I’m currently running two campaigns, one for Lancer and one for Masks.
In Lancer, my players just finished their first series of combat. They had opened up with making a supply raid against a convoy, taking out their escorts and then seizing it. Now, for the second half, they held back against enemy reinforcements while their transport made away with the supplies. They now have enough materials to perform maintenance and upgrade their mechs, clone themselves in case of emergency, and have retrieved some mysterious black crates that seem to emit an unusual wavelength. For our next session, I’ll be showing them about leveling up, as well as providing information on the narrative mechanics of Bonds.
For Masks, we had our Session 0. All players are new to both the system (PbtA) and the game, but they’re interested in learning and have dedicated themselves so far. The 4 playbooks they chose were Doomed, Nova, Legacy and Transformed, which give me a lot of leeway into presenting extra-powerful threats and letting the sword of collateral damage hang over their heads - as well as promise power at a cost to a few, if they’re willing to pay. We are playing on a world that had a type of “No more mutants” tragedy happening, and 95% of all metahumans/superpowered folks have disappeared, leaving the remaining teams to “promote” teen heroes to the front to deal with keeping peace. Next week they’re going to face their first threat, as well as deal with their internal turmoil over being handed such responsibility.
How about y’all, what have you been into?
The power went out on the 19th (Washington state), so I pulled out Carved By The Garden, a solo journaling RPG that I purchased kinda on a whim but never tried. It was my first time trying a solo RPG but it went better than I expected, it got pretty intense by the end. It was a horror RPG as well, so playing in the middle of the night with no power, flashlight in one hand, was pretty cool. I was a little unsure of how well the journaling system would work but it went pretty smoothly once it got rolling.
Tonight I just played a DCC horror funnel, “Creep, Skrag, Creep”. It went pretty well, lots of characters were killed and lots of luck was burnt, people were burning eight luck at a time which I’ve never seen before. We play a lot of DCC but this was separate from our other campaigns.
I have yet to play a solo RPG (despite owning a small book), that sounds like the perfect occasion, glad you had it available and also managed to put it to good use!