Disciples of Bone and Shadow: Solo OSR RPG Review
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- Опубліковано 7 лют 2022
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QUESTING KNIGHT PATRONS!
Adam Waselnuk
Alex Dzuricky
Christian Lindke
Craig Chouraki-Lewin
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Eric from Bloat Games
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fickle
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Zix - Ігри
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Author here, thanks so much for reviewing this! I must admit I agree with most of your notes, I'm applying the lessons learned on my next games.
any chance we see a "seekers beyond the shroud" with new additions like that in DBS? i mean, mechanics for developing solo rpg elements like threads, oracles for open questions... that kind of stuff.
@@CALPURNI0 yes, the Narrative Playbook expansion for Seekers Beyond the Shroud is exactly that, plus much more! Let's hope Exalted Funeral releases it sooner rather than later.
Seems super interesting! Definitely have to keep this in mind.
Was super psyched about this product after the review. To see it was not available to buy made me instantly uninterested. I don’t like digital rpg books. I like to hold an actual tome in my hands. Hard pass until you reprint for the masses.
@@Tom-pk4ye as far as I know the softcover is still available via Exalted Funeral.
Really nice to see a review of a solo game! I would love to see more of these
The idea of a tidal-locked game world seems really interesting. It's a place where conflict is abundant, because there's all the fewer resources to go around. It's ripe for thematic duality, since you've got the darkness beyond one horizon and the scorching light beyond the other.
And the zones normally unfit for habitation could still provide avenues for adventure.
Sunny Side: Need to have some kind of magic spell or armor to shield from the baking heat and blinding light. Lands inhabited by fire/earth elementals, metal folk, floating sapient crystals, or beings made of pure light. A city/temple built in the shadow of a high mountain. Immense domes of frosted glass, built by an impossibly ancient race (dead, dying, or degenerate), under which persists an overgrown, thriving jungle ecosystem. A ziggurat built at the place where the sun is highest in the sky, the Temple of Eternal Noon.
Dark Side: Must bring your own light, food, and warmth. A desolate, frozen, lightlesd wasteland. Interspersed with recessed areas, ecosystems subsisting off volcanic vents deep in the earth. A paradise city of the dead, where millions of corpses mime the lives they used to live. Tomb cities of an ancient, forgotten empire, now mummies waiting out eternity. The fortress of yeti raiders, who mount enormous albino bats to fly to the middle ring to raid, pillage, and feast. A city of ice spires, lit by luminescent ghosts enslaved to a Lich Lord's will. Kingdoms of snow, water, wind, and shadow elementals. A yawning, self-aware cloud of darkness, waiting for the dying of the light so it may reign supreme as it did before the world was made.
Exactly! The setting in the core book is centered around the habitable area closer to the dark side, so it's a dark and cold place. I had plans for an expansion set in the central area, where life is easier and lots of city-states fight for control of dwindling resources. And a writer was working on the area near the sunny side, the Scorched Wastes, with pretty cool faction play. I hope Exalted Funeral decides to release it all!
There is some great stuff here.
Exalted Funeral: re-release that hardboi!
I need to figure out how to find these gems while they're still in the funding stage, I would have killed for this in hardback if I knew.
I started playing this a couple weeks ago thinking it was a lightweight solo game - it is not. This is a chunky OSR game up there with the best of them. Could easily be played with a group.
Yeah, a lot of people play it co-op, actually!
Hello everyone. This is great. Reading it rn after purchase. Thanks for the suggestion.
Roll under but with d100 seems like a really good system, just because PCs can level up for a lot longer and get stronger and stronger, compared to roll-under d20 where once you get your attributes up to 20 you've reached the cap.
Thanks for the shout out!
Not just one of my favorite solo rpgs, but one of my favorite rpgs overall.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Ben! If you have played through this or other solo RPGs yourself, I would be very interested in hearing about your experience.
