Post Comic Solo Delve talk! If you need to read the comic first, I gave it it's own page on my site so I wouldn’t be posting a million blog posts about it.
The first "session" for the comic is done! Which means that I can talk a little about playing that first session, what I learned and what I've started doing since then.
First off. The process of recapping a solo delve as a comic was very fun! I am very bad at "story structure" and am much better of reading between the lines. For me this was a perfect setup. It had me thinking a lot about things like "narrative" in RPGs.
This game was played almost entirely with the free SRD of OSE. I kept it very barebones and really only worried about the mechanical aspects of dungeon crawling. I followed the rules and procedures of the game and then reverse engineered the story from that. I know there's a lot of people that don't really think you can have a "narrative" TTRPG experience in a dungeon crawl, but I disagree. It's just a very specific type of story. It's a story about people doing their best in a weird line of work. People trying to scrape by but also seeking thrills. Gambling with their lives in hopes of hitting it big and often times falling down hard.
I like playing games in that style because it reminds me of working in the service industry in my 20s. It reminds me of catering jobs where you're flying by the seat of your pants because half the staff called out sick. It reminds me of meeting cool people and then losing touch because they move away or quit or die. It reminds me of going out for drinks after terrible shifts and bonding with people you wouldn’t have any other reason to hang out with.
Okay. Enough about that, let's talk through some of the interactions in the first session.
There were no encounters on the way to the dungeon. Here's the world map I made using Hexkit and Zeshio’s Tiles:
the Keep is on 0412 and the dungeon is 0813
The first door in the dungeon was locked. Misty spent a full hour attempting to unlock it. Each attempt is 10 minutes and causes a reaction roll, but we were lucky. The party had to rest after all the failed attempts because as per the rules there you need to rest for 1 turn out of the 6 that make up an hour. I imagined this as Misty resting while everyone else stood around annoyed, which didn't make it into the recap but was very funny to me.
The Gnomes were a cool interaction. When the party encountered them I rolled reaction (2d6) and got a 6: Uncertain & Confused. I decided this warrants a reroll if you can justify it, and decided that they would try and give the Gnomes food. I rolled 2d6 again and it came up 12: Enthusiastic Friendship. So, Gnomes like snacks, and are our friends now. I probably should have attempted to recruit them at this point but I wasn't really thinking in those terms yet.
The next door was stuck so I rolled my unstick the door check (d6) twice, for both the Dwarf and the Fighter since they were both trying. They both failed and the failure triggered a wandering monster roll, which came up as Stirges! I decided they were sleeping in the walls and we had awakened them. Combat played out pretty much exactly as I drew it. Iris died, and the Fighter knocked out (he rolled a critical miss and my table for that said he hurt himself for 3 damage. This would have killed him but I decided that you cant accidentally murder yourself and that he was knocked out at 1 HP) perhaps I am too soft on myself but I suppose that’s the bonus of being your own DM. Who got attacked by monsters was all determined randomly because I figured Stirges wouldn't have a favored target.
With 2 party members down I decided that retreat was the only good option (especially if I was ruling that the fighter didn’t die, it felt like he needed to be brought back to town to avoid death) so I had the party pack up the Stirge corpses in hope that they would be useful for someone in town and we could make some amount of money.
There was 1 wandering monster on the way out of the dungeon, a Trader who was confused per the reaction table. I'll be honest I completely forgot about this when sketching my comic out so there's no pages about it. I decided that the Trader had gotten lost in the dungeon and lost his mind. Perhaps I'll add a page to the final version of the comic for this, I meet this trader again in a later delve and it would be good foreshadowing.
After leaving the dungeon we had not wandering monster rolls on the way back to town. I spent some time looking through Hamud's Harvesting Handbook for what Stirge parts would go for and they did NOT fetch much. I'm still working on a procedure for selling "non treasure items" like monster parts, weird objects etc so I've been poking around in various tomes to figure out the best way of going about it. With no money and a 4 day cap on resurrection based on the level of Cleric that resided in the Keep I wasn't going to be able to bring the Elf back to life. I decided instead that she would be properly buried, and in turn decided that within the lawful church of Bahamut that would mean the corpse being ritually burned to avoid it coming back as an undead. This would cost 50 gold because Funerals are expensive, but in terms of the gold economy in this game its like 2 grappling hooks so its not impossible.
In terms of the comic I wanted there to be some tension about using the limited funds for this, considering how they had just met the Elf, but Ellis the Cleric being the de-facto leader made it make sense to me. It was a last minute decision to make Iris and Zora friends, but I like the way it played out.
I'm still figuring out how I want to do the second session recap. There's way MORE of that session so I may make the format support that a bit more.
We'll see! Thanks for reading.