Let’s just start with an ufff. This month has been a lot. I’ve still been playing a little bit every day and getting in 6+ over the weekend, but in terms of my Moon Challenge I was an epic failure.

The plan was to play 4 games that I found in itch.io which were free. I would do one a week and then report back here with short reviews on all of them. Instead I spent the first part of the month playing Old School Essentials and figuring out how to run published adventures solo. Then I got Captain’s Log Solo RPG on discount and have spent the last half of the month playing it.

I did keep up with the blog through sickness and I even took up book binding. I started to bind some of my 1000s of RPG pdfs in order to motivate me to play them. Side note (and I’ll write a post about this at some point) book binding is super fun, has a low entry barrier, and so far hasn’t been too hard. I highly recommend it, if you have been thinking about it.

Old School Essentials – Recap & Thoughts

The first half of the month I was elbow deep in OSE and putting together my way of running on published adventures. I then worked my way through one of my favorite beginning adventures, Dovedale. It was published in 1994 in Dungeon magazine, by Ted James and Thomas Zuvich. Essentially, it is a whimsical adventure with a talking fish, an ornery tribe of goblins, and some farmers who are struggling with water rights. It is a great first adventure for young folks.

I worked my way through it thinking that I knew what was going to happen and that there won’t be any surprises. But that wasn’t the case. While I did follow the plot as it was written in the adventure, there were enough other things which just won’t happen in a non-solo game. For example, one of the farmer’s daughters decided to join my character on their quest and then they promptly died in a large battle between the goblins and the local militia.

Moving forward with that same character, I’m going to try to just read what I need to run the adventure and essentially leave it the same as written. Then I can compare the two ways and see which one I like better.

Captain’s Log Solo RPG – Recap & Thoughts

The second half of the month I dove head first into the Captain’s Log Solo RPG. It has been a lot of fun. I spent the first week plus building, first a captain, and then all of the bridge officers. It has caused me to start doing a lot of lore reading about Star Trek and has inspired me to start watching a few of the seasons of various shows that I missed. The lifepath character generation is super fun and fostered a lot of writing in regards to the backstories of each character.

The game play is broken into missions which are then broken into three acts with each act containing 5 scenes. So it feels a lot like watching an episode of Star Trek. Right now I’m rolling about once a scene but I’m only part way through the second act of the first episode. One tip I would say is ease into. What I mean is that I threw a big problem at the characters too early and now I feel like I need to keep amping it up to increase the tension. When I should have spent the first few scenes setting the stage and then dropping the problem on them. I will try that next episode.

I’m also using Mythic’s Adventure Lists. I mixed all of my characters Threads and Characters together and when I need something of that nature I can pull from the list. I think in the next game I might treat Captain’s Log’s acts like scenes from Mythic and roll before each act to see how it might change from what I expect. Just to throw a might more surprise in and keep things connected to the bridge officers.

Final Thoughts

I didn’t complete my moon challenge this month, but that is okay. I did get into a nice groove into two systems that I’m really enjoying and they are different enough that I feel moving between them will be easy. Even now I keep thinking about my OSE game while I’m playing Star Trek and I’m sure when I finally go back to OSE I’ll be thinking about Star Trek.

I am traveling this week, so I’m again testing out solo RPGs while traveling. Last time it was snowshoeing and spending nights at lodges, this time it will be flying across the Atlantic, so airplane gaming and downtime gaming. I’ll probably write about what worked and what was a pain in my next post. And I’m still planning on writing a post about binding your pdfs.

How has your month gone?