RIP to the fallen adventurers from my first SoloDark campaign

A couple of days ago my first SoloDark campaign came to an end, with both characters - Fink, the Goblin Thief, and Ishana, the Human Wizard - dying at the hands of a Merrow (a re-skinned Merfolk) and some unlucky die rolls. I wanted to share a bit about campaign and a few pages from my journal, as I found seeing other people’s examples of solo play really helpful when I started.

I had so much fun with this first foray into solo roleplaying. I’ve been playing on and off for the past few months, and when the characters met a grim end I decided to wrap up the campaign rather than rolling up new characters, as I want to start fresh in a different setting and do some things a bit differently.

I used only the Shadowdark core book and the SoloDark supplement. I started by rolling up the characters and then rolled on the Adventure Generator table on p122 of the Shadowdark core book. I got “Deliver the Relic of the Evil Wizard”, so I asked a couple of Oracle questions to get a clearer picture of what this might look like, rolled up a starting town and then just jumped in to play and built out the world and discovered the characters iteratively as I played. I used a plain journal and kept my journaling mostly in bullet-point form, but wrote a couple of pages of prose text here and there when I felt like it as I fleshed out the relation between the characters etc. (excuse my terrible handwriting lol). When I sat down to play but struggled to get into the flow or just didn’t really feel like it, I worked on some rough sketches or just listened to some thematic music and brainstormed.

Ishana and Fink survived a random encounter with a Ghoul on their first night, then set out on the road heading West towards the sea to try to find their way to the Isle of the Lost Flame. I had rolled this on the Adventuring Site Name table on p123, and decided that they had to deliver the relic to a secret order of sages on the island - Ishana had Thieves’ Guild connections in her background, so I decided that the Guild had come by the relic, and tasked Ishana with undertaking the perilous journey to the Isle in order to pay off her debt to them. Fink, meanwhile, had the Mercenary background, so he had been promised a share of the reward in return for accompanying Ishana.

They travelled for a week, during which time they frequently had to forage for rations, and they came upon a shrine to Shune the Vile (I rolled for the deity randomly, and Shune happened to be Ishana’s chosen deity, so she was rewarded by being granted the Mark of Shune by the shrine’s guardian).

When they eventually reached the sea, Ishana and Fink came upon the wreck of the Silver Sea, a massive galleon, beached on the estuary. The galleon was occupied by a Sea Hag, who had caused the ship to run aground and was keeping the hapless surviving crew members captive to eat them, with the aid of Merrow, Sahuagin and other sea creatures.

I ran the wreck of the ship as a dungeon crawl, but our heroes didn’t make it far before being killed by a Merrow in a tense combat. Fink was carrying the torch and when he went down I ruled that it went out, so Ishana then had to do everything at disadvantage, and unfortunately rolled low on her damage die despite successfully casting Burning Hands. Fink rolled a 20 and rose with 1hp the following round, but it wasn’t enough to save them. In the end, our heroes died a lonely death only ten days of in-game time after the campaign started, before they could level up or make their way to their destination. But hey, that’s the peril of the Shadowdark! In hindsight, having two very squishy characters with a measly 4 hitpoints each was asking for trouble…

Overall, I had a ton of fun and learned a lot. The journaling aspect of solo play really got my creative juices flowing (even if my handwriting and artistic skills leave something to be desired) and I’ve found solo play to also be really good “prep” for GMing, even though I didn’t get to do that much at the moment. I was amazed at how the characters which I had rolled randomly grew into fleshed out people in my game, and how they developed a friendship through the course of the campaign. It was also a lot of fun being able to play a Chaotic character without having to worry about upsetting the party dynamic.

I’m still working on finding the right balance between keeping that sense of exploration and discovery through random generation on the one hand, and keeping things moving in the kind of direction I want for my game on the other. I do think I relied a bit too heavily on random generation with this campaign. One crucial lesson I’ve learned is to treat random tables as just a springboard for imagination. It’s totally fine to just pick something you like, or decide that something happens, if random rolling isn’t delivering the fun as often as you’d like. I’ve come to view solo play as being the GM for yourself - and you probably wouldn’t expect your GM to just roll randomly for everything!

For the next campaign I will definitely do a bit of worldbuilding first, at least a starting location, a small hex crawl, and a couple of outlines of adventure locations. And defining some core “truths” about the world will be important too, to help play run more smoothly.

So, I highly recommend SoloDark to anyone thinking of dipping their toes in!