Josef Adamčík

My 2024 in TTRPG

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It was a quiet year on my blog, but I have been busy playing and running tabletop role-playing games (as well as doing other things). It’s time for a small retrospective, as I did last year, and as my friend Florian from rollenspielgblog.net recently did (written in German).

Just some of he TTRPG books I bought.

Stats and numbers

Most of the games this year took place in person, either with my small three-person player group or within the Berlin VS RPG community. (If you’re based in Berlin and looking for opportunities, feel free to reach out—I’ll send you an invite link to our Discord.)

In total, I played in 89 sessions, broken down as follows:

14 online vs 75 in person,
21 times in the GM (or similar) role vs 68 times as a player,
10 times as GM for people in VS RPG community.

The games I played

Here are the games I played this year (roughly in chronological order):

Trophy Dark
Bump In The Dark
Those Dark Places
Cyborg
Deathmatch Island
Lasers & Feelings
Death in Space
Mothership
Cairn
Savage Worlds
Trophy Gold
Orc Borg
Blood on the Clocktower (not TTRPG, but a social deduction game)
Index Card RPG
Alien RPG
Brindlewood Bay
Eat the Reich
Wildsea
Warlock
Monolith
Ironsworn: Starforged
Delta Green
Vast Grimm
Of your free will (not TTRPG, but a nordic LARP, however I am not sure If I noted the name down correctly since I can’t really google it now)
Escape from Dino Island
Pirate Borg
Hell Night
Wetwired
Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast
Mork Borg
Liminal Horror
In media res (Call of cthulu short-shot)
Last train to Bremen
Frontier Scm
Spire

Here’s a revised and polished version of the text:

That’s 35 games in total. Most of them were one-shots (sometimes multiple instances of one-shots). I played a short campaign of Wildsea, a mini-campaign of Delta Green, and a short hop-on/hop-off campaign of Monolith.

Notable one-shots include:

The Waking of Willowby Hall: Played using Cairn, though I don’t think the system mattered much. The module is very good.
Escape from Dino Island: The first GMing experience for the person who ran it, and it was amazing.
House of the Hollow: for Mörk Borg.
One session of Deathmatch Island: My character got a haircut during a chase scene and, in the final round, fought the hairdresser—and won!

The games I ran

Let me go a bit more into detail about the games.

Mothership

I must admit, I’m a bigger fan of the Mothership content and its creative design than of the system itself. I’m still figuring out the intended experience of the game—how it’s meant to be run—and reconciling that with how I want to run it, which might differ. Running the game a few times and listening to others discuss it has been incredibly helpful.

The modules I ran this year included: Decagone, VR Dead, and Year of the Rat. Let me highlight Decagone: its art feels cartoonish and even cute, which doesn’t evoke horror vibes at all. The module itself is a simple escape room but introduces intriguing, module-specific mechanics (I won’t spoil it—check it out, and you’ll see what I mean). These mechanics create excellent tension and pacing. I ran it twice, and players always had a blast. While it’s not a typical Mothership scenario, it works as a fantastic one-shot and could easily be adapted to other systems.

Alien RPG

The tone and themes of Alien RPG align closely with Mothership, but it uses a variant of Free League’s Year Zero Engine. I ran the cinematic scenario Chariot of the Gods in two sessions.

The system features an interesting stress and panic mechanic—arguably a touch more engaging than Mothership’s. Beyond that, however, it feels quite mediocre. While I generally enjoy d6 pool systems, Alien often involves overly large dice pools and too many rolls, which quickly becomes tedious. The action economy in combat, armor rolls, and other minor mechanics feel at odds with the cinematic thriller or horror experience the game aims for.

That said, the secret character agendas were a highlight, earning praise from players. However, some agendas are undeniably more compelling than others. The scenario itself suffers from a bit too much railroading for my taste.

Brindlewood Bay

This year, I’ve been running a full campaign of Brindlewood Bay for my two-player mini-group. We’re almost done—just one mystery remains, though I still need to write it.

Both players love the game, especially its dark conspiracy themes. As a Keeper, I feel I struggle to make situations truly dangerous for the characters—I’m too lenient. My complications and conditions lack impact, and I feel the game could be deeper if I addressed this better. The players haven’t complained, but I hope to improve this aspect, especially when trying other games from the Carved from Brindlewood family.

Ironsworn: Starfroged

I attempted to run a short campaign, guiding the group with the intention of playing in a GM-less style. My mistake was organizing the game for too many players, expecting some to drop out. Instead, all five participated, making consensus-building during worldbuilding and character creation difficult. Too many compromises felt like making the world and story all over the place.

I stopped after two sessions where we did the worldbuilding, characters and played a short intro scene. I planned to organize another session but ended up procrastinating and not doing it for couple of months. I would still love to play the game cooperatively with other people, but I wouldn’t try with more like three players (including me).

Blades in the Dark

I wrapped up a play-by-post campaign at the start of the year. Aside from that, I ran one one-shot session. The game is challenging to play effectively in a single session, especially with new players unfamiliar with the mechanics.

CBR+PNK

CBR+PNK is a streamlined twist on Forged in the Dark, designed specifically for one-shots. The entire ruleset—similar in complexity to the “score” portion of Blades in the Dark—fits on two 4-fold pamphlets: one for players (including the character sheet) and another for the GM.

he disadvantage is that I can’t imagine running this without knowledge of Blades in the Dark. The systems works quite well for a one shot, however it would be much better if players know at least one of the other Forged in the dark games. There’s a bit too much moving pieces to fully grasp in one session.

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast

Is perhaps the most unique game I own. I played several sessions with two different groups and overall got quite positive feedback. There’s a bit of getting-used-to since the way how the game works is unusual and every chapter has it’s own variant of the rules. The characters are very well written and the chapters tend to create interesting context for their exploration. I look forward to exploring the book more in the future.

The games I bought

I can’t list all of them here. Plenty of games arrived from crowd funding I ordered before 2024, I supported too many crowdfunding campaigns in 2024. Apart from the I spent too much money in some of the local Berlin shops and bought too many digitally. I will never be able to play or run all of them. It’s an addiction!

My first TTRPG Convention

Yes, as highly socially anxious person, I have never been to any TTRPG (or gaming ) convention. Last year I visited Bircon and truly enjoyed the event despite its flaws. For me it was a unique celebration of community and my person achievement on my way in overcoming my social anxiety (I mentioned that topic last year). I certainly plan to join next year and hopefully run a game there.

Plans for 2025

Last year, I mentioned I planned to run more games. I think I managed to do that. Regarding my anxiety, the biggest achievements this year were two sessions where I ran a game for a table of people I had met for the first time.

Another goal I had was to indulge more in my creative side and potentially write and publish something. Unfortunately, I only wrote a short adventure as a submission to the zine produced by the VR RPG community, “Every Wednesday We Roll”. I was certainly hoping for more.

The end of 2024 brought one big change: I moved (together with my partner) back to Prague after more than seven years in Germany. This means I lost access to the wonderful community of TTRPG enthusiasts in Berlin after almost two years of participation, and I also left behind some dear friendships that developed or started developing there. That brought a lot of sadness and gave a weird aftertaste to the move, even though I love Prague and look forward to restarting my life here.

