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Post by Lemunde on Nov 1, 2021 15:59:10 GMT
I've been trying to get this game setup for several days now, whenever I can get a spare moment in. I've been refining and expanding on the rules I made a few months ago, which I only did minimum testing on with a throwaway character. As much as I'd like to take a more minimalist approach to running solo D&D, the only alternative is using an oracle. I don't have anything against players who use oracles exclusively, but for me it feels like giving too much mechanical control to the player, which makes it less a game and more of a tool for generating stories. But I'm not here to gripe and moan about what tools players choose. First rule of lonewolfing: don't let anyone tell you you're doing it wrong. That being said, my approach involves a lot more tables and some expanded rules on quest building and NPC interaction. I'll link the documents of what I have so far below somewhere. They're a work in progress and probably will be for some time. I fully expect to expand on them a great deal as I play through this campaign, whatever it turns out to be. For now, let me introduce you to the hero of this tale: Elnik Grelen, a half-elven monk/ranger. I'm using a gestalt character because I feel it makes for the best balance for a combat encounter with an equivalent challenge rating. If you don't know what a gestalt character is, it's basically taking two different characters and mashing them together to make one character. It's similar to multiclassing if you rewrote the multiclassing rules to give you the best of everything. I won't go into too much detail as to what's involved with making a gestalt character as there are resources online for that. But a key difference I'm using is to give my character hit dice from both classes as opposed to just taking the higher of the two. Trust me, when going solo you need all the boons you can get. I gave Elnik the sage background. I let the dice decide his personality by rolling for all his background traits: Sounds like he has a deep respect for knowledge and the written word. Putting this all together, I image Elnik desires to acquire knowledge at any cost and then to share that knowledge with as many people as possible. He believes secrets are synonymous with lies and that no knowledge should be kept from any who seek it. His bond is interesting. I'm probably going to have to add all of those to the settlement tables. Cities should potentially have libraries and the like. See, I'm already having to make modifications. I still need to flesh out his equipment but I'll get to that later. I drew up a rudimentary map in paint.net. The grid-lines are to help determine distances and locations. I can get any random location using just 4d8. There's a good mix of biomes here: forest, swamp, mountains, plains, hills, desert... No arctic biome as it didn't seem like it would fit the climate. Full SizeI need to populate it with some settlements. I'm going to roll 1d4 to see how many cities there are, 2d6 for towns, and 4d6 for villages. Roughly averages to 2, 6, 12 respectively. After rolling I got 2 cities, 7 towns, and 12 villages. Pretty close to what I was expecting. After rolling for each location this is what I ended up with: Edit: I've since altered the map somewhat to put some settlements nearer to water. Edit^2: Added some roads. Will add more later. I would have liked more villages near water. I guess that's what happens when you do this randomly. It's interesting that nothing ended up in the central mountains or the eastern desert. Good places for dungeons, I say. I still have a few things to set up but it's getting late so I'll have to come back to this later. Solo rules
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 2, 2021 2:45:42 GMT
There's a few things I need to do to set up my world aside from just mapping it. I'm going through the DMG and looking for tables that might help define the setting. First one I've come across is the Forms of Government on page 18 so let's see what this tells me. I rolled an 84 on a d100 which gives me... So it sounds like there's a monarch but they don't have any real power. I'm inclined to believe that the center of government doesn't reside in this particular realm, but let's see what the dice say. I'll give it a 1 in 4 chance that this land is the center of government... Rolled a 3 on a d4 so no. I should probably give this realm a name, but before I do that I need to know what the dominant race is. There are 9 races in the PHB so what I'm going to do is roll a d10. If I roll a 10 then the dominant race is actually from a resource outside the PHB. In the Settlements and NPCs document I have humans as the dominant race by default, but this can be easily altered. So let's see what the dice give me... Wouldn't you know it, I rolled a 10. This should be interesting. So in addition to the PHB I have Volo's Guide and Mordenkainen's. I also have Cthulhu Mythos for 5e, but the races in that are... well let's just say having ordinary cats ruling the kingdom is probably a stretch too far. Volo's has 8 options for races (including monster options as one) and Mordenkainen's has 1, so I'm going to roll a d10. On a 10 I'm going to have to dig deeper for a race and things are going to get really weird. I rolled a 6 which gives me... tabaxi! That's interesting because running a large kingdom is a bit out of character for tabaxi. Maybe they're the dominant race but they don't actually rule. Sort of like the British rule over India back in the day. That being the case, let's see what race the ruling class is: I rolled a 4 which gives me... human, of course. Yeah, this is making more sense now. A nation of tabaxi ruled over by a decadent class of human nobles. After some adjustments, the random tables now look like this: Now I just need to name the place.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 3, 2021 4:56:34 GMT
Looking through the tables in Xanathar's, there aren't any good name tables for towns and cities of different cultures. So what I'm going to do is use the tables for Egyption human names, given that cats are often associated with ancient Egypt. This is just for the settlements. My apologies to any modern Egyptions if cities sound like the Egyption parallel of "Bob" and "Barbara".
