u/DinoHorrendous

In my last post about the general mechanics of the Adventure Series, I thought I’d mention those poor unfortunates who sometimes turn up in a scenario.

I guess originally it was as simple as me thinking, “Where the heck is everyone else?” It just seems much too convenient that our heroes run into a bunch of bad guys with not another soul in sight. So I wanted there to be some poor sods who get caught in the crossfire and the Bystanders idea was born.

Of course once they existed they started to demand more interesting things to do than throw themselves to the ground (originally that was a 2 or a 3 and there were civilians flipping up and down all over the table!) so every now and then they get an actual role in the scenario.

However, when I was writing Wardens I started to think more about the idea that the team can always see the Bystanders but not the Adversaries, especially when the Adversaries will look like the Bystanders, and the new mechanic of placing more Markers and then having some become the Bystanders appeared. Of course there was a reason in Wardens as you have to try and convince the Bystanders not to panic, as that helps break the timeline, but actually it makes some sense in other situations too, as you’ll be seeing in new Arcs across the series.

More recently still, when writing the new Superhero game I wanted the big new idea to be that they need to protect the Bystanders, and not just in a general sense but in terms of some specific actions. I’m sure this will trigger yet more ideas as we go, so if you think that currently the Bystanders are a bit “meh” well stay tuned, it’s all going to make sense!

From the start I wanted to keep the actual battles quite tight and fast, so six figures for the team seemed like a good number, with up to twice that for the adversaries.

However, I also wanted to add an element of thinking about tactical options, having random things that might mean a character is not available, and with injuries I wanted to still give you a good chance of having six that are actually available. Hence the roster of 10.

In the current games there is always a leader, who you get to keep throughout, but the others can die or be laid up for 5 games and that needs some flexibility. There are usually a few “better” characters to give you some options from the start, and often at least one rookie, you can watch to see how they grow, if they survive.

Of course along the way I have found myself messing with some of these standards a bit, there are scenarios now where the team is split in half so only 5 on the table even if everyone is available, there are even some where everyone who is available can fight, not to mention a few now where you start with just 1!

Also I’m finding that I like messing with who is available, whether you can replace characters that die, whether you can dig yourself out of a hole by using the other members, and even what happens if one of the roster is a traitor.

As I’ve been playing these campaigns myself, I’m finding the different teams starting to take on an identity of their own so I want to play with this some more going forwards, like not having a leader, the characters having interpersonal issues, things happening to team members outside of the actual battles, and you’ll see this in the new Editions.

Any thoughts?

As promised then, here are the new Arcs coming next week. I should say that with all of these there’s a good chance that if you start to fail any games it will turn into a downwards spiral as the following games are made yet more difficult. That said I imagine there will be some satisfaction gained if you get into a spiral and fight your way out of it again.

The Guild of Adventurers

Story Arc 10 - Horrors walk these lands

“Bold hero, we were very impressed with your last endeavour, so we think this next quest is perfect for you. You need to report to the Holy Father at the cloister on the large island to the west. He apparently has need of a hero, but hasn’t told us why, so be careful.”

This has been re-written to all be on the island against the undead, but now includes Vampire Thralls. You still need to rescue the child and find the silver so the blacksmith will make you weapons but it’s a bit more involved now.

Story Arc 11 - Caravan

“I wonder, most impressive hero, if I might tempt you and your Party to take on something for the Guild itself? We are building a new Guild House on the southern coast, in a small isolated fishing town, but the seas around it are proving too dangerous to get supplies in by boat. So we need to rush a caravan of staff and supplies down there and we feel they may need some protection.”

This one needs you to track the passage time as the adversaries get tougher the longer it goes on. Unfortunately there are delays and random incidents and of course the result of each battle plays a part. I’m leaving this one wide open, the Adversaries can be any race you want, and even differ from Incident to Incident. This is also a perfect excuse to go for an Arabian Nights type feel and swap the locales to a desert theme like rolling sand dunes, an isolated oasis, a ruined city in the sand, etc.

