How I write solo rules, pt. 2
Here I shall attempt to walk through my process making solo rules for non-solo ttrpgs. Part one covered This Ship Is A Tomb (Fey Light Studios). I recommend you read that first.
Case study: Constant Downpour - Soldier Splashing All Alone
Constant Downpour is an adventure module made by Spicy Tuna RPG for the Mothership RPG. Inspired by Ray Bradbury’s “The Long Rain”, this module dumps the PCs on the inhospitable jungle planet of Venus where the rain. never. stops! It’s a nasty (in the best way) psychological adventure underpinned by hex-crawling and procedural generation.
As part of the Remastered edition of this module, Spicy Tuna asked me to make a set of solo rules. To which I replied that, being British, I can relate to being in an inhospitable environment where it always rains. Time to strap on the galoshes.
Note: I’ll try and keep this free of spoilers for Constant Downpour.
Step 1 - what’s the big idea?
This is the question you ask whoever made the game/system/module you’re adapting. In doing so I want to a) get a feel for what they think makes the game tick, and b) get a sense of what they want a solo ruleset to achieve.
From a chat with Marco of Spicy Tuna RPG, I wrote down these notes:
- Fog of war / revealing parts of map
- Story of dying hope
- Book contains potential spoilers for player
That’s enough to get going. As with This Ship Is A Tomb, Constant Downpour (CD) is already fairly procedural, a quality which lends itself to being solo-able straight out of the box (or book, rather).
However, the big thing that sticks out from a solo perspective is related to the flow of information. CD has a lot of gated knowledge — details that the Warden (GM) protects and the players have to work for.
I’ve written previously about this quirk of trying to play systems or modules meant for group play as solo games. It’s very hard to ignore the hidden details in a text that your character is not meant to have any knowledge of.
Let’s talk about hex, baby, let’s talk about me and me
CD is fundamentally a hex-crawl. Hex-crawling, with all its uncertainty and tribulations, is how players will experience the module. Whilst CD handles unnamed hexes with procedural tables to keep even the Warden guessing, there are plenty of important named hexes. How do you keep these surprising to a player who has already seen the Warden-facing map or even read through the core adventure?
My answer was to uproot the named hexes from their previously fixed locations. Their details are the same (more on that later) but the order in which they’re discovered is randomised. The challenge with this is that there are locations that need to be discovered only near the end to retain the narrative arc of the module.
Taking a quick glance at the named hexes, you’ll find there are 16 to discover (disregarding the one you start in). If you’re familiar with Mothership you’ll know it uses d10s. Say the process for establishing which hex you come to involved rolling a d10 + a number that increases gradually over the course of play, that would give us the rough trajectory we need. Well looky here, looks like we got ourselves a new stat.
Get drenched
And that stat, in keeping with the torrential setting, is Drench, representing your character’s gradual adaptation to the environment. Whenever the PC enters a named hex (the black ones in the picture above), Drench increases by 1, then the player rolls 1d10 + Drench to determine which hex they’re in (there’s a list with page numbers off to the side, out of frame).
I wasn’t content with that being all there is to Drench though. Another challenge with modules made for group play is that they can be pretty brutal for a single PC. Mothership has a Panic mechanic whereby when bad stuff happens, you roll 1d20 and compare it to your character’s Stress (a stat that’s pretty much always on an upwards trajectory). If the die result is less than Stress, the character experiences an effect from the Panic table, the entry corresponding to the number rolled. The effects are almost always bad news.
I thought it would be cool to have a similar mechanic but in reverse — as Drench goes up your character’s more likely to experience an effect that will help them out. The thematic reason for this is that the longer the character stays on Venus the more they become like a Venusian, in some cases spiritually, in others very physically.
As with Panic checks, you need a good trigger for something like this. In a group game, the Warden arbitrates, deciding when a character panics. When you’re playing alone, even with the best of intentions, it can be easy to forget to apply this. With my own Mothership solo adventure, Thousand Empty Light, I mitigated this my having set checkpoints where the player should roll a Panic check.
I sought out a good trigger in Constant Downpour, and in the end the best approach was asking someone who knows better — Marco, the designer. With your own module you have the best sense of the rhythm of the mechanics, and the answer was ‘dreams’ and ‘nightmares’. These are types of episode that crop up in the base module with the right sort of frequency we were after. Also, it’s kind of cool thematically, these hallucinatory moments are the precursor to transformations the character undergoes.
This section’s about oracles. I couldn’t think of a funny title
I love making oracles because I love thinking about words. I’m particularly interested in the idea that all the permutations of an oracle table represent a picture of that game’s world. When I made the oracle for Lay On Hands, I wanted the player to be able to infer qualities of the setting from the results — to think about what sort of environment dictates that things like ‘The Thorn’ and ‘The Dust’ are weighty symbols for whatever passes as civilisation in the game’s post-apocalyptic landscape.
Like This Ship is a Tomb, I wanted a thematic underpinning for CD’s oracle. Unlike that module, I opted for a smaller oracle, just d10. As a player, when you’re consulting an oracle, you’re searching your game’s context for meaning. I like the idea that that mirrors your character searching for meaning. Inspired by this thought and the rainy jungle setting, CD’s oracle is inspired by pareidolia, the idea that the PC is squinting through the downpour and thinking they find some sign:
0: a pale rictus (discomfort / subterfuge)
1: sharp-edged machinery (resilience / order)
2: the glow (shelter / vision)
3: tall figures (authority / scrutiny)
4: grasping hands (desperation / activity)
5: a higher being (hope / retribution)
6: the flicker of ghosts (condemnation / history)
7: a waiting door (liminality / indecision)
8: your doppelganger (familiarity / betrayal)
9: a loved one (pain / anger)
Many of these entries speak to an emotional thread running through the solo rules…
They’re going to pay for what they did to ________________________
Let’s return briefly to the problem of information. Shifting around the order in which hexes are discovered only partly solves the problem. In all likelihood the player has already read through the procedural stuff in CD and has a fair idea of the risks and some of the spoiler-ish thematic stuff.
The solution? Encourage this pre-knowledge. The introduction to Soldier Splashing All Alone (as this set of solo rules came to be named) says: “Your character starts with full knowledge of the situation on Venus. If you haven’t already, feel free to read through the first half of the Constant Downpour rules, detailing procedures, encounters and items.”
The reasoning here is that you play as a character who has seen leaked intel about the goings-on on Venus and they’ve come to avenge a loved one who was purposefully sent to their doom. It perhaps goes without saying, but giving a solo player a strong motivation is always a good idea. I like that this one differs from the PCs motivations in a group game of CD. It’s a nice twist just for solo.
My favourite little detail of this ruleset relates to that note I jotted down at the start: “Story of dying hope”. Realistically, even with some boons from the Drench effects, this module is deadly. Everything is out to get you and the pressure is relentless.
So, what’s your PC’s tangible mission, how do they win? Recover some evidence? Bump off a particular target? No, your mission is: cause as much damage as possible to the people that took what you loved.