I recently picked up The Outcast by Cezar Capacle, a much smaller solo RPG book, but haven't had a chance to sit down and play it yet.
The Outcast is great! The world building alone is outstading
Speaking of gameplay examples at 18:00, are there any Maze Rats actual play examples you could point me towards?
The physical appearance seems quite nice. I will need to look into this one and see if it lives up to the visual appearance.
Ah, Solo RPG's. A writer's best friend in a lot of ways.
Very cool.
When creating a character, do your skills max out at 50? Or can you increase a skill by 50? For example, First Aid starts at 20. Can you put 50 points in First Aid at character creation to get it to 70? Or are you capped at putting 30 points in to get it to 50?
Do you think this game can be played coop (2-3 players)?
Sounds appealing to me. Unfortunately none of my buddies or family have any interest in playing RPGs with me... I've read dnd books and watched videos about them for years but never played!
Yeah I found myself without a group and that's what got me into solo RPGs. It's not the exact same experience but at least you get to explore a world and have a good time!
That’s why I solo RPG and I love it
I once tried to convince my girlfriend to play and she looked at me with such seething hatred and anger I never dared again!
That's why this is a solo trpg man... You don't need anybody else to play it
@@haveanotherpinacolada seething hatred and anger? I hope you're exaggerating a bit because otherwise that's kinda unhealthy-sounding
Is it just me or is the whole solo rpgs thing growing? I use MUNE and 5 Room Dungeons for my games and a few random tables, might check this out though, thanks for the review
It is growing for sure! Since the pandemic, interest has sky-rocketed, for obvious reasons.
I'm curious how different running an OSR/D&D-style game solo or co-op is from running something like Ironsworn, which I guess is PbTA.
In my humble opinion it's easier, because anything PbtA-related uses moves and things like that, which require you to do even more heavy-lifting, as they're too vague. When I'm soloing I like having as many clear rules and external resources as possible because it means less decision-making, which forces you to don the "GM-hat" and breaks immersion. That's of course my opinion, I must admit I like book-keeping and tracking things clearly.
@@alejotm000 Good points. I'm running Ironsworn in a co-op game with a friend right now, and I'm definitely going to check out your game and try it out. Thanks for the work you did in making it.
@@josephkrausz9557 don't get me wrong, Ironsworn is a fantastic game, but I personally found combat a bit confusing and too vague for my taste, and not getting proper loot is also a let down for me, haha. Thanks for your interest in my work! You can check out the free, basic version, it's available on Exalted Funeral's website.
Nice book!
i actually believe that Basic Roleplaying was derived from Runequest.
And people make fun of me for playing solo RPGS
Boots of the thief.....hmm I guess if you didn't have a water source you could just pee on them?🤣
Barbarian PrInCe Expert set
How is that OSR? What old school played this solo free form table fed complex game? That label applied here actually confuses more than informs, in my opinion.
That put aside, it looks like a lot of work was invested, and it is a beautiful product. Sounds like a great idea repository. Thanks for the review.
In 1975 Gygax created a solo rules system for DnD. Which I would consider old school, plus old school DnD had a lot of tables. So if you use his solo rules with 1E , B/X, BECMI, you're going to be rolling on a lot of tables
@@pewprofessional3181 Cool! Going after those Gygax rules. Sometimes those labels are tricky to grasp... Why would D&D 5e not be old school, for instance, if many of it's aspects come from it's original versions? While a lot of products use new mechanichs and game philosophies and are pointed out as being part of the old school movement.
Thank you for the answer!
As the game creator I'm very wary of labeling this as OSR. It has the old school design sensibilities, for sure, but it's in no way compatible with any type of D20 ruleset.
@@alejotm000 Congratulations on the product, it looks beautiful and I look forward to gettin' my hands on it! I'm a designer myself and through this review it's apparent you've put a lot of work in your book. Thanks for the answer and take care!
