Super Endless Quest - does it sound inviting?

Like I mentioned in my last post, I'm not playing my solo game books to take me through summer slowdowns. I have T&T solos, and I have the Fighting Fantasy books. But, there are a whole truckload of solo gamebooks out there!

I managed to find a couple which actually said "Dungeons & Dragons" on the cover, which was intriguing. Two books found their way into my waiting paws, and the one I'm looking at right now have a Keith Parkinson cover illustration and the inviting title "The Ghost Tower". It's not without some effort I stop myself from writing "... of Inverness" after that. Is there a relation? I don't know yet.

But, what is striking is the enormous series logo above it all proclaiming Super Endless Quest! Is it just me, or doesn't that actually sound a bit discouraging? A quest that goes on and on with all the limitations of the solo format feels very restrictive top me. When doing some research, I found that in the big index at rpg.net there are indeed if not an endless list at least a very long list of these books.

The game system looks to be something which is quite far from D&D. Actually, it doesn't seem to have any relation to D&D at all! Considering how simple a system D&D can be, when pruned from it's worth excesses like AD&D1 and D&D3, I find it a bit curious that they didn't try to base the rules on D&D. Wouldn't that be an extra sales point if you could take the character in your solo onto further adventures in the dungeons of your friends when playing the full D&D game?

Anyhow, this is a new field of adventure for me and since I know many gamers have tales to tell of being shaped in the forge of Fighting Fantasy I wonder if anyone ever was brought into the fold by the Super Endless Quest books?

Summer slowdown - solo gaming

I'm in the midst of summer vacations, and gaming is now happening less than usual. A few years back I remember a friend saying that soon it would be summer and then there would be more opportunities for games. I've found that instead it means even less. Everyone is gone, to summer houses and trips abroad for those who can afford. But, not wanting to give up I've tried to do some solo gaming.

For many years I saw T&T as that game which was all about solos. I even considered it an odd choice of a game, since I had a gaming group and didn't need such a game. Poor fool I was. Actually, the first contact I had with adventure gaming was through that marvellous little book The Warlock of Firetop Mountain with those fantastic Russ Nicholson illustrations. God knows why I then developed that attitude towards T&T.

Having a pile of T&T solos I grabbed a small volume by Andy Holmes, being one highly regarded solo writer. I have played some of his solos before, but this one Wytches, was new to me. This time it felt there was a story to it, with some quite decent pieces of exposition setting the mood. I started to play it and explored the small village. Walking around talking to people getting to know the story of the solo was a nice change from the kind of solos where you walk from fight to fight. Naturally I finally found myself in a fight, and was squashed like a bug. I had +5 combat adds and had to go up against a monster of +30 or something like that. Might as well have said, "you die" that paragraph. Holmes seem to be very fond of that kind of solo writing where you encounter a monster which is a total TPK waiting to happen. It's not just Holmes doing that, though.

It has been said that "balanced" encounters is a true sign of the decadence of modern editions of the world's most popular rpg. When it leads to players feeling entitled to "challenges" scaled to their level, and treasures as their due I feel it has gone very wrong. That being said, I think monsters which are way out there should at least be very uncommon or possible to avoid. In a solo the possibilities for evasive maneuvers are often not that common, so I prefer those to be random encounters and/or things which the solo writers include an "escape clause" for. Victories won by the skin of your teeth are valued the most, but it's a fine line. I think maybe the subtle queues gained by a GM from her players is needed to gauge when it's time to let the big stomper in on the stage and when the players will just feel harassed by it.

Naturally, I had to bring a Fighting Fantasy book on my vacation as well. That's where it all started after all. City of Thieves, the den of inequity, is where my brave adventurer headed. Once again we have a solo where the main task in not to fight, but to enter a hostile environment to find a person and then having found him scout for the the items of power needed for the main task. The city almost felt like a real place, with a mood of its own when you carefully approach proprietors of different kinds of stores illustrated by the classic look and feel of Fightiong Fantasy artists. I don't think I really appreciated before how much of my imagination of the fantastic have been shaped by these artists.

Once again I run into the limitations of the solo format. Dead ends can, and will, happen when you take one of the paths through the numbers not tested and tried by the authors. To their defence I should say that in a solo of 400 paragraphs that is juist to be expected. You would need a computerized testing suite to find all those possible dead ends. Ian Livingstone have at least prepared for it, writing the paragraph I ended on so that coming there you had to check if you had the needed components before travelling further, a small checkpoint if you like.

It is amazing how this hobby is to its very nature a creative one. Having played these two solos I now find myself wanting to beat them at their game, and write my own! I did it once and that was a mini solo of less than 40 pages, I think. Was it even 20? It was a lot of work. Maybe, just maybe, the summer with its lack of gaming opportunities will be the fount of something after all.

Yet another post about combat actions

I just read a most intriguing blog post about actions and stunts in combat, over here at Ragnorakk's blog Tran Eskoor an Doon.

It's nothing new that many players only do what they are explicitly told they can do. Using that and actually putting some cool stuff in front of them takes adding 1 and 1 and not getting 4. I'm bad at maths, Ragnorakk isn't. Cool stuff!

Even if this just about T&T solo gaming, I think this can be used for more than that.

The Gaming Libray: Buffalo Castle

Today I've decided to take a look at a classic, Buffalo Castle from Flying Buffalo, copyright 1976.

Buffalo Castle is the first of the solo adventures which T&T is so known for. I don't know if this is the first solo ever, according to Rick it might very well be. The designer of this dungeon is Rick Loomis, and it is one of the few adventures by Rick. There's one in a FreeRPG Day booklet as well. Being the first solo it is very charming to see so many of the tropes that later became staples of dungeon designs everywhere. We have odd games of chance that can lower or raise your stats willy nilly, we have teleporters, monsters to fight and treasure strewn for grabbing which look ominously unguarded. Last but not least is my favourite, a grassy plain with a big herd of buffalo! What! That's some castle.

I love this little adventure! I got mine as a pdf in the 7th ed box, and printed it out and played it a lot. Sadly I noticed first afterwards that the original was significantly smaller that letter size, so I only have tiny print in the middle of the page. The illustrations are all drawn for the adventure and they depict some of the denizens of the castle, some treasure and signs you might find, and similar things. They are all done by Liz Danforth and all have that "Danforth feel" and atmosphere her pieces are well known for.

This solo takes us back to a time when the hobby was very young, and in the introduction Rick Loomis describes the idea behind it as a way to try out T&T and see what it's all about. Incredible enough he also says "or for Dennis Hall, who lives in Alaska and doesn't have enough people nearby to play group games like T&T". Very informal, indeed.

All in all it's a marvellously fun romp. Unlike Keep on the Borderlands it's not very usable as a start of your own campaign, but in the minds of all T&T delvers it compares as the first place where they encountered fame and fortune. Some later solos took the art form in multiple advanced directions, and some of them had both intriguing stories and locales usable for campaign play (like City of Terrors, for example). This on the other hand is at the core just what good old exploring for fame and gold is all about, it oozes fun out of every pore.

I've saved the best for last. Rick Loomis have generously put The castle online, for free! Try it out and have some fun!