Naturally, there was a desire in me to do solo gaming. However, as my attempt to DM myself has shown, I’m prone to killing my own characters or giving myself challenges so hard, I might as well be lining up the party for the guillotine. That’s when, during my trawling through RPG.net, I came across a flash app for Mythic GM Emulator.

Had no idea what this was, but it looked cool. Then I read the forum and noticed it was a derivative of the Mythic GM Emulator so I decided to take a look at that. As soon as I got a good idea of what the rules were and how to keep track of notes and stuff, I was ready.

I set up the session as a sort of “game within a game” sort of deal. Where I, as a character, end up going to a D&D session where the GM is a large computer a la Deep Blue and two other characters play… well, characters. This was a way for me to not only introduce how Mythic is played to the audience, but also to help train myself to playing Mythic.

My character was Olodak Spelloyal. Originally an assistant to the court magician before the magician was executed for supposed treason, the trauma locked Olodak into a murderous rage. Another player had Elfalcon Huntinghawk, an elf from a nomadic tribe who grew fond of magic. And then there’s the third player, who in the narrative is actually an AI meant to keep a track of mental trauma, had a character named Gracella Seaskipper, who is basically a bard.

The game starts with the classic “you meet at an inn” because I didn’t read the part where you can generate an opening scene via the Random Event feature, but I decided to rip off Disney and have a crazy old man break into the inn and scream out how his daughter’s been captured by a beast.

Though in this case, it was a dragon who just so happens to be the king that Olodak used to serve before he executed his teacher. He signs on, followed by Elfalcon (who doesn’t trust an orc to save someone) and Gracella joins because, hey, this could make a fun story! And… it actually is a nice premise. These guys weren’t in a party before this very moment and even though they are, they’re mostly in it for themselves. Olodak wants to kill the king, Elfalcon wants to save the girl, and Gracella wants a new story to base her songs off of.

The in-story reason for Chaos Factor was it being a defect of the computer. I dunno, it sounded cool and it made sense. The more the game starts going crazy, the more distorted things got, almost akin to breaking a simulation. The other thing I did was have every question asked by the players be a question on the Fate Chart. It made sense to me.

This led to the party gaining a bunch of items because one of the players asked if they should go to a store and buy items, only for them to get an exceptional no, meaning we were able to get five free items regardless of their rarity.

I got myself chainmail and a falchion, with three remaining items I would cash in later (in hindsight, potions of healing given my character’s wanting to keep everyone alive), Elfalcon’s player got a quarter staff and four rings of elemental control, and Gracella’s player picked some normal, every day adventuring items. This upset my character (not Olodak, but the person playing Olodak) and so he left, only for the GME to have a freak out, go Dalek on me, and ends up with me coming back to the table.

I should mention that the meta part of this game did not have any sort of system and outside of the Yes/No question thing I mentioned above, had no interference from Mythic. The meta-game goes meta when my character decides to ask if they’ll have random encounters a la JRPGs, to which the GME responds with a yes.

The party encounters an ogre who, after some questioning of the GME, isn’t a nice fellow. Olodak and Elfalcon’s players argue over whether or not to kill him, though the Elfalcon’s player decides to loophole things and ask if the Ogre attacks first. He doesn’t and goes into town. Gracella tries to justify her place in the party, but Olodak intimidates her. He tries intimidating Elfalcon, only for him to just gust of wind him over to a church where they encounter a racist priest.

Well, he was a nice priest before the Random Event generator got triggered due to double digits going under Chaos Factor (back before I decided to adopt the “all Doubles trigger Random Event regardless of Chaos), then the random event in question just so happened to involve the Priest, whose actions meant Debase Inside… Which I chose to interpret as “he refuses to heal non-humans in his church”. To which Olodak tries to slay him for…

Only for the Priest to kick them out with his holy powers.

However, with the help of gaming the system, the characters make it to King Draco’s castle. Well, after solving a rather easy challenge of crossing a broken bridge. Their first real battle is with a Dire Bat, one which Gracella, with a performance roll of a natural 1, managed to annoy the crap out of with her songs. Long battle short, the bat got zapped by Elfalcon’s Shocking Grasp and the group head further into the castle. With the help of Elfalcon’s hawk, the group enter King Draco’s lair…

Unfortunately, they were frozen to death by King Draco’s ice breath so… Yeah. Game ends there with the metagame even having its GM say that they failed.

Overall though, it was a pretty fun first run at the Mythic GM Emulator, one that got me addicted to its formula and sucked right into the world of Solo RPGs, though it didn’t properly take until a couple of games later and the next game would have no Mythic involvement.

Though, that was because it as a starter box adventure. Tune in next time to see what I mean when I recount my tackling of the 4E Starter Box adventure.