My Future TTRPGs & Art Plan, How To Improve Your Solo TTRPG Session, A Jam Devlog And A Vermis II Class
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Sleepdrifter's Newsletter #12 📜
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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
🎲My Future TTRPGs & Art Plan
🧩How To Improve Your Solo TTRPG Session
🧙🏼♂️What I’m Up To: Breathless Jam 2 & Kal-Arath With A Plastiboo’s Vermis II Class
🎲My Future TTRPGs & Art Plan
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| A drawing I’ve made for my game Lost In A Forest |
I may not seem very prolific these days as I haven’t released anything in TTRPG since January (my 36 words RPG: Lost In A Forest), and I’m not speaking a lot about play sessions in recent newsletters.
That’s probably because I do too many things at once in my spare time (playing video games, coding stuff, making music and digital collage, having a house/garden/dog to manage, newly having a van 😀…) but I’m always thinking about TTRPG nonetheless.
That’s why I write all the things I have in my mind for future materials.
Here are some things I've been thinking about lately.
As I’m struggling with Point Of Interests, loot and NPC in my solo session, I want to make a deck of cards for each type of thing, with everything needed for solo playing.
For example, you get a deck of POIs with biomes on one side that show you if you can use it in the biome you are (desert, mountain, plain, etc) and on the other side: an illustration or a map, with encounters table, features table, what you see/feel/smell/hear, etc. Same idea for the loot and NPC. I got some other stuff to bring this whole idea a lil’ more but I think it would be a great thing to get.
Note that something similar exists for POI on SoloRPG’s Patreon, called Deck Of Point Crawl Location.
Then, I had this fun project in mind, to make an OSR adventure where your player will have a blank Character Sheet with nothing on it. In fact, they start completely naked and suffering from amnesia. They don’t know what stats they got, what their name is and what they can do. But you, as a GM, know everything.
And that’s the whole point of this adventure: finding who they are.
I think of specific events and stuff to make them test each of their stats, to see if they fail or succeed, etc.
Otherwise, I really want to make more art things, inspiring stuff that goes a little further from their original media. This is something that drives me for years now, but it feels more “easy” to do now as I know more things like digital collage, video editing, sound design, coding etc.
And now, I have a sort of cross-media idea, something about “Crafting A God” involving cool physical stuff to make, weird rituals and grim imagery. Probably in a pamphlet or zine format along with a video. It’s still a vague idea, since I came up with it only two days ago, but it sparks my imagination.
Note that you can find all of my games here, and all of my music on Youtube and Soundcloud (yeah I really should put everything on Spotify one day).
But don’t worry, my plan to make an article about Gary Gygax’s Solo Dungeon Crawler and my Gévaudan Setting are still on track, but I used all of my TTRPG spare time to create my Breathless adventure (as mentioned here).
🧩How To Improve Your Solo TTRPG Session
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| My solo session of Barbarian Prince / Rogueland |
As I wrote in the previous section, I struggle with Point Of Interest, loot and NPC in my solo session.
But before I get any idea to resolve those problems, I made something I find helpful to help myself go further.
I’ve asked myself this very simple question:
What are my struggles when solo playing?
Then, I write everything that came to my mind:
NPC interactions
Looting random objects on bodies/ruins/houses etc. Not treasures, but real random daily objects.
Being into towns, villages, cities, …
Being creative in random POI
Once I state those facts, I take each one and think about why it’s a problem when I encounter them.
As an example, when I play and the dice makes me randomly encounter a friendly NPC, I really don’t know what to do with him/her.
It’s simple when you encounter someone and the GM starts a conversation, with all of his/her ideas in mind, but when you are the player AND the GM, this is something very different.
Quite often, I ask for directions like “Where is this place?” or “Where is this person?” but that seems kind of blank to do that with each one of them.
So, instead of trying to make NPCs be like real characters, I decided to use them as tools in my session.
When I stumble upon one, I roll to check if they are here to:
Giving me a rumor
Giving me a quest, or helping me with my ongoing one
Selling me a special merchandise
Being an obstacle in the current quest, like he knows something, but asks for something else in return
Of course, this table can be modified, extended, you name it.
All of that stuff will also help me create my NPC deck of cards.
Now, for the “looting random objects” thing, I haven’t found any great tables or things for a while (except for the Mörk Borg’s “Corpse Plundering” table, but that doesn’t suit every mood). That’s why I decided to create my own loot system, with the deck cards I mentioned in the previous section of this newsletter.
