Readers of previous posts on this Substack would know that I am in the midst of preparing to play Werewolf the Apocalypse 5e (WtA) solo for one hour every day in April. This project is all TTRPGJared’s fault. Tomorrow is my start date, I’ve got no character, no locations, zero NPCs, and not a single solo supplement to help play in sight. This is not an excuse to give up on the project, we are going full steam ahead. The following plan should be compatible with any solo GM oracle of your choosing (a dice rolling method that helps you randomize potential GM actions or questions you may have as a player to said GM. It’s a fancy way to get yes or no answers, which actually go a long way in creating your story), I will be using Mythic 2e in my playthrough. Here is my plan to tackle WtA as a solo RPG.
Generate a Setting
Geek Gamer’s book Solo Game Master’s Guide recommends creating your character last and that is what we will do here. First we need something to randomize our setting. One of the potential advantages of playing a game set in a modern setting is that we can just pull from real locations for setting. Don’t do this, unless you have already run a game in a certain location already, your solo game will become endless prep. Researching a whole city, county, or small town is a big endeavor. It is best to just make a setting up based on themes and the feelings those themes evoke. Hey it worked for the Simpsons!
I generated my setting with, Table Fables: Modern.
Stonewood
Size- Large Town population 94,000
Founded in-1825
Quality of Life-Poor
Transport- No buses, Great rain system, small airport nearby
Education-Poor
Major Sports Team-None
Tourism-Excessive tourism
Crime rate-Below average
Historic Events- Organized Crime, saw a dramatic rise and fall of organized crime in the past.
Notable Features-Medical (known for high quality doctors and medical facilities)
Notable Festival- Comedy Festival
Headline news- A major road is under construction.
Locations in Stonewood
Here is where I am going to start adding some things which I will touch upon later. I will generate seven predefined locations in Stonewood. Which I’ll go into more later, I will again use Table Fables: Modern as my generative source. Using the Urban Landmark table I get.
1 Safe Places-Children Statue
4 Places we are fighting for-Fountain, Statue of the Mayor (Vandalized), Community Library Box, Summer Ice cream shop (Only open in the summer)
3 Places we have lost- Historical House, Band Stand (graffitied), Wind Sculpture (An entrance to the Pentex building?)
I like what I am seeing here so far, I am imagining a suburb somewhere in the Midwest. It was the site of some famous events during the Mafia’s prohibition heyday. The yearly comedy festival is massive, maybe the biggest in the United States. It brings in money that lasts the community the whole year. The money from tourism hasn’t trickled down for whatever reason, the poor are poor but the center of the town has an impressive light rail system. More than likely aimed towards the tourist hotspots as well as the venue for the festival, but it’s something to be proud of as a local. There are a number of major parks, as well as a major corporate office of Pentex, the servants of a Wyrm spirit, Fly.
If you are not familiar with WtA… think of the Wyrm as the spiritual force of decay and entropy, its (maybe) sentient and malicious. If you think thats abstract and hard to quantify, it sure is! The Garou (what werewolves in the World of Darkness call themselves) see themselves as the Earth’s sort of spiritual antibodies, fighting a war against the Wyrm, they are currently very bad at this job and the Wyrm is on the cusp of winning this war. Hence the name the Apocalypse. I imagine Pentex will be a major part of my life over the next month, they are tied to the Suburb’s profitable pharmaceutical industry. That’s all I need for now. I can discover more about Stonewood in the coming weeks. But for setting I am all done. Now let’s take a look at the local werewolf (Garou) milieu.
Generate a Social Environment
The World of Darkness RPG line’s most popular game is Vampire the Masquerade. It’s a game that sells itself as a game of political horror. I won’t argue with that, Vampire is very much about power and control of a finite resource, human blood. WtA newest edition is just as political the Garou are no longer a unified fighting force but a wait for it…Shattered Nation! Politics amongst the Garou will be a major theme in my own game. Shattered Nation has been a pleasant surprise in terms of tools we can use for solo play. In it are rules to randomize; historical events, pack dynamics, as well as sept culture. A sept is a unit of organization in werewolf society, if packs are a group of Garou who work together, a sept is the next step up, it's a group of packs who work together. Most septs are organized under a single place of spiritual power called a caern. Ours will be no different. Currently I don't know anything more about our sept or caern other than it is a place with a children’s statue. Using Shattered Nations let’s generate a social environment for our pack.
Other Packs of the Sept
This is an important part of our game. We need to know what kind of situation our characters will be placed in. It also makes character creation much easier on us, we can pull ideas from our social environment as well as our location. Shattered Nation, on p. 55 suggests 10-20 Garou in a community of this size. I decided to roll a d10 adding the result to 10. I rolled a 1 so I ended up with eleven Garou that belong to our sept outside our pack. Dividing eleven amongst three packs seemed the most logical thing to do. So there are a total of fifteen nine foot tall murder machines operating inside Stonewood. It’s fine! Next I will generate pack names and types via the pack name table on page 19. I counted fifteen pack types in the Shattered nation so I made a second table from the pack types listed between pages 20-26.
