Solo Roleplaying Session 0 Part 1: Intro to the system.

Transcript

Today we’re going to talk about something that I love. I love everything about it really—Crown and Skull. I think really it’ll probably end up just being a big ad for all things Runehammer. Brandish Gilhelm, a man of many names. He’s just awesome. Awesome dude. He makes passion projects. You can tell that he puts a lot of love and care into them.

I have a lot of his projects in front of me right now. So, the backdrop, the map of the North Holds, which is the setting of Crown and Skull. I have two of his recent dice kits here. So, the Trollmers—pretty standard D&D set. Then, recently he came out with these, which are a little slightly different color than the original ones I got. I don’t know if that’s by design or just different batches or different colors. These things are very high quality, very thick boys. Then these are just binary dice with skulls on them. Directional dice. Yes. No. These are D4s and prism shapes. And then these are specifically for Crown and Skull. There’s a defend attack and an AoE attack. And that’s what the encounters are.

All the rolls in Crown and Skull are player-facing. So although the game wasn’t designed to be a solo played game, I think with just a small amount of work, it’s going to be very well suited for it. And I’ve DMed for two different groups now for Crown and Skull. So I’m very excited just to kind of go my own path and do my own thing.

One thing that’s kind of weird about me is I only use the Platonic solids. So, I don’t use these guys, like the D10s. And I don’t use the D4. So, to make up for that, there’s a D8. I roll that instead. So, that’s a two. That’s four. Let’s see if we can get something that’s not an eight. So that would just be—you divide that by two and now that’s a four. And then for the percentiles, kind of the same thing with the D20. So if I need to roll a percentile, I roll a D20. So that’s just a three. That’s my tens spot. Second time I roll it, I just take the one off. So that’s a seven. So 37. It works the same way.

I know that’s a little bit extra work, a little bit extra math when I could just roll these. But to me, just having that little bit more of that esoteric cool aspect to it is just more fun and more enjoyable for me. So I don’t even really use these. I just use the Platonic solids.

And also there’s the full pack of D6s in the Trollmers which I use for other games. So I have them in other places. But just again, these boys thunk—hopefully that comes through on the microphone. And like this right here, here’s a comparison. There’s a standard just like cheesy Chessex D6. Huge difference. Here’s a normal D20. There’s the Runehammer D20. Very awesome.

So, I don’t know. I’m going to be all over the place because I’m just excited about this kind of thing. I like people who make good products because they want to make good products. Not because—look at this book. This is leather bound, gold foil. All of the pages, and I’ve flipped through this thing hundreds of times and it still looks great. They are thick, fibrous, like they feel good to touch. This is an artifact. Volume two is the same way.

The map—I have mine framed and the cover on top of it—but even the map is very thick, very high quality. It’s just great.

So, all right, let me stop just gushing over Runehammer. It’s all so good. This, you’re probably wondering about this mouse pad. All of the monsters in Crown and Skull are meant to be put on an index card. And Runehammer also makes Index Card RPG, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard of.

So, for example, this monster, a Needler, his HP is 10. I should add, I do use these for record keeping. I shouldn’t have thrown them over on my desk, but I just don’t roll them and I don’t use them to actually play the game, but I really use them for record keeping. I know it’s a little bit silly. But I just think they tapped into something magical when they were using the Platonic solids, and in the original D&D, they weren’t using like D4s—D4s didn’t exist, D10s didn’t exist. They were using what they had. So, that’s also just something to think about.

So, six attack. Again, I’m looking out—he goes in phase one and he has two tactics. So to represent that, I put two dice here, and normally what the tactics actually do specifically I could write on the card, or if I wasn’t going through the book I could have a whole bunch of index cards prepared and just set here. And I have multiple mouse pads too.

With these dice—really, because you can get tactic one, tactic two through five, tactic six—this just makes it so I don’t have to think about it. So that’s just a normal attack. Needle Blow: a tiny barbed arrow that pierces armor, destroy attrition unless no equipment left, then flesh attrition. And the attrition is just how Crown and Skull actually works, which I’ll probably get into in a different video.

