Solo Toolkit Actual Play #2

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

This is the second chapter of an actual play with Nate Treme's Wander and tools by Silver Nightingale.

You can find the start of this here.

Day #3

Roll 6 on Weather (land) table

The clear sky is still with us. We will continue north-east today.

4 MP at the start of the day, +1 for the horse = 5 MP.
We want to cross the swamp on H9 so - 2 MP = 3.
We arrive on I8.
D12: 10 on Terrain Generator “Swamp”.
Roll “Thorny Thicket” on features for swamps.

We decide to go further North-East so : -2 MP = 1
We arrive on J6.
D12: 11 on Terrain Generator “Mountain”.
Roll “Thundering Waterfall” on features for mountains.

As we’ve spend half of our MP, we roll for Event: 3 “Nothing”
-1 MP For foraging : I roll a 5 : + 1 ration.
A mountain is a dangerous place so we roll 1d6+1 on Hazards for the end of the day.
Result: 6+1 = 7 “Hostile Encounter”

After a long traveling distance, we arrived on a mountain, near a thundering waterfall.

This place is beautiful.

We decided to camp here for the night.

A big swamp, then mountains

Monster Maker Generator:

Color: Deep Green, Shape: Amorphous, form: Beastial, Sounds: Whispers
Traits: Regenerating, Abilities: Poison spit, Weakness: Diseased, Behavior: opportunistic
Strategy: Basic move & attack
MEDIUM, Stats=11, Defense=3, Damage=2d4, XP=10

We heard some weird whispers echoing through the mountain wall.
Then we saw it: a weird green amorphous creature that seems very hostile to us.
We immediately draw our swords, and get ready to fight the creature.

Combat rule from Wander + Enemy AI on Solo Toolkit + Mörk Borg Initiative: 1-3: Enemy start | 4-6: PC starts
Initiative: 3, so the monster starts

The beast starts crawling to us, spitting some weird goo.

Roll 3 on Set Target: “Random”
Roll a 3 on a d4 with 1-2 : Chieftain | 3-4: Me
The beast rolls a 4 against its Stat: 11, so it succeeds at spitting on me.
Roll 2d4 for damage: 4+4 = 8
I only got 1 defense, so it kills me!

It spit right into me, the thing burns me and burns me again.
I fall on the floor screaming to death, my flesh starting to melt. 

Chief is looking at me in horror, fleeing for his life.

Here ends this short game (only 3 days).

Analysis of the game

I really, really, liked all the generators from Silver Nightingale. They are simple to use, yet very effective.
As a solo player, I tend to struggle a lot with “what to do?”, “What happened now?”.
But the Quest Generator coupled with some Solo Toolkit’s Generator (Change The Scene, Event Seeds, Solo Mystery Clues etc.) makes the difference for me and makes everything very smooth.
The Hexcrawl generation is very efficient, so is the monster generation.

As you can see, I haven’t got the occasion to try the Delve generation mechanism, but I’m sure it’s cool too!
The only “problem” for me came from the lil’ system Wander: it’s super cool, gives simple things, yet enough to play a full game.
But it is super deadly, as you can see in this actual play.

The other thing missing with it, to be the most effective way to play with the Solo Toolkit, is to have combat and stats more close to standard OSR, so you can generate or choose monsters that are easy or not to defeat, while simply using the Monster Generator.
Rules like Rogueland, OSE, even Mörk Borg, can rapidly do the trick I guess.
It’s only a matter of taste here though. Wander is really cool and inspiring.

And let’s speak about what’s make Wander so cool:

It’s really fast to create a character, the experience system is a clever idea that can give a nice touch to your game.
As I’m not very fond of magic in TTRPG (don’t know why tbh), the magic system here is very simple and effective. (And I totally forget that I got a power to make me invisible in this AP!)
The background and traits creation is super simple but I find it very cool with some great combinations.

What came after ?

I’m currently trying to make something similar to Wander in terms of format (so: a business card, because I really love this format), while trying to modify the rule to have something easier to play with all these generators, and easier to play with my way of playing.
It’s also a cool exercise to be creative!
I’ll speak about it later, if I manage to finish the thing.

Thanks a lot for reading this AP, and I’ll be making some more soon!

Cheers,

Sleepdrifter