The Night Children- Reformers
The Claw Guards-Avengers
The Claw Commandos-Watchers
Already we can see that this sept is dysfunctional. Remember when it comes to inter Garou relations, maximize toxicity! My gut feeling is that the current dynamics involve the Night Children who are up against the status quo of the other two packs. Historically the leadership of the sept has been anything but competent as we will soon see. The Claw Guards are too busy fighting past battles that have already been lost, and the Claw Commandos are sort of a Garou inquisition, hyper fixated on internal betrayal rather than fighting the real fight. How I came to these conclusions will become clear in our next section.
Local Legends
I decided to generate two past historical events. Both of these events happened in memory. The choice of two was completely arbitrary, but I liked the results. Feel free to experiment with the number should you wish to try your own game. I used the tables found on page 103 of Shattered Nation.
Each event includes three elements, the enemy, a complication, and the accomplishment.
A corporation, an ally suffered from Harano (think of it as a supernaturally potent depression that the Garou can suffer), an Ironic victory; the fight was won but the battle was lost.
Pentex has to be the corporation in question here, why? Because it's one of the iconic antagonists of WtA. The event is a bit muddy but whatever did happen, the local Garou faced Pentex before and lost. The most obvious fight that was won would most likely be that either the Garou who suffered from Harano recovered or their authority was finally stripped and they are now no longer in position to influence sept war strategy.
Stargazer, the enemies' crimes worse than initially they seemed, victory over the legendary of elders.
The Stargazers are complicated, they are a political faction of werewolves that have separated themselves from the former Garou Nation, their presentation has changed a lot in the newest edition of WtA. Info is fairly sparse so I have got to do my homework tonight, but a very intriguing piece of local lore. It does explain why there is a need for a pack that is solely focused on rooting out potential heterodoxy in what remains of the Garou Nation. We will discover all of what this means while we play.
The Sept
Our sept, much like most septs in the time of the Apocalypse, is alone in its fight against the Wyrm. Why? Let’s roll on Sept Grievances p. 38 Shattered Nation.
Suspicions: Nothing has been proven but there are rumors that members of another sept have been spotted with Black Spiral Dancers, Garou who have sided with the Wyrm.
Paranoia all around at our home sept.
Generate randomly or choose an option from the following pages in Shattered Nations p.56-60 to create your own sept or alternatively you can choose a premade sept from pages 60-64.
Geography-City (small)
Function- Politics
Sept Types- Reclusive Sept
Function here is in reference to how it functions in our story. I chose to not randomize this portion of the process as ideas on what this sept is have already formed in my mind. I want things to be tense at the sept, an aura of paranoia, the sept needs someone or something to rally it together. The location of this sept is….
Herschel’s Medical Center
Caern (think of this as a spot of major spiritual power, the operating base for our sept)- It is connected to an old abandoned hospital, the statue of the children is in the front entrance. It represents a time of medicine before the local Pentex front corrupted it. Each caern was a rating from 1-5 to represent it’s power level. For Caern Rating I will be using a simple d4 to determine how powerful the caern is. You could use a d5 but I think it is more fun to not start at maximum level. For each point I will invest in a trait of the caern. See pages 191-195 in the core book.
Caern rating-3
Security-1
Rite Focus-1
Permissive Gauntlet-1
From here, I can see that I have a sept that is rather paranoid about outsiders, who are paralyzed by weak leadership, but are protecting a fairly powerful caern. Hopefully my pack can change this.
Don’t Forget the G in RPG
The last point of our prep is directly inspired by this section’s title taken from p.16 of Solo Game Master’s Guide by Geek Gamers. Since WtA does not have a solo rules supplement as of the time of this writing, let’s do our best to gamify our game.
A Weekly Game Loop
Let’s steal from Blades in the Dark. We will make a weekly cycle, our pack are not a lovable group who form a found family, they are professionals with lives, doing their best to stop the Apocalypse. Our game will reflect this, our pack operates on a week by week basis. An investigation stage, a hunt stage, a results stage, a faction phase, and downtime activities. There will be a moot (a formalized gathering of all four packs in the area) in four weeks. The following rules are a work in progress which at any time may be dumped.
The investigation stage will be the time our pack is looking for a target to hunt. The who and what will be decided as needed by the narrative. Once the target or location has been selected. We move on to.
The hunt stage, this is the fun part where we rip and tear till it is done. Garou are always messy so we will then move on to
The results stage, in the results stage we will look back at our pre-generated areas of conflict that were created during our location generation. As of right now I am thinking each contested area needs 6 successes in order to flip. I hope to show this system in action as I play.
A faction phase, there will be five threats along with three allied packs that will move and attempt to take locations. They will gain or lose dice in a dice pool based on mission or story results.
Downtime phase, this is our character moments and role playing phase we can do just about anything we want.
These rules are a try at making this into a wargame, one where I can make and look at a map and see who, or what, is winning at a glance. A work in progress, but one that I hope inspires more ideas from others. Tomorrow, we will create a pack and discuss my personal philosophy on playing a cast of characters over a single character as well as finish creating a cast of antagonists. If you have more suggestions on what I should add please leave a comment below.