But he gets two tactics. So I get this other dice and that is also just an attack again. But see, if I were to get this symbol, that’s the AoE attack. Blinding Shot: Needler fires a flare-tipped arrow. All foes will resist to look away in time or be blinded for the remainder of the round.

So just this very cool, very simple recordkeeping, player-facing rolls, very straightforward with this AI. I don’t have to try to worry about gaming the system, right? Like Slime Beast. If I roll a one, he slurps and sucks along, moving toward light movement or an open space. Two through five, he jumps forward but gains a small amount of mass—this action heals essentially. Then six, he elongates by one foot for every three HP. Creatures touched are sucked into the sticky gelatinous material.

So there’s built-in strategy and tactics in all the monsters and all the encounters. So I don’t have to worry about what they’re supposed to do. I just spawn them in, go from there. My characters can react however they want. And the way that I can—like these are kind of like yes/no dice. Obviously I have a yes/no but I can use them for keeping track of things. So maybe the party is here as they’re moving across the hexes and the cities.

One thing that’s also very cool about Crown and Skull that I think will lend itself well to solo play is I don’t have to do any prep because each hex—so Old Watch, let me find one that’s actually in frame. So Garden Burrow—if you’re actually—here’s a better one. So Grayfoot Forest, which is right here at the top of the screen. What you do—and again this uses the D10—so say the party sets out of Thrin and they go into this hex. When they go into this hex, I roll a D10. So that for me, that would be a five, which is “Crumbled Ruins: curved pillars and cobble stairs of an elven temple.”

And then that’s our location. So now I know that I can take a note of that—that hex is an elven ruin. And then I roll a D10 again. And this will give me an event. So 18 for me. That’s an eight. “Sunlight Lance: you find an heirloom lance perched on a ritual stone.”

So I have the scene I’m in, an event that’s going on. And then I can kind of roleplay that myself from there about what’s actually going on in here. And sometimes those events will be monster encounters. Sometimes they’ll be NPC encounters. And it’s just—there’s a lot of lore throughout the world that’s already there for me that I can run with, but there’s also—it’s vague enough that I can kind of do my own thing. Because really my goal when solo roleplaying is to just kind of tell a story, right? Like write a novel just with extra steps.

Okay, so I think the next step is going to be to generate a party. So I mentioned how excited I was about that Warmachine set, not just from a Warmachine perspective, but just because of how evocative and fun the sculpts are.

So there is a free character builder PDF, which is the first half of this book—the character creation. Not first half, like the first section where it runs you through the ways of building your own character. And there’s also an official online character builder.

What really pulled me into Crown and Skull—and what has really—like there was a lot of back and forth in my head about what system to use because my plan is, my solo play, to build a world where I’ll eventually do a real campaign with real players again when things are—like when the timing is better—and not another system like OSE. I’m going to do an OSE one too. A Dolmenwood one is coming when I finally get my Dolmenwood. I will also be doing a Dolmenwood campaign. So stay tuned for that. That’s going to be a lot of fun.

But what pulled me in was the adaptability. I can pretty much make any character I want to make. I can do any kind of magic I want to do with this in the rule system—not flubbing it—in a working like—obviously it’s not a war game, so it doesn’t have to be balanced, but I can make it within the confines of the system that make the game so fun to play, right? Which was important to me because I want to be able to throw a ton of stuff at it.

So, I’m going to play through book one. We’ll see how far we get. Then, like Crown and Skull 2 introduces new material, but it’s also a continuation of the story told in book one. So, you’re playing—it’s a living world, right? Like the events of what happened with Runehammer’s actual group form the next book of Crown and Skull and the next events in the series. So, it’s a living world, which I think is cool, and you’re just kind of existing inside of it, which is something I’d like to make myself one day. So, that’s another reason I want to play through and just kind of see like what’s going on.

So, on to finally making our party.