Solo toolkit Actual Play #1

This Article was originally written on Substack: you can read it here

Hi all! This is my very first longpost on Substack and actually my very first solo Actual Play! 

I play solo for some times now and I wanted to try things with simple mechanics and small format, like pocketmods and business cards. 

Recently I stumbled upon Silver Nightingale's stuff who creates some amazing solo tools, perfect for such a project. 

Solo RPG Toolkit image from Silver Nightingale's itch.io

What are I going to use in this AP? 

• Nate Treme's Wander for the character creation, tests and combat rules

• Silver Nightingale's Solo Toolkit, for all the delving, hexcrawling, settlement generation, oracles etc etc

• Silver Nightingale's Blank Hex Map, to draw the map

• Silver Nightingale's Quest Generator, for… well… quest generation! 

Character Creation

Wander by Nate Treme. Photo from his itch.io

To create my character, I'm going to use this little yet beautiful business card by Nate Treme called Wander.
Here is my character :

Wander: Alkar  
STR: 11
DEF: 12
WIS: 8
Defense: 1
XP: 20
Background: Farmer | traits: pegleg
Spell: Vanish: Target becomes invisible for 2d4 minutes. 
Inventory: Tent

Day #1

I choose to start on the center of the map, in a village, then roll to see the terrain type on the Solo Toolkit’s Hex rules.
Start on G10. At a Settlement on a swamp.

Swamptown Village (yeah, very creative).
Main industry: Craftsmanship. Culture: Honor-bound. Look: Ancient. Sounds: Hammering. Mood: worried.

It’s my native village, where I’m a farmer. I lost my leg here some years ago, with a bad sickle hit while working on a crop field.

The starting village, on the Blank Hex Page by Silver Nightingale

Quest generated with One Page Quest Generator

A worried chieftain arrives at my farm on a horse. 

He came right inside my house with a small chest under a veil. Put it on the table and said:

“Quick peasant, hide this chest and myself where you can! I’m followed by some thief who wants to rob me of this trunk! Said that the horse is yours!”

I took the chest and put it under the coil, in my fireplace. I’ll hide the chieftain under my bed.

---

Quickly after, 2 thieves arrive at my door. They seem very, very dangerous and I have no weapon.

“Peasant! You must have seen a chieftain on a horse passing by, right ? There’s no way you missed him.”

“I must say I’ve seen someone on a horse. He passed by my farm like fifteen minutes ago, to the east.” I’ve said.

Roll a 4 to the question “Do they trust me ?” : “Yes, but”.
Roll a 2 on “Change the scene” and get an environmental change.

“Ah! I se. Thanks for your cooperation.”

Outside, the rain starts pouring like buckets of water thrown by the window.
“Well, peasant. We’ll stay here for a while. The weather is not glade on us, and the chieftain’s traces will be erased from the mud…”
I’m starting to stress.
“Why don’t you make us a fire, to warm us a little ?”
Oups, a fire… There’s the trunk hidden in the fireplace.

“Oh yes, I would kindly do that, but my fireplace is stuck because of some nest a bird just made inside of it, 2 days ago.”

Roll a 4 to the question “Do they trust me ?” : “Yes, but”. 
Roll a 3 on “Change the scene” and get: NPC Act suddenly.

The chieftain, hidden under my bed, crawled behind one of the thieves and put his blade on his throat!
“So, thief! Seems you’ll die if your pal doesn’t drop his weapon now!”
“Haha! If you think I care about this guy!” The other thief draws his sword and jumps on the table to start fighting the chieftain.
The chieftain cuts the throat of his hostage and joins the fight.

I step back, looking at the thief’s knife.

Roll a 5 to the question “Do I have the time to take the thief’s knife ?” : “Yes!”.

I jump, take the dead thief’s sword (a 2d4 weapon) and start to fight the other thief.

