The Solo AD&D Fire Rises

Posted On October 10, 2023

It turns out I’m not the only one playing AD&D solo these days. I’m not even the only one with a blog discussing the results of my solo play. Today I present to you “Fort Cranium“, a newish quick recommendation today.  He started with a 5×5 map of 30 mile hexes, which are subdivided into 5 mile hexes of their own, a large are with plenty of room to explore, loot, and colonize.  Make sure you stick around for future episodes to see how a few dice rolls can spin up a wholy different experience.

The self training rules, and the rules for clearing a 30 mile hex gave me thought. If it’s possible to train by yourself, you could make a frontier campaign. A single outpost with only the bare essentials, and no high level characters to train you. Where the players would have to be the first high level characters that the game always assumes are on hand.

This raises an interesting point. You can drastically alter the experience of a solo play by imposing upon yourself extra challenges.  Fort Cranium I stacked the deck against himself in a way. With no high-level patrons to train up his characters, they will take a long time to train.  Interestingly, this may lead to some real world beneficial impacts.  The longer training times will slow his progression, which will free up his spare time. Although his campaign will operate at a slower speed, he will face significantly less time pressures keep his people moving moving moving all the time.

This also means he may have more time for the embellishments, those little activities that Donald Featherstone lovingly called ‘domestic wargaming’.  Planning of heraldry. Charting every stone in the base castle.  Character sketches.  And so on.

I have no idea if that was intentional on the author’s part or not. It is something you should consider in the event you sit down to a solo game of your own.