One of the reasons my solo game sometimes fizzle out is that the PC’s, the characters, just lack a reason to adventure, let me try to explain.

Low post views and giving up.

A good while back, on my old blog Chainmail & Sword, I created three characters for a home brewed back of a postcard set of rules. Those three characters were Weasel, Kid Sinister and Rook.

I played out a sort of Post-Apocalyptic/Steampunk style game. The rules worked fine but the blog posts largely went unread at first so I gave up on the game. Page views did pick as time went on, which only goes to show that you should persevere and that perhaps I gave up way to easily.

The adventure basically revolved around the three characters and their search for a missing friend called Shona. The characters lived in a big metropolis known only as ‘The City’, which was surrounded by wasteland. Weasel discovered that Shona had left The City and was heading north to find a place called New Haven, a city where everyone and anyone could have a better life.

I played the game through to its conclusion, had some fun with it, the characters made it to New Haven, well two of them did, they didn’t find Shona but that left the door open for a second adventure.

I realised the home brew rules needed some serious amendments and left it at that. I made a deal with myself to work on the rules and revisit the setting and Weasel, Kid Sinister and Rook at some point in the future.

Lowlife 2090 and a rebirth.

Soon after the end of that game I received an email from Pickpocket Press to say that they had a sale on over at DrivethruRPG.com and the PDF of Lowlife 2090 had been reduced by something like 75%.

Lowlife 2090 was I game I had been think about purchasing for some time but my finances rarely allow me to purchase anything over a couple of $ or about £1.60 here in the UK. It just so happened I had a few spare £’s in my account at the time the sale was on so it would have been foolish not to have taken advantage of the offer.

Mendoza City was so like my creation ‘The City’ but on drugs. Lowlife 2090 and Mendoza offered so much more than my own simple rules and setting, it only seemed right to put Weasel, Kid S, Rook and this time Shona as well slap bang in the middle of Doza and set them off on an adventure. That is exactly what I did.

Once again the characters were on the trail of a missing person, this time the brother of a friend of Rooks. This time it turned out that the missing person had gambled away his inheritance and then swindled his sister out of hers at which point he paid a notorious people smuggler to get him out of Doza.

Again that left the door open for a second adventure but it never happened.

So what went wrong?

In the first game, Weasel had lost his life in an ambush, Kid Sinister and Rook made it to the Utopia that was New Haven. There was no reason for them to continue the search for Shona.

In the second game, there was even less reason for the hero’s to carry on. Shona was a singer at Nero’s Bar and Grill, working most nights and pulling in the crowds for Nero. Rook was a part time waitress there and getting by. Weasel and Kid S too, although living outside the law and getting noticed by the local gangs, they were doing okay and just needed to keep their heads down for a time. Why did any of them need to risk their necks looking for someone who did not want to be found anyway.

In both games I had also added conflict within the party of characters. Weasel was jealous of Rooks friendship with Kid Sinister. Weasel blamed Rooks for his life falling apart . At first this seemed like an interesting party dynamic to explore but in the end it simply did not work for me. I was constantly wondering why Rook would not just up and leave and why Kid Sinister would not just go with her, why Shona would not just turn her back on Weasel. It just didn’t work.

So both the PC’s and me lost the will to carry on. Two more games abandoned.

A reason to adventure.

I love the cyberpunk and sorcery world of Lowlife 2090, it is a game I keep coming back to. The fact is I have real liking for Weasel, Kid Sinister, Rook and Shona. In my head each has a unique personality and they fit straight in to my vision of Mendoza City, I cannot abandon them that easily. But I need to update them a third time, give each characters a bond to link them to the others and a collective reason to risk their necks in Mendoza City, to keep them moving on to the next adventure.

In fact, during the character creation process, Lowlife 2090 goes someway to doing just that. Towards the end of creating the character you roll d20 on the Turning Point table, this is the irreversible moment when the characters life is changed forever and they became a ‘lifer’.

For Shona ( you can see character sheet here) I got the following result.

So we know her farther got himself eaten and Shona is looking to get enough cere (the cryptocurrency in Doza) to get herself a better life.

We also know she is a singer, so maybe we can say that after her farther died she busked on the streets to earn cere to help keep a roof over her mothers head and feed them both. She now needs a bond to one of the other characters, well busking on the streets of Foundry Bay will be risky at best so lets say Weasel, a streetwise young spriggan, kept look out for her, made sure she came to no harm. That friendship, that bond. is still strong and now Shona, moving up as an Influencer and singer, feels its her turn to lookout for her spriggan friend.

We can do the same for each character. Lets say Rook found Kid Sinister when he was left for dead, Kid Sinister and Weasel grew up and worked together on the streets after both lost their parents and have always been close friends, Shona took Rook, an illegal alien, in off the street and got her a job at Nero’s Nook. Now the four have a close bond to two of the other characters which we can show as a diagram.

Finally, what drives them on? Each individual character has their own life goal, this we find out again from the Turning point chart, for Shona its to get enough cere to get out of Foundry Bay and poverty. I think that is something they could all aspire to and will keep them going from one adventure to the next.

In the next post the characters embark on a new adventure in Mendoza City.