Tabaxi have their own naming convention for themselves which sound more like Argonian names from the Elderscrolls series. I'll have to use some other means to generate those names. I'll probably just pick a random word and dress it up a bit. It's all flavor so it doesn't matter too much.
So I'm going to start with the name of the realm and to do that I'm going to roll a d200, which is a d20 combined with a d10. Over 100 I'll use the male names, after subtracting 100 of course. The name of this realm shall be called... drum roll...
Pakhom
Cool. Now just for fun I'm going to roll the names of the two cities. I'm not going to name everything right now. City names would be common knowledge. Everything else I can discover as I play.
The first city in the forest at 3-7-1-1 shall be called (rolled a 179) Pawero, and the second city lying in the plains at 7-6-1-1 shall be called (rolled a 94) Takhat.
Now that I have some of the names situated, I'm going to look through the DMG and see if there are any more tables I can use to help describe the land of Pakhom. There's a table called "World-Shaking Events" that can help define some of the history. What I'm going to do is go back 1000 years, roll a d1000 and add that to -1000, then roll on the table to see what happened that year. I'll keep doing this until I reach the present day. But first I'm going to roll a d1000 to see what year our history starts at.
So our history begins at the year 388, which puts present day at the year 1388. Time to roll again and whip out the calculator. I rolled a 72 which puts the first event at the year 460. Rolling on the table we get "Prediction, omen, prophecy". That sounds appropriate for this point in the timeline.
Each entry on this table has detailed descriptions for them further in, some of them with their own tables. This one doesn't have any additional tables, unfortunately, but I can roll again on the World-Shaking Events table to see what the prophecy predicts. Rolled a 7, which is a new organization. This one has its own table I can roll on which gives me (rolled a 10) Secret society/cult/cabal. I'll just roll a d3 to choose which: secret society. So we have a prophecy that predicts the formation of a secret society.
Now the thing about prophecies is sometimes they have a deadline, sometimes they don't. Sometimes their deadlines are ambiguous. I'm just going to roll another d1000 and add it to the timeline. If it's in the future then it hasn't been fulfilled yet. Actually how would you even know if a secret society was ever formed? Okay, scratch that. I'm just going to leave it up in the air. There's no deadline for this prophecy but it's prominent enough that people take it seriously.
For the sake of time and my sanity and the sanity of anyone reading this, I'm just going to keep rolling on the tables until I have a full timeline of significant events.
I find it interesting how random rolls can sometimes fit together so perfectly. Here's how I see this all fitting together. 900 years ago, a prophet travels the land warning the nobles and anyone of prominence of the coming of a secret criminal organization. The thing is, this prophet wasn't actually a prophet in the religious sense. This was a man who was personally involved in the early stages of this criminal organization's formation, but he kept his involvement a secret to avoid incriminating himself. Apparently something about this organization made him not only want out, but it was bad enough that he had to warn as many people about it as possible. Maybe the organization tapped into some kind of dark magical resource that made them a much greater threat than they otherwise would be. Who's to say?
No one really took the prophet seriously, but ten years later this prophecy came to fruition when clear evidence of this organization's existence was revealed. People started going missing, certain nobles found significant portions of their property stolen or vandalized resulting in them losing power and influence, smuggling and piracy ramped to new heights with law enforcement finding itself helpless to stop it. Murders and kidnappings started going unreported. Essentially what we have here is a mafia with such power and influence that no crime can be committed, reported, or prosecuted without first gaining its approval. They became the de facto rulers of Pakhom, bribing nobles to turn a blind eye to their doings and disappearing those who refused.
For nearly 1000 years they have remained in power, with no one outside the organization knowing who or what is truly behind it.
