Sunday, February 24, 2013

Smugglers in the Dark - part 1

There are several entertaining posts about solo dungeon crawling at Tabletop Diversions and Solo Nexus. While I have played some crawls using Dungeons and Dark Dungeon, with the recent re-release of old Dungeons and Dragons PDFs, I decided to try a little crawl using the Basic Set.

Character creation
The first step was to generate a party. I wanted to have a fighter, a thief and a magic-user. I started rolling the three characters' attributes and then assigned them to a suitable class, with maximized hit points. I then used the Universal NPC emulator (UNE) to create a general description and two motivations for each character. To keep things simple, I discarded one motivation from each, trying to make them consistent with each other. Lastly, I rolled on the Mythic description chart to give them a quirk.

From the results I got, I did not think that any of the characters would be lawful, so I used the Mythic fate chart to answer the question "is the character chaotic?" with a likely chance for each of them -- an "exceptional no" would mean the character actually was lawful. I rolled a 50/50 chance for each character to be male or female and finally, I used this fantasy name generator to pick names for them. These are the resulting characters. UNE and Mythic results are marked in brackets.

Ingont
Chaotic Human male Magic-user
Few people would be able to guess that Ingont spent the last several years studying in the Academy. The light-haired man dresses like a peasant and seldom talks about magic, carrying his spellbook hidden in a bag. His actions and words are carefully measured to disguise his plotting mind. Currently involved with a secret society, he is tasked with expanding their smuggling routes to the south of the kingdom. [logical herald, maintain contraband, irritatingly nondescript]
HP 3, AC 9, STR 9, INT 17, WIS 12, DEX 11, CON 7, CHA 12
Modifiers: +10% XP
Spellbook: magic missile
Backpack: dagger, waterskin, flask of oil x5, lantern, iron rations x1, 95gp

Swyem
Chaotic Human female Thief
Swyem is a frail young woman of light and delicate manners. For a few years she has worked for a local trading guild, managing the sale of goods in neighboring villages. Lately, however, she became involved in a smuggling scheme. She is not troubled by exploiting others' weaknesses and needs to serve herself. [habitual drifter, guard deprivation, slowly fancy]
HP 3, AC 7, STR 8, INT 10, WIS 10, DEX 10, CON 7, CHA 11
Modifiers: -1 to hit and damage
Short sword, Leather armor
Backpack: dagger, waterskin, iron rations x1, thieves tools, 4gp

Eryz
Chaotic Human male Fighter
Eryz thinks that they are out to get him: the village elder, the tax collectors, the king's knights. He only really trusts his half-sister Swyem, who arranges jobs for him to guard or sometimes bully others. Physically, he is not very imposing and may even come out a little clumsy but if you look into his eyes, you can see an eerie fire burning. [fanatic bum, agonize the government, quietly messy]
HP 8, AC 5, STR 11, INT 9, WIS 9, DEX 7, CON 11, CHA 11
Modifiers: -1 to missile fire, +1AC
Sword, Chain mail and shield
Backpack: dagger, waterskin, torches x6, iron rations x1, 50' of rope, 34gp

The story so far...

Ingont, Swyem and Eryz grew up together and used to cause all kinds of trouble in their village. Eventually, Ingont went to study the magical disciplines in the Arcane Academy and Swyem moved to another town, taking Eryz with her. She kept corresponding with Ingont and they started to smuggle magical trinkets in and out of the kingdom.

Ingont paid a visit to Swyem when one of their couriers went missing. She had found out that the courier was poisoned and died in the woods, and a group of kobolds took the magical trinkets to their lair in some ruins. The three characters bought the necessary supplies and are now ready to enter the lair, to recover their "merchandise."

... To be continued.

3 comments:

Will Scarvie said...

Wow. That, is pretty darned cool. Nice process, and interesting characters. Looking forward to reading more.

Sean said...

Very interesting. I know I've seen UNE somewhere before but I tracked it down again and downloaded it. I need to get on my solo adventure. Look forward to reading more about yours.

Ricardo Nakamura said...

Thanks for the comments! I am setting up a card-based system to match the Basic Rules turns of 10 minutes / 120' movement to continue the game.