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What ho, Blog Demons?

Spencer 2020-08-24 6064 Comments Off on What ho, Blog Demons?
Incessant Rambling

How to break the ice after nearly a year and half? It’s been about that long since my last post. Sure, I’ve started plenty of posts in that interim period — Black Blade #5 (the conclusion), posts on SHOctober, Solo-a-Module Month, and SGAM, among others — but they were never finished. Will they be? I don’t know! You see, I spend a great deal of time and effort in trying to figure out what to do with my very limited free time — which usually results in a lot of not doing anything, or at best, a doing lot of research…

Tarot for Solo RPG: Conflict

Spencer 2018-09-10 12208 Comments Off on Tarot for Solo RPG: Conflict
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Some time ago, I discovered a free game called Dungeon Solitaire: Tomb of Four Kings. It’s a “dungeon delve” game played with a deck of poker cards, not wholly unlike the Solitaire you’ve probably played before but obviously with a dungeon crawling theme behind it. I enjoy the game and I’m grateful to have it in my head (the basics are quite simple) for those times when I’m bored and a pack of cards is at hand.  To get on with the point, I shortly found out there are expanded rules for the game, called Labyrinth of Souls, which uses Tarot cards in…

Cards and Role-playing Games

Bicycle Black Tiger Playing Cards
Spencer 2018-07-03 15187 Comments Off on Cards and Role-playing Games
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  A few days months ago on the Lone Wolf Roleplaying G+ Community I inquired as to whom might be using cards in their RPG sessions. I’d started out shying away from cards, preferring to soak up the nostalgia of rolling polyhedral dice, but have recently become more intrigued by cards thanks to playing the Dungeon Solitaire games. I started snatching up cards left and right and now have several decks piled about, including the complete GameMaster’s Apprentice decks from the recent Fantasy Deck Kickstarter. Cards in Solo RPG The results were somewhat surprising, to me at least. A good 60%…

Thoughts on Soloing a Published Adventure Module

Spencer 2018-03-09 10177 2 Comments
Resources

My first solo play session was attempted using a published adventure module (the Hero Kids “Basement o’ Rats” introductory adventure). I had fun — I was able to use a simple d6 yes/no mechanic to pose questions and emulate GM responses — but I also had enough foreknowledge (and inexperience) that it was too confining compared to more free-form, generated-on-the-fly sort of play. And that’s the problem, right? Modules are published for GMs, so they’re chock full of great stuff that absolutely spoils things for the players if they come into such knowledge before the proper time. As a solo…

What the Heck is OSR, Anyways?

Spencer 2018-03-04 4497 Comments Off on What the Heck is OSR, Anyways?
Featured

I’ve posted about my role-playing roots here before, but to give a quick recap: I’m basically a n00b. I actually got started out reading DragonLance novels, which naturally lead into D&D miscellany, but other than a few feeble attempts to play at a relatively young age and a few more feeble attempts at NWoD as an adult (interspersed with some Shadowrun in the intervening years), much of it is new to me — even the old stuff. My D&D-specific gaming experiences lie almost solely in the 1994 boxed set of The Classic Dungeons & Dragons Game, though I recall reading through…

Hero Kids Compatible Encounter Generator 0.1.19 Released

Spencer 2018-02-23 3914 Comments Off on Hero Kids Compatible Encounter Generator 0.1.19 Released
Family Gaming

I’m not sure if anyone actually uses it, but I’ve updated the Hero Kids Compatible Encounter Generator web app (henceforth known as HKGen because that’s too much to type out every time…). It’s set up as an offline, responsive javascript web app using an appcache manifest. You don’t necessarily need to know that, but you should see a popup asking if it should reload any time you visit the page after the code gets updated. I actually had issue with this on my Android phone and had to go in and clear the cached data in the mobile Chrome browser…

Four Against Darkness Compatible Game Board

Spencer 2017-11-23 44448 Comments Off on Four Against Darkness Compatible Game Board
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Lately I’ve been playing a nifty little dungeon-crawling game called Four Against Darkness. Some might call it a board game instead of an RPG, but whatever it is, it’s a solo game designed for one player to delve into a randomly-generated, old-school style dungeon — using only a pencil, paper, and a few d6 dice. I’ve been enjoying it, but I won’t get into the details here (stay tuned for an actual play / review post). Instead, I just wanted to share the 4AD Game Board I’ve created for use with Four Against Darkness — in both 20×28 and 30×42 sized grid-flavors!…

Rolling Solo – Appendix A: What Now?

Appendix A: What Now?
Spencer 2017-11-23 12519 2 Comments
Resources

So you read through the Rolling Solo series and learned how to engage in solitaire role-playing — great job! I hope you enjoyed it. But, if you were left asking yourself questions like “That’s it???” or “Now what???” or “Help!!!!?“, I don’t want you to think I’ve left you hanging. Wisps of Time got your back. But, what should I do now?? If I haven’t said it enough already: whatever you want! It’s up to you! But, if you’re like me and often want or need a little more direction when faced with such an open-ended response, I  have some suggestions for you. First,…

How I Format Actual Plays (and How You Can, Too)

Spencer 2017-10-10 3957 Comments Off on How I Format Actual Plays (and How You Can, Too)
Community

Not much to see here, I just wanted to point you to my latest community contribution: ap_shortcodes.js. It is a drop-in JavaScript solution for easily formatting your actual play reports with custom BBCode/WordPress-style “shortcodes”, such as [story] to wrap your narrative elements, that get replaced out with HTML+CSS to consistently style them across your site. Check it out at the link, and also check out the GitHub project, where you can contribute code or to the Wiki (or, dare I say, report bugs). I don’t actually use it to format my posts here, but I do basically the same thing with…

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