Solo Blueholme: Between Sessions

Initially I planned to write-up the second delve in my solo game of Stygian Library using Blueholme as my OS(R) of choice but realised I hadn't actually finished it, and recording experience and downtime activities was taking longer than planned. The previous delve can be read here:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2025/11/solo-blueholme-first-delve-into-stygian.html

Some Stygian Librarians by Alec Sorenson

All of this took place in June/July of last year (2024) and has been sat in my drafts for a while: I can't stand clutter! Let the posts be SEEN!

Solo Blueholme: First Delve into the Stygian Library

Continuing on from my previous posts about the Stygian library & Blueholme, this is an Actual Play report of my first solo session in the library June 2024! Related posts can be found here:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2024/06/blueholme-stygian-library-solo.html

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2024/07/solo-blueholme-session-0-chargen-etc.html

...both of which detail the minor changes I made to Blueholme (a retroclone of the first D&D introductory basic set) before starting the campaign.

This particular post was inspired by Technoskald's series of reports upon multiple delves into the library:
https://solo.technoskald.me/tagged/stygian-library

Emmy Allen's Stygian Library, cover image by Alec Sorenson 

You can purchase a PDF of Emmy Allen's Stygian Library from DTRPG at this affiliate link or a beautifully produced hardcover print edition from Soulmuppet Be aware that there will be a new edition of the book released relatively soon, to coincide with the re-mastering of Gardens of Ynn. The new edition appears to be an update to the cover only, but if you're planning on buying the Ynn remaster it might be worth holding out for the new print edition of Stygian as they appear to form a rather elegant pair...  the new print edition has been out for a year or so now, the previous remaster (with the Alec Sorenson cover) having been superseded. Otherwise the two book are identical.

In defence of false rumours [#deadbird]

I'm not a huge fan of RPG Design discourse. I know what I enjoy in tabletop games and my openness to embracing new ideas extends to adventures and rulesets rather than abstracted diatribes and forge-era "theory". I love hearing about the obscure media and radical thought that inspires the brilliant worlds practitioners of this weird hobby continue to create, but for the life of me I can't recall an occasion where anyone's Appendix N included a patronising twitter thread.

So let's keep this brief.

False rumours can be bad. Exhibit A:

RUMOUR: 

The Bewilderbeast can only be harmed by ROOT VEGETABLES

CONSEQUENCE:

Player 1: My fighter attacks the Bewilderbeast with a carrot.

GM: Roll to hit. 

Player 1: 15... hits AC3! Am I good?

GM (makes performatively furtive eye movements, giggles etc.) uhhh... yeah. I mean.. you HIT the beast... with a CARROT! The Bewilderbeast remains unharmed!

TPK ensues. Sad!

But they can also be FUN (if not GOOD):

RUMOUR:

The colonialists plundered the Old Kingdom's mines, loaded their wagons and headed to the hills. They were set upon by Winged Terrors near CREEPERS CREEK and the wagons of gold were never recovered.   

CONSEQUENCE

The party head to Creeper's Creek to recover the lost gold... but the legend is false, the gold was recovered long ago. Nonetheless there's a weird druid guy, a cool place to build a fort and a cave network that they can go and check out now that they're here. 

Why not just post a rumour that Creeper's Creek has a cool place to build a fort and a cave and a druid?

Because uniformed idiots are part of what makes a world seem real, and the promise of gold that isn't there will compel them to continue to explore in a way that vague notions about a weird druid will not. 

Solo Blueholme session #0 (chargen etc.)

A number of weeks ago I posted regarding my intention to run Stygian Library solo. There's a link right here but for some reason they aren't showing up as such, so please scroll to the end to read the comprehensive list of pages linked in this post. I've since already run a party of adventurers through a delve in the Stygian library, and had some thoughts about what the survivors (spoiler alert! some of them survive!) do next. However, before writing that up I wanted to go into a little more detail about how I'm using BLUEHOLME as the "operating system" (OS, Really) for Stygian.

The 1977 Dungeons and Dragons "basic set" by Eric Holmes, aka. the Holmes Basic can be thought of as the "missing link" between OD&D and B/X (or perhaps even B/X and AD&D 1e), and it is not without its fans (particularly popular blog The Zenopus Archives). Blueholme is a retroclone of that ruleset by Michael Thomas, and seems to have emerged following conversations on the Dragonsfoot forum.

