Session 0

In RPGs played by a group, a “session 0” is traditionally a preparatory session that doesn’t feature any gameplay, but instead focuses on setting the tone of the campaign, aligning expectations, creating characters, and sometimes collaboratively worldbuilding or at least explaining core features of the world. Although I was playing solo, I still wanted to consider all these campaign elements, so I’ve written them out to reference them while playing through this campaign, as well as to introduce readers to the Chronicle of the Crimson Sun series.

As part of this particular session 0, I also had to follow a few game system–specific procedures, including figuring out the situation, creating a legend, determining the starting location, and then settling on the starting date.

Tone and Feel

For this campaign, the tone came baked in to the system and setting I’d chosen: the Forbidden Lands system from Free League and the Dark Sun campaign setting by Wizards of the Coast. I consider FL to be in the “Old School Renaissance” (OSR) tradition of games (more on that here), and I knew I wanted to play it more or less “rules as written,” letting the dice fall where they may and allowing the story unfold accordingly. From the Forbidden Lands product page:

In this sandbox survival roleplaying game, you’re not heroes sent on missions dictated by others – instead, you are raiders and rogues bent on making your own mark on a cursed world. You will discover lost tombs, fight terrible monsters, wander the wild lands, and if you live long enough, build your own stronghold to defend.

That seemed to fit pretty well with Dark Sun, which is clearly Hobbesian with its “savage, brutish, and short” ethos described on the back of the fourth edition campaign guide:

Beneath a dying sun lies a world of sand and fire, a world of barbaric splendor and savage desolation. This is Athas, a desert planet laid waste by unchecked sorcery and ancient wars. Immortal sorcerer-kings reign over the cities that remain, celebrating their tyranny with bloody arena games and brutal oppression. Cruel slavers and fierce raiders roam the wastelands in search of captives and plunder. Only the strongest heroes can endure the fury of the crimson sun.

To me, Dark Sun and Forbidden Lands both fall within the umbrella of dark fantasy, with the former being more heroic than the latter, but both having a level of grittiness and a focus on simply surviving the landscape. My hope was that even though I’d have to do some level of translation from system to setting, that the overall vibe would be similar enough that the “localization” would be relatively seamless.

Expectations

Normally, I like to use the CATS Method of getting all the players on the same page because it covers those things that I think are critical to the long-term success of a campaign. However, because I was playing solo, I didn’t need to align with others on expectations—I’d be free to run the game and adjust the setting as I pleased. Most importantly, I’d be able to play when I could, which was of the utmost importance to me as a new mom with a very needy infant. I also wasn’t sure how long I’d be playing the game for, and I wanted latitude in deciding how long the chronicle would keep my interest.

As part of the campaign, I wanted emergent storytelling, which FL felt designed to deliver even when playing cooperatively, and would be even more evident when played solo. To me, the game system would be a sort of writing prompt generator to help me get words on the page but still experience the delight and surprise of the dice, cards, and oracles.

Character Creation

Although I didn’t need to worry as much about overall party composition, I did need to build the main player character, her companion, and her animal companion. I also needed to figure out their relationship, their starting circumstances, and why they were traveling together in the first place.

To create my characters, I followed the rules in the Book of Beasts, complemented by the “Legends and Adventurers” booklet found in the core boxed set and the Forbidden Lands Solo Expansion by Matt Kay. I found the FL resources listed at the Lair of Secrets to be very helpful when searching for a web/editable PDF character sheet. I settled on using forbidden-sheets.com, which creates a new blank character sheet with a unique URL so that anything you write on the sheet will be saved and can be recalled by revisiting that URL. You can easily print a PDF version of the two sheets by selecting the A4 page size from the print dialog menu.

You can check out Erenil Halfshadow, my elf hunter, and Cedran, a dwarf minstrel, over at the characters page for this chronicle. There, I’ll go into the specific process for creating each of them.

