I will probably try my hand at fictional writing soon, getting Malik to get on board the No Refunds. But first, a quick review of the SOLO book itself.
I've been reading over the PDF, but really prefer real paper. Call me old fashioned, but I seem to better grasp things written down on paper. The book showed up yesterday, and I've given it a once over. It is well made, and fairly large type (yay - see that old fashioned thing before? My eyes are getting old too!). But having a book means I can go through the pages, go back to re-read something easily. And I can carry it anywhere.
It is well laid out, and he gives some good examples of play. There are essentially four play types, each with its own sequence of events and encounters. There are also shared encounters, and some additional explanations of what he is trying to accomplish as well as the how. The four play types translate well to the way I've played Traveller over the years. The Travellers are just that: adventurers roaming the stars and looking for adventure. The Star Traders focus more on trade, and include the option of trading without a starship (this was an article somewhere in the JTAS, and something I've thought of playing around with a while ago). The Navy rules have you playing on a small Naval vessel. Finally, the Scouts have you exploring new systems, and doing the system generation.
I'll be going through the Star Traders system, which has basically the same recipe as the other rules. Roll for planet-side stuff, roll for cargoes either at the port or across the planet, maybe roll for encounter as you go to jump, roll for something to happen during the week in jump space, and emerge, roll for a space encounter, and back on the planet. It is how you interpret and play at those various rolls that essentially makes the game. Additionally, some of those rolls may require the Plan, and then more dice rolls to figure out if you succeeded or failed, and if you had positive or negative consequences. Then you back-fill that story. It does seem like an interesting system that I am eager to actually play.
There are other options for solo play. Some interesting posts I've found:
Playing ALONe With Traveller
Freelance Traveller - Doing it My Way
Shaun's Solo Traveller
COTI thread
And of course a link to the rules I am using: Zozer Games
and dang typo in the title, supposed to be 0.91 and ended up 0.01. Although that is fitting as well, my intent was to keep things sequential. And now any links are set to 0.01. Hmm, well, sort of makes sense as this is the source of where this solo effort came from, so I guess I'll leave it as is
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