A Bit of Urgency


Sometimes, a solo sandbox game can lack a bit of drive to push it forward. If the adventures don’t exist until you are generating them on the fly, you may need some ignition point to get the adventure going. Once you have finished one adventure, you start the process again. Where does the next adventure come from?

At the end of that first adventure, and after following adventures as well, you can look back and try to find anyone who lost out as a result of your character’s actions. Surely not every bad guy is dead? What about the not strictly bad guys, but those that can profit from others’ misfortune?

Revenge is a Powerful Motive

Once you can find someone who fits this profile, you can use revenge as a motivator. Nearly all oracles have a tool or option for creating complications or interrupted scenes. You now have someone whom you can use as a source of those interruptions.

You can do this as a two-step process. If you get a complication or interruption, as the oracle, was Mr(s). X the cause? If you get a yes, then maybe the person you wronged or upset in your previous adventure has hired someone to exact their revenge, or to beat you to some prize. Whatever fits your current adventure and is within their capabilities, as you imagine them.

As you adventure so you will pick up more people who have suffered at your hands. You can go from a single Mr(s). X to a small random table of potential people working against you.

What havoc could a surviving coven member wreak against you?

A fun exercise then becomes examining each of these people, or organisations, and deciding to what lengths they are prepared to go. A wronged merchant who missed out on selling grain at inflated prices probably wouldn’t want to start hiring assassins, but zealots who survived your destruction of their temple and enclave would probably have no problem with that. What havoc could a surviving coven member wreak against you?

It can almost become a minigame in its own right, deciding what these people would be prepared to do, and who of your other loose ends they would be prepared to work with? You can then set up timers, countdowns, or clocks to see when these factions discover each other, and then when they decide to cooperate.

When you throw a complication, you can then ask the oracle if it is one of these groups, if you get a yes, you can roll on your table of wronged people out for revenge, but if you get a yes, and… then you could look at the ones who would be prepared to work together. What if those zealots now have magical backup from the remnants of that coven?

Rather than just being a murder hobo moving from town to town killing everything that gets in your way, you have introduced consequences that can rumble on for the rest of the campaign.

There is a Dr. Who storyline, Matt Smith as Doctor, I think, where all his opponents come together to try and finish the doctor off once and for all, or lock him into some time prison. That is the kind of thing you can build towards without ever having to plan it in one go, or knowing at the start of the campaign that this is how it will end. You can just grow it organically as you upset minor bad people along the way. As you grow in power, some of them will as well.

As I said above, revenge can be a powerful motive!

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