I still plan to visit Berlin whenever I see the opportunity (e.g., for the aforementioned BirCon), and I hope I’ll manage to maintain at least loose connections with some of the people I got to know.

This move also brings a new challenge: finding a new community of people here in Prague, either English-speaking or Czech-speaking. Since the fallout from moving between countries and the chaos caused by the holidays are finally settling down, I am starting to slowly look around.

Every wednesday we roll Volume 2 - a zine of my TTRPG group

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have mentioned the group I started playing with last year in my previous post. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had a blast playing around 15 games with the group, and I ran three games myself (two games of Mothership and one of Alien RPG).

The group celebrated two years of its existence in April. Yes, there was a party, and yes, there were games. We also published a zine called Every Wednesday WE roll volume 2 (You can grab it for free on itch). It’s the second issue; the first one was released last year and is also available on itch.

Every Wednesday WE roll volume 2

The zine is small and humble but packed with good stuff. You can also read more about the group in both zines. My contribution is a short adventure for Mothership called “Dreams of Candyhill”. It’s just three A5 pages long, and I took it as a challenge to pack as much as I could within this space and wrote the adventure in a rather short time.

And a small note: it does have Mothership stats for NPCs, but apart from that, it should be easy to incorporate into other games and even worlds. I can imagine this being a present-day Liminal Horror investigation or a cyberpunk mission, maybe for CY_BORG or any other cyberpunk game you fancy.

I think it might be worth improving the layout for readability and investing more time into making it better overall. It’s possible that in the future, I’ll create a newer, bigger version and publish it as a standalone module. But for now, enjoy what is there.

My 2023 in TTRPG

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A year and a few months ago, I wrote about my personal renaissance of pen and paper games. Long story short, I shared how I returned to the hobby after many years without engaging in it at all and how amazed I am by the abundance of amazing games and adventures available nowadays. Back then, I had been running a Mausritter campaign for two people, exploring solo gaming and tentatively venturing into playing with others, whether through PbP (play-by-post), online play via voice/video, and I had hoped to find some people to play in person as well

Just some of he TTRPG books I bought.

To provide better context: I live in Berlin, English is my second language, and German is my third, though I am far from fluent in it. I also struggle with social anxiety, which immensely hinders me when it comes to seeking new people and interacting with them (it’s no accident that most of the hobbies captured on this blog are things I can do alone at home). Even playing in Play-by-post was anxiety-inducing and way out of my comfort zone.

For the last year, I decided to use my obsession with TTRPGs as motivation to start overcoming this anxiety. The plan involved repeatedly exposing myself to social interactions until I became more comfortable in those situations. This included playing and even running PbP games at the beginning, then adding online one-shots through StartPlaying and some Discord communities, and eventually joining open table campaigns. The ultimate goal was to start attending in-person games organized by a community here in Berlin.

Looking back, I must say I not only succeeded but even surprised myself with the progress I made. I started keeping a log of games at the end of September (unfortunately, I didn’t have this idea sooner) and, in just the last 3 and a half months, I played in 25 games. Out of those, six were in-person with the Berlin community, three were run by me in-person for my partner and a friend, and one was run by me online. Even the months before were quite intensive. There were weeks when I had 3 or 4 games. I estimate that I must have played at least between 50 and 60 games last year. Apart from that, I had run a PbP of Starforged, I have been running a PbP of Blades in the Dark, and I participated in several other PbP games.

So, what games have I been playing? Here’s a simple list, just from the top of my head.

Blades In The Dark
Lovercrafesque
Electric Bastionland
Mausritter
Vaults of Vaarn
Cairn
The mall
Mothership
Coriolis
Mörk Borg
Dath in Space
Frontire Scum
CyBorg
Corp Borg
ICRPG
System Shutdown
Brindlewood Bay
Public Access
The Between
Bump in the dark
Apocalypse Keys
Wanderhome
Troika!
Starforged
Liminal Horror

Solo play

Thanks to the overwhelming number of games I played with others, I didn’t have as much need or opportunity to play solo. As a result, my Starforged and Ironsworn campaigns were mostly left abandoned. I played Miru towards the end of the year and might write a short review soon. However, things might be changing slightly, as I upgraded my solo setup at the start of this year and began a new character in Starforged, but that’s a topic for another post.

Me as a GM (Conductor, Keeper, Warden, Guide, or whatever)

My small two-player in-person group finished their Mausritter campaign during the first half of the year. We played ‘Liminal Horror - The Mall’ and have recently started a campaign of ‘Brindlewood Bay.’

Additionally, I ran one Starforged session and one Mausritter session online.

I am very interested in running more games. Of course, it is more intimidating and demanding, especially for someone struggling with social anxiety, than simply being a player.

Me as writer.

After digitally publishing a simple addon for Mausritter, ‘The Whites’ (I wrote a devlog about it here), we also created a complete adventure for the ‘Winter has Come Mausritter Jam’ called ‘Chrismous Forever,’ which was published at the beginning of 2023. I really enjoyed developing all the ideas and acquiring the necessary skills to put it together. The only thing I regret is not writing more during the last year.

Plans for 2024

Three pillars in this regard are:

Continue playing games, meeting new people, and developing new friendships.
Run more games, making it as routine an activity as playing has become for me now.
Write more and aim to publish more, mainly focusing on adventures and other supplements.”

How one hobby leads to another - TTRPGs and bookbinding

Sun, 25 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am still into TTRPGs (or PnP if you wish). You can read about how I resurrected this old hobby of mine last year. My two-player real-life group just finished their Mausritter Campaign. I play regularly at several open tables online and even managed to overcome my anxieties and join a couple of real-life games here in Berlin. And I plan to play (and run!) more.

All DIY home printed and assembled.

Part of the hobby is reading and collecting games, rulebooks, adventures, and other modules. I do buy more than I could ever use in play. Sometimes I buy physical books, but often they are only digital. I still like to have something physical in my hand, so often, I print things on my old printer (Cannon MP550). I don’t know how old it is, but it’s at least 10 years. I started with A5 pamphlets. They are straightforward to print and assemble.

You print two A5 pages per A4 sheet, double-sided; the only tricky part is that the pages must be appropriately ordered on the sheets. Some digital downloads now contain, apart from the “normal” PDF, a PDF where you get 2 pages per a4 sheet in the landscape orientation. The pages are in their natural order, which works when reading online, but you must keep them as loose sheets when printed. You cannot fold and staple them into a “zine” (pamphlet). Some exceptions provide the “booklet” version (Liminal Horror, for example, has such a version). Nevertheless, most of the time, it’s up to you. Thankfully plenty of software has this feature, usually called “print as a booklet.” You can find it in Adobe Acrobat Reader and PDF XChange editor (which I mostly use nowadays).

The assembly is then straightforward. Fold them in half, staple or sew in the middle and cut excess paper on the edges.

Home printed pamphlets

You can see above that I printed plenty over time, including the two I wrote and my partner illustrated (both for Mausritter, The Whites and Chrismous Forever. I also made some A6 booklets with Ironsworn and Starforged oracles to support my offline solo play.