Blueholme & The Stygian Library, solo preparation

I've recently been playing Gangs of Titan City as a solo game, but you may have noticed various other RPG luminaries engaged in this dark practice. Indeed, it was friend-of the blog JFUR who first inspired my return to the labyrinth alone with her Into the Odd solo campaign. While ludic onanism has long been a staple of the frustrated forever GM, seeing Skullboy aka Better Legends transform his own game into an entire comic book, Delvers felt like something of a shift in the sands. Why, even friend-of-my-idealised-higher-self Semiurge has been at it—as this write-up of Grant Howitt's Big Gay Orcs (CW: butts touching one another) can testify.

Where's this suspiciously professional introduction headed? Into the Stygian Library, that's where: because when I'm not already writing about playing RPGs by myself or reading RPG books (all by myself) I like to play RPGs about books. By myself. And then write about it.

A crop of just about the first illustration in the book, by Alec Sorenson

THE WEEKLY R/OSR BLOGROLL

 This post was originally a note on substack.

THE WEEKLY OSR BLOGROLL

If you have a  podcasts, mailing list or blog related to old school (or old school adjacent) TTRPGs please post on the r/osr blogroll linked below, and have a look at other links shared as comments on that post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/15jgtd7/weekly_osr_vlogblogroll_round_up/

Pariah character classes for OSE or Basic Fantasy

Made by Igor Gadreaud 

If you prefer to explore the implied setting of PARIAH with a more faithful old-school system (as hinted at in my previous post, a design analysis of my own game, it's perhaps worth giving the players something they can sink their teeth into. I'm more than a little wary of doing this, but in the words (paraphrased) of Skerples of Coins and Scrolls:

Writing a... class is easy. It meets what I'd call the "minimum creativity threshold". To write a wizard you just need about 20 decent ideas. To write any other kind of class you need between 4 and 10. It's not difficult to make a class based on any random idea you've ever had. It's also a lot easier to think of elements of a class than it is to, say, a fill in a d100 table or write a dungeon.  

It is known.

PARIAH HEXGEN #15: TEMPERATE BROADLEAF FOREST

Part of an ongoing series last update with MANGROVE:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/11/pariah-hexgen-14-mangrove.html 

...we now come to TEMPERATE  BROADLEAF FOREST. I feel like I'm making genuine strides towards a comprehensive proto-neolithic psychedellic animist hexcrawl, more than two years after making this initial post.

* * *

PARIAH HEXGEN #14: MANGROVE

I originally included this generator with a continuation post concerning GENIUS LOCI REACTIONS AS ENCOUNTERS but I like it too much to leave languishing as a footnote. I like the revisions to the generator enough to give them their own post. 

Besides which, I should continue on from the series which last covered TROPICAL FORESTS:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/09/pariah-hexgen-13-jungle-tropical-forest.html

...we now come to THE MANGROVE...

* * *

Spirit of the Wilderness: Second Look at Genius Driven Loci Encounters... and a new hex (mangrove)

Previously I've posted two posts about random encounter generation, both of which within the framework of PARIAH (but easily adaptable to your old school game of choice blah blah...). The first attempt was inspired by Goblin Punch's encounter stew, but modified to accommodate the skills system I'd built into PARIAH (this version was included in the zine). I wasn't entirely happy with it, especially when playing it online and started to think about how I could move things around and create something more coherent but also thematic. 

I googled "Nature spirit - scary" and got this

What then emerged was something based around the Genius Loci reacting to the PCs as they enter and interact with the place in question, usually (but by no means always) imagined to be the local 6 mile hex. A poor reaction leads to more lethal encounters, ba weather, and shitty foraging; the inverse is true of a a good reaction roll. You can read it all here:

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/07/genius-loci-linking-encounters-hazards.html

That post has become one of the most popular on this site, no doubt due to it being featured in an edition of The Glatisant. Nonetheless what was presented was somewhat incomplete. 

This represents an attempt to grant that post a little more polish.

Ulysses

I used to think the DIY old-school scene needed to take more inspiration from James Joyce* than Ulysses 31. I have since revised that opinion.

Characters L-R: Yumi; the eponymous hero, Ulysses; Telemachus and finally the robot Nono

Ulysses 31 was a Japanese-French anime released in the early 80s, charting the voyage of the titular hero through space after being cursed by the Gods of Olympus. You don't need to have studied classics at a posh English school to recognise that this children's cartoon was a sci-fi retelling of Homer's Odyssey. The (literally) epic storytelling, stylish animation and (figuratively) epic soundtrack (U-le, U-le, UlySSEEEEES!/Flying through the ga-la-k-SEEEE!)would insure that the cartoon would have a lasting impact on young Gen Xers and older millennials around the world.

