Replay 1 - Session 1: The Thieves who...

17 Jun, 2026

Do not steal?

I decided to start recording by writing my solo RPG sessions which I have only begun recently. This is going to be very scuffed, but I'd like you to accompany me in making this world, the characters, and story that will unfold by the dice.

In particular... the six sided die. I've been thinking for a while, what system should I use? I read a lot of manuals for a ton of games, many of them simply for the pleasure of knowing. In the end it was time for me to choose a game... and I couldn't choose one. I only knew one thing: it had to be D6 based!

My final choice was to hack something together, a lot of Sword World 1.0 DNA runs through this game, but there are also a lot of differences that, honestly, makes it completely different — if I had to say, this is closer to Fifth Edition D&D than Sword World... actually, that's not true. It's hard to say what this is—well, there is a thing that I know, it is not perfect... but it is way better than any of my other attempts at making a system of my own. I will be making adjustments as I play, but for now... let's start.

This story starts... nowhere... because there is no map or places. So I had this idea, that I wanted to subvert the RPG trope and instead of playing as some low level good guys trying to do good deeds, I would instead play some thieves or bandits.

So I made a faction, I named them the Crimson Strike Band arbitrarily; I thought it was a cool idea that they would wear, as a sort of uniform, some piece of red fabric. I rolled two six sided dice to know how many members were part of this group of thieves. There were 4 members, damn, I expected more.

Using a table, I rolled for their races, note that it is more likely for humans to live in cities and villages, so there was a human bias. There were 3 humans and 1 grassrunner. If you are wondering what a grassrunner is because you haven't read the Sword World 1.0 rulebook, you can think of them as dark skinned halflings with pointy-ears... they also live for a long time, mostly in forests. With that said, just because I took them from Sword World doesn't mean I am going to follow the SW manual or lore; they could be entirely different, but for now they are pretty similar, at least in appearance and the fact that they mostly live in the woods.

After that I roll their genders, ages, stats, modifiers, and according to their attributes I decided to give them a sort of role in the party. I will talk a bit more about this later, because I have to mention something that is even more important: I rolled their alignments. There was a 2 in 6 chance of characters being evil, 3 in 6 of them being neutral, and a 1 in 6 chance of them being good. I rolled, and I kid you not: Neutral, Good, Neutral, Good.

That means the Crimson Strike Band is either a sort of vigilante, Robin Hood, steal from evil... type of crew. Or they are bums that can't do evil because they are too incompetent. I chose to make a faction of thieves in the first place because I wanted to play bad guys — and in the end I am playing good guys. And by GUYS, I mean GUYS, because despite the fact that it would have been cool to have a girl or two in the party... the dice chose that all the members are men!

Here's a list of the characters, in order of descending age, with random generated names (from a table I made, which creates very dumb sounding names), I also will give them a sort of role or class, just for the sake of understanding, the game itself is classless — so now you know it is truly not like Sword World.

Demdem the Grassrunner - Magic User - Neutral

Gertosel - Guardian (?) - Neutral

Ferem Knightveil - Thief, Hunter - Good

Suilandos Knightveil - Magic User - Good

I will only give characters surnames if it is necessary. Coincidentally the two good aligned characters were young, and they were also very good in terms of attributes. Because of this I decided that they would be siblings, two brothers, and I also chose for them to be ex-nobles from the city of Molinos... which is somewhere near wherever the hideout is.

There may be a plot to say that perhaps their family was assassinated, and now they seek vengeance... but honestly, it is too soon for a vengeance plot. So for now... the family died in circumstances I have yet to reveal to myself — and these two boys; 20 and 17 years old, joined the two thieves, Gertosel and Demdem. The incredibly funny twist... those two rolled terrible for their attributes. In other words, they joined the faction of two bums.

Demdem is an average magic user, he has a +2 intelligence and +2 wisdom¹. So by all means, Demdem is incredibly average, and it is because of this that I chose for him to be a teacher figure for Suilandos... despite the fact that Suilandos himself has +3 intelligence; surpassing his teacher.

The real bum is Gertosel, he is 30 years old, he has a dexterity of +1, meaning he is not good at melee or ranged combat, and he also has an intelligence bonus of +1, meaning he is not good at magic either. I am starting to think that the original Crimson Strike Band were notoriously terrible thieves (lol). But hey, not all is bad. He has a charisma bonus of +3, so he knows how to talk and could be an okay bard, but most notoriously — he has a whopping 13 max hit points. So I went full defense on him; plate armor and all, with his +1 dexterity he's not sneaking anyways... hopefully he gets training for that terrible dexterity or finds an enchanted sword².

Well that should be all for today's session, this was the equivalent to session 0. Right? Making characters and stuff. Next sessions I am going to send these bums on a mission... a dungeon?!