Later on today [Monday 31st] I will be releasing my Coriolis Solo booklet.
The rules are called Zenith Solo, in a nod to the generation ship at the heart of the setting.
This will be the first book I have released in a very long time that I cannot put on my own store, Itch, Lulu, and Amazon.
Because it is part of the Free League Workshop, I am confined to selling it purely on DriveThruRPG.
Scroll Down to find out how to get a 40% discount on this title, and future releases.
Zenith Solo uses the standard Zero Engine dice pool. The yes-no answers start with a 6 dice pool, any sixes rolled count as a yes, and the more sixes giving a more emphatic yes answer.
No sixes is a flat no.
I decided against going down the No; No, but…; No, and…; route for this set.
The reason I didn’t want greater degrees of negative answers is because of the Darkness Between The Stars. While you are playing you can push rolls and pray to the Icons. This gets you a re-roll, either to try a failed skill test again, or to try and get a better success.
Every time you do that, the GM gets a darkness point that can be spent against you. You can also accumulate darkness points through your own actions and from stressful experiences.
In solo play, there is no GM to decide when to spend those darkness points. So, I put rules in place that when the pool of points hits a specific threshold the points get spent. This is a check that is made at the end of each scene, and the consequences happen in the following scene.
I use the standard adventure format, Prolog, Act I, II, III, Epilog and show how that uses the standard 5 room dungeon format. The Epilog is often the point where a final plot twist pulls the rug from under the characters. That could be unintended consequences, or problems with payment or the villain was not the one pulling the strings after all (your nemesis in the wings). The more darkness points you have in the pool when you enter the Epilog stage is worse the final outcome could be.
I have been doing a lot of d66 lists. I got into doing these for Wickedly Solo, a forged in the dark game. I have been playing Alien RPG recently and my house rules for that game uses themed d66 tables. These rules use 14 themed d66 lists, to pull inspiration prompts from. You pick two or three columns and roll for random words, then see what you make of them.
The rules also encourage you to start building your own custom lists, so you can flavor your solo game around the way you want to play.
Here are some sample pages, so you get an idea of what I mean.
This is really a whistle stop tour of the coriolis solo rules, it only has the three core ideas, yes-no dice pool, complex questions word lists, and an expansion on the 5 room dungeon format to make use of darkness points.
One reason the rules are so simple is because the year zero engine is so solo friendly by default.
These solo rules should be released in about 7hrs from now.