Eventually, I came across books I wanted to print, but they had too many pages for a pamphlet. I thought assembling them into multiple sections (or signatures) into a complete book and placing them into a cover couldn’t be that hard. I am certainly not a stranger to DIY crafts, so I started some research. It’s not unusual for me to start with the idea of doing a quick job, only to later spiral into the topic and spend more time researching and watching videos, followed by buying a lot of tools and supplies to finally get to what I wanted to do in the first place. So for some time, I had been obsessed with bookbinding videos, almost exclusively from the youtube channel Das Bookbinding (don’t worry, it’s in English), which is fantastic and captures a lot of institutional knowledge you wouldn’t find in the more common DIY bookbinding videos. I learned about many nuances of the craft (the paper has grain direction, and it matters!). I also learned by trying (your cover can warp in an ugly way!).

The first sewn book with multiple signatures I made was RUNE solo game. I wanted to take it on vacation and play it there. Long story short, I didn’t manage to assemble it in time and ended up reading a digital version. I still bound the book later to practice. The cover is quick&dirty and doesn’t use proper boards for cover (just a card stock), so there ended up being quite a bit of warping.

RUNE

Warped and not really holding together.

After that, I made several one-section pamphlets with hard covers, trying to use better boards and improve the technique.

Solitary Defilement and Alone in the Crowd, solo supplements for MÖRK BORG

I also made a small sketchbook (using premade text-block) to practice book covering.

Finally, I got to my last creation. This time I tried to do everything properly: the paper with the correct grain direction, nice 2mm thick boards, bookbinders cloth, and even a bit of advanced mix for glue. I took my digital copy of Magical Industrial Revolution by Skerpless (which is amazing, by the way) and chose to use Square Back Bradel Binding while using a bit different sewing method than in the video and doing the cover a bit differently. I am happy with the result, even though it has its flaws. A bit more photos from the process follow.

Does it make sense?

Let me make this clear. This is not a practical or cheap way to get a physical book. If you can get a POD (print-on-demand) copy, it’ll be more affordable and less work for you. I enjoy making things with my hands, and there is a lovely meditative aspect in most of the steps of the process. I also enjoy a lot learning and improving new skills. This will not likely be my long-term hobby, but I am pleased to have bookbinding in my skillset. I am confident my family will get DIY notepads and books for the next big gift-giving holiday in December.

Build log

Folding the signatures. Everything is printed using my old printer. The paper is A4 short-grain which is very hard to get.

All the signatures are ready for sewing. Usually, there are 4-6 sheets in a signature. I went for 5.

Punching the holes into signatures.

Sewing

The text block is fully sewn.

Gluing the spine

Making the cover. I don't have pictures for detailed steps here, but it's done primarily according to the video linked above.

Cover ready. The spine is covered with bookbinder's cloth, but the rest is just a printed cover from the PDF with some adjustments to fit the space on my book well. The adjustments are primarily about adding more of the background color and figuring out how to position it.

The text block before the final assembly. I have added the bookmark and some paper on the spine and headbands.

Stáňa - a monoblock split keyboard, part 2

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The PCBs have arrived over a week since I wrote the last post.

Stáňa the Bat with v0.1 PCB prototypes

I soldered together one PCB. It was a quick job. Putting together a QMK firmware and porting my current keymap from Sofle was faster than I anticipated. QMK is truly an awesome project. Adding a new keyboard is almost no work. You can see the commit on my fork of QMK.

Assembling the keyboard

Sunset Chocs and LDSA keycaps

Both the switches and the keycaps are produced by lowprokb.ca. I got them some time ago in a group buy, and they were one of the reasons why I wanted to try the low profile again.

I must mention that my main keyboards have Zilents, silent tactile switches from Zeal, 62g (the lightest) variant. They are quiet and, their tactility is very crisp. I am used to them a lot. The keycaps I use are Oblotzky GMK Oblivion and KAT Milkshake, both very nice premium sets from group buys.

Sunsets seem rather loud compared to Zilents, which is no surprise since they are not designed to be silent. But it certainly took some getting used to. They feel heavier than the Zilents, and the tactility doesn’t have as lovely feel as Zilents. That said, they are certainly way better than Choc Browns which I tried years ago. I am pretty happy with them now since I got used to them.

The bare keyboard assembled.

The LSDA keycaps are pretty nice. They don’t feel as good as my Oblivion and Milkshake (the plastic does feel different), but I like the profile, and after some time, I ended up enjoying them. I haven’t tried MBK keycaps yet, but I ordered a set to try them out.

Overall it’s a huge win. Those products together opened the world of low-profile keyboards for me, which I am very intrigued to explore. My original experience with Choc Browns and the original keycaps from Kailh was so terrible I gave up on low profile completely, so I am glad I can change my mind.

Layout

The layout is tighter (so-called Choc spacing, 18mm x 17mm). Surprisingly my fingers adjusted quite quickly, and I don’t have any issues with mistyping (not more than I had on Sofle).

I am thinking about trying to do a more aggressive pinkie stagger. One of the things people often mentioned they would like to see for Sofle as well. Also, a bigger gap between hands and maybe a wider angle as well.

Stáňa with Stáňa v0.1

The interesting thing is that I do miss one of the encoders. My left rotary encoder on Sofle is mapped to volume control and apparently, I had been using it more often than I realized. My hand keeps reaching for it when I need to quickly adjust the volume, but there’s nothing on the board. That’s something that’s not that hard to unlearn, but I might add a footprint for a rotary encoder to the next iteration.

3D printed case

Design in Fusion360

I spent some time designing an enclosure for the keyboard. I already had some experience with Fusion360, but this was my first attempt to design a keyboard case. The thing with CADs is that you have to spend time with them to be able to design things in a reasonably efficient way. This first attempt was full of struggle, and the source file is messy. But I am happy with the result. I learned a lot, and I have a much better idea of how to approach the design next time. I plan to have the possibility to add mods (display, trackpad, etc.) to the middle so the middle cover can be easily redesigned and replaced as needed.

Simple black case from 5 parts

It’s been a long time since I used my Prusa MINI. I had some trouble with getting the parts to print without warping and lifting from the bed and still haven’t fully figured out how to deal with shrinking (how to compensate or how to design the parts so they have a good fit).

The fit at the bottom could be better.

I also tried “manual” multi-material extrusion to have the logo on the front. I messed up so many times that I lost count. I don’t think I am going to try this again.

Variant with logo

I would like to try out some 3D printing service and have the case printed with a different technology than FDM (SLS maybe?) but I think I will keep this for one of the future iterations.

Plans for v0.2

There are plenty of things I would like to try. Some of them might be reversed in the future.

Add 10-15 mm between the halves, just to have the hands a little bit farther away and have more room for components/mods in the middle.
Try to angle the halves a bit more.
Try a more aggressive pinkie stagger.
Add the possibility of mounting a rotary encoder in the middle of the board.
Switch the matrix from 12x5 to 10x6 (saves one pin).
Add connectors for Cirque Trackpad and some display to the board.
Different placement for the mounting holes.

For now, I am going to stay with RP2040. The wireless iteration is going to come later once I am sure about the layout.

Stáňa and Sofle

Is Stáňa open source?

Not yet, but it will be. Right now, the design exists only in my private repository. I’ll publish it once it gets through a few iterations. So far, there’s nothing special about it, and I would prefer to publish it in some reasonable state (pick some open hardware license, document it, make sure design files are not a terrible mess, etc.).

Stáňa AKA Sofle Unsplit - a monoblock split keyboard

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A year and a half ago, I wrote: “I am finally starting to feel the itch to open KiCad, Fusion360, or Inkscape and start designing. We’ll see if the itch stays for long enough to yield a result. I hope it does!”. It didn’t, at least not until now.