My question is this: would it make for a good campaign?

Generic Adventure Game: HIT PROTECTION & HIT DICE

Let's cut to the chase- this is another "0 HP" post, but I've been thinking about it while putting together this GENERIC ADVENTURE GAME  by working backwards from monster stat blocks.

You don't have to read any more if you don't want to. No one will think any less of you.

But if you do, let me know what you think.

CHERRY -FLAVOURED CHARGEN

Follow-up post to a concept  https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/08/cherry-coloured-funk.html: an Esoteric Enterprises campaign where a party of down-at-heel artists and performers, all tied to the same unscrupulous agent, carry out magical crimes in the esoteric underworld of H-Town. 

What follows is a simple character generator... grab one of each of the standard dice-set (D4, D6, D8, D10, D12) and roll....

Reverse Engineered Adventure Game

This is a post was originally made on 27th September and then removed. Revisions have been made since then. To lay my cards on the table: the objective is to create a gam without the standard attribute array..

When I first put PARIAH up on DTRPG I received a comment accusing me of advertising the product falsely and misusing the OSR label. I made sure a full preview was available and asked the commenter to take a look and see if they were willing to revise their opinion. To my surprise... they did! Not only did they take a look, they also revised their opinion!

By their definition, a game is OSR compatible if a character created can be run-through a B/X , 1e or BECMI adventure module with minimum effort. It's not a definition I agree with, but it did get me thinking: what kind of gaming system could you run through a B/X module with minimum effort?

PARIAH HEXGEN #13: JUNGLE/ TROPICAL FOREST

Continuing this series of hex posts by terrain type, following the previous posts about temperate plains...

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/09/pariah-hexgen-12-temperate-plains.html

...we now come to TROPICAL FORESTS...

* * *

CHEAP TRICKS OF DMing - MANUALLY AGGREGATED

This post aggregates the DMing advice from all sources following the 15 more cheap tricks to liven up your game by Phlox, itself following up an earlier post of ten similarly cheap tricks. It includes "cheap tricks" from the following source: 

• Phlox
• Sahh
• Cosmic Orrery
• SunderedWorldDM
• Eldritch Fields 
• TheFirstGokun

If you can't see the generator, follow this link:
https://perchance.org/cheap-tricks-aggregator

PARIAH HEXGEN #12: TEMPERATE PLAINS

The last few posts in this series have opened with apologies: let's get things back on track. Last time out I brought you two mildly different river generators....

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/09/pariah-hexgen-11-rivers.html

...but now we travel to the prairie/steppe/grasslands of the TEMPERATE PLAINS:

PARIAH HEXGEN #11: RIVERS

In the spirit of the previous post (which was all about giving a little more than is superficially apparent... maybe?....

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/09/pariah-hexgen-10-hex-with-solitary.html

...I'm providing not one but TWO river generators. Fact is, they're both very similar: one has hippos and crocodiles, the other doesn't. They both have Giant Otters (if you're lucky- there's a different encounter table generated each time, did you realise?

So read on to generate TROPICAL and TEMPERATE RIVERS for your PROTO-NEOLITHIC ANIMIST HEXCRAWLING...

PARIAH HEXGEN #10: A HEX WITH A SOLITARY CONIFER

This post was thusly titled in an attempt to differentiate it from the previous dense taiga and upland taiga posts but make no mistakes: this is about a slightly less dense and flatter version of those two territories... perhaps begging the question why.

Well I shall tell you.

You might have realised that I cut my RPG teeth on BECMI and the later Rules Cyclopedia in the late 80s and early 90s, and I have a strong affection for the gazetteer series and the beautiful maps that they included. I loved them so much I've recreated them (though ever-so-slightly different) for the production of these hex generators... but more than that, I've created these generators to honour these hexes in some way.

You see, when my players would embark on overland journeys through the Grand Duchy of Karameikos all they had to differentiate one hex from another was a slightly different journey time and a choice of 8 monsters. Yet (as other authors have pointed out more eloquently than I) a 6 mile hex can be an entire world... and that's what I'm trying to do here.

(Not evening mentioning that gazetteer hexes were EIGHT miles across)

So here is the SPARSE TAIGA: somewhere between the dense forests of the far north and the either TUNDRA of the farthest north. Stick this on your map:

PARIAH HEXGEN #9: HILLS

Yes then... the series continues. Hot on the heels of this...

https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2021/09/pariah-hexgen-8-mountains.html

...we now have this:

Yep, it's the HILLS...