Story Arc 12 - The Saviour

“I won’t try to sugar coat this one, but I think you can handle it. Indeed I hope you can because time is of the essence and everyone else has turned it down!  You of all people know that some individuals have a special calling, a fate that has been clear since their birth. We have a young girl that is apparently a mystical seer, and who has foreseen an urgent need to be at a druidic circle many leagues to the east, by Alban Elfed, the autumn equinox. She says the fate of our world hangs in the balance, and who am I to argue?”

Also open in terms of adversaries this starts differently with your companions turning up as you go, then the battles get tougher while you try to keep the girl alive and have to weigh up going to a settlement against adding extra adversaries to incidents.

We Need Your Best Squad

Story Arc 10 - Behind their lines

“I’m sorry to have to ask this of you Commander, but I have a vital mission for you. This will need a small Squad to go deep behind enemy lines, and we won’t be able to support them if they get into trouble out there. It might be a suicidal mission, but it must succeed, so I’m afraid I’ll need your best squad.”

Again, this has been re-written but still has the basic premise that the squad goes to do a job and then has to fight hard to get back while trying not to alert the enemy and make things even harder.

Story Arc 11 - Hybrids

“I can’t believe anyone could be stupid enough to think that mixing human and alien DNA was a good idea, but clearly someone has been experimenting. The reports are confusing, some say they have incredible strength and stamina, others talk about heightened senses, and a few reports even hint at psychic powers! I don’t know what to believe and I need you to send your best squad to find out the truth and who is behind it.”

In this new Arc your Squad is a law enforcement special ops unit that finds themselves in deep trouble as they fall foul of a powerful Corporation and become targets for their experimental super-soldiers, not helped by sabotage from a traitor in their own team.

Story Arc 12 - Race against time

“I’m dying, we all are, and we can’t leave Earth for fear of spreading this disease. We’ve traced the source to an ancient ruin in the Abalon sector, patient zero was an archaeologist on the dig site. We believe the answer to this is also going to be found in some ancient site so we have located a team with the knowledge and skills to follow the clues. So I need your best squad to babysit them, they are our only hope!”

All the games in this Arc will include a number of unarmed members of the Archaeology team that are trying to track down the clues that will take you from location to location in the hunt for the cure. Again you’ll need to track time as you are on the clock to find the cure in time.

As I have said, the plan was always that the Adventure series would get upgrades rather than expansions. So when I:embarked on the first set of updates earlier this year, I had three aims.

The first was to fold back in anything I had improved on when writing the new editions. So there’s the new covers, the new formats for the tables, proper titles on the QRS so you can remember which is which if you have more than one, purely cosmetic stuff. Then there’s tweaks to the rules like how to pick up weapons off incapacitated friends or adversaries, becoming disarmed in hand-to-hand, having a roll when throwing grenades, little things that improve what we have rather than changing them. The only big change was to do away with “uncovering story arcs” and moving the completely random scenario picker to an Optional idea.

The second was to introduce some new rules. I’m wary about doing this though, so what you’ll find this time around is some additional ideas in the Optional sections of the rules and in the first four it’s only small stuff, like giving players permission to assign experience instead of randomly deciding who gets it. When I got to Guild and Squad though I was already toying with adding more RPG like elements to the games, so I’m trialling a couple of small things so to see if there’s appetite for more. One is a different look at injuries, that gives a roll for where the injury is and then the concept that if you get injured twice in the same way that creates a lingering term niggling effect (or immediately if the character took a major injury). The other is defining experience in terms of gaining skills instead of just a bland +1 on a stat. I’ll be interested in feedback on these once you see them. If they go down well then the next round of updates can improve on them and roll them into the whole set

The third, and main, plan was to keep adding story arcs. The Arcs are the “big thing” that differentiates the Adventure Series from other solo games as far as I know, so that needs to keep being the hook. A funny thing happened though. As soon as I started on the new ones I realised that the 5 special and 10 random formula was limiting me. The original idea was that writing arcs would be easier if I only needed 5 new scenarios each time, but instead it became more difficult trying to work in the more superficial random scenarios into a complete story. I also had the thought I’ve expressed here already, that players are more likely to run a different arc than to replay one, so the mechanism to make them all easy to replay is probably wasted, especially if I stick to my promise to keep adding new ones.

