Creating a world with solo Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

Solo AD&D has been a topic over on twitter the last couple of months, and The Joy of Wargaming have been livestreaming his session on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6BajytesJE&ab_channel=TheJoyofWargaming

Solo AD&D – What it is? 
As the name implies, you play the game solo, and what’s better, it’s in the actual rules:

Mostly in Appendix A, but with a bit of work, you can play the entire game solo. 
But!
You have to be impartial, since you taking on the role as a player as well as an adjudicator. Consider using random tables, assign different outcomes to dice roll and STICK BY YOU ROLLS. Go with the flow, improvise and perhaps grow as a Dungeon Master.

That’s the idea anyway. No way to know if we don’t try. So here is my contribution to this experiment.

Solo AD&D as world building

The self training rules, and the rules for clearing a 30 mile hex gave me thought. If it’s possible to train by yourself, you could make a frontier campaign. A single outpost with only the bare essentials, and no high level characters to train you. Where the players would have to be the first high level characters that the game always assumes are on hand. 

To me that sounds like a great time! So i want to combine this idea with the solo play and make the following setup:

1. A random 5×5 30-mile hex map, with only 1 town in it
2. No high-level characters or no characters able to train my characters
3. 1-4 random dungeons, that i generate as i play them

So here is how I set it up.

The setup

I want to preface this by thanking Joy of Wargaming on YouTube again, since his videos served as the inspiration for a lot of this. Go watch his in depth series on his channel if you would like to try something like this.

At first i generatede a 5×5 area of 30-mile hexes using the rules in Appendix B: Random Wilderness Terrain. I even checked for habitation, hoping i would get some ruins or abandoned castles, but no such luck. I only got one hit, a town of 900 people, and that would suffice.

30-mile hexes

6-mile hexes, with a 30-mile hex overlay

The town of Supranemus was born, 150 miles from the border of civilization. The drawn area is the know world, and anything beyond that will have to be explored by my characters.

But since it was a larger town than I first imagined, i felt that it needed a castle of some sort. So using the rules on page 182-183, i generated a small shell keep with a level 12 fighter.

Now this wasn’t really the plan, since he also would have 3 henchmen, but I’m determined to using the rules and perhaps 4 higher leveled characters wouldn’t ruin my vision for a frontier campaign.

And thus Sextus Gellius Labeo, the 12th level LN fighter was born, with his two wizards, the insane potion seller Caeso Verres Atticus and the calculating scroll maker Decimus Flavius Norbanu. Lord Sextus also had his army leader Aulus Cestius Nepos, who patrolled the 30 mile hex under the lords control.

You can’t handle my potions traveler

In generating these characters, I immediately saw their worth in the campaign. 

The LN lord, who wants to create a republic, could be a powerful friend or formidable foe. 

The insane potion seller would need a constant supply of ingredients, and give me a chance to explore the rules for potion crafting. Ditto the scroll writer. Just their present in the world immediately creates adventure hooks and quests, so although I was skeptical at first, their addition to the world seems to be for the better.

Rumors and dungeons

Again, taking inspiration from Joy of Wargaming, and adding some rumors to the world. The proces is simple:

• Make a grid with numbers 2-12 on one side, and environments on the other.
• Add monsters from the random monster encounter table by rolling and voila. 

You now have a rumor table of the local monsters and also a good idea of what areas are more dangerous than others.

Sorry about the hand writing

As you hopefully can see, this gave me fairly dangerous mountain and hill landscape, but also some cool monsters like the Criosphinx in the desert, and pegasusses both in the rough and desert.

I should start giving my players something like this. Or at least reward them with bits of it whenever they go searching for rumors. Knowing what’s out there to an extend and also knowing the frequency, gives me an opportunity to make informed decisions and plans. 

I also made a table like this for the city, and it really helped set the flavor of city in my head. Look to the city encounter table in the DMG.

 

Next up was the dungeons. I decided that my characters would know of d4 dungeons, which came out to 2. But where to put them? Well, what better table to use than my personal favorite: The treasure map on page 120.

Two rolls on the gave me a result of labyrinth of caves found in the lair (i just took that as the dungeon was inside the city, since that was where i would be starting, and the next dungeon was 6 miles north in some ruins. Perfect!

The characters

Last but not least. I could have gone with a random party, using the tables on page 175 or even Appendix P: Creating a party in the spur of the moment, but I already had a party in mind. A group consisting of the four main classes, Fighter, Magic-user, Cleric and Thief. These four would (if they survive) be the first to of their kind in the wilderness, and eventually serve as the first teachers for new characters and perhaps players. 

The idea is, that one day or perhaps just from time to time, I will use this world I build and discover through solo play, as the world my players explore as well. And the I will know all the high level characters by heart, because I used to control them. That’s the idea anyway, no clue if it will work, but I think it’s worth the shot. 

The founding four:
Diego Grande, LG Human Veteran, AC: 2, HP: 12, S17 I12 W14 D15 C18 CH14
Pedro Alvarez, LN Human Rouge, AC: 7, HP: 4, S13 I11 W9 D15 C13 CH9
Elena Moreno, LG Human Acolyte, AC: 5, HP: 2, S15 I7 W17 D11 C15 CH12
Leocardia Rosado, NG Human Prestidigitator, AC: 10, HP: 4, S12 I17 W8 D11 C16 CH8

All human LN/G squad, with the desire to go out, loot the wilderness and build something for themselves. Cities , monasteries, towers or guilds.

 

Session 1

First session wasn’t a catastrophe, but we didn’t really make that much progress. The characters arrived in the city and started to look for the dungeon. I rolled 2d6 and if the two numbers came up the same they would find the dungeon (not a great way to do it i realize now). This resulted in the group going around for about 30 minutes, before they got a random encounter with some displeased tradesmen. 

They did their best to sweet talk their way out of trouble, and quickly went the other way. Half an hour later, the same tradesmen were encountered, but this time i rolled the lowest possible option on the encounter reaction table. 

The tradesmen, lumbers one and all, feared that the newcomers would stir up som trouble or perhaps steal their jobs. So they took their clubs and attacked my party. Magic missile and arrows were fired, but the magic-user was quickly reduced to exactly 0 HP. We downed, non-lethally, two of the tradesmen, en the rest fled afterwards.

Great, now my wizard needs to rest for a week. 

We found and Inn, and that was it. Not the most exiting start, but I’m confident we’ll find the dungeon next time!