Barbarian Prince, a one-page dungeon, and a musical tool to improve your TTRPG immersion
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Deep forests, giant mountains & weird dungeons. I speak about TTRPGs, video games, music and what I like.
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Summary
⚔️Barbarian Prince + Rogueland: Another Way To Play This 1981’s Solo Classic
⛪The Whispering Church: A Basic Fantasy RPG One Page Dungeon
🎻Pocket Bard: How to Handle Music & Sound Effects In Your TTRPG Session
🧙🏼♂️What I’m Up To
⚔️Barbarian Prince + Rogueland: Another Way To Play This 1981’s Solo Classic
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| My Barbarian Prince / Rogueland table |
Barbarian Prince is a solo board game / TTRPG from 1981. It’s a pretty “weird” one, built like no other game, and it comes with two booklets : the rules and the events one. It also came with a fully drawn hex map.
The game itself is cool but some aspects aren’t most traditional TTRPG players’ cup of tea (mainly how the combat works).
You can see LoneAdventurer’s playthrough of the original game here:
I’ve read Castle Grief’s post and SilverNightingale’s one, along with Chaoclypse’s video on how to play this game with other rules and it seems like a very fun and interesting way of playing it (see below for the posts and video, all of three are more than interesting if you are into solo stuff).
Basically, you use Barbarian Prince’s rules for traveling, being lost and encounters / events to get the depth of the whole game (the event book is 75 pages full of things to happen). And you use whatever you want for the rest: combat, stats, dungeon crawling, you name it.
Castle Grief uses Basic/Expert, Silver Nightingale uses OSE, and Chaoclypse uses OD&D with Chainmail.
I was tempted by OD&D (without Chainmail), but as I’m still not very used to the game, I chose to go with the OSR: Rogueland. I already spoke about Rogueland in a previous post, but I love its simplicity.
So I chose a hex to start, and use Silver Nightingale’s Quest Generator to go along with something to do. The quest was to kill some foes in the Ruins Of Pelgar (Hex 2009). After 20 days of traveling with very few events and monster encounters (except for a mighty minotaur and some bandits), I arrived at the ruins and I’ve been killed by the very first creatures I stumbled upon: a carrion creeper.
It was quite a long time of playing though since I played the whole day 😅
For creatures encounters, I was using the hunt/rest/mishap system from Rogueland, which tells me if something happened, and when I stumble upon a foe, I check on the wilderness or dungeon encounters of Whitebox FMAG and tweak the monsters’ stat for the Rogueland system if needed.
For dungeon delving, I was hesitating between several dungeon generator: Chaoclypse’s Solus for OD&D, my own dungeon crawler game GrimRogue who was inspired by Rogueland, and Perplexing Ruins’ Solo Dungeon Sheets. And I choose the last one because it provides some easy and fast way of generating a dungeon and pre-made rooms’ shape.
I had a blast playing it, despite the very few events - the very thing that makes Barbarian Prince so cool. I’ll definitely make another attempt!
You can find a superb Barbarian Prince version here and Rogueland here.
⛪The Whispering Church: A Basic Fantasy RPG One Page Dungeon
Last Sunday, I had 2 hours to lose. I wanted to play something simple without too much to generate. And I recalled this cool video by Chaoclypse about a solo one page dungeon for Basic Fantasy RPG (BFRPG).
I hadn't played BFRPG before, and I wasn’t in the mood of learning a whole new game just to try a one page setting, so I used another OSR: Rogueland (yes, again).
The Whispering Church is a simple pamphlet dungeon, a church, with a story around it, GM tips for solo gaming and encounters. What more do we need?
It’s a 2 to 4 character level 1 adventure, and I chose to play with 2 characters.
It has a great atmosphere and a nice simple starting quest: retrieve lost children.
The whole built-in GM system is pretty well thought for solo gaming.
When you enter a room, you have to read the description. In that description you get bold keywords. You choose one and roll on the “What Happens” table, to get some prompt. There’s also a descriptors table to help spark your imagination.
