Oops! It’s been a while. I’ve actually had a lot of gaming stuff going on lately that I haven’t gotten around to blogging about! For one, I kinda sorta went and wrote a game. More on that in another post. This one is about how my husband and I did a dungeon crawl through a published adventure without a DM (sorta)!

What we did

I’ve been tinkering with solo play lately, and today my husband was saw me fussing around with papers and maps and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was going to try to play Castle Xyntillan solo, without a DM. I asked if he’d like to join.

Given the deadliness of the dungeon, we decided to each run a small party of adventurers that was collaborating to delve the dungeon. We each rolled up 3 OSE characters, tracking them using a one-page tracking sheet I threw together.

This post is going to focus on how we made this work, rather than reporting on our session. Still, here is a short and very incomplete record of things we accomplished in about 3 or 4 hours of play:

  • Explored, like, a solid dozen rooms of the castle?
  • Had some fights, won a few.
  • Found some big shiny treasures.
  • Managed to parley our way out of a skirmish with a bunch of veteran skeletons.
  • Very nearly TPKed thanks to a nasty random encounter and a few bad rolls.

By all measures a pretty solid session!

We figured out exactly how to play as we went, but our n-GM framework came together pretty quick. In brief, we followed the guidelines below, which I cobbled together from a variety of excellent sources on solo RPGing (listed further on).

No-GM Dungeon Crawl Framework

  1. Write a default order of operations for your party – eg. When we find a door we do X, Y, and Z. At corridors we do blah blah blah. Stick to this unless you run into a situation where your characters cannot or following it would obviously be a bad idea. Remember, following your default order takes time, so there’s a balance to be struck between thoroughness and speed (at the potential cost of torches, oil, encounters, etc.)
  2. Take more time than you usually might to figure out character backgrounds and personalities. This can be tiring, especially if you have a lot of characters, so use whatever background/character detail tables you have handy. Let your understanding of the characters inform their decisions.
  3. Try to only read the parts of the module you’re engaging with right now. Obviously some modules make this easier than others.
  4. Use oracles1 and tables to fill out description a DM might. Ironsworn is free and has really good general purpose tables and procedures for this. Maze Rats and Knave have heaps of excellent tables for OSR stuff at a reasonable price. (EDIT: Kevin Crawford’s World Without Number is a D&D-type game with tables galore and a free edition.
  5. Procedurize what you can’t roll on a table. If you know a sourcebook that has a mechanic for something, use it. I grabbed bits from Ironsworn (an excellent solo engine on its own), the hireling and retainer rules from Castle X, various blog posts knocking around my head, etc. This is maybe the most free you’ll ever be to fuck around with mechanics at the table. Savour it.
  6. If you don’t have a table or a mechanic, just imagine and/or talk over what would be cool, how the consequences might play out, etc. Seriously, this led to some of the neatest moments in our game.
  7. And finally, Quantum spoilies: if you know something your character shouldn’t, you can either:
    • Figure out why your character knows it anyway, and/or, if that feels like cheating…
    • When you “use” the spoiler, ask an oracle whether it was true. A “no” might mean it was true in part but the specifics were wrong (eg. a treasure isn’t where you thought it was), a detail is changed (the treasure is cursed), or make a note of it for later. If you save it for later, ask the oracle if the quantum spoiler applies whenever you think it makes sense (“oh, is that treasure that was supposed to be in that other room actually in this room?”)

Some clarifications and remarks

Letting characterization take the lead sounds almost antithetical to the OSR playstyle, and it is up to you how much to lean into this. Given that you already might have more and better information than you should, I found this an interesting way to generate encounters and difficult situations. For instance, at one point we had managed to call a ceasefire with a very large group of skeletons. My husband suggested they’d want to “keep” the fighter they’d killed in the skirmish. I agreed. However, I thought my cleric might object to letting a fallen comrade be claimed by the living dead. On the other hand, starting a fight with the skeletons would almost surely lead to a rout. I decided to roll 2d6, one representing her zeal and the other her prudence to see which would prevail.2 Luckily, prudence won out. If you have an easier time than me just getting in your character’s head, for better or worse, you probably don’t need to hear this.

Maps and Rumours: Castle Xyntillan is better than most modules in terms of offering separate player and DM maps. For this game, I printed out both, stapling each DM map to the back of its corresponding player map. When we explored held my phone flashlight behind sheets so the DM map shone through the player one. I also used a PDF editor to remove the true/false/partial tags from the rumour table, so we could roll on it without knowing whether a given rumour was true or false.

How was it to play? A couple hours in, my husband remarked, “this is nice!” I agree. We like playing RPGs but don’t really enjoy running 1-on-1 games (it’s exhausting on the DM). This was decidedly more relaxed. I’d say we played at a slower pace than usual, as we had to spend more time figuring out how to deal with a spoiler or represent a given situation, but we also covered a lot of ground because there were only two of us. As a forever DM, it was a welcome change to let go of the reins a little when it came to making rulings. I think this more relaxed mood also helped us play for longer.

In short, I recommend it! Looking forward to doing it again!

Further reading

As I said earlier, a lot of our no-DM framework was cobbled together from the multitude of excellent solo RPG material now available online. I’ll list those that had the most influence on our session, with a few words about each.

  • Ironsworn RPG by Shawn Tomkin: If you check out one thing on this list, let it be Ironsworn. It is a full system for playing solo RPGs, with some of the tightest mechanical design I’ve ever seen in any game. Tomkin played games solo for decades before writing Ironsworn and you can tell; it has excellent insights into the challenges and pleasures of solo RPGing. It is a masterclass. Beyond the mechanics, it contains excellent advice (the bits about “everything is play” are especially eye-opening) and enough oracles to get most fantasy games off the ground in one single book. I know some players find it a bit too crunchy but if you want a complete and coherent vision of solo play that works right out the box, this is it. Cannot recommend it enough. P.S. It also has an excellent dungeon crawling supplement, a planet-hopping sequel, and setting for maritime campaigns.
  • Wizard Deadloss: A YouTube channel where one guy runs a party through an ongoing BECMI campaign using a series of published modules. 102 episodes and counting. I took some notes from him on handling the map and making “in-character” decisions. However, the main reason I recommend his channel to witness how he just sits down and plays without an elaborate solo framework.
  • Solo RPGs: Playing a Prewritten Adventure by RPGTips: A lot of good stuff on this guy’s channel but this video had the greatest impact on how I think about using published material. A major influence in “quantum spoilers”.
  • Solo Game Master’s Guide by Geek Gamers: Geek Gamers is a YouTuber and one of the most recognized voices in solo RPGing. She has a profoundly different brain from me and a lot of the ways she plays don’t quite click, but her book (and YouTube channel) nevertheless contain some very good advice. I learned a lot from the sections of assembling your solo kit and her advice to get a sense of the world and setting before you do character creation.
  • DM Yourself by Tom Schutt: A book on running published D&D adventures solo (albeit with a focus on 5e). Provides guidance on selectively skimming modules, a good worksheet for setting up your “default orders”, and a “AI combat tactics” tables for running enemies, among other things. Frankly, I think this book could be a few blog posts, but the price tag isn’t bad and it helped motivate me to try this out, so it goes on the list

  1. After I published this a friend of mine asked me what an oracle is, and I realized it’s kinda a solo RPG inside baseball term that merits defining here. In brief, an oracle is anything that generates an answer to player questions the way a DM might. Ironsworn has great oracles, and even better advice on how to use them. ↩

  2. This was inspired by Wizard Deadloss, who often uses d6s to “poll” his BECMI party to make group decisions. ↩