Lightning Bolt Compatible with Fireball

Lighting Bolt

Compatible with Fireball [by Skavenloft Games]

This book is intended to allow you to play Fireball by Skavenloft Games without a Game Master [GM].

We do that by delegating as many of the decisions within the game to the dice. Fireball already does this when you create your character and personal quest. If you have ever played a game with random encounters, you have probably used one dice roll to decide if there is an encounter and then a second roll to see what the encounter was with, then you have witnessed delegation in practice. The rules and dice may tell you that there will be an encounter and what it is with, but it comes down to the GM to describe the encounter and how it first appears to the characters.

When we solo play, we ask questions to the dice and let them make the decisions, but then we decide what the answer looks like to the character. Depending on the question, this may well be self-evident. If you ask if there is a door at the end of a corridor, there is either a door or not. A negative answer probably looks like a blank wall. If unsure, you can ask follow-up questions like, ‘Does it look like the door down to the dungeon?’ What you may think a dungeon door looks like could be completely different from how I see it, but that doesn’t matter; as long as you can imagine that door in your game, you have a perfectly good one.

Solo games work well when we create the world as we play. That dungeon door did not exist until we asked the question. Fireball doesn’t come with a game setting. It is just a generic fantasy role-playing game with a certain sense of style created by our personal quests.

Quickstart

Solo rules turn any game into a quickstart package fro the gamemaster. Create a character, and you can start playing almost immediately. Create the world as you go, and slowly introduce rules as you play until you have a grasp of the game's core mechanics. You can test drive your adventures before presenting the game to your table, and know how the game plays when starting your players off.