Colostle Solo RPG

 Hi!

I've been pootling around with my Brutal Quest RPG sessions and have been really enjoying the process of constant bodges and improvising a story as I go and have picked up Colostle, the solo storytelling RPG game to see how it works and have a try at playing an adventure.

The premise of Colostle is that you inhabit a castle that is so vast that each room appears to be a country or even continent. The main antagonists in the game are called Rooks, strange stone tower like automatons who attack the inhabitants of the world and also provide them with much of their tech, be it grafting arms, rookling companions, transport or even magic.

I've read some really positive reviews of the game so was quite keen to take a look at it and the artwork throughout, along with the setting is really evocative and thoroughly enjoyable too. 

 The rules themselves are pretty straight forward as your travels and encounters are all based on drawing from a deck of cards and looking up a table. This also gets used for creating cities, finding treasure and even combat but instead of doing the whole leading you through the adventure, the results give you prompts to create your story and adventure journal.

This is a completely different approach from what I usually do when playing games as I do tend to take notes when putting together battle reports or background but actually crafting a complete story around a few prompts that essentially give you the result of whatever you're doing but leaving how you did it, what you see and what your foe is like is completely new to me.

I'd initially tried playing it straight from the book using the cards and journalling as suggested but I kept on finding myself stumped as it felt a little too simple so I incorporated my Rory's Story Cubes which added to the experience by giving me more to work with than just the suggestions in the book and after a few false starts, I settled on putting together a more visual journal to cover the adventures of my character, Edmond of Brokhill:

Everyone knows that all good stories start with a map so I drew up the Roomland of the Rock Garden, an out of the way place which has two exits into other areas (I rolled a D4 to see how many). Thus far I only have the area surrounding Brokhill sketched in as Edmond hasn't done much adventuring yet (more on that later!).

Next I spent a bit of time writing a bit of background on the village of Brokhill and Edmond my adventurer. I actually used a book called The Amazing Story Generator that belongs to my wife to give him a background so it turns out he works for a secret agency called the Order of the White Tower and is seeking a large armed woman who may hold the key to the Order's goals of finding a way to live in peace with the Rooks (something Edmond struggles with due to having to fight them on a regular basis to protect the locals from being crushed by the great constructs).

 

I also decided to put together lots of little sketches to help bring the game to life a bit as I found just writing in the journal a bit of a struggle whereas having some visuals really helped give a sense of reality to the adventure.

Next up, I set off on my first adventure and Edmond who is one of The Armed, a class which is good at combat but not brilliant at exploration got three cards and I ended up with an encounter in an abandoned bandit camp involving a shady character who wished to rob me of something.

Thus Gaspode was created and he dutifully tried to dry gulch our hero who lost the fight and ended up unconscious whilst the dastardly Gaspode made off with an item that had been hidden in the camp.

So we now have our first encounter out of the way and Edmond has been shot with a crossbow and left to die in an abandoned bandit camp somewhere in the borders of Rook Country. Not an auspicious start to an adventure but we shall see how he gets on in the next session.

I must admit that I prefer my own solo RPG bodge to this approach as I like being able to roll dice and fight more interesting combats which your characters fate is down to the luck of the dice as well as your decisions, especially as most times in Colostle if you come up against a human opponent, you're going to crush them pretty easily, I gave Gaspode the same stats as Edmond and the cards resulted in Edmond striking once, a draw and Gaspode striking twice so Edmond lost the combat. 

I'll persevere with the adventure to see how it goes but if nothing else, I suspect that I'll be creating lots more small art pieces for an adventure journal for my Brutal Quest rpg sessions to help me flesh out the setting, characters and so on!

Speaking of which, the PDF of Planet 28 2nd edition will be released this Sunday so I suspect I'll be delving into it in the not too distant future so in the meantime, All the best!