Full disclosure: I love gaming by myself. Sure, I enjoy running RPGs for others and playing board games with my friends, but I don't need a group to play. I have a wide variety of solo board games, and I'm no stranger to countless solo RPG-ish games like Ironsworn, Four Against Darkness, and various solo oracles like The Gamemaster's Apprentice cards and Mythic GM Emulator. Now, I'm obviously a fan of Mutant Crawl Classics, but I'm typically too busy running or writing adventures to find time to actually experience the game as "just another hapless 0-level Seeker". So this new series will chronicle my attempt to run myself through a solo MCC adventure -- beginning with a small quartet of 0-level hunter/gatherers -- and see what grows from there. And you'll be tagging along for the adventure, both to watch how this works (if it does) and to see how it unfolds along with me...
For this game, I'm going to be using the following rules and tools:
- MCC rulebook (of course)
- Mythic One-Page GM Emulator (the classic Mythic GME solo oracle, boiled down to a single page)
- Gamemaster's Apprentice Deck: Base Deck (a fantastic resource for randomizing items, objects, locations, NPCs, and everything else)
- Purple Sorcerer's MCC 0-level Party Generator (for my initial group of unskilled 0-level hunter/gatherers)
- a set of weird dice, paper, pens, etc.
And before I begin, here are the ground rules I set for myself:
- My randomly generated 0-level foursome will consist of a pure strain human, a mutant, a manimal, and a plantient, just so I have a good mix of genotypes and abilities to work with.
- To keep things from becoming too random in this first outing (while I work out the process and gameplay), I shall be running the team through "Rivers of Iron", the 0-level funnel found in the newest core MCC rulebook. Yeah, I wrote it, so I'm familiar with the locations and scenes, which may appear like it gives me a woefully unfair advantage. But I plan to introduce randomly generated hazards, challenges, and foes throughout, replacing the preprogrammed elements with new ones. I may be aware of the map's layout and the Big Scenes, but Fate Itself will determine what lurks within the ruins of the ironworks!
- In the posts that follow, the game play, dialogue, and color description will be in italics like this.
- Conversely, the mechanics and behind-the-scenes decision-making will be in normal text like this.
- I'm sure there might be some other nuances and details that will surface during play, but we'll talk those out as they occur.
So join me in the days to come as I venture into Terra A.D. during this series that I've titled "Solo Crawl Classics!"
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