Test Run With the Radiance Adventure Engine
Part 1
A Few Words Before Actual Play
The Radiance Adventure Engine is part of Oddfish Games’ ambitious Solar System of tools to run roleplaying games solo within a narrative framework. The basic Radiance tool builds on the hero’s journey storytelling structure, which is what I’m running for this, but the expansion Radiance Advanced offers several other narrative structures to use as your framework.
Put simply, Radiance is a collection of cards helping you to run your game. The bulk of the set is a huge collection of mini detail cards, which serve as a kind of oracle to prod your imagination while playing. Every details card has a concept on one side and an image on the other. It’s up to you to choose which side to use. There is also a big deck of tarot-sized cards. These are story cards on one side and path cards on the other. Story cards are for the individual steps of the story, and path cards are generally used to fulfil/play out a story card.
The idea behind Radiance is that you can use any RPG. The system only takes care of the story you develop in play, while your chosen RPG handles all the game mechanisms. Oddfish released the product as digital files after their Kickstarter campaign, so I’ve had the chance to do a couple of short runs using the files. Now the physical product has finally arrived – and it’s beautiful – it is time to take it for a spin for real.
Choosing a Game
I had a handful of games in mind to use with Radiance, but couldn’t decide. Instead I went right in and pulled the first card, which is a story card that gives you your story’s “core adventure problem”. In other words, the theme. This is what your coming adventure is about. Hopefully that would inspire me to decide on my RPG.
I drew the card “Persuasion”. For the core adventure problem you only use the card’s storyline on top, nothing else: “Detail or hero must convince a stubborn detail or hero to comply with their plan or adopt their perspective.” Every time you see the word “detail” on a story card it’s a prompt to draw a detail card. I drew “Transport” and “Healer”.
Then it’s time to play around with any ideas you get from the details and the storyline. There are some extra words on each detail card for inspiration, the point being not to get too literal in your interpretation, but often your brain just starts pondering right away. I my case I decided that this might very well become a story using the Cartel RPG. “Transport” will in my case mean a drug dealer of sorts, perhaps even a drug lord, and my story’s core problem now reads “Hero must convince a stubborn drug dealer to comply with their plan or adopt their perspective.”
Since I’ve used the detail Transport, it stays on the table to be reused later if I want, while the unused detail goes back into the bag.
Time to create a player character and I already know it has to be the playbook La Rata, a mole within the drug organisation.