Grunts

GRUNTS: A SOLO RPG MERCENARY'S HANDBOOK

You are a Grunt—a meat-sack with a blade, a carrion crow in the corpse-market of crumbling empires. Here, survival is a dialectic of greed and decay. Your currency? Traits: not virtues, but open wounds dressed as talents. Grave Robber (you sniff gold through six feet of soil, but the dead know your name). Hexblood (grandma’s demonic dalliance left you spell-adjacent and spiritually bankrupt). These are not classes. They are diagnoses.

The dungeon is a living carcass, its ribs arching into OSE, DCC, B/X, AD&D—systems as necrotic as the modules they birthed. OSR-compatible? More like OSR-consumable. Plug your Grunt into the rusted machinery of any dust-choked module. The gears will chew them raw. Roll d6s for the whims of the game, d10s for gambles that reek of diesel and desperation, d20s only when the ceiling drips sentient regret.

Gold is XP, but it is not inert. It is a currency that makes your veins crackle. Spend it on booze that erases memory, bribes that birth new enemies, or art that immortalizes your worst failure. Hoard it, and it crystallizes into Corruption—a tax levied by the dungeon’s HR department. Your teeth hum lullabies. Your shadow petitions for emancipation. Your skeleton dissolves into a sentient jelly.

The Oracle is your dungeon-master, a dice-god with a whetstone grin. It answers yes/no questions with trapdoor twists: Is the bridge safe? → No, but the spiderweb beneath it sings showtunes. It is not fair. It is not kind. It is the bureaucrat of your demise, stamping paperwork as you bleed out.

And the relics—oh, the relics. They are not loot. They are landlords. Bond with a dagger that whispers your insecurities, a ring that eats your dreams, or a chalice that siphons life from your dog (a moral support companion that weeps in iambic pentameter). Each use earns a Doom Token, and at three tokens, you roll on the Treasure Cataclysm Table: your skin peels off to start a rival adventuring guild, or your body becomes a timeshare for eldritch squatters.

This is Grunts: a solo RPG where power is a deadly plague, progress is a pyramid scheme, and the only thing cheaper than your life is your next mistake.

Grind. Die. Repeat. The dungeon always spits you out.

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