Stáňa v0.1

I have been a happy user of Sofle V2 for several years. Over time, I had some ideas about what to incorporate in the following design, but I didn’t start working on anything. Recently one of my keyboards began falling apart. First, the switches started failing. Then the USB connector broke off the pro micro board on one of my boards. Of course, it happened on the one where I didn’t bother to socket the microcontroller. It’s not a big deal. I still have a spare PCB and some pro micro as well. But it did remind me that the keyboards can break.

And suddenly, I felt I wanted to design a new board again.

Over time, I bought some new components:

Nice!Nano - a pro-micro compatible board with nRF52840. Wireless goodness!
Kailh Choc Sunset Tactile switches I was not too fond of Kailh Choc Browns, which were too heavy for me. Those are supposed to be lighter and they are the reason why I felt I could give the low-profile switches another try.
Raspberry Pi Pico, of course!
WaveShare RP2040-zero a tiny board with RP2040

The main ideas that were circling in my head were:

Keep the layout I am used to (or make just minimal adjustments).
One board. Easier to travel with, even if it is just my keyboard for traveling.
Wireless.
Try the low-profile again.
Try RP2040-based microcontoller.
Use a nicer display.
Better case than sandwich case.
Wague ideas about modular designs.
If wired, then USB-C and preferably on the board so it is more durable.

Last week I upgraded my Kicad (there’s version 7 already!) and started playing around. I decided to start with a very simple board for the first iteration to try a few things.

Un-split ergo board. I have seen the term “monoblock split” used for those.
The same layout as Sofle V2, 30-degree angle between halves.
Try the Choc switches. Use the more compact spacing (18 x 17 mm), which makes the layout more compact than Sofle V2.
Switches must be socketed.
Start with the wired version and use the cheap and cute WaveShare RP2040 Zero
No rotary encoders. I never really got used to using them.
No display.
No RGB. I still have absolutely no interest in RGB lighting.

Stáňa v0.1

I managed to put the design together over the weekend. The working name was “Sofle Unsplit,” while my partner noted it looked like the puppet of the bat we have. The puppet is called “Stáňa,” and she is one of the performers on our Tik-Tok. I immediately decided to call the board the same. Yes, the name that most of you will never know how to pronounce or write and might make the keyboard hard to google. That seems like a name I would pick for a new design (Sofle was also a joke). My partner Anna quickly drew a logo, and here we go. The board is already being manufactured.

Stáňa v0.1

The next step is to design a compact 3D-printed case. That’ll take much more time than the design of the PCB.

After that, I would like to make a wireless version of this design. I am also considering adding a nice display, even though I am not sure yet which one. The MX version might come as well. The board would have to be bigger to fit MX switches. It depends on how I like the Choc switches and the compact layout.

It’ll take a couple of weeks for the boards to arrive. Let’s see if my interest lasts.

Solo RPGs and the evolution of my setup for Ironsworn and Starforged

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The concept of playing TTRPGs alone sounds very odd and very appealing at the same time. This post is about how is my relationship with solo RPGs developing.

Playing Ironsworn outdoors.

I am a very socially anxious person, therefore playing TTPRPG solo is a very appealing concept for me. However, it does sound weird. Am I going to be sitting at the table, rolling dice and talking to myself? How could that work? Solo RPGs, mainly Ironsworn and Ironsworn: Starforged are a huge part of my personal TTRPG renaissance.

How I started

I started as soon as Starforged released. I was late to join the Kickstarter, I was event too late for the “late pledge”, but I bought the physical copy as soon as the store opened and therefore got the PDFs and I dove right in.

I even started capturing my first Starforged experience in written form on this blog. It has so far 8 parts. I moved on and started playing other characters, but I am quite sure I’ll return to Valentin Sikorski, the space courier soon.

My first gaming setup was in front of my computer. PDF with the book and captured my sessions in Stargazer. Stargazer is a very nice web application for solo play of Starforged. It can run in fully offline mode, even on mobile devices, has moves reference, all the oracles for random generation, star map and a possibility to write down journal entries. It’s truly amazing application which keeps getting better.

First struggles

One of the big things each solo player has to figure out for themselves is how they capture their sessions (and if). For me, writing is the obvious choice. Talking to myself would feel much weirder and could be annoying to people around me, and that would limit the possible times when I could play. Just imagining things in my head also didn’t feel good enough.

However, I type quite fast on my keyboard, so it felt like an obvious choice. And because I have a blog, I could even publish it, couldn’t I? I know that no one will actually be interested in the produced text. But I like to write down things around me as some kind of diary of my projects, what I did and learned. I don’t do it for others, but for myself. That was always the case. And if someone stumbles upon my ramblings and finds them interesting? Well, that’s indeed nice, but not required. I approached my solo play in the same way.

You can read the results. It’s a weak prose. Partly because English is my second language, partly because I didn’t want to invest too much time into producing it and also, I am no writer.

We have already stumbled upon one interesting point: I imagine and capture the story in English, even though It’s my second language. Why? Mostly because I can, partly because I wouldn’t be interested in publishing it in Czech language (see, I am writing it for myself and still prefer to use global language, so more people could actually read it. Silly, isn’t it? Those humans!). Nevertheless, it is very difficult to switch languages in your head when playing a game where the rules and all the oracles you use to spark your imagination are in English. This extra translation hoop makes it actually worse. Thankfully, my English is good enough, so I can think in the language and have my internal monologue in it. Although, I did realize that my “sci-fi and fantasy adventure vocabulary” is much weaker than I would like it to be. That makes it quite an effort to capture the story in writing without feeling like it sucks on all levels.

And here we are running into the first big struggle I had. I kept spending time writing the prose, editing the prose, fixing typos, looking up synonyms and words I didn’t know. I felt my game is going forward slowly, and it’s actually quite some work to progress with the story. That was sucking out some enjoyment from the game, and I started wondering what to do about it.

Theoretically, it should be possible to stop writing the prose. Take just a few notes. Sum up scenes and dialogues in a sentence or two. But how to achieve it when I sit in front of my computer and have my Sofle keyboard in front of me with all the typing and editing power?

Getting outside

Another struggle I had was to find the time when I would enjoy playing while sitting in front of my computer. I work from home-office and sit on the chair full time. Often I just hate the idea to stay sitting there for fun.

Thankfully, Stargazer runs offline. I took my Chrome tablet, downloaded the PDFs, installed Stargazer and outside we go. My beloved partner Anna likes to paint during our trips and walks and that’s perfect opportunity to play. I was hoping this could also help me to write less. The keyboard for the tablet is terrible, the layout is far from what I am used to, and it slows me down significantly.

Fully digital: Chrome OS tablet, Stargazer, PDFs

It worked only partially. I liked the ability to play outside, but typing on the tablet was a pain, and I was still in the “I am going to put this on the blog” mood, so I would just spend more time editing when I got home. Another issue I had was with the small screen. I had to keep switching between PDF’s and Stargazer and search for things in PDF’s. It ended up to be inconvenient and fiddly. Also, typing on the tablet when it sits on the lap (while sitting on a bench or in public transport) is very uncomfortable because it’s just too low, and it tends to slide down from my short legs.

