I finally got to sit down and read through a zine I snagged a couple of weeks ago that a friend of mine created. I had been meaning to do this for a while, but life and health complications conspired to take my attention away from my TTRPG hobby.
This is a very fun little dungeon crawl. I love that it puts non-combat resolutions as a focus because I think that narratively you'd come out with a really unique story of your party's adventure through the dungeon. It does have full stats for all encounters, however, so if Plan A fails you can always hoist an axe and see if Plan B succeeds.
The mechanics underpinning the adventure's design ensure that you should get at least two unique playthroughs (if you somehow manage to get entirely new sets of doors on your second run), but realistically, I could see three or four runs still providing new doors for your characters to walk through.
If you're a Cairn GM who runs quick sessions for several groups, you could put this to each group individually and walk away with unique resolutions from every single game... and there are enough loose narrative threads around that you could very easily tug on to springboard yourself into new adventures if you chose to explore them.
You can find it here:
https://creative-wronging.itch.io/jadore-la-door
I plan to do a solo run through this dungeon crawl, as it feels extremely solo-able to me. Most of the chamber events are set up in a way that doesn't assume any 'correct' way to tackle the problem. We are given a scenario, an NPC, and what that NPC wants, and then it's left open for the players (as this is intended to be a group-focused dungeon crawl) to do what they want and for the Warden (Cairn's name for the GM), to arbitrate.
I think that's extremely solo-friendly, and I've been really meaning to give Cairn a solo spin because I think it would be fun and simple to do.
Taking one of the publicly facing images from the Itch page, we can see what I mean if we look at what is behind Door #1:
We want the key that the Snakefolk person has.
He wants to feel like he's come out on top of a trade.
That is so wonderfully open! With all of the doors/chambers in this adventure, we are greeted with non-combat ways to resolve the challenge and proceed forward... which means we can just as easily run this with a single adventurer as we could with four. Nothing in the design forces us to have specific party compositions or skills. Some few of the challenges would be easier with several players, but I can only think of one that is perhaps challenging as a single player.
Thanks to the narrative focus as well, we have situations where you can easily be the GM and Player at the same time. Oracles or even a yes/no/complication grid can very neatly be used for any outside simulation of a GM that you'd care to have.
Or, at least that is my initial thinking. I'll be trying it out in the next few days and will report back once I've done so!
Until then, as always, Happy Gaming!
I've got a brand new TTRPG and Solo Gaming focused YouTube channel, and you can follow me there: OblivioncubedSolo
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