Party of one: Part 2

A few other discoveries since my last post on solo adventures. [Edit: briefly updated with a couple more finds.]


One of the strange things I've noticed about solo adventures is they aren't geared for level 1. Even the D&D X's challenge ones. It just seems to me that it'd be logical to do solo adventures with a new player  or new character in an OSR type game to give them a little XP and some treasure. Guess that's either not how people write these things or they just wrote one-on-one adventures to have one-on-one adventures, not to fill some need in how these are used or desired. Because it seems to me that having a wider range of levels for any given adventure would make them much more useful.Also, from what I've seen of the X's Challenge modules, its just kinda standard that the lone PC is likely to have a henchman or hireling. I guess that's one way to do it, but it seems a little... unsatisfying. Then again, many OSR games were designed for much bigger parties too: 4-10 is a bit more of the spread than the 4-6 that seems like the norm today. And some of the old school modules really want 5+ or 6+ PC more than just a group of four. Anyway, the new finds:

There's one-on-one adventurer guide for OSR games free on RPGnow from the same folk who did Red Tide (Sine Nomine Publishing) called Black Streams: Solo Heroes (the term solo keeps being used to mean one hero, but also the no-DM choose-your-own-adventure style thing just for added confusion. I keep trying to clarify it by using one-on-one but I can't change the name of someone else's product. Also, the plural seems disturbingly delicious there: solo heroes.). Its free, so you're probably picking it up now. But it's basically a set of simple modifications to OSR games to allow a solo PC to be competitive.

I ran across a review for one Dungeon adventure, The Ulrich Monastery, which doesn't get a very good review.  But if you want some ideas... maybe? Oddly, its for levels 5-6. This lead me to search more of the reviews. White Fang (Dungeon 20), Scepter of the Underworld (Dungeon 12),  and The Djinni's Ring (Dungeon 9) appear to be solo (not one-on-one) adventures. Tenfootpole.org doesn't really do much review for the last three, leading me to suspect they're really choose-your-own-adventures. But, not 100% sure, I'd have to take a closer look.

Sine Nomine also kickstarted an OSR one-on-one game itself: Scarlet Heroes! But I haven't picked up a copy to see if it does more than their Black Streams: Solo Heroes stuff. It looks like it might, but its also tied up with their Red Tide setting.