This seems pretty short as it is a 5 room dungeon (church), but as you need to roll for random encounters every 3 turns you might play a little longer than you expect.
Personally, I haven’t had the time to finish my session, because I’m very busy these days (except for last Saturday where I got the whole time to play Barbarian Prince 😀).
I was attacked by 4 stained glass shadow and my party was almost killed, we will see what happens to them in the future 😉
You can find The Whispering Church here and Basic Fantasy RPG here, both for free.
🎻PocketBard: How to Handle Music & Sound Effects In Your TTRPG Session
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| Mörk Borg’s list of bands that inspired the game creation |
As a musician, I love music (Wow, what a twist!).
That’s why having a proper ambient music for my game (solo or as a GM) is a must have.
Some games offer a nice list of music to listen to while playing, like Mörk Borg at the very beginning of its rule book. But the vast majority doesn’t, and aren’t as moody as Mörk Borg (even if the bands on that list are some of my faves).
That’s why I often play Dungeon Synth music while playing, a niche genre I was into before I even got into TTRPG (fun fact: I even have Mörk Borg Soundtrack by Gnoll back then, and that’s why I buy MB as my first TTRPG to master).
Here are some bands I recommend for any medieval/fantasy/folkish vibe TTRPG:
And that’s just a very tiny list of cool bands from the scene.
But there’s something missing when you just play music in the background.
Picture the scene: a calm fantasy music is playing, you are exploring the forest while a huge eldritch bear attacks you! The calm music continues in the background, as the GM is too busy narrating what is happening.
But what if he can modify the mood of the music to suit a battle in just one click?
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| PocketBard application, image from pocketbard.app |
That’s exactly what PocketBard does. You download the setting you are into: a cryptic dungeon, a tavern, a forest, a town, etc, and you always get suitable exploration music and a battle track. You even have a “win” sound and some sound-design to go further into the sonic exploration of your space!
Each song’s intensity can be adjusted with a simple bar, modifying how epic or dark it can get. I also love that you can put ambient sounds on top of it (rains, wind, etc)
And this is what the free model is giving you and you can extend that with monthly or annual subscriptions.
I always use it now in my games when I want to make them immersive (except when we are going with folk-horror stuff, or space horror things)
The app is available in the App Store and Google Play.
🧙🏼♂️What I’m Up To
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| French book: The Beast Of Gévaudan by François Fabre |
This week, I continue my work on the Gévaudan setting. I’m very slow at it as I struggle to concentrate on stuff these days, because of too many personal things to do. But, I got some good news for myself: I finally found a book I lost that is about this whole case, La Bête Du Gévaudan by François Fabre. I will surely dive out some excellent stuff for my setting in it! 😀
I’ve almost finished a big personal project (a gift) and I’ll offer it tomorrow! This took my brothers and me a while. That’s why I put my YouTube channel project on pause because both were too time and mind consuming.
Otherwise, I started to read Conan by Robert E. Howard. I never read anything about Conan despite seeing the movie (which I’m a huge fan of, I even got the Thulsa Doom logo as a back Tattoo! 🐍🔴🐍).
I’m only some pages into the story, but I love how it uses a lot of mythical places like Hyperborea, Asgard etc.
Yes, playing Barbarian Prince made me start reading it 😛
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| Sandbox Generator by Atelier Clandestin |
This week, I received this amazing book by Atelier Clandestin: Sandbox Generator. It’s a very well thought generator for anything you can think of: hex map, towns, cities, NPCs, houses, dungeons, mega-dungeons, Blazons, taverns, you name it. I’ve barely read it since I’m more than busy this week but this is going to be quite something for solo play and for creating stuff!
And speaking of being busy, I’ll be on holiday for two weeks starting this evening and I don’t know how I will handle the newsletter during this time, so I’ll keep you in touch!
That’s it for this week!
Let me know if you enjoyed this article, if you played/read/watch any of the stuff I mentioned this week 😀
See you next Friday!
Cheers !
Sleepdrifter
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