Rule from Wander + Enemy AI on Solo Toolkit + Mörk Borg Initiative: 1-3: Enemy start | 4-6: PC starts

Combat:
Chieftain, [HARD] Stats=14, Defense=5, Damage=3d4. Basic move & Attack.
Thief, [HARD] Stats=14, Defense=5, Damage=3d4, XP=15. Basic move & Attack.
Initiative : 6. We start!

Chieftain d20 result : 20. As it needed to be under his stats, he failed.
My roll against STR : 4. I strike ! Damage : roll 2d4 = 6
Thief defense is 5, so 5-6 = -1. He is dead. I gain 15xp
Yes, with Wander’s stats and combat’s system, things are quick and really deadly.

The chieftain is glad that the thieves are dead and his chest was kept.

Roll a 6 on the Motivation inside of Quest Generator: “Uncovering Truth”

“Now I have to find who is trying to steal me!”

“But, chief, what do you carry in this chest?”

Roll a 4 to the question “Will the chieftain tell me what’s inside ?” : “Yes!”.
Roll a 5 on “Change the scene” and get: Advance a plot.
Roll a 3/3 in Action/Themes Table: “Rally”

“I’ll tell you, only if you follow me and help me!”

“Yes chief, I’ll help you. What is this all about?”

Start a kind of new quest with One Page Quest Generator to put the story further. Got: Assist ritual. Location: Hidden Sanctuary.

“I know this burglar came from a bigger group, where they do ritual stuff. We need to infiltrate them and understand what it is all about. They are hiding in a sanctuary. That’s what we should look for!”

“We’ll look around the village for clues. But, again, what’s inside the chest?”

Roll a 9 on OSR Treasure Table: A magic item.

The chieftain opened the chest, revealing a nice looking cup made with horn.

“It’s a magic cup that we pass from generation to generation in my family. I don’t know what real magic it contains, but this weird cult really wants to take it from me. Let’s stay here for the night and wait for the rain to pass”

#Day 2

Roll 6 on Weather (land) table

Clear Skies

I take some rations before we leave for the village, and I already got a tent to camp in the wild if the sanctuary is far away.

Roll 1d4: result 1. So 1 ration in the inventory

We leave my farm for the village.

Roll at advantage on the Clue table, in the Solo Mystery Clues System: 1 and 4. So no clue at all

We talk to people, go to the tavern, go everywhere in this little village to find absolutely nothing about the thieves’ cult.

“I guess we have to go to some bigger cities, where rumors are easy to find.”

Roll a 3 to the question “Do the chieftain know where another city is ?”: “No, but…”.
Roll a 5 to the question “Does he know what direction to take ?”: “Yes!”.
Roll a direction, as we are on an Hexagonal grid : 2. So North-East it is.

“I only know that there’s a city to the North-East of here. We’ll better hurry”

We leave the village.

I use mouvement point(MP) according to the Solo Toolkit’s Hex rules.
As the chieftain got a horse. I assume we’re two on it. My pegleg makes me thinner than some humans.
A horse gives +2 MP, but, as we are two on it, I’ll take only 1 MP.
We gain 4 MP a day + 1 for the horse = 5 MP.

We want to cross G10, when we are on a swamp so -2 MP = 3.
-1 MP to forage, where I roll 5 : +1 ration. 2 MP left
We are at the end of Day 2, so we need to rest. -1 Ration.

As we move to H9, we look at what's there.
D12: 1 on terrain generator “Same as last hex” so a swamp.
Roll “Fungal growth” on Features for swamp.
A swamp is a dangerous place so we roll 1d6+1 on Hazards for the end of the day.
Result: 3+1 = 4 “Lose 1d4 Ration”. I only got one so I lost it.

We travel with no problem across the swamp, foraging on the road. We rested and slept, but unfortunately, an animal must have taken one of our rations. Across us, there's a lot of fungal growth.

We land on H9, on a swamp again

So, here it is for this first AP. 

We'll definitely see where it's going, but I love all the creativity I can get with so few elements. 

A huge congrats to Silver Nightingale and Nate Treme for doing such amazing works in the TTRPG community!

See you! 
Sleepdrifter 
Thanks for reading!

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