31 day characters – Best Left Buried

Best Left Buried by Soul Muppet is a grim, Darkest Dungeon inspired dungeon crawler, with a simple but brutal system. Characters aren’t really expected to last long, or come out of a delve unscarred. The system is basically 2d6 plus your stat vs. a difficulty number, with 9 as the default. There’s an advantage mechanic […]

31 day characters – Dragonbane

Dragonbane from Free League is a modern version of venerable Swedish RPG Drakar och Demoner, or Dragons and Demons. I don’t know how close to the original game the new system is. The system is a skill based d20 roll under with some heritage from Free League’s Forbidden Lands RPG in the form of conditions, […]

31 day character – Mazes

Mazes from 9th Level Games is one of those systems that’s pretty simple from the player side, but has more substance on the GM side, even though the GM never rolls dice. The game is a hundred percent focused on the dungeon – you start at the door, and gloss over downtime. The flavour is […]

31 day character – Talisman Adventures

Talisman adventures is an RPG based on the venerable boardgame, Talisman. It uses a 3d6 + Attribute system, and looks pretty simple to play. Character creation involves picking your Ancestry – options being Dwarf, Elf, Ghoul, Human, Leywalker (magical beings), Sprites, or Trolls – and then your Class – Assassin, Druid, Minstrel, Priest, Prophet, Scout, […]

31 day character – Fantasy Age (1st edition)

Fantasy Age is published by Green Ronin, and is used in the Blue Rose RPG (which formerly used an early form of their True 20 system). AGE is descended from True 20, but has ditched the d20 for 3d6, and added a stunt system which is quite elegant, but does require the players and GM […]

Thirty-one character challenge – Let’s get started!

I’m starting late because I got confused about which day was the first of January and my plan requires me to have the week’s characters done by the weekend so I can do a system shakedown at the weekend. Week One – Back to the dungeon We’re starting the New Year with a smattering of […]

The Thirty-one day character challenge

I’m terrible at these yearly challenges. Never really got started on Dungeon 23, managed 15 days of Hexcrawl 24, so in 2025 I’m going to keep my ambitions realistic, and take part in the 31 day character creation challenge in January – see https://tardiscaptain.com/gaming/character-creation-challenge/ for more information. My plan is to make characters during the week, […]

Tilt oracle and Troika! – Part 2

This is the conclusion of a brief solo play of Troika!, using Alex Yari’s Tilt Oracle. There is combat in this chapter, for which I used the Initiative manager from this site – https://www.technicalgrimoire.com/troikagenerator As before, textual Oracular answers are cutups seeded with Dunsany’s Time and the Gods. Last chapter saw Yale, Sorcerer of the […]

Tilt Oracle and Troika!

I volunteered to playtest the Tilt Oracle by Alex Yari, the basic premise of which is that you have a Number which determines what type of question is more likely to give a yes or a no answer, and as with other solo oracles you use those to frame your adventure. Unlike other oracles it […]

Solo-a-module month – Death in Freeport, Part 4

Last time, Jevan was accidentally initiated into the cult of the Nameless god that’s corrupting the city of Freeport. This time he’s still got a scholar to rescue and a high priest to slay. Currently Jevan is level 3, has 15 out of 21 HP, is out of Epiphany spells and has one use of […]