Getting analogue

I stumbled upon Traveler’s Ironsown. It’s a very nice set of cards with move reference for the Ironsworn game, meant to be used with a traveler’s notebook in the 11 x 21 (cm) format. It also includes a character’s sheet and other sheets to support the play.

Short beer and play session on the Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin

I hesitated a bit. First, the sci-fi Starforged is much closer to my heart, and I wasn’t certain how much I am going to enjoy its fantasy predecessor. But the main concern was writing by hand. I knew it would certainly slow me down since I type everything on my keyboard nowadays, including all my work notes, to-do lists, shopping lists, everything. I almost forgot how to write cursive, and I have never really been good at it. However, I was intrigued.

You can see from the images around, that I tried. I ordered a nice journal with inserts from Amazon (essentially, the same you see on the pictures on the DrivethruRPG page of traveler’s Ironsworn). I bought few nice gel pens of various colors.

Furthermore, I printed the traveler’s Ironsworn, and the move references for Starforged (which I later replaced by the preview of traveler’s Starforged from Colin’s Patreon) I found a nice mobile app that would allow met to roll dice when it’s not practically to roll real ones. I printed the asset and delve cards in smaller sizes, so I could just glue them into my journal.

Assets for both Ironsworn and Starforged and Theme and domain cards from Ironsworn: Delve

I didn’t have any of the books in physical form. I had the move references, but the oracles and foes are quite useful as well. Of course, I could always use my phone and check a pdf there. But that wasn’t working really well.

I ended up taking quite some effort to put together and print small roughly A6-sized booklets with oracles and foes for both Ironsworn and Starforged. Using various PDF-manipulation programs, I took the pages and ordered them in the documents as I wanted. For Ironsworn I combined pages from both the main Ironsworn book and the Ironsworn: Delve supplement.

Nevertheless, this really gave me a lot of freedom to play at various places and in various situations. I have played on plain, trains, in cafes, or just sitting in the nature.

Ironsworn and Ironsworn: Delve oracles and foes combined into two small booklets

For Starforged, I just selected pages I wanted. There are more oracles and I used better paper (all the amazing illustrations are awesome for flavor) so I had to split the oracles into four smaller booklets. I used PDF X-Change editor which has not only “print as booklet” feature but also “book mode” which can split the document into multiple “signatures”. That saved me some work, although, if I had to do it again, I would rather use some better approach how to split the oracles into multiple booklets, so they are organized by theme. Now they essentially should be bound into a small book with four signatures, which I didn’t do.

Starforged oracles (4 small booklets) and foes

After some time, I got used to writing by hand again, and it went so far that I even write a personal journal by hand now. I still tend to write a bit more narration while playing than I hoped for, but at least I don’t obsess about formulations and editing. The fact that the written text is harder to change helped me a lot.

Playing Ironsworn in a cafe in Edinburgh

I played quite a bit of Ironsworn while on vacation in Scotland and I must say that imagining the story of Asha (cutthroat, shadow-walk, a giant spider companion), who rescues her sister from a raider camp, while sitting among the hills above Edinburgh or taking a break in café in the city of Edinburgh was astonishing.

I was so happy with the experience, I even laminated the Traveler’s Ironsworn cards.

La-mi-na-tion, La-mi-na-tion!

I appreciate the offline and compact setup at home as well. I can just play on my balcony or even in bed. Sometimes it’s a bit of mess with all the cards, booklets and pens around, but the experience suits me much better than on a tablet or computer.

Other struggles and learning how to play solo

Playing solo is demanding from many aspects. I had to figure out what stories I want to create and what kind of fun I seek. But I also had to unlearn a bit and train myself to approach things differently. There have been a lot of thinking about playing, reading about playing and lurking on discord while other people discussed playing involved in the process.

I’ll higlight three main points I took from it so far.

Failures, fail forward and building of a story

Ironsworn is designed in a way that it inserts complications when a roll fails (miss) or successes only partially (weak hit). The probability distribution of rolls is chosen to support this. It’s most common to get the “weak hit” and misses are quite common as well. It’s sort of “fail forward” approach we see in many other games. It works quite good, but it can be also very frustrating when the player is not completely on board.

Playing Ironsworn in hills above Edinburgh

At the begging, I was a bit frustrated when I didn’t roll “strong hit”. I was aware of what is the game trying to do and why, but often I would hate the outcome because I imagined the story going somewhere else.

I would say there were roughly 2 sources of this frustration:

First, I wanted to be good in the game and succeed similarly how I would like to succeed in a computer game. It’s interesting, that I don’t have this urge when I play a TTRPG game with a GM. But in solo I had it. I just didn’t want to fail. Starforged doesn’t really work if you can have fun only when you roll well all the time. As a GM, I do prefer players who can “roll with the punches” and I think games where failure is celebrated are better. But somehow I had to learn (and I am still learning) how to actually appreciate this in solo play. On the other hand, it’s certainly a good training for any other TTRPG game I could play in the future.

Second, I got too attached to the direction I wanted the story to go to. I would imagine certain goal I want to achieve with the character (e.g. Valentin Sikorski wanted to infiltrate a secret factory) and the step they would get to get there. Then I would play, and the game would throw complications and twists at me and I would be upset I am being distracted or doing something other than what I wanted (e.g. Valentin is doing an expedition and dealing with perils on the way instead of just going there and doing something to fulfil the vow.)

The second one is a bit trickier to deal with, and it was the main reason why I paused Valentin’s story and tried to play other characters. I decide to try to just make a character and give them a simple vow and avoid thinking about where it could go in the future. I also tried to avoid complicating the story myself. The game can do it on its own very well and If I add too many complications myself, it might be harder to figure out, what the next complications introduced by the game should be. I tried a couple of characters, and it worked much better. It requires some learning, and I am still trying to improve, but being really able to let the story flow and just wonder where it goes is amazing. I suppose, it’s the experience a player should have in this game.

Oracles and imagination

I also had been quite frustrated when I couldn’t come up for an interpretation for an oracle roll in a certain situation. Ironsworn asks the player quite often to imagine what happens and provides a lot of tables with random details. Many of the oracle tables are concrete (like “Spaceborne opportunity”) but the core ones are very abstract.

There’s action/theme oracle which provides a verb/noun pair and descriptor/focus which provides an adjective/noun pair. I struggle with those since they often give me only very vague information or sometimes simple don’t make sense.

Dunbar, Scotland

I learned that re-rolling those oracles or using other tricks to quickly go through more options is fine and not a failure. Likewise, I am also learning that I shouldn’t stress it too much and just move forward, even when things are not fascinating or don’t make 100% sense. And the last, but not lest: I give myself time to think about it a bit. My sessions are usually short, just a few moves and a bit of story progress. When I don’t know how to continue, I pause and let it go. Usually, some idea will come to me during a walk, when I am taking a shower or the next time I pick up the game. Getting rid of the expectation that I should be able to sit down and play through a coherent session was a very important step for me. I have multiple characters in my Journal, so I can even switch between them If I get stuck but still want to play.

Expectations!

Overall, expectation management plays a big role in playing a satisfying solo game. But isn’t that true even for the traditional, multiplayer TTRPG games? Of course, it is!