The World

Originally, I’d envisioned playing this solo game in FL’s Bitter Reach region, but because I’m currently preparing to run a Dark Sun campaign, I figured I would kill two birds with one stone. Using the scorched world of Athas in my solo game would allow me to refresh myself on the setting and research dive into the lore through play.

I have a fairly large collection of Dark Sun PDFs purchased from DriveThruRPG, which I would be using as source material, but I’d also gathered some of the publications from Athas.org, and I’d bookmarked the Dark Sun wiki as well. Dark Sun is a very fleshed out setting, so there’d be a wealth of information for me to draw from, but also enough blank spots on its canvas for me to fill in as a GM and solo player to be satisfying.

I’ve joked that “Dark Sun is Dune by way of Conan and Mad Max,” but that cheeky elevator pitch can also serve as a sort of lodestone for how this chronicle might play out. Some of the tropes and setting hallmarks I wanted to try to include were:

• A desert planet, victim of ecological collapse
• Wasteland warfare between hardscrabble settlers and brutal raiders
• Psychic powers and drug-like substances
• Dangerous and feared magic, heavily regulated or outlawed outright
• Powerful factions at each others’ throats, including secret societies and shrewd guilds
• Tyrannical and seemingly omnipotent rulers
• Vicious monsters and mutated beasts

Yet I also wanted to reduce or avoid the bioessentialism inherent in the setting (e.g., “all dwarves/elves are fundamentally X”), and try to steer clear of or adapt some of the elements that seemed like they played too much on negative stereotypes of real-world cultures. I wasn’t going to remove prejudice or slavery from the setting, but I was going to be conscious of how those things appeared in my games. (Genocide is also intrinsic to the fictional history of Athas to explain the absence of certain classic D&D species, but isn’t something I intend to explore in my game.) If I were playing with a group, this would be the time to go over lines and veils, but I know my own limits in terms of what content or themes from the setting I want to include or not.

The Situation

To figure out how and where the game starts, FL has you roll on the “How Did You Meet” table in the “Legends & Adventurers” booklet. I received the result of “Survived a Shipwreck,” and while large bodies of water are practically unheard of on Athas, there are plenty of vehicles designed to traverse the sands, and it was easy to imagine the Erenil and Cedran were both travelling with the same caravan on their way to Altaruk.

Create a Legend

To devise a reason for the adventurers to be venturing forth (I almost wrote “heroes,” but I don’t think that quite works in this game), I used the rules on pages 27–31 of the “Legends & Adventurers” booklet. Here are the original results:

A long time ago, in the age of the Blood Mist (5–280 years ago), there was an Honorable King who sought a monster because of duty and traveled to a hill located in the Bitter Reach in some hills in the direction of the North-East. As the legend goes, it is said that he came back changed and that at the location there is a suit of armor but also Starved Ogres. The monster is a gigantic predator with wings and 2 legs. It has 3 horns and a spiked tail, with and armored hide.

I got somewhat duplicative results (“the king traveled to a hill in some hills”) but nothing I couldn’t work with. Because I rolled that he sought “a monster,” I also used the rules for monster generation in the same booklet. It turns out, the Monster Generator is very detailed, but I realized I could make as many or as few rolls on the tables as I wanted. After generating a “gigantic predator with wings and 2 legs and 3 horns, with a spiked tail and an armored hide,” I decided I had come up with some kind of wyvern entity (or “tryvern,” as the case may be). I only needed to know enough information to get my PCs interested, so I stopped there.

Here’s the edited-down legend I’m more or less working from, adapted to the world of Athas:

Many score years ago, there was an honorable noble who sought to slay an ancient beast known as the tryvern, whose scales are made of steel. He traveled to an island in the Sea of Silt, where the giants now rule. As the legend goes, it is said that the noble came back changed, and no one knows for certain whether the tryvern still reigns over those skies.

The “armored hide” detail dovetailed nicely with the roll that “at the hill there is a suit of armor” (and was more compelling to me than “the king left his suit of armor behind”), so I extrapolated that to mean that one could essentially use the tryvern’s hide to fashion a suit of one’s own. And in the world of Athas, where metal is scarce, such a scalemail armor would be a priceless treasure.

