Running a Solo Campaign: Some Observations

I’m currently involved in two solo campaigns with my wife, one as the DM, one as the player. Here are a few of the observations I’ve gathered over the past few months.

Puzzles suck

You know puzzles: you have to put the right thing in the statue’s hand for the door to open, or step on the right blocks on the floor in the right order, or solve some stupid riddle, that kind of thing.

The fun of puzzles is in the interaction between players as they spitball possible solutions and worry about what might happen if they do it wrong. In such a situation the DM can subtly guide the group toward the correct solution. I prefer leaving the solution open-ended and just choosing whichever proposed solution presents the most interesting complication, a method that requires the group to suggest a few different solutions.

You don’t get that with one person. If they’re stumped, the adventure ends there, or it comes down to, “Can I just roll an Intelligence check to see if my character can figure it out?” Either way, not fun. Unless you and your player just love them, skip them all together.

You know, like in a D&D solo campaign: walk from place to place, meet people, get into adventures.

DMPCs suck

It’s no fun as a DM to have to roll all of the monster attacks and then roll for 3-4 NPCs. All of the solo campaigns I’ve played with my wife have involved a powerful animal companion or some kind of loyal servant that can absorb some damage and contribute a little to combat. One campaign I ran years ago began with the PC inheriting a golem. The first session involved finding a crystal that would power up the construct (though obviously it wasn’t as powerful as a golem from the start). This type of companion adds another layer to combat without making it too complicated for the player, but it also raises the stakes in combat: will the player be willing to sacrifice the creature, or will she put her own character in harm’s way to protect it?

You fly through encounters

There are two reasons for this: 1) there is no distracting banter going around the table, and 2) one person can make decisions much faster than a group of people. Four people take fifteen minutes deciding whether to enter the west room or the east room. One person takes 30 seconds. Planning out a series of encounters to fill up a 3 hour session would take forever, so what I do is just come up with a network of 10-15 NPCs for each location (i.e. town, neighborhood, dungeon) and make liberal use of random tables for encounters (both combat and non-combat encounters) and treasure (so I can answer “what’s in that guy’s pocket?” or “what’s in the tavern storeroom?”).

Most solo campaign advice points out that you can really “craft a story around one hero” or something to that effect, but I’ve found the opposite to be true as well: the solo campaign is the perfect vehicle for a minimally-plotted sandbox. Which leads me to my next point:

Reciprocity, generosity, and trust are even more important in a solo campaign

If you’re playing with a creative, clever player, you become more of another player reacting to the actual player’s choice than a “game master” or referee. You learn to let the player take the session where they want to take it sometimes. This happens in a sandbox with a group, of course, but there’s something about the one-on-one dynamic that makes it even more fun. Instead of approaching it like a game of chess, as adversaries, something really great happens when two people receptive to each other’s ideas build something as a team.

But the story thing is true too. When you’re a player who trusts the DM and who is on the same aesthetic wavelength, you can sit back and enjoy the ride the DM has planned for you. My Planescape campaign is a pretty wide-open sandbox because I like reacting to the plans my wife, a very proactive player, comes up with, but the Dark Sun* campaign she is running for me is very much on-the-rails because I’m terribly indecisive as a player if not given direction and because I trust the DM to come up with awesome stuff.

*Planescape, Dark Sun…yes, we were in a 2e mood in the months before 5e came out. We’ve converted the Planescape campaign over to 5e (maybe I’ll post my 5e Githzerai PC race sometime), but the Dark Sun campaign seems to have petered out. 

Another Vampire, Why Not

[TW: Suicide]

Vampire

AC: 18 (2)

HD: 9

AL: Chaotic

Attacks: Bite 1d6+disease, weapon

Special Abilities: become ethereal, dimension door, charm person, polymorph self, cause disease, chill touch, cause wounds

“Imbécile!—de son empire                                         (Imbecile! If from his empire

Si nos efforts te délivraient,                                        Our efforts would deliver you,

Tes baisers ressusciteraient                                          Your kisses would resuscitate

Le cadavre de ton vampire!”                                      The corpse of your vampire!)

—Charles Baudelaire, “Le Vampire”

Vampires are the corpses of human suicides who ended their own lives out of despair rather than out of honor. The honorable suicide is an act of self-sacrifice, but the despairing suicide is a blasphemous attempt to defeat death, a vain effort affirm one’s wholeness by ending the process of deaths-upon-deaths that constitutes a life, a defensive act that seeks to shore up the walls of the self rather than to dissolve them completely. As a result of this paradoxical desire, vampires are cursed with an unslakeable lust for annihilation.

