Sablemage
Demi-God
In a nutshell: Second edition of the solo gaming supplement for Traveller. 178 page PDF from Zozer games, written by Paul Elliott, $12 here at time of writing.
Intentionality
I went to DriveThruRPG to re-download Solo, and had three pleasant surprises; first, there is now a second edition of Solo; second, I have a free copy of it in my library, I assume because I bought the first edition some time back; and third, the first edition, while no longer available, is still in my library - I expected it to be overwritten by the new edition. The second and third surprises are very welcome and by no means as common as I would like, so full marks to Zozer for customer service there, as always.
First Impressions
The first thing I noticed was that the layout has been completely revamped. It has a more modern look, with better use of colour, and is just easier to read than the first edition. Also, the random tables have been collected together at the back of the book, rather than being scattered through the chapters; that addresses one of my key problems with the first edition, namely having to flip between sections so much in play - I eventually printed out the pages with the tables I needed, and arranged them in a binder in my preferred sequence.
The second big change is the addition of two new campaign types, mercenaries and scavengers. The scavengers campaign draws heavily on Zozer's Hostile Solo, and I suspect the mercenaries one draws on Zozer's Modern War, but I don't have that so that remains a suspicion.
How It Works
Solo approaches solitaire play a little differently than most solo RPG supplements.
- Rather than the style of campaign emerging during play, or being predefined before you start, your first decision is which of the six types of campaign you're going to play; travellers, traders, scouts, naval officers on patrol, scavengers or mercenaries. Or you can make up your own campaign type by mixing and matching components.
- Rather than playing a single PC who picks up friends along the way, right from the beginning you're playing an entire band of adventurers; this is solo troupe play, and its purpose is to focus you on strategy and outcomes rather than the minutiae of individual dice rolls.
- Rather than playing through scenes in detail, you define a plan, rate it for chances of success and levels of danger, then resolve it with a couple of dice rolls. You then go back and construct a narrative to explain how things played out to get the team to that conclusion. This is a bit like resolving an entire scene, or even scenario, with a Traveller task chain or a SWADE Quick Encounter, and is a deliberate design choice made to avoid getting bogged down in setting up, and rolling for, hundreds of low-level decisions and effects.
So, a game consists of a setup phase in which you decide on a campaign, generate characters to suit, and assign them a world or subsector to adventure in (and maybe a ship). The campaign type defines the team's overall purpose and is the thematic skeleton out of which subplots and storylines will grow.
Then, you cycle round a core gameplay loop specific to that campaign type which generates events, encounters, and missions until a scenario emerges, let's say you need to rescue someone from kidnappers. You create a plan to handle the situation, and describe it in a few sentences. You rate the plan as flaky, solid or foolproof, and dangerous or not. You assess the characters and decide whether their skills and characteristics warrant applying any modifiers to dice rolls. Then you roll dice to determine the outcome, and finally write down what happened and how it generated that outcome, in whatever level of detail you think appropriate.
And then it's back to the core gameplay loop.
(Something I often forget personally is that there is nothing stopping you dropping out of resolving a plan to (say) play through a firefight using the standard rules.)
What You Get
The book opens with the best explanation I've seen yet of why you might want to play solo, then moves into an overview of how to do so, explaining how the rules gradually build plotlines and the various ways to resolve events. Each aspect of the 'how to' is further detailed in subsequent chapters.
The next section looks at characters in more detail; how many should there be, how are they connected, how to create them. Note that in Solo a fair amount of the game is driven by the bonds between characters, whether positive or negative, and random events invoking them. Note also that only the bare bones of personalities and bonds are created initially, the rest emerges during play; for this reason the author recommends not using Traveller's Connections rule during character generation.
Then, more detail on resolution; resolving tasks, scenes, yes/no questions, inspiration tables, and when not to use any of those methods. ('Scene resolution' used to be called 'the Plan', but it's the same thing.)
