New Solo Game? 👀
Jun. 2nd, 2026 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ripplestitchUK Games Expo was enjoyable but exhausting. On top of my inevitable fatigue I unmasked to eat and drink (could have gone outside but it was too, too hot and my companions weren’t sure they could handle the heat and frankly, on the amount of meds I take that fuck my heat tolerance neither was I) and couldn’t find my hand sanitiser so may have picked up some kind of con crud one way or another because I feel a little iffy. It does seem to be mild but blegh.
I picked up a gift for a friend and some solo rpg zines and also! The physical starter set for the Pendragon RPG which I’ve been curious about for ages. I have a free pdf of the starter set (or part of it?) but found it very difficult to work with in that format.
The Beef and I played the intro tutorial game and I think I could possibly run a couple of sessions for him using the adventure in the box and the abbreviated rules. I have an interest in Arthuriana but my study is quite shallow so I’m glad his point of reference is half remembered films like Excalibur haha. I think he should pick up the vibe okay, though.
Human magic users are not as powerful as faeries. But there are a lot of them. And while fighting between fae courts is heavily codified because if they kill each other too much… they have these structured almost feudal court systems and a strict code of conduct almost like the ideals of chivalry (perhaps less benign) but the high fae knights are captured and ransomed, not killed. Cruel and unusual behaviour has strict rules about how it can be applied, etc. Debts and vows are binding. Those who break the rules certainly exist—nobody can exploit a loophole like a Faery—and coups and large scale invasions are semi regular (every hundred years, or so?) but they were unprepared for human armies.
The humans have their own sense of honour on the battlefield and off, but they are not the same. They’re spell sniping knights left and right! Their blades are made of an alloy containing deadly iron and they do not hesitate to use them with lethal force! That’s not how this works! Though very easily manipulated alone or in small groups, it turns out humans are terrifying in their own way en masse. But they do honour surrender.
So the Archfae agree to what will be known as The Truce. They can keep the land they currently inhabit, but no more abductions. No charming all the children from a village away to be eaten by hags or enslaved to make Faery shoes or made into pages to serve the wine that looks horribly like blood and fear catching the eye of a bored noble. No torturing artists by making them salve away at their canvases until they die feverishly clutching their painbrushes. Yes, fine, the mortals who are too daft to take precautions and listen to the tales are fair game. Seductions are also not the same as abductions. But we’re watching you, and we Will End You.
…Can the human sorcerers do that? Well. No. Even aside from the fae being formidable and continuing their reign of terror on the general populace while war rages, they are a bit like a fungus. You could wipe them out, but their magic has infiltrated the land and it will create more of them through means other than birth over time. They cannot be killed in any way that matters. Better to pin them down now with a binding while they still don’t really understand what lying is.
By the time Ivy is born a few centuries later, more and more iron and steel is in the cities. It’s more common for urban dwellers to not even know another person who has seen a fae of any kind, let alone seen one themselves. The new generation of sorcerers are getting complacent and not paying attention. In another couple of generations the Witches may be the last bastion keeping the fae in check.
The fae are watching these developments with interest.
Ivy happens to live on the outskirts a magical wood ruled by Duchess of the Glimmerwood, a vassal of the Spring Queen, who is pro-status quo. I think my game is going to take place not long after the Truce, and follow a Fae knight of the Spring Court who is struggling with the difficulties of their new restrictions while still doing his job (being heroic™ in the name of his beloved Spring Queen, protecting the Spring Court from various dangers, policing the local fae rabble who are not the ones who actually signed that contract about not terrorising humans, and doing his duty regarding furthering his bloodline).
I think it’ll be interesting to work with the honor and glory system and the I’m hoping this will help it translate relatively well to existing adventure modules where they do a lot of monster hunting and I think it’ll fit the vibe of the mechanics, with a bit of tweaking. It’ll also be useful to refine this lore (and plug in plot holes) as it was somewhat hastily thrown together via offhand comments by Ivy’s familiar Nutkin as I played the early games of Apothecaria and kept rolling interactions with what I decided were with fae (before I realised that they turn up canonically in a later expansion).
Recently there have been a trend of depicting the fae as big scary alpha males and I don’t love it, so I specifically set out to make them the losers in this scenario and my protagonist is probably going to be something of a himbo.
I’m excited, but I’ve got a lot of studying and possibly purchasing of rulebooks and scouring of subreddits to do first. I’ve been looking at the implementation of solo games using this system and fell in love with this playthrough of the system and setting as intended, featuring a squire who is a girl in disguise! https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/pendragon-gpc-mythic-annales-milites-de-sarisburiensis.560128/
I picked up a gift for a friend and some solo rpg zines and also! The physical starter set for the Pendragon RPG which I’ve been curious about for ages. I have a free pdf of the starter set (or part of it?) but found it very difficult to work with in that format.