Finding solace only in the grave, vampires often sleep for months, rising from their interment periodically to feed. The blood of any creature will sustain the vampire, but it is the blood of sentient creatures—especially the immortal blood of elves—that most thoroughly nourishes the vampire. After feeding, the sated vampire often becomes delirious, as though intoxicated, and it is during this period that the vampire is most likely to reveal itself to others through wanton acts of violence or an obsessive, often romantic, attachment to a single individual. To replenish its arcane power, the vampire will slumber in its own grave, passing ethereally through Earth’s fathoms disturbing neither soil nor sod. The only known means of destroying a vampire are striking the head from the body, plunging a stake through the heart, and burning the body to ash.

Those persons cognizant of the secret of the vampire’s creation have been known to make dark pilgrimages to the Fata Subterrane in order to carry out the desperate, fatal ritual, plunging blades into their hearts or dragging them across their throats, expecting to wake, after a three-day respite in their cavernous graves, imbued with new life. Hoping to midwife companions for themselves, some vampires even court humans of such a dolorous mien, creating around themselves foul cults that culminate in mass suicide. Few if any of these humans are ever reborn as vampires. It seems that only those who truly wish for death are granted the curse of eternal life in undeath. 

1d8 Gems from a Decadent Wizard's Hoard

By way of “What the Sonnet Is” by Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1894)

1.  Fourteen small broidered berries on the hem

     Of Circe’s mantle, each of magic gold;         

2.  Fourteen of lone Calypso’s tears that rolled  

     Into the sea, for pearls to come of them;       

3.  Fourteen clear signs of omen in the gem               

     With which Medea human fate foretold;      

4.  Fourteen small drops, which Faustus, growing old,  

     Craved of the Fiend, to water Life’s dry stem.         

5.  It is the pure white diamond Dante brought 

     To Beatrice; (6.) the sapphire Laura wore        

     When Petrarch cut it sparkling out of thought;         

7.  The ruby Shakespeare hewed from his heart’s core;  

8.  The dark, deep emerald that Rossetti wrought          

     For his own soul, to wear for evermore.

5e Race: Revenant

Briefly:

• Revenants are those humans who have been raised from the dead but have no memory of who they were in their previous life.

• They work for the clerics who resurrected them to pay off their debt and buy their memories back, a feat accomplished by only a handful of revenants.

• Many revenants, after years of thankless toil, find themselves dissatisfied with this arrangement and opt to escape, giving up on recovering their old lives in order to start new ones, often winding up on the margins of society, alive but unable to fully live.

Death, sages will tell you, is not the end. It is an end, yes, but also a beginning: the beginning of an existence that is not life, one indescribable with the broad brush of language, a tool capable of only the most cursory and ephemeral strokes. For as far back as our planetary memory extends, death was a threshold a body inexorably approached but crossed only once. Those remarkable few who have crossed that threshold twice often have a good reason for returning: a heroic sacrifice repaid, an earthly destiny yet unfulfilled, a lust for power that transcends the limits of biology, or simply a powerful ally within the clergy. These are people who return to this world as the same person who left it, their humanity intact. They recall the moments leading up to their death, but have no memory of death or the hours after their resurrection; otherwise they are whole, with a continuous memory and sense of self. It is as though they simply turned in for the night and awoke the next morning. The dead rising from the grave was, for all of human history, a rare occurrence, and the world of the living could be relied upon to provide an interminable harvest of souls to feed the chthonic void.

That longstanding agreement with death, it seems, has been annulled. For the past several centuries, the Priests of the Far Shore have taken upon themselves the task of collecting bodies from battlefields, hospitals, dark alleys of forgotten city quarters, and anywhere else the forgotten fall. They feed those corpses to their Liminal Vaults, the great stone mausoleums that return life to the dead.  The dead return not as human beings but as revenants, without memories of their past lives, without a developed personality, without the skills that defined them in life. Some clerics not associated with this sect have sanctioned this act as a true miracle, while others denounce the act as exploitative, blasphemous, or both.

In order to pay their debts to the Order of the Far Shore, revenants are contracted to agricultural landlords, ship’s captains, mining companies, and other similar ventures. After so many years, the revenants are told, the cost of their resurrection will be repaid and they will be given their freedom and the memories of their previous existence. But after years of toil with no end in sight, many revenants find themselves unhappy with this arrangement and escape the workhouses and plantations to start new lives.  The Apotropaic Order of Mendicant Sorcerers actively recruits from this group, but so do the Silent Quarry, the city’s most powerful criminal organization. No one else will have them.

Situations experienced in life may spark fleeting, nebulous memories in the revenant, but their former lives are never fully recoverable. It always feels like it happened to someone else. Some go mad grasping for those memories, welcoming another death. Others accept their new lives as a clean slate and attempt to make the most of a second chance free of whatever misfortunes led to their first death.

Ability Scores: Their gaunt physiques and wan complexions give them a romantic aura of danger and mystery. Charisma increases by 2. Despite their attenuated appearance, the bodies of revenants are surprisingly durable. Constitution increases by 1.  

