Solo expeditions, part III

Continuing adventures of my little band in the solo West Marches campaign. I have improved my MidJourney skills over the course of the week, and I have really enjoyed adding thematic tones to the game through the AI generated images. 

After lucky rolls and avoiding a trap that would have likely killed one member, the band stumbles in a very cool room. “Treasure room” was the randomly generated purpose of this room, and so I threw that text into MJ with excellent results. This was quite a departure from what I was picturing in my head with a trashed and devastated room that was just a shadow of its former self. One thing that caught my attention in all of the randomly generated images was small, humanoid forms amid the squalor.

One bit I wanted to quickly comment on:
One thing I thoroughly enjoy about running games for others is while I may have an idea or overall idea of the game, the players’ creativity and actions will frequently create a very different picture from what I was expecting. Solo uses random tables and has always given me a similar feeling of excitement of discovering the unknown. Using MidJourney produces an almost identical benefit, in many ways even better. This room is a perfect example. In my mind I pictured a 20 x 20 rectangular stone room with a couple shelves or tables with random mundane items that the band could collect as treasure. Instead MJ provided me with a far more dramatic room that was multiple levels and introduced a completely different thematic tone. It also provided me with the opportunity to add an interesting NPC for role-playing!

This page actually took me two days to get through. I struggled coming up with not only who or what Terez was, but his personality, goals, and even why he was there. I also realized that my low level  PCs could walk away from here with massive amounts of treasure, I did not want to do that, and so it took me a while to come up with reasonable treasure and reasons why they could not walk out of here billionaires. You also might notice that I decided to start voicing my characters speech. Though I did not spell it out previously, I have been thinking about their speech and personalities in my mind, but I decided to start documenting their thoughts and speech in hopes that it would make it a more engaging read.

And this is where the dice decided they hate me. At first I expected the monk would be a simple zombie or perhaps mummy. Things did not turn out that way, and utilizing the tables in Perilous Wilds created something completely different. And again my expectations were utterly knocked aside. When I rolled that it was an aquatic squid my initial idea was a rather small creature. MidJourney thought otherwise and gave me this instead.

Needless to say, we quickly decided we were running. 

And for once the dice played along and allowed our little band to escape….

Until next time!