More than that, all of the POIs and NPCs I will create for those decks will get their own possession/objects, to help the process.
In the same way, being in town and being creative into POI will greatly be helped with these POI Deck.
But here is the thing I write to help me improve my play session nonetheless.
When you arrive in a town, you can make this place a little more incertain, or even dangerous. You can roll for random words like “Hunger”, “Anger”, “Isolation” etc to help you spark a weird vibe, and decide that, if you roll a 1 on a dice, the situation goes badly in that sense. Like, if the city is screaming for food, your bad luck makes you fight against people wanting your corpse to eat it. This isn’t mandatory in every city or town, of course, but that can make a great tension in those places.
With the same idea, rumors or events can spark things up in town like “There was a huge theft in town”, “The city is on fire”, “The city is at war” etc
Otherwise, set yourself a precise objective before entering the town. “I’m here because I want to know where this dungeon/person is”, “I’m here because I seek these relics” or simply “I’m here because I want to rest myself”.
Finally, POIs work in quite the same way as towns.
You can ask yourself: “Who is in this place?”, “Why is this place dangerous?”, “What do I feel, smell, hear?” and make tables for those questions.
Substack is full of great articles about how to improve your solo playing:
And there’s an amazing video by Chaoclypse about improving solo play.
🧙🏼♂️What I’m Up To: Breathless Jam 2 & Kal-Arath With A Plastiboo’s Vermis II Class
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| My Work In Progress Cover for Breakless, a Breathless Adventure |
As you may have read in all my previous newsletter, I'm working on an adventure for the Breathless Jam 2 where you have to escape a prison during a zombie outbreak. This is going very well, and I’ve almost finished writing all the keys for the prison map.
I’m also working on the art, but I struggle to properly export my artwork from Affinity Photo 2 with all the grain/noise I added on the image.
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| Kal-Arath Cover by Castle Grief |
Otherwise, I really want to make a solo campaign session of Kal-Arath, now that I’ve got the four zines from Castle Grief. I also need to take the 2 zines from SilverNightingale called Vision Of Kal-Arath.
Reading Plastiboo’s Vermis II (I speak about it here) doesn’t help, since it also takes place in a strange desert.
It even has a super cool class that can be used in the Kal-Arath world, called The Bone Hunter.
The following text is an extract from Vermis II by Plastiboo . Copyright: Michel Nitri from Hollow Press.
The Bone Hunters are infamous for beheading their victims and offering their skulls to Ghylak.
Decapitation is a common practice among the followers of the god. The most devout going as far as to offer their own heads to the cause.
The Bone Hunters tend to be solitary and ruthless people, feared by the travelers and merchants that trek throughout the endless deserts of Agerutt.
EQUIPMENT of a BONE HUNTER: Sword & Dagger / Black Iron ArmorGhylak Fetish: A small idol made of wood or, occasionally, ivory: a carving of a coiled snake with the head of a woman.Exploration Gear: Various materials, containers, and tools commonly used during the exploration of ruins and temples.Crooked Fang: A fang from an emissary snake. Its venom enhanced its user’s strength and reflexes for a short period of time before rendering them unconscious.
Note that Black Iron Armors are made of… Black Iron.
The Cold Metal
In order to endure the scorching temperatures of Agerutt, the desert dwellers don armors, helmets, masks and ornaments made of black iron, a strange mineral that is always cold to the touch.
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| Zelda 1 Main Title image by Nintendo |
This past week, I’ve played a whole lot of video games (as usual, without finishing any…):
Zelda 1 on NES. I own the original cartridge and a NES, but I’ve played it on my phone using the Lemuroid emulator. God bless the save state system, this game is harsh! I love the mood of the whole game though.
Zelda Tears Of The Kingdom on Switch. Very fun and with an amazing sandbox game design. As usual with modern Zelda games, exploration is amazing here.
Moonring on PC. A free Ultima like on Steam, that also takes a lot from traditional Roguelike. I’m only at the beginning of the game, but it’s already very cool.
Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster on Switch. I finished the DS version years ago, and it was fun, now I play it the more “original” way with a lot of QOL improvement though. Very cool version.
Chrono Trigger on SNES. Like Zelda 1, I play it on a Lemuroid emulator, even if I don’t own the original copy of it. The game has gorgeous pixel art for its time and fun combat.
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 !
SleepdrifterThanks for reading!
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