Then there was the event 52 years ago, which may or may not have been related to the existence of this organization. Every single sparrow native to Pakhom was hunted to extinction. Sparrows were as much a staple of the tabaxi diet as chickens are to humans. The sparrow population had never seemed to be under threat before. For some reason they either stopped breeding or a concerted effort was made to eliminate them en-masse while concealing the evidence. The result was that the Tabaxi were forced to rely on other, less desirable forms of sustenance which created a short-term food shortage and put even more strain on the lower-class Tabaxi. Over the years Pakhom has been recovering from this crises, with more traditional farms and forms of hunting filling the giant gap left by the extinction.
And that brings us to the present day and the end of all the relevant tables I can find in the DMG. Next I'm going to start rolling and setting up the starting conditions for our hero and his immediate environment.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 3, 2021 8:52:08 GMT
Part of Elnik's background says he "works to preserve a library, university, scriptorium, or monastery". With my modified tables these can all potentially appear anywhere, but I need something guaranteed to exist in the world. So what I'm going to do is roll randomly on the world map to determine which settlement this structure will be at and then what type of structure it is. A lot of this map is pretty sparse in terms of settlements, so this may take a few re-rolls. (A few seconds later...) Okay, so it only took one. A town in the forest at 1-5-3-8. This town shall be called (rolls 80) Qalhata. There's four types of structures listed so we'll roll for it and get (rolls 4) a monastery. Rather appropriate given that Elnik the half-elf is also a half-monk. I was planning on having whatever character I rolled have a small shack in a village somewhere, but having his own room at a monastery works just as well. You can easily avoid having a murder-hobo by putting a roof over your character's head. That at least takes care of the hobo part. Monasteries are usually built in service of a deity, though I suppose there are exceptions. There are 37 entries in the PHB for Forgotten Realms deities. My character is neutrally aligned so any aligned deity I roll here I could work with. I'm going to roll a d40 (d4 where 4 equals 0 and d10). If I roll above a 37 I'll have to think outside the box. Maybe roll on another deity list or create the First Church of Humanism or something. (rolls a 39) Well... Okay, so I have a couple of options here. The tabaxi worship the ambiguous Cat Lord, who's nature doesn't really suggest that people build temples or monasteries to his service. And Elnik, being a non-tabaxi, doesn't sound like the kind of person who would venerate him. However there's also an entry in the PHB for deities in Greyhawk. I'm not sure I like the idea of mixing settings. There's a list for non-human deities, but it's the same problem as The Cat Lord. You know what, I'm just going to reroll and if I get above 37 again then fate has decided that Elnik's deity is something a little more extraordinary. (rolls a 4) Beshaba, goddess of misfortune. She's chaotic evil. Actually, reading over her wiki entry it makes a lot of sense. People don't worship her to have her intervene on their behalf; they worship her to keep her from intervening. It's like those stories of tribal islanders tossing virgins into a volcano to keep it from erupting. Her followers try to keep her happy to avoid bad luck. Remember what happened with the sparrows going extinct? Imagine the tabaxi thinking that Beshaba had become displeased with them and wiped out all the sparrows out of spite. So they erected shrines and a monastery to her where sacrifices of wine and brandy are given and prayers to keep her mischievous hand at bay are spoken. Okay, that's Elnik's background and adventure hook set up. But we need to know a little more about the town of Qalhata. I'll be rolling for that stuff in the next post, then Elnik will be ready to set out on his first quest.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 3, 2021 11:15:09 GMT
Rolling for all the NPCs and services for the town was a rather long and grueling process that I won't subject you to. Suffice to say I won't have to do this for every settlement as the idea is you're supposed to discover these things as you play. But Elnik's been in this town a long time and has gotten to know the people who live there. Here's the raw data for the town:
I had to think outside the box for the tabaxi names. Lots of tabaxi name generators online but I'm trying to stick to tables as much as possible. While I couldn't find any actual tables, I did find several tavern name tables, which follow the same basic concepts that tabaxi names use. The results were entertaining if somewhat repetitive. I tested my dice afterward and they seem sufficiently randomized. Sometimes rolls just go that way, I guess.