So all the new Arcs became 15 brand new scenarios, and that created more involved stories, which in turn led me to think of them as “level 2” stories. Which means again that by the time I got to Guild and Squad I was ready to run with that as the concept. So that’s what I’m finishing off right now and will be publishing next week, the updates to Guild and Squad that are specifically adding follow-on arcs for your Party or Squad to keep going instead of starting fresh. In both cases I’ve ended up re-writing the tenth Arc that was already there as well as adding two more. Tomorrow I’ll tell you what these stories are.

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Today’s post takes a look at the fundamental differences between the seven Editions so far.

Call Security! of course was first, so set the core rules, but it is currently unique as it takes place “inside” and has to deal with floor plans, corridors, rooms, and opening doors. That said, I’m carrying some of that across as optional rules to We Need Your Best Squad right now as I think of playing scenarios inside a warehouse, bunker, building complex, etc.

Protect and Survive was then the first game to be played on open terrain and needing to explain things in terms of “table edges”. The original version had optional rules for wandering monsters turning up which I have since gone back and made a core part of the game.

Plunder and Fighting was therefore the first that I felt needed to feel “different” in some other way. That was achieved (I think) through the idea that these are “swashbuckling” pirates! So leaping and swinging into combat, or as I call it “Flamboyant Moves”. I also had to deal with reloading firearms. If you want to add black powder weapons to a different genre, grab the rules from here (or from Wardens).

Join the Posse was next. The unique aspects here are the posse itself (especially if you play the optional rule that it’s a different set of volunteers every game), fighting from horseback, and using a new mechanic called “Quick Draw” when a spotted marker turns into an Adversary.

For The Guild of Adventurers, the big challenge was making it miniature agnostic without watering down all the possible races to be exactly the same, which is how I ended up with 10 Arcs (soon to be 12). The other huge difference of course is Magic, there are 10 (of course) different spell lists and unique foes that also use magic in some of the arcs. If that wasn’t enough I made your team (in this case Party) work differently as you only gain additions to the roster if you need them, plus brought in the Rogue character type with sneaking actions that lead to stealth moves being added to other Editions.

We Need Your Best Squad was just going to be Call Security! but outdoors, but it soon took on an identity of its own. For a start, throwing grenades out in the open made me think about an actual mechanic for that (which I’ve since rolled back into some of the others), then I decided to bring in the possibility of Psionic powers, plus I had so many different story ideas I ended up with 10 Arcs again!

The Wardens of History is hugely different though. Not only does it have no weapons stats (as mentioned before) but instead of the Markers only being for Adversaries, there are always Bystanders and the Markers can be either. There’s also the new idea of the team interacting with Bystanders as part of the whole “don’t break the timeline!” idea. This way of using Bystanders and making them more integral to the scenarios is going to be used a lot more going forward, and I’ve started rolling it backwards through its use in individual Arcs.

That brings us up to date so far, and I’ll start talking about the new Editions soon.

The third look at the mechanics is the way the Story Arcs work. I’ve already said that I wanted there to be a structure to the games that lead to a conclusion before players might get bored and lose interest. The 15 game sequence wasn’t quite an arbitrary number, it was picked to give the characters and their story time to develop, possibly mean some attrition of your team and introduction of replacements, but have an end close enough that it would encourage players to see it through. I think I got it right, but would be interested in hearing how it felt for others.

When I started out I was looking for a way to enable people to play the same Arc multiple times, by having 10 of the 15 randomly generated from a pool. I suspect that wasn’t necessary, that players are more likely to play a different Arc than replay one, and you’ll note all the new Arcs don’t use the random games. I may even do away with them entirely in the new Editions and go back and remove them from the old ones in next year’s update round, so let me know what you think.

