Despite playing wargames - both miniatures and boardgames - for many years, I have never played RPGs of any kind. I always thought you needed a DM/GM, so as a mainly solo wargamer I thought they were not something that would work for me in my context. However, this has changed over the last few months.
It all started with an RPG called Beowulf: Age of Heroes by Handiwork Games, an RPG designed to work with 5th Edition Dungeon and Dragons rules. This RPG is specifically designed to work with 1 player and 1 GM, although you can play it with more players. It is written and illustrated by John Hodgson, whose artwork also featured in many of the Warhammer Ancient Battles books and who also produces the backdrops you will see in many of the photos on this blog. Indeed, it was John's artwork that first caught my eye, as Beowulf is beautifully illustrated. Now, I like the whole Dark Ages period anyway, so the thought of playing games rooted in post-migration era Europe but with a fantastical, monster-hunting element really appealed. Even if I never played the RPG itself, I felt that there would be lots of ideas that I could use in my games.
So I ordered both the rulebook and the first supplement, The Trials of the Twin Seas. They are both gorgeous, hardback books packed full of really atmospheric artwork that evokes the period wonderfully and serves as inspiration before you have even read a word.
Obviously, Beowulf; Age of Heroes contains all the rules needed to play the RPG, but it also contains plenty of other useful information about the setting. There is a chapter describing the setting; the information here can readily be transported into a miniatures game to give your game plenty of period flavour. The rules for the RPG also contain lots of ideas that can transfer across - whether it is generating random encounters as your ship travels the Whale Road, coming up with particular characteristics or abilities for characters in a game, types of monsters you might face or generating random period names or the type of treasure you have found in the monster's lair.
The supplement, Trials of the Twin Seas, contains six RPG adventures. With a bit of tweaking, most of these could easily form the basis of scenarios for a wargame, the great thing being that they will not require much in the way of figures (not that that has stopped me from buying new models like the Vendel Era models from Medbury Miniatures, which are just perfect for representing warriors and heroes in the era of Beowulf. They even do models for the man himself!). The book also contains battlemaps for the various locations, which can be used with miniatures in the RPG game to resolve combat, but which also show you the features you might need to recreate the scenario as a wargame on the tabletop. Another interesting feature is the inclusion of flow-charts showing the various stages in the RPG adventure. They provide a very useful framework for converting an RPG adventure to a tabletop wargaming scenario and I have been toying with how this idea can be applied more widely in wargaming scenario design.
Handiwork Games produces various accessories for the game, like the Story Cards pictured above. These are quite a clever way of inspiring an adventure with prompts tailored to the themes of Beowulf. The way they work is that one side contains artwork with numbers where jewels might appear on an artefact. These numbers appear in different sequences on each card eg 1, 2, 3, 4 or 2, 1, 4, 4, 3. On the reverse are 4 prompts; so you draw cards and use the prompts that correspond to the number sequence on the first card eg if the sequence was 1, 2, 3, 4, you would draw a card and use the first prompt, then draw another card and use the second prompt, and so on until you had four (or more) prompts which you can put together in any order to set your adventure off. I thought these cards would also be an excellent resource for generating ideas for a scenario, so I got a pack!
As I said above, Beowulf: Age of Heroes is designed for 1 player and 1 GM, and so in that sense isn't really suitable for me as a solo wargamer. Having said that, the books are packed full of inspiration and ideas, so I have enjoyed reading them just for that and the lovely artwork they contain. Nevertheless, reading Beowulf: Age of Heroes did make me want to play it as an RPG, taking the part of a warrior battling monsters in the dark corners of the world! This got me to thinking whether there was such a thing as an RPG that could be played by just one person without the need for a GM. So I popped 'solo RPGs' into Google and discovered that solo RPGs are a booming part of the genre. Enthused, I saw that one solo RPG in particular called Ironsworn seemed to have lots of favourable reviews, so I decided to investigate further; what I found will form the basis of 'RPGs Part II (SPOILER ALERT: It's really good!).
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