The Beef and I played the intro tutorial game and I think I could possibly run a couple of sessions for him using the adventure in the box and the abbreviated rules. I have an interest in Arthuriana but my study is quite shallow so I’m glad his point of reference is half remembered films like Excalibur haha. I think he should pick up the vibe okay, though.
My real interest is the possibility of playing it Solo, however, as I’ve seen it done and have been inspired. As usual though I find myself tending away from the source material and I’m pondering how well I could reskin it to be an episodic game of adventures of a faery knight in the setting I’ve developed for my game of Apothecaria. I think the Faeries I created for that (pulling from various inspirations but particularly from the weirdness of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and their rigid cycle of reenacting old fae legends that feel very Arthurian, over and over.
To share my context via the series of messages I sent a friend when they very kindly played sounding board for me:
In Apothecaria I decided that the faerie lore = the realm of Faerie has been in trouble for some time. Fae are getting sick and because they are supposed to live so long their natural fertility rate is pretty low. They have been having a population crisis. Hence nipping over to the mortal realm and kidnapping or charming humans away—they can interbreed, magic breeds true (with caveats) and humans do it Fast.
Human magic users are not as powerful as faeries. But there are a lot of them. And while fighting between fae courts is heavily codified because if they kill each other too much… they have these structured almost feudal court systems and a strict code of conduct almost like the ideals of chivalry (perhaps less benign) but the high fae knights are captured and ransomed, not killed. Cruel and unusual behaviour has strict rules about how it can be applied, etc. Debts and vows are binding. Those who break the rules certainly exist—nobody can exploit a loophole like a Faery—and coups and large scale invasions are semi regular (every hundred years, or so?) but they were unprepared for human armies.
The humans have their own sense of honour on the battlefield and off, but they are not the same. They’re spell sniping knights left and right! Their blades are made of an alloy containing deadly iron and they do not hesitate to use them with lethal force! That’s not how this works! Though very easily manipulated alone or in small groups, it turns out humans are terrifying in their own way en masse. But they do honour surrender.
So the Archfae agree to what will be known as The Truce. They can keep the land they currently inhabit, but no more abductions. No charming all the children from a village away to be eaten by hags or enslaved to make Faery shoes or made into pages to serve the wine that looks horribly like blood and fear catching the eye of a bored noble. No torturing artists by making them salve away at their canvases until they die feverishly clutching their painbrushes. Yes, fine, the mortals who are too daft to take precautions and listen to the tales are fair game. Seductions are also not the same as abductions. But we’re watching you, and we Will End You.
…Can the human sorcerers do that? Well. No. Even aside from the fae being formidable and continuing their reign of terror on the general populace while war rages, they are a bit like a fungus. You could wipe them out, but their magic has infiltrated the land and it will create more of them through means other than birth over time. They cannot be killed in any way that matters. Better to pin them down now with a binding while they still don’t really understand what lying is.
By the time Ivy is born a few centuries later, more and more iron and steel is in the cities. It’s more common for urban dwellers to not even know another person who has seen a fae of any kind, let alone seen one themselves. The new generation of sorcerers are getting complacent and not paying attention. In another couple of generations the Witches may be the last bastion keeping the fae in check.
The fae are watching these developments with interest.
Ivy happens to live on the outskirts a magical wood ruled by Duchess of the Glimmerwood, a vassal of the Spring Queen, who is pro-status quo. I think my game is going to take place not long after the Truce, and follow a Fae knight of the Spring Court who is struggling with the difficulties of their new restrictions while still doing his job (being heroic™ in the name of his beloved Spring Queen, protecting the Spring Court from various dangers, policing the local fae rabble who are not the ones who actually signed that contract about not terrorising humans, and doing his duty regarding furthering his bloodline).
I think it’ll be interesting to work with the honor and glory system and the I’m hoping this will help it translate relatively well to existing adventure modules where they do a lot of monster hunting and I think it’ll fit the vibe of the mechanics, with a bit of tweaking. It’ll also be useful to refine this lore (and plug in plot holes) as it was somewhat hastily thrown together via offhand comments by Ivy’s familiar Nutkin as I played the early games of Apothecaria and kept rolling interactions with what I decided were with fae (before I realised that they turn up canonically in a later expansion).
Recently there have been a trend of depicting the fae as big scary alpha males and I don’t love it, so I specifically set out to make them the losers in this scenario and my protagonist is probably going to be something of a himbo.
I’m excited, but I’ve got a lot of studying and possibly purchasing of rulebooks and scouring of subreddits to do first. I’ve been looking at the implementation of solo games using this system and fell in love with this playthrough of the system and setting as intended, featuring a squire who is a girl in disguise! https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/pendragon-gpc-mythic-annales-milites-de-sarisburiensis.560128/