The one revelation I had about the solo games is that they do really teach you (or force you to learn) skills that are going to be useful while playing games with other people. Being mindful about what kind of story you want to play, rolling with punches, failing forward, understanding what kind of game the system can help you to play, interpreting what happens on the fly. All of them are useful tools for every player.

Posing with my journal on a beach in Edinburgh.

What next?

More games. I played The Wretched and Dead Belt. I have a physical copy of Thousand Years Old Vampire I would like to try, but I struggle to figure out who my vampire should be at the begging. Furthermore, I would also like to play other games in some interesting settings using the Mythic Game Master emulator. But I am certainly going to keep my little journal with Ironsworn and Starforged. The games are amazing, and the system works very well, when you take your time to understand how is should work. I am also eager to try Cybersworn a cyber-punk flavor supplement for Starforged.

The Whites - a Mausritter supplement (devlog)

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A reader of this blog might have noticed I like to make things. So even my recent obsession - TTRPG games - leans towards making things. Let me share how I made a small Mausritter supplement based on content I created for my Mausritter campaign.

The Whites as an A5 zine printed on my home printer

I have been running a Mausritter campaign for a party of two people for several months. I have already briefly mentioned it in “My personal renaissance of pen and paper games” and I also explained how I run the campaign in “low-lethal” mode.

We play a campaign based on The Estate. The players (and characters) went through most of the adventures in the collection and their campaign is getting to the end game, and they are soon going to enter into conflict with the most powerful factions. The characters are already quite a high level for Mausritter (4) and have several loyal hirelings and several overpowered items.

I created The Whites to be a group of antagonists that would pose a serious challenge to them, they would have to be creative in defeating them. The resulting NPC group and their hideout - a dungeon which had been built a long time ago by bat cultists - are now published as “pay what you want” on ithch.io. My by my beloved partner Anna made all the illustrations apart from the maps which are hand-drawn by me in a lousy attempt to follow an amazing guide on Paths Peculiar. We published only the part that didn’t depend on The Estate (the only thing left is the well) and on our campaign.

The Whites - cover

The Whites and The Estate campaign

This section is going to contain spoilers for The Estate adventure collection. It could also require some knowledge of The Estate to be really understood.

Let me give you a partial rundown of what happened in our campaign. I’ll focus only on the events that relate to The Whites and the way how I integrated them into our story. I have been playing the faction mini-game between adventures and all of them were slowly advancing their goals. Furthermore, I kept projecting those advancements together with character actions to all the tables (rumours, encounters and events in Brickport) as we went through. I am skipping many details which are not important for introduction of The Whites. Maybe I’ll write the “full” breakdown of our campaign once the players finish it.

The Whites as an A5 zine printed on my home printer

Characters arrived at Brickport. Their first hook was for Chapel of eternal peace. They were asked to find a lost mouse and bring her back to her parents. They had a short skirmish with Reverend Goldenfur, during which they stole his magical amulet and got away. They also got enough evidence to destroy his reputation (and the reputation of the cult) in Brickport.
At this point, I added Reverend Goldenfur as a proper faction. His first goal was to get back the amulet. Note that there already was another faction (Magpies) that wanted to get the amulet as well.
The information about the fact there are multiple buyers for the amulet spreads through the underground in The Estate (represented by Goadholm).
Their next adventure was the Ember tree. The adventure went well and when they summoned an elemental, their last wish was to harass Goldenfur more and steal more of his valuables.
The room they had in the inn in Brickport got broken into and searched. Thankfully, they have everything valuable in a bank, including the amulet.
The next adventure was Fruit of the Orchard.
One of the characters starts a romantic relationship with Butter Grant (NPC hireling).
The next adventure is Snake in the sewers. They save Ursula the witch. Ursula invited them to visit her.
They take the amulet from the bank and go to visit Ursula. I placed her on the north edge of the map (they stumble upon the Workers work, rulers rule adventure on the way there). Eventually, they arrive at Ursula’s place, and she explains to them how the amulet works. I had to detail this myself, together with a history of the amulet. I must admit I might have made the amulet too powerful.
PCs are bothered by the burglaries in Brickport, so they decide to investigate them to make sure their possessions are safe. This leads them to Goadholm. I detailed the settlement and also the Bone Gang a little bit, so they had a nice opportunity to meet part of the criminal underworld of the Estate. They were ambushed by two thugs who tried to steal the amulet from them.
The next adventure was Mush Rush, quickly followed by Frogacle race. They win and can ask very clever questions about the agendas of Sabrina, Zipporah and “two-headed rat”. They are learning a lot of important information for their endgame.

At this point, an interesting thing happened when I played the factions mini-game. Two of the factions (Magpies and Goldenfur) achieved their goal “get the amulet” at the same time. I didn’t want to take the amulet from the player characters without any agency so I came up with a small adventure where “losing the amulet” would be a possible outcome.

The Whites as an A5 zine printed on my home printer

This is where The Whites come in.

The Whites came to The Estate because they were hired by Goldenfur to get the amulet back. They followed the trail of the amulet and eventually found the player characters. They learned about them, and their dear ones, and plotted a plan. Furthermore, they also learned there are multiple buyers and didn’t hesitate to take advance from all of them while still planning to run a surprise auction and sell to the highest bidder because that’s the kind of scoundrels they are.

Their plan ended up being as follows:

They’ll enter Brickport, wearing common clothes, and pretending to be merchants.
Percival, Erin and Balthazaar would enter with their cart dragged by Krflaf (a Rhinoceros beetle). They would check if PCs left the inn and park it below a balcony of one of the rooms. Percival waits outside.
Erin and Balthazaar hire a room in the Inn but instead of going to their room, they would break into the room of one of the PCs where they would kidnap Butter Grant - lover of the PC. They would stun him and put him in a bag and drop him from the balcony to the cart.
Balthazaar and Percival would leave with Butter Grant. Erin would stay and spy on PCs.
Once Percival and Balthazaar had enough time to get away from Brickport, Erin would hire a mouse kid to deliver a letter: “If you ever want to see your beloved again, bring the stolen amulet to the old well by midnight on the nigh of the full moon. Don’t try any funny stuff.” and she would leave the town as well.
They would hide in their hideout, which is located in an old ruin of an underground bat-cultist temple. The temple is hidden in the walls of the old well in The Estate.
After two days or so they would set up the handover place neither far nor close to their hideout. They would put a few torches there and a letter for PCs to leave the amulet there and go back home to wait for the kidnapped to return. They would be hidden around to make sure everything goes as they want, but they wouldn’t give PCs any opportunity to negotiate or demand.
They would release Butter Grant somewhere far away from their hideout, making sure he doesn’t know the way back, and they would initiate the auction.

Their plan worked well until it interacted with PCs.