There are several tables in the DMG I can use to flesh out the town, but looking them over I think they would only bloat and diminish what's already there. I think everything's ready to go. Next post, Elnik Grelen will be making his first journal entry describing where fate has chosen to take him.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 3, 2021 16:09:05 GMT
I'm rolling on the following custom tables to determine what Elnik's first quest should be: Results: I'm considering this the primary quest of the campaign, so I'm setting the quest complexity at 100. This is all from my Quest Generator if there's any confusion. Basically this means I have to keep rolling d10s and completing objectives until those rolls add up to 100. "Hostile" I interpret as someone who is going to need to be defeated in combat before I can even talk to them. I do have rules for using persuasion against hostile NPCs but the DC is incredibly high and Elnik's charisma just isn't going to cut it. So this hostile NPC must be some kind of criminal... I think it's time to let the journal take over the interpretation of these rolls.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 4, 2021 7:02:09 GMT
That pretty much covers the quest prompts I rolled earlier. It took a little imagination to tie it all together and I imagine I'll have to do a lot more of that as the game progresses. I rolled to see if Confused Wolf knew any of the details Elnik would need to complete his first task. Specifically I need to know the identity of the NPC I'm looking for, their location, and/or any NPC in town that might have more information. She didn't know any of these details. If she had, this journal entry would have looked a lot different. As it stands I'm going to have to question some people in town.
I had to make a few adjustments to the quest generator to make everything flow better. I have some ideas on how to improve it but I want to test what I already have first. I also spent some time making an NPC character sheet template, which looks similar to a monster stat block. I'm going to need it if I'm going to be rolling random NPCs to combat. The NPC entries in the Monster Manual don't look like they'll cut it for my purposes.
Each non-monster NPC I combat is going to have a random level from 1 to 4. I consider this a tier 1 adventure, which means I don't expect my character to progress much beyond level 4 or 5. Afterwards I may consider rolling up a new realm for him to adventure in. But for now that means most of the monsters I encounter are going to be at or below CR 1, with a few possible exceptions. Considering I could potentially encounter up to 4 of these monsters at a time, I believe this should be relatively balanced, though more difficult at early levels. If the NPC I'm after turns out to be level 4, well I'm not sure how a level 1 gestalt character will stack up against them.
So I'm now at the point where I have actual control over what Elnik does next. I could cut to the chase and start asking around about the criminal NPC, or I could do a bit of shopping as Elnik has a good bit of coin left over from character creation. I used the optional rules to give him gold based on his classes rather than give him a whole bunch of useless equipment from his class descriptions and background.
Another option is I could just bamf off and do my own thing. There are other quests that NPCs might potentially have to offer. Or I could explore the wilderness a bit and see what I can find. coughgrindcough But I'm not too much of a fan of that idea. It's not in Elnik's character to just ignore the wishes of a vengeful goddess he venerates. Guess we'll find out.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 4, 2021 10:39:00 GMT
After a couple of rounds of questioning NPCs I realized that there are probably going to be times when all the questioning in the world wasn't going to get me anywhere. So I came up with this idea of an investigation track. Similar tools have been used in other systems. I set a goal based on the town's population of 110. Each hour I spent "investigating" I rolled an investigation check (at disadvantage due to the weather) and added this to the investigation track. Once I reach the goal of 110 then I'll have found where Eida Jamjar is hiding out. There's probably going to be other times I'll have to use a track like this. So far Elnik has spent seven hours investigating and he's not even halfway through the track.
I've been thinking about quest deadlines and whether or not they should be implemented. I'm going to have to think on it some more because, like in the case of the main quest, I don't want my PC to be on a rail where he has to focus all his attention on that one quest without being able to take the time to do anything else. Maybe I could have some tasks with a deadline, some without. Another complication is determining how long a task should take, given the fluid distances involved. I don't want to make it too complicated. Maybe it's not worth it. Eh, I'll table it for now.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 6, 2021 7:45:24 GMT
A few interesting rolls this time. I gave Eida a level range between 1 and 4 and I rolled a 1. If she had been level 3 or 4 this would have gone quite differently and I probably would have had to be more creative in my approach. I was surprised by the off-handed check to see if Whurdred, the street vendor, knew of Eida's location. I legitimately intended to continue on the investigation track but as it turns out it wasn't needed.
I felt that I needed to roll another check with Elnik carrying her back to the monastery. This one was very situational so I didn't have any rules or tables written down for it. The thing is, whenever you do something suspicious in a public location in broad daylight (like lugging around an unconscious halfling) people are going to notice. However the setting's background also states that arrests aren't made without the criminal organization's approval. I rolled a d2 to see if any guards noticed me. If they had I would have had to roll some kind of social skill to allow them to let me go. Failing that, I'm not really sure what would have happened. What would a corrupt guard do if he saw someone blatantly violating the law but was powerless to stop it? Lots of variables there.
Regardless I would have allowed the interrogation to continue in one form or another. The flavor for how that all comes about is just that: flavor.