Anyway, sticking with the idea that the core of the game stays constant, all Editions have the following:

Your team is a roster of a maximum of 10 characters. These are rolled for where there is usually a leader, some experienced members, and some general ones that will hopefully get better. For the record, this is a solo game and I want you to have fun, you don’t have to roll, you can pick the characters that appeal to you! Most of the actual battles involve 6 of these, sometimes just picked by you from those who are not currently injured, sometimes with a roll that might see a character not being available or not in the best shape.

There are a number of table layouts involved, described in quite an open way to enable you to use the terrain you have to hand, and each game is described in terms of where any Bystanders start, how many Markers there are and where they start, how many actual Adversaries are in the starting pool, and where the team enters the table.

You play through the battle, usually taking around 10 Rounds and taking probably an hour to play (longer if you are taking photos and writing up a report of course) during which there may be an objective to achieve (other than just removing all the adversaries from the table of course), additional adversaries appearing, or a special character to watch out for. Team members may be incapacitated, which puts them out of the fight, while the adversaries may be killed or might run away.

At the end, you check on the casualties in the team to see if they survived and how long they might be unavailable for games through injury. You usually get the chance to replace dead team members, often gain some sort of reward or reputation improvement, and always have a character roll for possible experience gained.

Then it’s on to the next game.

If you haven’t played one yet, I hope that sounds like fun? If you haven’t played, I’d love to hear what you thought?

Continuing the dive into the mechanics, we turn to the combat rules.

When designing this system there were two things I was looking for. The first was simplicity, and the second was a way to drive the narrative, which of course both come back to the fact these are for solo players.

Why simplicity? Look I get that there must be a reason that so many games make you roll for hitting the target, roll again to get past the armour, and roll again to see how much it hurts. It all makes sense right? But it’s boring, and bordering on tedious. In a solo game focused on outcomes, all I want to know is this character shot at that character, what happened to it? 1 roll to do the job, easy!

Then there’s the narrative aspect, or as someone else put it, in solo games you need an element of surprise. So when I decided to go for 1D10 as a core mechanism as much as possible, the very first thought was to make a 1 a bad surprise, and a 10 a good surprise. Add into that the need to deal with cover (and in some games a nod to armour) and the 1D10 does it all. So this character shoots at that character, a single roll and the target is either wounded, or not. Or just maybe the shot put them down, or maybe the weapon failed. It’s quick, it drives the story, there’s some jeopardy for your heroes as 1 shot might take them out, but equally the arrow might bounce off a tree, the bullet just wound the adversary when you needed them down, etc.

So then the challenge was how to do the same for close combat. I love the visual of the two different coloured dice rolling together, and the fact that you can often immediately tell the result without even worrying about the modifiers really works for me. I originally dithered over what happens if it’s two against one and all that kind of stuff but actually the game doesn’t need it. Swords flash, the protagonists separate and one is now bleeding, or is knocked to the ground, or is out of the fight, or has dropped their weapon. Simple, fun, obvious, and drives a story. Two characters both roll a 10, how great is that, they took each other out!

I also dithered over modifiers for weapons, I mean again who really cares? I certainly don’t see the point in worry about different types of rifles, but I can see it worth having a difference between a pistol and a submachine gun, or a dagger and a poleaxe. That said, in Wardens we just assume everyone has the same weapons and don’t have profiles for any weapons.

The one thing that was simple originally but I went back and “complicated” was grenades. Why? Because they needed some narrative effect, the chance to fail, or miss.

So there you have it, any thoughts?

Feel free to ask questions about the Adventure Series and as we go I’ll add them here for easy access.

I’m going to now do a series of posts looking at the mechanics. Please feel free to comment!

I’ll start with the aspects that make it what I call “true solo” rather than simply you taking turns playing one side and then the other.