I started the game by narrating how one of the PCs came to the room and Butter Grant wasn’t there and and described some signs of struggle. She quickly realized something happened and gathered the party.
PCs know the gate guards in Brickport pretty well, so they got the information about an unusual group of merchants with a cart and beetle who came and left. They even got info that there was one mouse less when the cart left.
They left some of their hirelings by the gate to stop anyone who would match the description of Erin in a cheap cloak.
When they asked around, they found someone who told them it was parked under their balcony.
They got some info from the innkeeper.
A mouse kid approached them and gave them the letter. They tried to catch and interrogate the kid, but it got scared and managed to run away.
Erin chose to wait a bit until things de-escalate and didn’t leave the city immediately.
One of the players introduced an amazing story twist with a bit of world-building included. She remembered an old guard who was watching some goods in the port and their cockroach, Jim. She explained that her character knows that cockroaches are very good at tracking, and she knows that because her boyfriend (the kidnapped Butter Grant) was a nerd about insects, and he kept talking about them and sharing all the interesting facts all the time. I really loved how she connected facts which I established (the NPC was their “insect interpreter” and “sharing details about insect life all the time” was a quirk the NPC had) together and added a bit that would help them to proceed with the story. So I did let them have it, even though it meant they’ll skip part of the adventure.
Before leaving, they convinced the Mayor to give orders to the guards to stop and hold anyone suspicious. This delayed Erin even more.
They convinced the old guard to help them and started under the balcony, where the beetle stood for a longer time. They eventually tracked the beetle all the way to their hideout.
They entered the dungeon, carefully sneaked around, killed ghostly Juniper, saved the hostage and had an encounter with resurrected Juniper and the rest of the party except Erin. The players managed to defeat them in their non-violent way: freed Juniper from the artefact, befriended Balthazaar and captured Percival, Riff and Raff. Later, they also captured Erin when she finally got back to the hideout.

The lower level of the dungeon. Drawn by hand on paper, scanned and cleaned a bit digitally.

What was left

You can see, that all the details about the amulet and the connection to Goldenfur and Magpies wouldn’t make sense in most of the other campaigns. Even those which actually take place in The Estate can have different development, and the Goldenfur’s amulet does not have to be an important element at all.

Therefore, I stripped all those details down. What was left was the NPCs, their backstory, the location in the walls of the old well and some hints on how to incorporate this into other campaigns.

I didn’t really think it was worth publishing, but my players kept telling me I should, so I took it as an opportunity to try to learn something new. Working with my partner on shared projects is always fun, and when she started painting the illustration, I just had to put the thing together.

We enjoyed the process, and we are already working on another one. This time it’s going to be a proper adventure, for the Winter has come Mausritter Jam. We have a nice pile of ideas, let’s just hope we finish it.

Update We since finished and published the adventure “Chrismous forever” and you can grab it on itch.

Low-lethality in Mausritter

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Mausritter is an amazing sword & whiskers tabletop role-playing game. I wrote a bit about how I got to running it recently.

In my group, there are two players only. They are not influenced by previous pen-and-paper experience and they are not playing video games so they haven’t created the habit of using in-game violence to resolve situations. One of the players is even very anti-violence because the setting full of little sentient animals makes her feel for them. It was clearly said that the death of a character or even dear NPCs is something that we should avoid. The other player would be willing to use violence more often, yet still less often than an average player.

Illustrated game notes by my beloved partner Anna. The text might contain spoilers for The Estate.

Mausritter is based on Into The Odd and the system itself leads to quick combats with real consequences. The book warns players that combat will be difficult and consequential (“Combat is dangerous business for mice, even brave adventurers. But sometimes it cannot be avoided.”) and that dying is part of the game (“Fight dirty. Run. Die. Roll a new mouse.”). The attacks in Mausritter always hit (there’s only the damage roll). So how can we run a low-lethality game in Mausritter? Is it even possible?

What Mausritter gives us mechanically

HP - hit protection in Mausritter (and Into The Odd family of games in general) is a quick refreshing resource representing the ability of a character to avoid real harm. We can imagine it being something like stamina that allows a character to dodge attacks etc. It can be (partly) refreshed after each combat during a short rest. When hit protection is depleted the character is being injured for real and their STR stat is being lowered according to the damage left. After each hit to the stat, the character has to roll an STR save and if they fail they are removed from combat but alive (“take injured condition and are incapacitated until tended to by an ally and take a short rest”. Rules as written, the character dies when their STR gets to 0 or lower.

That means that losing hit protection doesn’t mean harm is being done. It is easy-to-miss detail because our brains tend to treat this meta currency in the same way as hit points in other games. It’s also a bit contradictory to the claim that in Mausritter “attack always hits”. That claim is mainly trying to teach a player that they roll only once for their attack and the dice are based on their weapon. The way how I like to frame it is that the roll together with hit protection value answers both “will I hit?” and “how much I harm them?” questions.

This gives us several important things already:

Losing a lot of HP is a very good signal to the player that the combat is getting dangerous.
Every real harm can already remove a character from combat without dying.
“If an incapacitated creature is left untended for 6 exploration Turns, they die.” So there’s an hour to save an incapacitated friend (or enemy!).

This gives GM a lot of tools to keep the lethality low. Player characters and NPC are actually quite likely to survive the combat and can be saved by friends or captured by enemies. Even if an incapacitated player character is abandoned by fleeing player characters it’s usually possible to find a reason why the enemies would keep them alive: to have leverage, to interrogate, to exchange for ransom, and many others. Even the antagonists that just want to eat them could store them for later (quite a common trope in stories we watch and read, all those bodies in cocoons).

Illustrated game notes by my beloved partner Anna. The text might contain spoilers for The Estate.

House rules

The one house rule I would suggest, is to basically ignore the part when they die if the STR reaches 0. Take it as a signal to make the consequences hard but let the character live.

Some ideas follow. We should always make sure that those alternatives are fine at our table. I would also suggest negotiating this with the player and giving them options.

There can be some permanent scarring or body damage. Losing a limb or an eye can be already very hard consequence for the character marking them for the rest of their life and it can already have a very strong emotional impact on their player.
They can be removed from the play for a long time. For example, because of serious injury that will require a long recovery, or they could end up in a coma. If magic is involved there are practically no boundaries. Maybe their soul is captured in an artefact and their body will sleep until the characters figure out how to break the artefact. The player would have to create a new character (as if their character died) and it can be already emotional for them. But it gives room for the character to come back later (maybe there’s a magical cure or somebody who can be convinced to remove the curse from them etc.) The players can have a quest and work on getting the character back and later the player can choose which character they want to play.
An alternative to this is some kind of emotional damage. Maybe the character is going to be so traumatised they’ll never go on an adventure again. The player would be invited to imagine the character “living in peace for the rest of their days”. It can be an interesting way how to keep the character as NPC in safety while getting them out of play.

What about NPCs and their death?

The same rules as to PCs apply. So there’s is plenty of room for saving and capturing them when the fight ends. Together with the house rule above it’s easy to remove death from the picture in most cases.

Another important piece of rules is morale. Rules, as written, say that:

“Whenever an antagonist is in a battle with the mice and reaches one of the following conditions, it must make a WIL save. On failure, the creature must flee or surrender. 1) Is obviously outmatched at the start of a battle, 2) Takes critical damage for the first time, 3) Sees an ally flee or fall

Illustrated game notes by my beloved partner Anna. The text might contain spoilers for The Estate.

This rule has a significant impact on the game. Combat can quickly end because enemies just run away after the first one fell. It can snowball pretty quickly, sometimes maybe too quickly.

For example, the first enemy takes critical damage and manages to stay in combat but fails morale save and flees. Others roll because they see him running away. Some of them run also. This should trigger another roll for the remaining ones so it’s very likely all of them run away. That feels too much for me and I tend to roll only once per NPC and round.

The GM

I personally want any situation in my game to have a non-violent solution even when players don’t mind killing. One thing is when they choose violence, another when they have no other reasonable options to proceed.

