Last week, I was a bounty hunter.
I’ve been playing Notorious and Outsiders, two beautiful spiral-bound solo RPGs by Jason Price of Always Checkers Publishing.
Note the gold lettering on the titles. Beautiful books!
These games are powered by a dead-simple resolution mechanism, and put you in the shoes of an alien bounty hunter in a world that should feel verrrry familiar to you, if you’ve ever seen a Star War.
I especially liked some of the subtler references to the series (“There’s always a bigger fish” is a favorite quote), but there are enough quotes and nods that even the most oblivious fan will catch a few.
How’s it play?
You have a target. You’ve been hired to capture or kill them. And you’ve got a set of rules. You roll to pick a Nomad, and generate your troubles, personality, and woes along the way. You roll for the planet you’re on, and find out what factions rule there. Then, you proceed through a simple cycle: explore for random events, then head to a named destination. Along the way, you’ll get into fights, find leads, or tussle with locals.
People you meet with can be dealt with in one of four ways, depending on circumstance. You can speak to them, threaten them, attack them, or try to recruit them. All are resolved with the same simple resolution: roll 2d6 (ideally different colors), add some modifiers to one or both of the dice, and try to have yours come out ahead. You can spend Motivation (one of your three stats, along with Notoriety and Favor) to reroll either die, as long as you’ve got spend. Then, deal with the fallout.
What’s it like?
As you play, your stats will adjust, and the more notoriety you get, the more likely you are to find leads. After you find two leads, the next one will be your target, who leads you in a dramatic showdown where you tie up loose ends and run off to an epilogue.
The game is extremely evocative, and the prompts are delightful. Solo games are built on prompts, and these don’t disappoint!
However, it’s possible to get into a loop. For my first playthrough, I was a Muran, a skittish mouse-creature chasing down a rogue warrior from the Mystic Order (wink, wink). I struggled to get my Notoriety up, which meant that I was continually circling prompts until I got what I needed. Part of that is on me — I forgot that winning a fight gives you the option to kill your opponent for a free Notoriety boost — but even that wouldn’t have saved me, as I lost way more fights than I won. I ended up rolling the same events over and over, re-rolling until I found something new. I liked the play, but it was oscillating between frustrating and exhausting at the very end.
Say more about this mouse guy
The Mystic Order hired me to bring this guy in. He was a defector, and they wanted him back. I landed on a water planet, Veltare, and was immediately beset by a gang of bikers. We fought, I lost, and went back to camp. My camp was raided by some youths, who I threatened, and stole back my cape, which they were trying to turn into a fishing net. Bastards.
Some locals asked for help hunting a scary monster so they could harvest its sap from its cave. I said sure, got my tail handed to me, and scurried back to my ship, where someone was waiting for me. Another Nomad, my first lead. He told me to drop the case, and I refused. I beat him, though he was a (literal) bear of a man with a mean melee claw, and sent him packing with a warning. This one’s _mine_.
Heading into the biggest city around, I saw another of those sap beasts rampaging, and decided to intervene. Big mistake. Almost died before the local authorities saved my hide. Again, the locals immediately asked for my help luring one out of its cave, I assume as a joke (hey, this guy keeps getting his ass kicked by the sappers, lets see if he’ll do it again!). I declined, and continued on my way.
Eventually, I found a local talking to my target as a hologram, and learned that my target — a human named Kwame Devine — had left the order with some data because he believed that it was growing too strong, and that its mere existence was creating the kinds of enemies it had been created to quell. After MUCH faffing around in town, an almost endless loop of rolling for new prompts, I got enough notoriety to catch the guy. I handed him over to the Order, despite his insistence that it couldn’t be reformed from within.
Showdown troubles
The showdowns are REALLY cool. They’re all defined to be setpieces, where you’re in a neat location and something very cool and dangerous is happening in the background. Unfortunately, most of the showdowns I had didn’t quite land. That’s the trouble with random tables.
My first showdown was on a crashed spaceship while herds of animals were stampeding towards us. As this was a water planet, I changed it to be a half-sunk watership, with carnivorous sharkbeasts swimming in the water. I fought another nomad (a BIG no-no, one of the few rules the guild enforces), and let him escape with a warning.
Later on, I was in subterranean tunnels beneath a wooded planet (fine — cool, even), where the dangerous event was… a lightning storm? I struggled a bit to make that one work, but eventually landed on flickering lights and exploding sparks from the cool visuals (just out of frame) above.