Even the decision to make this what they refer to as “I go then you go” is part of this. I didn’t want the player to have to remember which figures have acted and which haven’t, so every Round always starts with all of you characters acting. This also allows you to operate them as a team, so for example each character can decide who to shoot at after they see what their team mate did, allowing them to gang up on a stubborn target that just won’t die

The first core mechanism though are the Markers. At the start of a game you always have a pool of Adversary figures ready off the table and a bunch of Markers on it. There are more Markers than Adversaries and it’s possible that more or less than the pool might actually appear. Not only that but despite where the Markers get set up, the rolls for when you uncover one because a team member can see it, or roll to see what happens when the undiscovered Markers move, you can suddenly find you have been hoodwinked and there are enemy figures popping up elsewhere, or even behind the team!

The other core difference between these games and others I have come across are the Reactions. You, the player, never have to decide what an Adversary does, it’s a simple roll on a single table (though with a few different tables depending on the type of Adversary). Yes this does sometimes mean they do something that you as a player might feel is odd, like running away for no apparent reason, or indeed continuing to try and fight when they are in their last wound, prone, and surrounded. However, for me that’s all part of the joy of solo gaming, I want surprises and not playing against someone else means I don’t need to worry about the game being “fair”. In fact the opposite, as my team are the heroes and I want them to overcome the enemy.

There are some other aspects that play into this too, like the team being able to do things the adversaries cannot, which I have taken to the extreme in Plunder and Fighting as your heroes fly through the air on grappling hooks to get a bonus in combat.

So there we go, that’s what makes these games “Solo”, any thoughts?

Bringing us up to date then with our look at the different editions and the stories they currently tell, we land on the Time Travel Edition.

This one has a little backstory to it, so stay with me. Call Security! Had been percolating in my mind for about a year before I wrote it. Protect and Survive was an obvious step after my Five Klicks from the Zone work with Ivan Sorensen got put on hold due to his work for Modiphius taking up all his energy. Plunder and Fighting also started off as Five Nautical Mikes from Tortuga. Join the Posse just seemed like a cool idea. Guild and Squad simply had to be done as the two most likely genres for an Adventure setting. So then the question became, what next?

I was thinking about superheroes, but something about the mechanics just wouldn’t click, so I tabled it (don’t worry I have nailed that now, so it is coming). I started to kick around a few others too. Then I decided to do a mental reset, so I stared working on the Campaign games instead. Then something weird happened, I was playing Enemies at the Borders when I felt like getting an Adventure game on the table, but couldn’t decide which. This was ridiculous, I had six to choose from and still didn’t know! So I though about that, and about all these other things I wanted to paint and play with that weren’t in the six yet. I started thinking about what would make each genre feel different, then how the heck I would write six or more stories for each without just rehashing the others, and stalled again.

I coincidentally had just finished re-reading Thieves’ World and was mulling over what to read next, when I remembered the Simon Hawke series called Timewars. There was also an RPG called Timemaster by Mark Acres back when I was GMing such things, and together they got my brain going. What was the ultimate answer to one set of rules where you can play any period you want, historical or non-historical?

It won’t ever be a big seller, you need to have a wide ranging collection of figures (or like me want an excuse to go, “those are excellent Zulu warrior figures, I want to paint 10!” but not only did six stories ideas drop onto the page easily, I have some great ones to dig more into the time travel phenomenon in more depth later (it only got released in April, so it won’t get an update until the next round, in early 2027).

Anyway, here’s what you get currently:

Story Arc 1 - Aliens among us

“Warden, we have intelligence that points to five nodes of trouble, the implication being that there are five aliens on Earth, bouncing around in time and recruiting local groups to do their bidding. You need to track them down and eliminate them!”

This is the most straightforward Arc. There are five aliens wandering around in Earth’s history to try and disrupt it, and your Team has to get on to the trail of each of them, and capture them, one at a time. The aliens are using hirelings (real humans in their own timelines) as pawns to further their aims, who you will need to interrogate to track down your real targets.