As GM I can do a lot to make the game less violent and lethal:

Avoid encounters where characters are immediately attacked.
The antagonists are not cruel murdering monsters. They are not eager to finish incapacitated enemies just because they can etc.
Let the characters have an escape route: multiple paths through dungeons, don’t block the escape path unless they actually make a mistake and do it themselves.
Try to make everyone they meet possible to talk to or interact with non-violently. Easier with intelligent beings but they can still lure an animal away using some food or scare the animal away by making loud noise etc.
Support their play style by giving them appropriate spells and items. Instead of “a sword that burns the attacked with magical fire”, give them “a rod of thunder that stuns the opponent on critical hit”. Instead of the “fireball” spell, they can find in “invisible ring”.
Remind players if they get stuck and miss some basic opportunity (“you can still run away”, “you can try to trip or disarm them”).

Illustrated game notes by my beloved partner Anna. The text might contain spoilers for The Estate.

The players

The players should be playing their characters accordingly. If they are afraid that their characters could die, they should choose solutions where they don’t risk dying. If they don’t want to kill NPCs they should try really hard to avoid harming them in combat.

If you feel they are not doing that, talk it through. Everyone at the table should be on the same page and try to create a low-lethality game if that’s the agreement. There is still room for some in-character variance. For example, one character is trying to convince others they should use more violence, and another disagrees and proposes a non-violent way. As always, make sure the disagreements are handled on the appropriate level (in-character versus out-of-character).

How does it work?

So far it worked quite well for us. Until now, the players have killed a couple of skelerats, blown up a giant snake, killed a re-animated moth queen (controlled by magical fungi), and some ghosts. Even when they got into a fight they often focused on other goals than killing enemies. We have played around 10 sessions and went through most of the adventures of The Estate and some of my additions.

Hamster Balthazaar and Jam of friendship Anna Text might contain spoilers for The Estate.

Just an example from the last session which ended with a fight. Two enemies were bewitched, disarmed and captured. Another two were trapped in the middle of an invisible ring (a spell which creates an invisible and impassable wall). We are yet to learn what happens when the spell vanishes. The last is bewitched as well and currently snacking “Jam of friendship” with one of the hirelings (we have found that they are long-lost cousins).

My personal renaissance of Pen & Paper games

Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Old hobbies

An interesting thing that keeps happening to me in the last years, as I am getting older (38 at the time of writing) is that I am returning back to the hobbies I had (or almost had) as a kid or teenager.

I have played a bit of Magic The Gathering, I made some models and dioramas, and I have gotten into micro-electronics (which wasn’t truly my childhood hobby but it was part of my education).

Now I got obsessed with TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games) or Pen and paper games how I remember them being called in the past. As a teenager, I spent quite some time running and playing a Czech TTRPG game called “Dračí doupě” which was a local D&D clone (an old website in Czech). I had also run several games of Shadowrun and read through a couple of more systems that were available back then.

I believed those times are a long time in the past. I couldn’t imagine I would ever have enough time to actually prepare a traditional TTRPG campaign with all the world-building and story-building I had been doing back in that time. And also, all the old friends I had been playing with are out of reach.

Mausritter

First, I came across Mausritter while some people mentioned the game in an unrelated discussion group. In this game, players play a little sapient mouse going on adventures. It’s still the “sword and sorcery” RPG we know very well from other games but re-flavoured into something quite different.

I bought a copy and convinced my partner and a friend to play it. Since then we have been playing a campaign in The Estate (an official adventure set for Mausritter). We are having a lot of fun that my partner documents in her awesome game diary.

Session notes painted during the session by ma beloved partner Anna and a sculpture of one of the characters.

Obsession

I did what I did with any of the hobbies mentioned above: reading about how to run games, and how to play games. Joined many discords, where I mostly lurk and observe other people talking about TTRPG games. I started buying and reading rules and supplements for various games. I have discovered a very rich and amazing subculture of indie TTRPG games. An amazing world that is full of amazing ideas and games I would love to play.

Mausritter itself is based on Into The Odd and that lead me to other games like Electric Bastionland, Cairn, and Liminal Horror. I bounced into game families like Powered By The Apocalypse (PBtA), and Forged in the Dark (FitD). I collected dozens of PDFs, and quite a few physical books and pledged on many crowd-funded products. I bet they’ll keep coming long after I get bored of the hobby and move on to something else.

Physical books I have bought in recent months.

Solo play, Ironsworn & Ironsworn: Starforged

One of the very interesting branches of TTRPG games I have discovered is solo games. It sounded like a very odd idea to play a game solo but also a very appealing idea for a socially anxious person who lives in a foreign country and doesn’t speak the local language fluently (yes, me)

I have already published several posts where I capture the story of Valentin Sikorski - a space courier in Ironsworn: Starforged. Ironsworn is the older version in a fantasy setting and I am currently also playing one character in this game. I plan to write a bit more about how I play those games and how my approach develops. It takes some learning and unlearning but it is certainly a very interesting experience.

Apart from that, I played The Wretched - a sci-fi horror journalling game. That was an interesting experience but it didn’t really tick the box of “game” for me. It felt just like a story driven by random prompts without any agency on my side.

There’s also a copy of Thousand Years Old Vampire in the photo above. It’s perhaps the most famous solo journalling game. I am yet to play it, and so far I haven’t figured out who is my vampire going to be at the beginning of the journey. I am looking forward to this one since it seems to have interesting mechanics of memories and experiences where the character forgets important events and people as they go through their life.

I also plan to try solo play with other games. Maybe using Mythic Game Master Emulator

Play by Post

Play by post (PbP) was originally about people playing games via good old letters. Nowadays it usually represents an asynchronous play on internet forums. It’s perhaps the most approachable kind of play because doesn’t require people to be able to participate at the same time or even be present at the same place at the same time. It’s a very specific kind of playing with its positives and negatives.

The game goes of course much slower than normal games. It can not offer as much immersion and it’s really a lot about luck if players and GM stay interested in the game for long enough so something actually happens. I have seen several games which never got past character creation and world-building, some that ended after one scene.

Of all my attempts to join a PbP game only one that survived a significant time is a Mausritter campaign run by an awesome “gamemouster” (link is to their blog post from the time we started playing). This game had quite a rapid tempo at the begging. A lot happened in a short period of time and the players and the GM was very active. Over time it slowed down. It’s not really a problem but there are days when I wonder if it’s getting to stall already or if it’ll pick up again. So far it keeps going and I am still eager to see what happens to the characters.

Birch Butterball, a former woodcutter from Oakstone. Illustrated by my beloved partner Anna

Online play

Last but not least. Playing via video/voice calls, sometimes using some additional software. It took me some time to find the courage to try to play a game with total strangers on the internet. So far I have had two very nice sessions (Blades in the Dark and Brindlewood Bay) and I am excited to play more.

What next

Play more! Play more solo, play more PbP, play more online. And eventually, find some people in Berlin who would enjoy playing in English and exploring various games. And of course, I am eager to run more games. Be it PbP, online or in the real world. Of course, running games for strangers is way out of my comfort zone so it might take me some time to get there. Playing with strangers is a very good first step, though!

There’s going to be more TTRPG content on this blog. So follow me on Twitter or find your old RSS reader. You can also add me on discord (josefadamcik#0052) if you feel like chatting!