Solo Dungeon Crawler - Solo DnD Tutorials

During the introduction of the first episode of my second season of the Tales of Mystara podcast, I mentioned that I would be providing various visual aids to accompany the podcast. This will include things like maps, unique monster statistics and tables, as well as short articles explaining my solo role playing game mechanics (I have posted several of these already). You'll have to bear with me as these will come in many individual instalments across the life-span of the season, with the dungeon map coming much later due to my attempt to avoid giving away information that might spoil any surprises. In this post I give you some Monster statistics, which includes the blighted vine growing at the entrance to the Palace of Evendur as well as the possessed rug, swords and armour located in the throne room. Monster Statistics for the Blighted Vine, Possessed Swords, Rug & Armour The Blighted Vine is basically a rough BECMI conversion of a Vine Blight, which can be found in Dunge...

In a group game of D&D characters often want to search for traps or listen for noise. In solo games this is a tricky mechanic, especially if as a Dungeon Master you already have an idea of what lies ahead. This is especially problematic if you’re trying to run through a prepublished adventure module by yourself. I have my own simple way of handling such situations. Checking for Traps and Listening for Noise - A Solo D&D Tutorial In my last article I touched on player autonomy and how you can switch your perspective from DM to player to observer depending on the situation. So with your DM hat on you will need to determine whether a character will check for traps where there is a possibility of traps. It’s important to remember that in a group game a player would not always remember to check for traps. We can easily tie the chance of making such a check to the character's level. To handle this situation I roll a d10. The chance of checking for traps is equal to 1 plus t...