I’m not sure where the idea that wyverns are poisonous comes from, but it resonated with me that my hunter, Erenil, was questing to slay this monster for its venom, which could be somehow transmuted into something she needed, such as a cure for a terrible disease afflicting a loved one—perhaps her child? The idea of a mother being forced to leave her child behind and setting out into the farthest reaches of the world seemed like rich ground to plant some seeds of a character into.

Meanwhile, I figured that Cedran, the dwarf, was interested in harvesting the tryvern’s hide to craft a legendary suit of armor—a kingly gift meant to get him back into the good graces of the Tyrian nobility whose patronage he no longer enjoyed. And if he could claim he slew the beast, then not only would that make for an excellent song, but thereafter he would likely enjoy a life of celebrity and luxury similar to Tyr’s most renowned gladiators.

As I considered how each character’s background affected their motive in pursuing the legend, I looked forward more and more to exploring their juxtaposed personalities in play: Erenil was born into a life of desperate survival in the Athasian wastes, while Cedran had up until recently lived a life of creature comforts behind the safety of a city’s walls. One had set forth out of real necessity to protect her family, while the other had embarked moreso out of a selfish desire.

Starting Location

Whereas the Forbidden Lands maps have their X and Y axes labelled, the main hex map from the PDF of the original Dark Sun campaign setting box set does not, so I couldn’t roll randomly for starting location as easily. That suited me just as well, since I had an inkling of where I wanted the action to start: on one of the caravan roads, between the great city-states.

Looking at the map, I knew I wanted play to begin close to Tyr and Altaruk, which are two of the main settlements that will feature in the Dark Sun game I’m planning to run. I decided to have the caravan in question originate in the Silver Spring Oasis and then rolled randomly to determine the direction it was headed. I got South and then rolled 2d6 to determine how many hexes along the road they’d gotten before the storm hit (result: 8), shifting the eighth and final hex south of the road to signify that they’d been blown off course. The result placed our party about 15 miles northeast of Altaruk as the crow flies. I noted down that they were in rocky badlands terrain, as that would influence the difficulty of any foraging and hunting rolls.

The above map of the “Expanded Tyr Region” from the Athasian Cartographers’ Guild shows the Tablelands, the traditional region where the modules of Dark Sun have been set, as well as Erenil’s approximate starting location (indicated by the red “X”). This image has been adapted under the original CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Starting Date

In Forbidden Lands, picking a date to start from mostly affects how time flows thereafter, but in Dark Sun, the date would affect the state of the world (inasmuch as I wanted to engage with the metaplot). I did want to be able to reference some of the Dark Sun chronology, especially the fall of King Kalak, so I pulled up the date system in the 4e and 2e sourcebooks I referenced.

On the one hand, the calendar system in Dark Sun feels very real and appropriate to the world–on the other hand, it’s nigh incomprehensible unless you see it laid out as months. I was incredibly lucky to stumble across the Merchant’s Calendar application on Athas.org, which still runs just fine on Windows 11. Huge thanks to Dave Ries-Clark (Agantyr) for programming this indispensable piece of software.

Having decided that I wanted to set my game in roughly the same year as the 4e campaign guide (“the Year of Priest’s Defiance,” aka the 26th year of the 190th King’s Age, aka Year 1 by the reckoning of the recently freed), I rolled randomly. Interestingly, the names of the months are different between the original edition of Dark Sun and the 2009 re-release, but I decided to go with the months as named in the Merchant’s Calendar app for convenience.

I rolled randomly for month and day, ending up with Morrow 10, in the season of Sun Ascending.

Ready to Play

With the campaign groundwork laid, I was ready to begin the procedure for the first quarter day: determine weather, assign and resolve tasks for the characters, and finally draw a card to determine what kind of encounter they’d have as they slowly shook off the sand and got their bearings.