Monday 9 July 2018

Rolf Rolfsson son of Rolf Rolfsson son of Rolf

A little while back I painted up a Reaper Barbarian to use as my solo D&D character "Rolf".  My first adventure in what is now a series of three linked modules was 'The Death Knight's Squire'.  I got the adventure from DM's Guild and I have to say it was excellent.  It was really well balanced and definitely seemed like it would have been challenging but doable with any type of character.  My initial plan was to make a couple more characters in case Rolf didn't make it but after running into some disappointing issues with D&D Beyond I ended up simply re-tooling Rolf for a second...and then third attempt.  I want to really emphasise that the adventure was well structured and balanced and Rolf didn't fail...twice...due to any issues with the quest.  On my first play through I made one unbelievably bad choice that resulted in me being undone by my own stupidity, on my second play through I was doing great until a string of bad die-rolls coupled with me forgetting to use one of my character's special abilities resulted in poor Rolf (junior?) running out of hit points before the final encounter.  I made some minor changes to the character between my first and third play throughs, one statistical change to get away from something that felt too much like min/maxing to me, and some trait changes based on some of the choices I made initially not really feeling applicable to a solo module.

Some of the changes I made necessitated a replacement model.  The new and improved Rolf is stronger but less agile, uses a bigger sword, and added a missile weapon.  Much like Garkas I started off with a Games Workshop Chaos Marauder as my base figure and added a backpack from the Frostgrave soldier sprue.  I then added a crossbow from a Gale Force 9 Paladin model that I still haven\t gotten around to painting.  And finally chose a head that came with an old Pirate Vampire that I have from years ago that came with multiple head options.


I carried forward the colour scheme from the original Rolf's shield and other than that went with a fairly muted colour palette, Rolf and his descendants didn't seem likely to be an overly flamboyant people to me.


Rolf Rolfsson will go into his next adventure at 3rd level with slightly improved offensive output and a little bit more gold in his pockets.  Hopefully he will be successful on his first pass as now that he's mid-story I think if he perishes on his second adventure I'll have to actually create a new character.

Wish me (and Rolf) luck!

-Jay

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