Saturday, August 30, 2025

Solo Dungeons and Dragons (1974 - OD&D) - Part 1

 After the fiasco that has become the last attempt of trying to play Dungeons and Dragons Solo I had given up almost completely. I have played a bit on paper, but not too much. I read through Ironforged but it didn't inspire me to do solo play yet, too loosey goosey with the journaling. I need more rules. 

In came Daniel from Bandit's Keep with his Solo Campaign of the original Dungeons and Dragons. And I was hooked. I got myself all the PDF's and made a map to play the Outdoor Survival on. I am taking this one step at a time, so I don't have to process all the information at once as I did with Ironforged. 

So, here is how this works - I am following Daniel's Example (Check out his series, I recommend it):

  1. First I use the Outdoor Survival Map and place 6 treasures on it. I determine their location randomly by rolling for the column and row of the hexgrid 
  2. I send a single mapper (level 1 character) into the terrain to try and find that treasure, using the rules for Outdoor Survival from the game by Avalon Hill. 
  3. If the mapper found treasure, I will create an adventuring party to pick up on it - but that's the next part. 

First I am placing my treasure on the map and the setup starts to look like this: 
As you can see, my mapper (the red token) starts on the left side (determined randomly, as his location), quite near to some treasure. The trapper can move 6 hexes at the moment, until he is starting to become affected by lack of water and/or food. He can also survive on the map for 6 days/turns until he becomes so lost he'll never make it back. That number increases as the mapper levels up (we'll get to that later).

Each turn consists of the following steps:
  1. Roll for directional ability and move accordingly
  2. Check for water and food, change Live Level Index Accordingly
  3. Roll for and resolve random encounters
  4. End the turn, keeping score of how many turns the mapper has left before he needs a rest.
I don't know exactly how much of this is from the booklets and how much of this Daniel made up himself, but it is what I have now and I might adapt it later when I find another way fits my style better. 

Day 1

  1. I rolled a 1. That means I move my full speed in a straight line. Depending on the terrain each hex takes me 1 movement or more. I am in the plains so I take the full 6 hexes of movement towards the treasure.
  2. I did not pass any food, I check if I found water (on a 1 or 2 on a d6 I do) but I don't. I adjust my food and water index. No change yet to my speed.
  3. Check for random encounters using "The Overworld and Wilderness Encounters" (TOWE): In the plains an encounter happens on a 6 on a d6, which I roll, so now I have to resolve the encounter:
    • Determining the attacker: Using the random tables in TOWE I determine the following:
      Encounter in Plains => Lycanthropes => Wearbears 
    • Now in "Monsters and Treasures" (MT) I can find more info about how Wearbears. They come in groups of 2 to 20, so I roll 2d10 and determine that our mapper runs into 9 Wearbears. 
      There is a 15% chance that he found their lair, but I rolled a 32 on the percentile die so they are wandering instead.
    • Now we need to check if he can evade them. For that we turn back to TOWE and check the Evasion table. A single mapper against a group of Wearbears that is about 50% of their max size (9 out of  19) has a 70% chance to evade them. I roll a percentile dice to see, and with a 21 they evade the wearbears.
  4. The mapper can survive in the wild for 5 more days (I use foundry's HP system to keep track of that).
Day 2
  1. I rolled a 2 so again I need to move full speed in a straight line. This way I cannot get to the treasure so I'll move in the direction of the woods, where there is food.
  2. I did not pass any food and did not find any water. After two days without water my speed drops to 5 hexes per day
  3. No random encounter
  4. The mapper can survive for 4 more days until he needs to rest.
Day 3
  1. I rolled a 2 again, but this time I am moving through the forest, where each hex takes 2 movement. With my reduced speed I exit on the other side
  2. I passed food (the deer on the map) so I don't need to reduce that, but I did not find any water again.
  3. No random encounter
  4. The mapper can survive for 3 more days until he needs to rest, I need to move towards the edge of the map or I'll die.
Day 4
  1. I roll a 5 for directional ability. I still need to use my full movement but I can make one turn. I turn back and head North-West instead
  2. I passed both food and water (the lake) so I don't need to adjust my indexes. 
  3. No random encounter
  4. The mapper can survive or 2 more days until he needs to rest. 
Day 5
  1. I roll a 4 for directional ability, which works the same as a 5, allowing me one turn. I move through the treasure, marking it on the map. 
  2. I did not pass food, but I rolled a 2, so I did find water. I adjust my food index.
  3. A random encounter happens. Using the tables as explained on day 1 I determine the following encounter:
    • Plains Encounter => Animals => Boars => 19 our of 6-36 (52%) => 70% Evasion chance
    • I do however roll a 91 on the dice, which means I do not manage to evade. That means a pursuit begins. 
    • I start by rolling a d6. Starting in the North and circling clockwise this determines in what directions the boars chase our poor mapper. However, we are extremely lucky, because I roll a 1 and with that the boars chase us North, off the map.
    • There is no speed given for the boars (they count as small animals) but they would on the long distance not be faster than a man. So we escape and since our mapper is off the map he is save with the treasure.
Now it's time to determine what treasure he has found, using the Maps-table in MT. With a roll of 44 it is determined that the map our mapper draws leads to Treasure. The Treasure tables and two rolls determine this map leads to a treasure hoard of 5.000 Gold pieces. Not bad. Our mapper can sell that map for 500 Gold pieces and receives XP:
500 gold = 500 XP
2 encounters survived at lvl 1: 200 XP 
Total XP: 700 - Level up at 2000



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Solo Dungeons and Dragons (1974 - OD&D) - Part 1

 After the fiasco that has become the last attempt of trying to play Dungeons and Dragons Solo I had given up almost completely. I have play...