⚀⚁⚂⚃⚄⚅ The Soloist

The Word of al-Masih — Session 000a

Black Blade, Black Blade
Forged a billion years ago
Black Blade, Black Blade
Killing so its power can grow
— “Black Blade,” Blue Öyster Cult

Welcome to my solo roleplaying game of Black Sword Hack, designed by Kobayashi. Meant to emulate the fiction of Michael Moorcock, specifically the Elric of Melniboné stories, Black Sword Hack is a hack of David Black’s The Black Hack. There’s a lot of Dungeons & Dragons in these games’ DNA, and D&D is probably the game you’re most familiar with when someone says “roleplaying game.” But the solo part might throw you. After all, aren’t roleplaying games played in basements with a group of friends? Yes and no.

I could go on at length about solo roleplaying, but many others have done that better. I’d suggest doing some DuckDuckGo searches and finding one of many excellent articles and essays on the subject. The simple version is that this is a roleplaying game like any other, just played with tools that allow someone to enjoy the experience alone. It’ll make sense later, I promise.

You’re reading what I refer to as a log, which consists of a summary of the action in my games. It’s not written in prose, so it’s not a story the way you may expect one told, but a combination of notes for myself and a description of the play for you. Some people find these fun to read. Some don’t. I hope you’re in the former category.

This particular log is for Session 0, a session used in traditional groups to make characters and establish guidelines and expectations for the game to come. We’ll make a Black Sword Hack character and maybe talk about the world we’re about to create together.

I’m using the original Black Sword Hack, not the Ultimate Chaos Edition. The latter has nothing wrong with it, but the first edition contains everything I need to enjoy the game except decent proofreading.

My understanding of the game world is essentially zero. We’ll flesh that out as we go along. However, certain setting elements are implied in the Black Sword Hack character creation process. We’ll touch on those.

You are under no obligation to buy a copy of Black Sword Hack, but I will occasionally refer to page numbers so you can follow along if you want. This is our cue to turn to page 12 and the start of character creation!

Because Black Sword Hack is ostensibly an OSR (Old School Renaissance) game, we first roll for Attributes. Six very familiar attribute names rolled down the line. Do we start with a character concept? No! You’ll get what you get, and you’ll like it!

This is what we end up with:

One intriguing thing about Black Sword Hack is that it eschews the traditional 3d6 for attribute generation in favor of a 2d6 table that always gives your character at least an eight but never more than a 13. This ensures a competent character, but never an exemplary one.

All these attributes fall into the 9-11 “average” range, so they’re nothing special so far, and that’s fine.

Moving on, we learn my character was born… in a palace of the Caliphate. This makes our game different from most of Michael Moorcock’s fantasies since those were all informed by European culture. Spires and minarets have begun to crop up in my imagination.

This makes choosing Origin easier. You can select from Barbarian, Civilized, or Decadent. Barbarian doesn’t fit our “born in the palace” background, and looking over the Backgrounds on pp. 14-15, I think Decadent might be the way to go. I see a Shahrazad-type here and want to follow up on that idea. We get three Backgrounds, so how about these?

These have explanations you can read for yourself, and I’m sure I’ll expand on them later, but in the immediate term, these Backgrounds provide the following attribute bonuses: +1 DEX, +1 INT, +1 CHA. Which brings us to…

Forbidden Knowledge grants four randomly selected spells. The rules don’t number the spells, but if you count them yourself, you’ll see there are thirty. So, quickly rolling a few d30s, we get…

You can find the effects of those spells on pp. 32-33. As with the various Backgrounds, the details will become relevant at some point during play. For the most part, these all fit the idea of a covert assassin very well. I’m pleased.

Hit Points (HP) are equal to CON. That’s fine. Our character’s Doom Die is d6, as it is with all characters. And our assassin has 100 coins to spend, which we’ll do presently. Also, she — and I think we’ve been gravitating toward she since I brought up Shahrazad, haven’t we? — can speak Thyrenian, which is this game’s version of Common, and Amaric, the language of the Caliphate.

Once we hit p. 18, we’re into everybody’s favorite part of character creation: shopping! But Black Sword Hack handles things differently in that there aren’t pages and pages of gear for people to browse. Things are broken up into price categories, and those prices can vary wildly. It’s pretty cool since standardized pricing is a modern invention.

But we’ll have to finish the last bits of character creation in our next session because I’ve run out of time for this one. I was a little too wordy earlier, I guess. Anyway, there’s not much left to do, so the second part of Session 0 will give way to gameplay next time.

I look forward to seeing you then.