The Warp Check and other tools
Here you will find the most updated version of my rules to play a prewritten module on your own while keeping the surprise.
This document is an extension to Mythic, heavily inspired by the works of the Lone Crusader, intended to allow the reader to play linear prewritten adventures solo in a way that still has surprises and keeps the story fresh and interesting.
As a first warning, it’s going to be messy. Mythic is, by itself, a story driver, so trying to constrain it to a predefined script will be hard. The trick lies in yourself: you will decide how much you will let Mythic alter the story and, in turn, guide the mechanics to follow its original path.
If you’ve GMed before, and considering the solo roleplaying aficionados, I’m sure you have, you’ll know that playing a prewritten adventure requires that you read and prepare it. You can’t avoid that here… completely. But the burden will be actually lighter. Creating The Adventure Script is the equivalent of preparing the adventure as a GM. To do so, you just read the adventure. Yeah, completely. Hello spoilers, you’re going to see all of them. Trust me on this. The Adventure Script is an executive summary of the adventure you’re going to play. It’s composed of elements and each of them can have attributes. Here’s a list of them (and I’ll use examples from The Lord of the Rings, which I’ll horribly butcher given the fact that I read the books twenty years ago and watched the movies for the last time on 2018):
The core is formed by the answers of the basic questions to your adventure:
The sequence of scenes of the adventure. It is associated to NPCs, Locations, Objects and, potentially, some of the Core questions.
Each scene’s attribute is a subsequence of events (ala plot points in The Adventure Crafter).
Escape from The Shire, Tavern meeting in Bree, Council in Rivendel, Beaten by Caradhras, Traversing Moria,…
The cast of the adventure. Each member of the list has five attributes, that can be codified as questions:
Aragorn, Legolas, Gandalf, Samwise, Saruman, Boromir, the Balrog,…
The different places that appear in the adventure. They’re defined by their geographical position, description and special properties.
Gondor, Dol Guldur, Mirkwood, Rohan,…
I don’t think I need to explain what these are. They are defined by their location, their appearance, their capabilities, and their role in the adventure.
The Rings of Power, Narsil, Gandalf’s staff,…
Things that don’t fit other containers. They will require a bit more effort detailing their attributes.
Contracts, prophecies, past events, stories, songs, spells, rituals,…
Once you have the Adventure Script, you’re almost ready to start playing. You’re going to need one more mechanic: the Warp Check, which will be the way in which the story will divert from the original one (because I’m assuming you want some surprises. If you just want to play the story as is, you don’t need this document).
Settle on (or roll) a number between 1 and 10. This will be the Warp Threshold. Then, when a new element of the story is presented, roll 1d10. You can get three possible results:
When randomizing a specific element, you can either roll separately for each attribute or assign the same result to all of them.
As a GM would do when people tend to go offscript, when playing a prewritten adventure we’ll sometimes need to softly nudge the story to the expected path. We will do so by altering the Random Event focus table. Specifically, we’ll remove the “Remote Event” and “Ambiguous Event” results and change them with “Gentle Nudge Towards the Adventure” or “Plot Twist!”.
When you roll "Gentle Nudge Towards the Adventure, randomly roll (or decide the most appropriate) which Script element is referenced and give a subtle (or not so subtle) clue that allows the character(s) to keep on the rails safely.
When you roll “Plot Twist!”, randomly roll (or decide the most appropriate) which Script element that has already been revealed is referenced and change something about it that was taken to be certain.
When you are ready to play a new scene, you should outline its attributes, this is, what general plot points are going to happen in that scene. Normally, following The Adventure Crafter, it shouldn’t be more than five. If there are less than five, test to see if there are added plot points a number equal to 5 minus the current number of plot points. Adjust the probability to your liking: remember that Mythic will insert random events at its own leisure, so too many plot points can lead to story bloat. Then, for each new point you must add, test for its position: generate a number between 1 and the number of plot points plus 1. Then assign its position, starting from “before the first plot point” and ending with “after the last plot point”.
Example: the next scene has two plot points: arrival at the Prancing Pony, meeting Strider. I must include a new plot point. I roll 1d3 and get a 3. Thus, I will add a new plot point after meeting Strider in this scene.
You can generate this new plot point with a random event check from Mythic, a new plot point from The Adventure Crafter or any of your favourite random idea generators.
Once you have your full set of plot points for the scene, warp check each of those to see if it’s altered and how.
This mechanic substitutes the chaos factor check when setting the scene with base Mythic.
The first one I did, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game’s classic Night of Blood, using three different levels of complexity: using base Mythic, using a loose Warp Check, and using the full set of mechanics outlined here. This should make something clear: use and abuse the rules as you prefer. Change from scene to scene. The story and your fun is the most important thing. Read my script and the actual play example here.