play games that are free on itch.io. As I’ve done before I’m planning on finding four games which are free and spending about a week on each one to get a sense of them and write up a review at the end of the month. I will also be continuing my OSE game and seeing what trouble I can get myself up to in regards to that system.

How was March for you? Usually this is one of the worst months of the year for me but for some reason this March did suck, even if it is currently snowing as I write this.