@@seitambem No problem! Glad I could help. It's The Strategic Review 1975 where you can find the solo rules. As for 5e...I'm probably not the one to be able to answer that in a matter of fact way. But from what I've seen so far there was a very structured and simple rules format that basic (B/X, BECMI,) DnD followed, that 5e doesn't quit have. Also, If you look at the character sheets they are very minimal, compared to 3.5 5e, etc. Which didn't take away from what you could do, it actually made the players have to role-play and describe what they were doing in more detail and it usually fell under a simple attribute test. Also in 5e it's more combat focused, you are pretty much a badass from lvl 1 and get experience from slaying monsters, as opposed to old school where you are a nobody, very fragile and gold and treasure was your motivation and where you got your experience from. So combat was deadly and it took a lot more thinking, strategy and being crafty to get by the lurking dangers to get that treasure or artifact. Playing for gold instead of playing to kill as many monsters as you could totally changes the motivations and the way players play the game. A lot of the OSR games stick pretty close to that old school DnD playstyle and rules format. OSR games are often very deadly combat, where what's on your character sheet doesn't tell you how to play your character, the player gets challenged more than the character, that doesn't mean people play OSR for the combat. There's no "hack and slash" style gameplay.
It just means that if and when combat happens in an OSR game, it's a life-or-death situation. The idea is to subvert or avoid those deadly situations as much as possible with your own ingenuity.
As someone who has never done solo RPGs (apart from Fighting Fantasy etc.), I'm not sure I understand what makes this particularly useful for this type of game.
It has a series of tools that allows you to play it without the GM's input. This is done through a series of oracles and other tables that should be able to answer virtually any question that arises during gameplay, and most importantly, keep you engaged and surprised by the story's unexpected turns.
In a lot of ways the perfect solo has yet to be designed, the field is still very experimental or too tied to traditional RPG mechanics.
I’ve tried a number of these systems, so far Ironsworn has been the best solo experience from an open ended game design.
You need to mechanize the story in some way, either through Choose Your Own Adventure designs (ie author as a proxy GM) or through including story considerations as part of the rules (for example, Ironsworn’s Oaths define adventure arcs, challenge level, and character progression).
@@johnmickey5017 yeah, still a lot of room for improvement, for sure! My games are definitely not the CYOA type, it would fall closer to Ironsworn, I suppose (although with more granularity, I personally dislike how vague some aspects of gameplay are in Ironsworn, but that is mostly due to its PBtA roots).
@@alejotm000 I left out the importance of a good oracle system. Robust setting / adventure + tailored oracle might be the winning mix in the end.
Ultimately the challenge is providing just the right information and extra structure, without being too constricting or too open-ended.
I don’t usually like PbtA but I felt it brought a lot of needed narrative structure and purpose to what can be an often unfocused play experience.
Excited to see what you do next!
Solo rpgs right now its a misnomer, these are not like playing a traditional rpg but solo, they are more like creativity games. True solo rpg imo has yet to be made
17:30 going to disagree with you a bit - I think the old Fighting Fantasy books and more modern adventures in their style are a lot better as they have a clear narrative and story to follow.
The open world ones just never really come together imo.
However each to their own.
Ok, follow up. Everyone is likely encountering the 87 page Basic edition. As the item in the video is 250 or so pages, there is CLEARLY something missing from my experience thus far. And it appears finding the 250 page version is going to take a while. My thoughts on the Basic file, is yawn. It's a 6 cliche stat, no classes no non humans, design. A VERY brief bestiary and not a great deal more product. It is best described as a sort of game book. What we see displayed here in the video, is NOT what most of the public is getting. And as this video is 2 years old...
I do not recommend the free version, it lacks the most important thing of the whole book, how to ai the game. Also i have several complains regarding the writing, the book is IMO poorly written. The things are scattered out without a context. Overall i like the game, i bought it directly from the publisher. Oh and the game have the worst cover i ever saw, even blank black should be ten times better that this logo.