Sablemage
Demi-God
This is both a retrospective of play and a review of sorts, based on reading the game in detail and playing it solo for about 50 hours using multiple different PCs, some recorded on my blogs and some offscreen.
Review
Scarlet Heroes is a sandbox fantasy game intended for a GM and 1-2 players or solo play. In 130 pages you get a complete game built on the bulletproof B/X D&D chassis, a basic but perfectly serviceable setting, and GM tools, monsters, and magic items tailored for that setting. Published by Sine Nomine Publishing in 2014, and still an Adamantine Best Seller on DriveThruRPG, where it currently retails for $15, or less if you wait for it to be on offer. I originally reviewed it here and played the odd session or two to try it out, but this is my first extended playthrough.
This is – I think – the final volume in Kevin Crawford’s Sunset Isles sequence, following Red Tide (campaign sourcebook and sandbox toolkit), An Echo, Resounding (domain level play), and The Crimson Pandect (magic rules expansion), which were all aimed at Labyrinth Lord. After Scarlet Heroes, the author’s interests in fantasy moved on, first to Spears of the Dawn (an excellent RPG with an African-inspired setting) and later to Worlds Without Number (which is more of a science-fantasy game and doesn’t appeal to me as much as the others).
The plot, as Jill Bearup would say, it goeth thusly: Some centuries ago the evil demons of the Red Tide conquered a mediaeval world, except for a small group of islands where survivors from many cultures have taken refuge. Unfortunately these islands were already occupied by various goblinoid tribes who did not take kindly to the newcomers. Now, the Red Tide lurks offshore, seeking to lure cultists into doing its bidding, while the goblinoids, elves, dwarves, halflings and various human cultures beat the stuffing out of each other for control of the now-limited amount of habitable land. The humans are analogues of the D&D player’s favourite warrior cultures (feudal Japan, Vikings etc.) plus something a bit like the Holy Roman Empire (or possibly the Swiss Confederation) but without gunpowder; I think that’s for the Warhammer players. Unusually, the dominant power is pseudo-Chinese.
The genius of the game is in the rules overlay. A few quite small changes – the way damage dice are interpreted, the ability to trade hit points for narrative control, and the Fray die which all PCs have – mean that a single hero can take on modules intended for 4-8 characters with a reasonable chance of survival; but as we’ve recently seen, PCs are still mortal. PCs also have a number of Traits such as “Fearless Ruin Explorer”, “Knows Many Thieves”, or “Contempt for Pain” which act as a further overlay giving them contacts, reputations, and so on, while also acting as skills for skill checks and roleplaying. The rules are highly modular and portable, and it would be the work of minutes to port them to any other OSR game or port that game’s monsters and spells to SH; if I did that, I’d use Old School Essentials.
In the Red Tide setting as written, as in B/X D&D, there are no elven, dwarven or halfling clerics, and no dwarven or halfling magic-users, but the Scarlet Heroes rules don’t specifically enforce this, leaving it to the GM to decide; the game merely gives non-human characters particular Traits to embody their racial features.
Retrospective of Play
I can see why so many solo RPG enthusiasts use the B/X D&D engine as their rules set. It’s almost indestructible and remains simple enough not to get in the way of play; these are features I value more as I get older, and especially for solo play. My opinions on Scarlet Heroes specifically:
- The rules are almost perfect for solo fantasy roleplaying, and I suspect they would be easy to reskin for other genres. I’ll probably try that in the not-too-distant future, as if that works SH can replace the Mythic GM Emulator in my usual loadout.
- The Sunset Isles setting strikes me as a bit of an acquired taste, and it’s one I haven’t acquired yet; I can’t settle to the Chinese or Japanese cultures, though I might try a Skyrim-inspired game among the Norse-adjacent skandr peoples.
- As usual with SNP products, the GM tools are peerless, although if you don’t rein yourself in, your campaign will drown in fractal layers of exploding detail. Follow the author’s advice and treat NPCs as monsters with perhaps one or two Traits and spells.
- I liked the diagram dungeon generation rules in SH, but I found using Axebane’s Deck of Many Dungeons was faster and less work when I was low on time and energy, so I’ll add that to the stack as well.
- The game isn’t terribly clear on how quickly a solo PC should advance in wilderness or dungeon adventures, but other kinds of PC get one XP after each session of gaming, and for a while now I’ve felt that a ‘session’ is roughly four blog posts, so I’m using that as a guideline.
In summary, this game meets my cravings for simple solo play with complex, emergent storylines, and Old School D&D-a-likes; it’s likely to become a permanent addition to my ‘go-to’ RPG pile.
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