Five Easy PCs

Getting to know your PCs and how to handle conversation and roleplaying in a solo DND campaign

“Back at Castellan Keep, the bodies of Feydras and Vandra burn on large pyres outside the walls.

Ingolf and his yeomen are stoic. Cromlech drinks and scowls, eyes filled with mixed emotions - sorrow. Frustration. Anger.

Algyrnon doesn’t even bother with the funeral - he’s recruiting.”

Three ring binder, lined and graph paper, home printed module and rule set…just add dice for a good time!

Before I dive into the next session report and recount the tale of The Battle of Buzzard’s Roost, I wanna share a bit of my methods with you for how I stay engaged in my solo campaigns.

Although my preferred playstyle is hack and slash, it’s important to me to “get to know” my characters a bit. One of the best ways to do this for me isn’t with backstory, but to build out the campaign world a bit at a time via NPCs and interaction, and decide how each PC would do that.

Last session report was mainly about the action, but there was lots of this sort of “exploration” downtime at the Keep as “conversations” played out in my mind between the party, the captain of the guard and Castellan, and between Feydras and Cromlech, Algyrnon and Ingolf and the like.

How I do this is similar to how I use the oracle in general, and how I tend to converse with new people I know in real life:

I ask questions, and listen to the answers - these answers often lead to further curiosity, and I ask more.

This is a little harder with “yes and no” questions that you have to ask using a simple dice oracle, but becomes a bit easier with “Spark Table,” or some sort of tool for determining how things feel or what’s being said - however, this campaign I made a sort of loose rule for myself that I wouldn’t get caught up in my usual paralysis of what supplements to use, or looking stuff up mid-game.

This time, its all just the dice and my imagination - it feels like the wonderful simplicity of those childhood games all over again. Just going with my immediate gut reactions and not agonizing over what’s right or wrong. I can always change things later.

Using this method, I built out some of the PCs relationships with each other and the denizens of the Keep.


Talla, a stable girl I lifted from the 2e Return to the Borderlands I remember using a long time ago. An eavesdropper and occasional thief, but a good person.

Her adult older sister Chandra works with the tailor - their mother ran off years ago with a mercenary captain, and their father was, unfortunately, one of the guards who died in my party’s excursion to the hobgoblin caves.

Feydras discovered this at the funeral for them, and immediately took responsibility as the good guy he is. He started spending a lot of time with Chandra, and I imagined him daydreaming about settling down after acquiring some wealth and taking care of them, starting a family of his own.

These kinds of “directed daydreams” are how I run NPC interactions - conversations aren’t written all the way out or internally roleplayed. I get a few pieces of info, and figure there was a longer conversation between these imaginary characters I wasn’t all the way privy to - like a scene in a movie that’s implied but maybe not shown on camera.

Cromlech has a growing friendship with the dwarven smith at the Keep - they aren’t from the same place (Cromlech is from Har-Cruach, or “Highmountain,” and the Smith, Griff, is from Dun-Bealach, a stronghold in the mountain passes.)
The two of them drink together during party downtime in the tavern after Griff gets off.

These sorts of things usually only take up a page of bullets between adventures - I just do a short paragraph for each character of what they’re up to. If I wonder about how things went, I make a few rolls.

In Feydras’ case, I asked the dice whether Chandra already had a suitor. The answer was yes. Then a series of rolls determined he was the innkeeper’s son, and a very bad sort who had mistreated her in the past, and who she fears, but won’t report on because of the leverage his father has here as a business owner. This gave things a darker spin when Feydras died. Will this bad apple come back into the picture with Feydras gone?

These sorts of things allow the campaign to begin to take on a life of its own, and create little story threads that keep me interested and involved outside of just “ok, another dungeon to sack,” but I keep them short and quick so I don’t get sidetracked. Just enough to give some depth to the PCs…and make it a bit more of a bummer when the dice and fate decree they go out the hard way.

Ingolf spends most of his time training with his 4 yeomen who’ve miraculously survived every engagement and been critical to party survival. I’ve decided that with enough training, they will be able to get a +1 to their bow attacks - why not? They’re 0 level archers, but they’re about halfway to level 1 with all the fighting they’ve been doing, and once they reach L1, I’ll give them the same class as Ingolf (a revised version of the Halfling I’ve dubbed “Woodsman.”)

Let’s hope these two last longer than the last ones…

Algyrnon recruits two new warriors - Hildred Starfall, a tourney knight who lost his mount and father’s sword in a melee back west (or east…? I’ve done almost zero worldbuilding so far, only the bare minimum of what I need), and is looking to make a fortune as a hired blade.

I immediately liked Hildred, and his brash youthful energy will be fun if he can survive.

Drune A’grenn - one of the forest folk, tough barbarians with elaborate tattoos instead of armor, who bears his own father’s sword and has sworn revenge on the Stone Fist orcs who slaughtered his village less than a fortnight ago.

Who needs armor with a mustache this powerful?

(Hildred is a fighter, Drune is a modified class from the B/X Class Options book I’ve used a bit - basically just a barbarian with an armor class buff when not wearing any other armor.)

The next big decision I made was that I was tired of dungeons for a while.

So, I simply made the choice to move the orcs from their usual caves in B2 out into defended villages near to one another (there’s normally two orc tribes in a loose allegiance) so I could do some more wilderness exploration and take the fight to the open, battling across the hills and woods south of the main river.

With new comrades, and of course, the four trusty yeomen, the PCs decide they will spend some of their rapidly accumulating gold on workers - and that they’ll supply up and fortify Buzzard’s Roost, the small fort originally being used by the Raiders from my first session (you can read it HERE)

These decisions, combined with the one to bring along the orc we interrogated who was a prisoner at the hobgoblin caves turned this excursion into a bloodbath of the highest order, culminating in what the party and villagers of the Keep are now calling The Battle of Buzzard’s Roost.

We’ll dive into that next time!

Keep your blades sharp,

- Castle Grief