This wasn’t the only time I had prompts that seemed to contradict with the established story. I had a lot of crashed starships on the water world, and in general many prompts that assumed there was land about. In my second game, using the Outsiders expansion, the faction that hired me kept sending goons, guards, and gbaddies to pick me off. Why are you fighting me? I’d shout. You hired me!
Not all nomads
With the expansion, there are 12 types of bounty hunters you can be. They ooze in style and flavor, from the cocky rookie to the robot that can self-destruct to end the game, along with anyone nearby. But really, they’re only differentiated by one thing: their ability to fight. This means that some are strictly better than others. Sure, some are offset by melee or range, and some are cool enough that you don’t care to be at a disadvantage compared to your peers (I’m thinking of the repeater gun where your first roll gets +1, then your second gets +2, and so on to a max of +5. That’s COOL!). But it feels bad to know that your first roll can determine how hard the whole game will be.
In my second game, I was a rookie, so I had two weapons (both very evocative!): a quick-draw laser that got +3 off the bat, then faded to a +1, and my vicious melee attacks, that started at a +1, then moved to a +2. The final encounter I had felt entirely unwinnable.
Their boss orders three heavies to Attack you in melee. If you defeat them, your Target brandishes a huge ranged weapon (+4).
The heavies don’t have stats, unless they also operate at a +4, which is how I read it. So I had to beat 4 people in a row — 3 at melee, followed by 1 at range — where they each add a +4 to their dice rolls, and I get, at best a +3. Brutal! I went in with 6 Motivation (possible rerolls), and still only managed to defeat two of the guards. I just don’t see how that’s possible to win! It left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, off of what was otherwise an incredibly fun and evocative series of prompts.
What about your second story?
I had a lot more fun with my second nomad, until the end. I remembered to increase my Notoriety after kills (and, frankly, sought them out, to avoid the risk of getting in a loop), and only had one or two repeat encounters throughout.
No Torren was a rookie Adraz, a kind of psychic warrior species (?) who left rich parents on a polluted planet to go be a bounty hunter. Unlike his father, No is a man of his word, following through on a deal, even if a better one comes around. It’s a good quality in a bounty hunter!
I landed on the wooded world of Luprah at the request of BRL, Inc, a podracing conglomerate who wanted to capture Nikka Bloo, a Kuda (fish-person) who had been using explosives to protest their new booster racing tracks.
This game was great because the planet was set up with 3 factions who were all equally terrible in their own way. A symbiosis quickly formed. The Green Aurora saboteurs operated out of here because of its far-away nature. The BRL(Booster Racing League) was trying to expand (I showed up during their ‘super bowl’, of sorts), and the Kuda Gang is trying to take over local crime.
I spoke with shopkeepers and locals who each felt that every faction was using the planet as a commodity. One of them was working with my target, and led me to some tunnels and then tried to kill me with a turret. I shot first better. My target wanted to destroy the BRL and return the planet to its un-famous state. The business leader agreed, saying that the big sponsors were driving out his small business.
Almost everyone wanted to de-industrialize the planet, except for BRL, who wanted to make it into a giant amusement park for booster racing. This felt more grittily political than the others, though as I mentioned, the people who hired me tried to kill me 3 times (including sending an assassin after me!) before I got my bearings. That was a little hard to reconcile, and I ended up deciding to help my target take them down out of spite before he got the upper hand on me in an absolutely unwinnable final prompt. I have to assume that was an oversight, right?
Overall
I really enjoyed my time with these books! They’re easy to use, beautifully laid out, and no bigger than they need to be. The plots they generate are simple and evocative, though I wouldn’t say they’re perfect. I had to ask myself a few times how to interpret something (does “Speak to a local to gain 1 Motivation” mean I get the motivation even if I fail to convince the local to talk? Do I get 1 Notoriety for fighting these thugs even if I lose the fight?), and the limited number of opinions a local can have (6) means that there will be repeats if you get into a lot of conversations.
The books are gorgeous, and easy to use, with helpful page numbers throughout. It would be easy to play with the PDFs alone, though I might recommend keeping two copies open for quick reference. The PDFs are also designed with accessibility in mind, as special characters copy and paste as English equivalents.
For a Star Wars fan especially, this game is a delightful ~2 hours of light journaling, with some truly memorable set pieces throughout. This is probably the most accessible, simple, and evocative solo RPG I’ve ever played. Well done!