Story Arc 2 - People create history

“Warden, there are reports coming in of seemingly random attacks on important people throughout history that are not part of our extensive historical records. It seems an alien race is trying to disrupt history by bumping off key historical figures before they achieve something they are famous for. However, there are strange anomalies in the pattern we can’t figure out, as some attacks seem to be on people who we’ve never heard of?!”

In this arc the aliens are attempting to affect the Earth by targeting individuals they believe are pivotal to Earth’s history, sometimes correctly but sometimes having mistakenly read Earth fiction they got their tentacles on and believed it to be historical facts. In fact they are so misled by these works that they believe that the lead characters are not only pivotal to Earth’s history, but will be very hard to deal with. So hard in fact they will send their own team of disguised agents for those ones.

So this is the time to pick your five favourite story characters and get them on the table! A certain officer (but not gentleman) of the 95th Rifles perhaps? An ex-Seargent in the US army whose pals are going after German gold? A secret agent licensed to kill? A gunfighter with no name? An outlaw who robs from the rich and gives to the poor? So many to choose from!

Story Arc 3 - Is it magic or technology?

“Weird things are happening in the timeline, pieces of technology showing up where they shouldn’t be, improvements in technologies way before their time, someone is seriously trying to disrupt history without getting involved themselves. Warden, we need your team to get back there and sweep up as fast as you can!”

In this arc, you will find a nebulous organisation directly opposed to your own, who instead of wanting to preserve history, want to bend it to their own will by trying to accelerate inventions by seeding them earlier into the timeline than they are supposed to be.

In each of the random Incidents there will be some piece of anachronistic technology hanging about that must be found and destroyed. I’ll have to leave it up to you to decide exactly what it is as it must make sense for the period you have chosen each time, just think of something that the locals in that period won’t quite understand, and don’t make it weapons. In each of the special Incidents there will be something more problematic and the Incident will detail it.

Story Arc 4 - The Monsters are real

“Heads up Warden, this is a bad one! Someone seems to think it is fun to genetically engineer terrible beasts and release them back in time. Of course, when the locals notice, things will get entirely out of hand. We don’t think it’s some dastardly plan to actually achieve a timeline disruption, so we can’t spare multiple teams mopping them up. Which means it’s down to yours.”

In this arc someone thinks it is highly amusing to pick points of Earth’s history and actually release the kind of horrifying creatures that the people of the time apparently believed in. In fact you could argue that they were at least partially successful and that’s how the myths started in the first place! 

Story Arc 5 - Killing time

“Pick a good team Warden, we’ve got a real challenge for you. The Time Warriors are a strange organisation that have got their hands on the same technology as us, and enjoy joining historical battles and trying to cause as much havoc as possible. You can’t even count on them all being on the same side of the battle as they will happily integrate into either side of a confrontation. Of course in the midst of battle any of the real locals are going to be dangerous too!”

In this arc every Incident will be some sort of skirmish on the edge of a battlefield (if you roll Non-military Adversaries, replace them with Novice instead), usually with all the combatants intermingled, so you are not quite sure which side each is on immediately (until you Spot them).

Story Arc 6 - Put it right

“Welcome back Warden, boy are we glad to see you! As you can see, something has gone horribly wrong with the timeline and clearly our foes have been successful in bending Earth’s history to their desired path. Somehow you translocated at exactly the same time as the breakpoint protected you and your team. There were these few of us in this area who were also unaffected, but that’s it. So for the time being you are on your own while we figure out how to fix things.”

This is the most challenging Arc, aliens have succeeded in their dastardly plan and history has been so badly changed that the Earth has been under alien control for years. There are now no Wardens or any such organisation, and the aliens have successfully eradicated any humans with the translocation gene.

Your team was already in ‘transit’ back to base when the change kicked in and thankfully their Translocation device was creating a bubble of “true time” so they can still remember how things are supposed to be. However, due to the change, their access to the right equipment for all periods is limited, and their choice of replacement personnel even more so!