This is followed by 'Building Plot'; passage of time, random encounters, law level checks, NPCs, interactions between characters, and how all this creates emergent storylines. This is about the framework which moves you from scene to scene and links them into storylines.
There is a short section on the importance of 'writing it down'; partly this forces the player to commit to a decision, partly it allows you to set the game aside and return to it some time later. In the same way that first edition Mythic tells you to keep lists of NPCs and plot threads, Solo recommends maintaining lists of allies, enemies, other NPCs, ships, and storylines, all at the back of your campaign journal. (Personally, I have found the journaling aspect of solo play to be one of its most enjoyable aspects.)
There are six chapters on the different types of campaigns, each of which has specific, tailored encounter tables and rules - for example, the Scouts campaign has quite a bit of information on surveying planetary surfaces, which is not really required in other types of game. The star traders campaign relies on the starship operations and trade rules in the Traveller rulebook, and is perhaps the thinnest subsection; other campaigns introduce more mechanics for their specific requirements.
After those, a chapter on starships, which begins with a section on fast-play space combat, then moves into detailing six different types of starships; these include deck plans for a subsidised merchant, and shout-outs to several of the Moon Toad ship files.
The examples of play and random tables have been collected together and moved to the back of the book, and the example of play for a star trader campaign includes a map and world stats for a subsector of space. (The other examples of play are survey scouts and mercenaries.)
Finally we close with a selection of quick reference sheets and blank forms; character, ship and system survey sheets, plus subsector, hex and square grids.
What's New in Second Edition?
Quite a bit, actually. This edition is specifically aimed at Traveller, rather than Cepheus Engine as the first edition was, but that doesn't make much difference.
- Improved layout, with periodic colour artwork. Easier on the eyes, easier to use at the table. Although personally I preferred the minimalist styling of the first edition cover, which was reminiscent of the Classic Traveller Little Black Books.
- Two new campaign types, scavengers and mercenaries. The scavs have detailed rules for salvage and asteroid mining, and a random interior generator for abandoned ships and stations; the mercs have rules for acquiring and carrying out contracts, which may be one-off missions or longer deployments to a battle zone where they face multiple engagements, each with its own objectives, encounters and complications; in the case of battle zones, random events also happen when you are resting up at a base between missions, and the overall state of the war changes randomly around you.
- Quick animals. These are part of the Mercenaries chapter, but really you can use them anywhere.
- Inspiration tables, each containing 36 random words, for use when sparking ideas to do with ships, urban or wilderness environments, personnel, actions, themes, or personalities.
- Spotlights. If nothing much is happening, or the dice are ignoring some team members, generate two words as a prompt for what a character is doing, or thinking.
- Half a dozen starship types with statblocks and descriptive text. These are the sort of ships you would assign to a PC group, rather than encounter randomly.
What I Think
I've used the first edition of Solo on and off since about 2017, and I've kept coming back to it; based on that I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a Traveller or Cepheus Engine solo supplement. This second edition is better-looking and covers more campaign types, but at its heart it is the same engine as before and works the same way. It's also reasonably priced.
Solo is aimed at Traveller, but actually it works with any SF RPG so long as you know a few things about each world and whether your PCs are especially good or bad at particular tasks. I used it with Savage Worlds for years, and it worked just fine. I also used the naval officers campaign as the basis for a group Traveller game, in which the PCs were the senior crew of a patrol vessel, and I'm toying with the idea of using the star traders campaign as a way of injecting random events and further scenarios into the Aslan Route campaign, so you may see that pop up in a week or three.
I feel Solo is best suited to a slow-burn slice-of-life game where the plotlines emerge organically over time, rather than a slam-bang pulp action adventure. It also deliberately de-emphasises detailed combat, allowing you to run multiple characters without the game bogging down in hundreds of dice rolls. So, most of a campaign occurs between the action sequences, focussing instead on relationships within the party, and with the NPCs they meet and the environments they inhabit. It's cerebral rather than visceral.
If that sounds like the kind of game you want to play, Solo is definitely worth a look.
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