Alignment: Revenants often find themselves at odds with a society that distrusts them and has no place for them. They tend towards chaotic and neutral alignments.

The Body is a Machine: The revenant requires no food, drink, or air to survive. They retain the ability to eat and drink, and many do so, whether for the pleasure it provides or to simply feel human once again.

In Death’s Cold Embrace: The skin of the revenant is cold to the touch. They have the ability to intensify this quality, granting them a resistance to cold damage at 1st level as well as the ability to cast the spell chill touch once per day beginning at 5th level. Charisma is the spellcasting ability for this trait.

Languages: The abyss still whispers to the revenant. They can read, write, and speak Abyssal, Infernal, or Celestial, depending on their alignment.

Poe's Names

This isn’t a comprehensive list of every Poe character ever but a collection of the more evocative names, drawn mainly from his poems. The most famous aren’t here (no Lenore or Annabel Lee), nor are the more obvious historical figures (Tamerlane). Some of these names sound like they belong in a sword and sorcery setting (Ulalume, Yaanel), which makes sense considering Poe’s influence on the Weird writers, while others will lend a more traditionally Gothic flavor.

d20 Name

       1.      Ulalume

       2.      Eiros

       3.      Israfel

       4.      Ianthe

       5.      Mendez Ferdinando

       6.      Solomon Don Dunce

       7.      Eulalie

       8.      Irene

       9.      D'Elormie

       10.  Isidore

       11.  Guy de Vere

       12.  Alessandra

       13.  Castiglione

       14.  Lalage

       15.  Jacinta

       16.  Baldazzar

       17.  Auber

       18.  Yaanel

       19.  Ligeia

       20.  Angelo

Speaking as a player, naming my character is often the hardest part of character creation. It's tempting to always go with a goofball name just because it's always easier to be funny than to try to come up with something serious that just ends up being dumb. I like having a list of "flavorful" names to choose from so that I can fit into the overall concept of the campaign and not worry about drawing a blank at character creation and ending up with Crack Skullgood, first level fighter. Something like this sword & sorcery nation generator from Chris Kutalik, but for character names, would be even better than a simple list of names. 

Thoughts on Research (and Some Other Nonsense)

I’m currently working on a Victorian-inspired campaign setting. I know, there are like at least—and this is just a rough guesstimate (not even a precise guesstimate)—forty eight thousand of these out there already. Why make another one? I’ll get into that later. But right now I want to talk about research.

I studied a lot of 19^th century British literature (not just Victorian) in grad school, even published a paper, so I’m having no problem finding source material. I’m going as far back as the Romantic era, Coleridge in particular, since Gothic literature continued to influence poets and artists up to the turn of the 20^th century. Poe’s in there, too, and all of the French poets he inspired, and Marx’s Capital (lots of vampires and werewolves and ghosts in control of the arcane constructs that are colonizing humanity); I’ve been reading everything from Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna to China Miéville.

I’ve got about 30 books, articles, poems, and films in my “Appendix N” right now. It’s like writing my thesis all over again, and it’s easy to get bogged down, or just to get so into reading and learning and absorbing information, that I never get around to actually writing. So here’s what I’m doing about it: I read a source, I take some notes, and then I don’t look back at it again.

I’m trying to keep the research at arm’s length for a few reasons. Most practically, constantly referring back to what I’ve read means I’m not writing. But I also don’t want to just put a fantasy paintjob on the Victorian era, faithfully reproducing historical details in D&D terms. What I want is to get a feel for the time and to capture the major themes without just doing “Fantasy London” or whatever. I have zero interest in steampunk; my interest lies more along the lines of the use of Gothic aesthetic figures as a way to describe and come to terms with the new social and economic order taking shape in this era. Hopefully this approach will result in a game more interesting than gears on a corset and goggles on a top hat, but steers clear of a super serious, not-your-grandma’s, grim’n’gritty reflection on class struggle, slavery, imperialism, and patriarchy.  It’ll be pretentious¹, how could it not be, I’m making it, but shit, I like games that let you go into a cave and kill everything and not have to think about the orc babies.

So anyway, the research I’m doing will help me get into the thematic space I need to be in to write this thing, but I don’t want to be shackled to notions of historical accuracy, so once I’ve read something, I’m not going back to it.  I have to remind myself that this isn’t scholarship; it’s a game.

_____

1. Pretentious, like having footnotes in a blog post. Reminds me of this classic from Jeff Rients. God, I can’t believe that post is almost a decade old. 

Dice Probability Calculator

Here's a useful site for calculating the probability distributions for any number of dice with any number of sides. Great for determining where the Common, Uncommon, and Rare encounters/items should fall on any table you might be making.