Today I put out my first Cut Up Solo supplement. The source material as you will probably know by now is The Hour of the Dragon, the first Conan Novella by Robert E Howard.
I have combined the two approaches I talked about last week. The PDF contains 2000 four or five word snippets, arranged in two d1000 tables.
The spreadsheets contain 16900 snippets and a sheet that randomly grabs 20 snippets for you.
The spreadsheets, Open Document Format and Excel, are a lot faster, and offer a better search function for when you want that special keyword. The downside is that it ties you to the computer screen.
The PDF can be worked with just dice and a pencil, or if you are on screen copy’n’paste.
Two Tribes
It certainly feels like there are two different styles of play with this style of solo play. The literal and the elaborated.
You can piece together the snippets and make them into a sentence or paragraph that are the literal words of the virtual GM. In the book I even mention that if I tried to GM a game in German, I would probably sound like a collection of cut up snippets. This method I am finding harder. It is the most different from what I am used to, which naturally makes it slower and slightly more awkward.
The second style is to take the strung together snippets and use them like you would the two word answers that something like Mythic would give you. Only this time you have so much more to work with. There is still a lot of your own creativity on the page. You have to choose which snippets to use. It is almost a case of you have to look at the snippets and decide what scene can you build from these words. If the answer is none, grab some more words.
I am favouring the second style. Having such a descriptive oracle is quite fun. I am also favouring the spreadsheet over the PDF.
What is equally exciting is that I am building a Fantasy Grounds module with all the snippets built in. It is a long time since I have created a FG module, and that was using FG Classic. Since then I have upgraded to Unity, but it doesn’t look like much has changed. It is just slower now.
When the FG module is written, it will contain all the text from the PDF, the basic oracle will be automated as a table, and all the snippets will be in there. The module will be controlled via a Story element, and your chat log will be your journal.
It that is the plan at least. It is work in progress, and things change.