Black Stream Runequest

 Time to give this a restart, I've posted enough material on RPG.net and Discord that I should have enough matrial to keep content flowing for a good while longer.
Now this does sort of make this less of a blog and more of an archive of my hobby musings, but I have expanded my RPG game selection and I think I can managed a post about every week and a half. If all goes well I hope this blog can be a new source of inspiration and fun to all who read it.

To start with, let's go back to what I think to b the best single thing to merge from the OSR movement, Kevin Crawford's solo rules.

These were first published in his short and free work Black Stream: Solo Heros, a teaser for his longer solo ruleset Scarlet Heroes. Here Kevin laid out the common problem with Solo or 1 Player-1 GM games in that you have to adapt the modules which are all built for more players with more action and a greater variety of puzzle-solving skills or you had to write very select solo modules ususally with a pregenerated character ala Fighting Fantasy.

Kevn decided that since OSR already used HD as the single life of a normal person back in Chainmail and level surpossedly indicated how many times over the entity was compard to a single person, that monsters could just drop HP all together and use HD instead. Naturally the player would still take HP damage but it suddenly leveld the playing field by quite a lot.

Further innovations followed. To counteract the action economy that still favoured monsters, the player had a free damage dice under select conditions calld the Fray Dice equal to their HD. Also player damage spread about monsters like how newer versions of D&D would have Swarms of weak monsters function as one. To prevent the high dice from either monsters or the player from claring an encounter, Kevin wrote a neat little table where the damage dice was matched with a lesser value, and only the best dice was taken., keeping the damage flat in the 0 to 4 HP/HD range. He even had an idea where players who get stuck becuase a module assumed another player had the skills or decision-making to get around an obstacle, could roll some damage to themselves and proceed. Assuming some streneous effort got them through. This was called Defying Death and originally was used for dealing with Save or Die style traps and abilitis. By the end, one Player was worth 4 regular ones. Easily creating Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser situations.

All this proved extremely enticing for use for Runequest, the older versions. As Chaosium has not already owned or even cared about the gameline, the whole original system was on the verge of whitering away, with a shiny new edition that was a fair bit more complicated and different in tone.

Therefore, it was hard to find players, so I began to adapt Kevin's solo rules to maximise the few who were interested. The key problem being that D&D is a RPG where numbers are very binanry. You ither beat the fixed scores or you don't, and Black Stream keeps thing that way. Ontop of the regular combat, if you don'thave mor HD, your free Fray Dice doesn't work. Runquest has subtractive armor and so you need to add dice, not just take the highest. A deeper problem was that RQ entities don't have HD, just HP.

So I tied a version out in a campaign and it didn't work out that well, the Fray Dices either very effective or not effective enough and the monsters just weren't going down thanks to RQ 2E's low starting skill values, where the playrs rolls to hit, the opponent rolls to block (no Dodge, just an arcan thing called Defence adjustments that could be as much a pain as THAC0), then damage is roll but armour is subtracted. I have to somehow convert the whole thing to be additive and not just have the player stand around waiting for the dice to turn in their favour.

You will ned a copy of the normal Black Stream: Solo Rules (it's free), but since RQ doesn't have HD, divide all HP and Location HP by 4, rounding up.

Since RQ 2E uses 3D6 straight, sub in 2d6+6 for SIZ and INT and/or assign 1 score of 18 (preferably POW). This generally makes a beefier hero and is what post-80s games do for the system.

Convert Armor Points along with Damage and Healing with the normal Conversion Table in Black Stream.

Now here is the important part, in Black Stream Solo Rules, you take the highest number among all the dice you roll and add the converted number shown on the Fray Dice as an auto-damage if your HD is higher (except d4 magic which is always).

RQ has additive AP not AC, so all the totals of the converted dice are added together. 

Furthermore, if your POW is higher than the enemy's, you roll +1D6 Fray Dice and add to total.

So Boxis the Generic with his POW of 12 swings at Bork the Trollkin who has a POW of 10. Boxis rolls and hits the Left Arm. Boxis's 1d6 shortsword + 1d4 Damage Bonus and +1d6 Fray dice roll: 3, 1, 5, this converts to 1+0+1 = 2 damage

Bork in RQ 2E has 1 point of armor from his resistant skin and 8 HP (4 HP on each arms from the chart)

1 AP on the conversion chart is 0, Bork has no natural AP here, also has his HP reduced to 2 and each arms only has 1. Bork loses 2 HP from his arm rendering it useless (but not severing it, as that required 8 damage over the HP in RQ 2E, which would be 3 damage here, since +8 = +2 on the Solo conversion table).

Unfortunately for Bork, he only had 2 HP altogether and so dies.

Now for Defying Death, since it is level based it clearly cannot apply to RQ, but since RQ characters literally gain in Power as they adventure that is close enough, the minimum dice size is POW/6, so a starting character might be rolls 2d4 or 3d4 for their first Defying Death roll of the day.

Healing 2 HP after resting for 5 minutes remains as that is too useful.

I also thought about including a generic +30% Solo Bonus for skills but this doesn't increase critical or impale chances.

For Call of Cthulhu, Solo players take minimum SAN loss. 

Black Stream: Solo Heroes can be found here on DrivethruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/114895/Black-Streams-Solo-Heroes