There was one other complication I found. I added to the rules that a hostile NPC gets upgraded to "uncooperative" once they've been subdued. This gives me a high DC to do persuasion checks with them. Other social skill checks can help with that but it always comes down to a persuasion check in the end. The problem is Elnik has only a +1 to persuasion while the DC is 22 with her personality and disposition taken into account, making it virtually impossible to get any information out of her. My solution? Another skill track!
I set the goal of the track to the DC multiplied by 10 making it 220. Fortunately Elnik has a really good insight, which means if I succeed on an insight check with a DC of 15 then it gives me advantage on the persuasion check, which ultimately makes the track proceed a bit faster. The interrogation still has quite a ways to go, however. Once the track is completed, I'll determine what information she gives away based on the next task I roll for the quest.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 7, 2021 16:30:51 GMT
Not much to add to this one. I did create a new rule where any prisoner, NPC or PC, could attempt an escape once per day. In Eida's case she would have to both get out of the manacles and somehow break through the door to the cellar. Given the high rolls required this wasn't likely but could be possible over an extended period of time.
I felt it necessary to point out that she did have a produce flame spell, but it wasn't very useful in her current situation. I suppose she could have been psychotic enough to try to burn down the whole monastery around her, but I'd prefer to just keep it simple.
Elnik's next task is to try to find out where one of these notes might be, which I already know is going to be in a wilderness location. That likely means several days travel with the possibility of some monster encounters. I look forward to finding out.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 11, 2021 10:38:34 GMT
I've been spending the past few days modifying more of the rules and tables. It gets a little obsessive sometimes and eventually you just have to force yourself to stop and play the damn game.
I wasn't satisfied with Elnik just going through every NPC in the list and asking them the same questions over and over again. So I decided to have him do a bit of traveling to find the answers he needs. Some of the tables I adjusted now include the possibility of having clues to any current quest. So Elnik could be wandering around some random dungeon, find a curious looking skull or something, spend a few minutes investigating it, and it would somehow reveal a clue as to where the hidden note is.
I really enjoyed the combat this time. These were pretty weak enemies but they had numbers on their side. Unfortunately they didn't have the dice on their side. Every single hit missed and they had advantage on their strikes the first round. I'm serious about extracting that poison but I didn't pick up any vials or anything while I was at Wealthy Wolf's, so he's going to have to wait 'til he gets to the city to try to get anything out of it.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 17, 2021 10:06:46 GMT
I decided to switch over to a more traditional journal-like structure for the narrative parts. The entries were just taking way too long and I was spending more time typing them out than actually playing. This first one is pretty long but only because I felt I needed to summarize his adventure up to this point. Future entries should be much shorter since I won't have to go into so much detail and just tell the story from Elnik's limited perspective.
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Post by Lemunde on Nov 18, 2021 16:50:25 GMT
I'm going to have to come up with some urban encounter tables/rules at some point. Currently wandering around cities is pretty uneventful. One should expect that you'd run into pickpockets and muggers, maybe the occasional swarm of rats. The DMG has a table for urban monster encounters but I want it to include a little more than that. The random person on the street isn't going to have to deal with monsters on such a regular basis. Maybe I'll have some of the encounters be benign, like some ruffian trying to push illicit goods on me, or an elder who needs help pulling his cart. Easy enough to come up with material for this kind of thing, I just have to make the time to jot it all down.
I'm also going to have to come up with a dungeon template for abandoned villages now. Going from house to house in a village is similar to going from room to room in a dungeon, but with each room having it's own set of sub-rooms...? I'll have to do some thinking on this.
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Post by Lemunde on Dec 8, 2021 12:20:54 GMT
So yeah, I hit level 2 finally. As harrowing as that encounter was, Elnik only really took minor damage in the end. For level 1, encountering three creatures can be quite a challenge unless you manage to get the upper hand early on. Felling that xvart (yeah, that's what it was) early on helped, but that boggle was a total pain in my asterisk. Fighting off a blink dog while a boggle is latched onto you stacking on multiple levels of disadvantage, not what I had in mind when I stepped into this house. And those boggles have other tricks too. And I'm not done fighting them yet. They're number one on the encounter table for this village, which means they're the most common creature. See when you roll for an encounter using my tables, you roll the die twice and take the lowest roll. This makes some creatures more likely to appear than others. I expect encounters will be a lot easier now, but that just means I'll be able to go through more of them without having to take a rest. I want to try to fully explore that large building and maybe a couple others before having to take a break. We'll see how it works out.
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