THE SOLOIST
We explore solo roleplaying games
Roleplaying games for solitaire play can seem a bit odd from the outset. ‘Aren’t they just writing prompts?’ is a question often levelled at their players and designers. And sometimes the answer is ‘yes, what of it?’ and other times they’re so much more. Let’s settle down for story time then.
Simple solo RPG experiences play out more like dice games, like the excellent reprinted version of Dark Fort bundled with the MÖRK
BORG Feretory – a game about wandering around a dungeon and murdering things using dice. Here you map the dungeon as you go, roll for encounters and loot, as well as if there’s anywhere to go afterwards. Each time you come to a dead end you return to town, and see if you get any better or richer. That, or you die. No shock there then.
Other small solo RPG experiences include building RPGs. Artefact, often cited as a great place to start for solo roleplaying, is a game about creating a magical artefact through a series of prompts. The goal here, beyond enjoying the process, is to build up a little piece of a world that you can transplant into other games. Similarly Beak, Feather & Bone lets you build settlements which can easily be converted and geomanced into other roleplaying games.
On the heftier side, and the games that feel most like a ‘proper’ RPG and less like a generation tool or advanced dice game,
are games like Ironsworn and Disciples of Bone & Shadow. While both are grim-dark fantasy settings, they do offer key differences. Disciples of Bone & Shadow is a hexcrawl in reverse – where you discover where you are (and indeed, what you’re doing) as you go, mapping a world like clearing the fog of war in an old RTS game and revealing there’s something that wants to kill you with each step. Ironsworn is a little more refined in its use of momentum to reflect your snowballing achievements, which can be spent like a form of ‘luck’ to improve results. Ironsworn is much more about telling interesting stories than beating up monsters an making away with the loot. Although both are fun.
Thousand Year Old Vampire is the storytelling conclusion of this kind of game and is similar to Artefact in that it’s a prompt led experience. But rather than the abstraction of being an object, you feel much more like this is a real story for your own character. You’ll have to discard memories from the game as you go, and your marks will mount up, making for an interesting dissonance about what you remember, and what your character remembers.
All of this is about finding the right way to play for you. Solo roleplaying is about what kind of story you want – if you’re looking for the mechanics of a game to leave a trail of actions that you can then connect together for your version of an epic tale, then something with more dice is going to help. If you want to be the author of your experience in a different way, with the systems there to make your story better, then leaning toward Thousand Year Old Vampire or Ironsworn might be the way to go.
In all of these solo experiences we’re attempting to surprise ourselves, and not in the way you might have tried to get rid of hiccups. In the same way that good art comes from restrictions on the artist, we get better and more challenging experiences when the games we’re playing force us to alter our course. Ironsworn offers the oracle for making choices about the world – similar to spark tables seen in Electric Bastionland. Roll a D100 and check the action table, combining it with the theme table if you wish, and you have an idea. Here getting ‘escalate corruption’ doesn’t make much sense, but does in the world of your adventure where choices about a non-player character action leads to further poisoning or pollution the waters at the mill.
Disciples of Bone & Shadow on the other hand lets you build up a world of threatening entities, creatures, ruins and people in a way that is less organic, but pleasingly mechanical – your challenge here is connecting the dots of conflict that are scattered in your travels across the map, like a detective on a corkboard of suspects.
The world of solo RPGs is growing fast, and there’s tons of different ways to play. For those of us who can’t quite get a gaming group together right now, but still want to have adventures, this might be the best way to play.