I got an email this morning and it touched on a couple of things. Firstly, I am happy that someone is enjoying my Stars Without Number solo rules. That is always nice to see.
The way I construct my solo rules is that I play the games and then I know what I want from the solo rules, so I try to recast the rolls and functions in the native dice, and conventions of the game I am playing. If that was D&D then a d20, high being good, would be my first reaction, for example.
The OSR rules mentioned in the email are one of my oldest sets of rules. When I was playing those sorts of games I found myself rolling 1d6 to check for wandering monsters. 1d6 to see if I could spot a secret door or sloping passage and 1d6 for kicking in a door.
If I needed an arbitrary roll, I rolled 1d6 and high was good and low was bad. When I started mucking about with the oldest of OSR rulesets, every weapon did 1d6 damage as well.
It is no surprise that the OSR solo rules ended up being driven by the humble d6.
When I wrote those rules I didn’t know that progress clocks existed, the same was also true about game-icons.net. I didn’t discover them until I bought Blades in the Dark.
Dungeon Crawl Classics
As it happens, I pocked up the recent humble bundle of DCC, but I have played it yet. This year I have been doing a mix of Wicked Onces, modern day Cthulhu stuff (Delta Green and Apocthulu) and playing some Rolemaster and 5e.
Goodman Games have a 3rd party license available, so they are at least open to the idea of people writing for DCC, and Mutant Crawl Classics as well by the looks of things.
I know there is at least one other person who would like to have the rules.
Finally, I know what to include, we want progress clocks, game icons for inspiration prompts, and a native feeling set of dice mechanics.
I really feels to me that there are almost no barriers to getting this done, and doing it quite quickly. The hardest part will be curating the collection of game icons to support the solo play.
I think this is going to be my next project, and a bit of a change from all the doom, gloom and hopelessness of the Cthulhu Mythos.