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solo_knightFirst Impressions: Rangers of the Midden Vale
What is it?
A Celtic mythology-inspired game where you are playing as rangers: people who travel around and solve problems.
The mechanics seem a little bit DnD Light: you still get the same six stats, a limited set of skills. There are tables to roll up a sinewy ranger with a soft face and wavy hair who wears war paint, who is curious but deceitful, and who uses formal speech. Their cloak is faded.
(Give me Colorful Characters any day. This is the sort of character creation I was talking about when I said 'mechanical creation does nothing for me'. That's not a person I can bring to life.)
Tools
A polyset (minus d%), as well as d2/d3 (just appropriate a d4/d6 if you don’t own any)
Price:
$5
Verdict
🧊Put on Ice
⛏️ Pickup game (potentially)
This was not created to be played solo, but there’s this solo play (endorsed by the creator) and I got it from a solo bundle, so I’m counting it as a solo game, but it looks like a good game to play with a group as well.
The solo play uses a lot of additional solo resources, so I'd have to see how well this plays with just the book rather than a lot of supplementary materials.
The book has useful tables of gear (with cost and weight), a list of weapons with their hit dice, and other items more, and here the streamlined nature of the game is making it immensely accessible. The list may be limited to four types of potion - healing, antivenom, poultice (anti disease) and a bravery elixir, but player and DM know exactly what they do. Compared to tiny dungeon’s ‘you can have anything you like, but you need to make it up first’ it may be more restrictive, but it reduces the mental load to near zero.
At this point, I have absolutely no idea how balanced this game is. This has a strong resource management flavour, which I’m not usually in favour of. Events and encounters are determined by tables rather than solely prepped by the game master (there's advice on encounter design, so you're not railroaded), and I can see why this suggested itself for solo play.
I can see how this may be limiting for group play because the story that is told depends a lot on dice rolled; on the other hand, this may be a great pickup game for sessions when not enough people make it to the table or when you want to play a one shot or try your hand at GMing without the rigidity of a module or the demands of homebrew. Similarly I can see this as a solo tool ready at hand: once you’ve rolled up a pool of rangers you can send a few out for a game session if you don’t want to spend time engaging with a new system.
So definitely something I'll keep around, study more, and will probably try as a solo game at some point.
I'm definitely keeping this around as a book of random tables; the enemies might or might not transfer to other settings, but the locations are definitely useful, and the list of potential enemy traits is short and to the point.
What is it?
A Celtic mythology-inspired game where you are playing as rangers: people who travel around and solve problems.
The mechanics seem a little bit DnD Light: you still get the same six stats, a limited set of skills. There are tables to roll up a sinewy ranger with a soft face and wavy hair who wears war paint, who is curious but deceitful, and who uses formal speech. Their cloak is faded.
(Give me Colorful Characters any day. This is the sort of character creation I was talking about when I said 'mechanical creation does nothing for me'. That's not a person I can bring to life.)
Tools
A polyset (minus d%), as well as d2/d3 (just appropriate a d4/d6 if you don’t own any)
Price:
$5
Verdict
🧊Put on Ice
⛏️ Pickup game (potentially)
This was not created to be played solo, but there’s this solo play (endorsed by the creator) and I got it from a solo bundle, so I’m counting it as a solo game, but it looks like a good game to play with a group as well.
The solo play uses a lot of additional solo resources, so I'd have to see how well this plays with just the book rather than a lot of supplementary materials.
The book has useful tables of gear (with cost and weight), a list of weapons with their hit dice, and other items more, and here the streamlined nature of the game is making it immensely accessible. The list may be limited to four types of potion - healing, antivenom, poultice (anti disease) and a bravery elixir, but player and DM know exactly what they do. Compared to tiny dungeon’s ‘you can have anything you like, but you need to make it up first’ it may be more restrictive, but it reduces the mental load to near zero.
At this point, I have absolutely no idea how balanced this game is. This has a strong resource management flavour, which I’m not usually in favour of. Events and encounters are determined by tables rather than solely prepped by the game master (there's advice on encounter design, so you're not railroaded), and I can see why this suggested itself for solo play.
I can see how this may be limiting for group play because the story that is told depends a lot on dice rolled; on the other hand, this may be a great pickup game for sessions when not enough people make it to the table or when you want to play a one shot or try your hand at GMing without the rigidity of a module or the demands of homebrew. Similarly I can see this as a solo tool ready at hand: once you’ve rolled up a pool of rangers you can send a few out for a game session if you don’t want to spend time engaging with a new system.
So definitely something I'll keep around, study more, and will probably try as a solo game at some point.
I'm definitely keeping this around as a book of random tables; the enemies might or might not transfer to other settings, but the locations are definitely useful, and the list of potential enemy traits is short and to the point.
