Month 2 of Solo: February '26
Mar. 1st, 2026 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solo_knightThe second entry in the 12 Months of Solo RPGs Project.
State of the List:
Blocked out until May 2028
Did I do what I intended?
Yes. Not as much of it as I’d hoped.
Actual Focus:
Published adventures. Which was my goal.
Did I engage?
Yes. I also started playing one of the mechanics from Scarlet Heroes, the Wilderness/Hexcrawl. While it's no longer 'Scarlet Heroes Month' I feel that making _some_ time for the previous month's focus isn't a bad use of my time.
Did I play my focused game(s)?
I played two solo adventures (one was very short), booted one, and started reading into a third, just did not have time or brain enough for it.
I have one, possibly two more gamebooks in my possession; and while I may play them at some point, this is not what I enjoy. Finding this out was one of the goals for this month.
Other solo-related things:
I have downloaded every itch.io bundle I have. Sorta. I have a saved page for 'download this' (a summer bundle that appears to have been free), but no evidence that I own the bundle, and the download links don't work. If I ever feel like it, I might chase it up - how did it happen, not necessarily 'give me access to these games' – but it's not a priority. I have so many games, and I managed to grab several of them as freebies anyway.
I am, as we speak, in the process of reviewing the first six pages of the second bundle I downloaded (I've reviewed the first I downloaded already, which thankfully was only three pages long; but I had originally downloaded it before coming up with my organising system, so pages 1-6 are just one folder into which everything got dumped.)
I will go through this today, and then the project 'download and sort itch.io files' will be DONE.
Go me. (I then need to go back to the Fonts, which was almost finished, but of course I acquired a few more fonts in the meantime. I also want to do the Great Purge and shorten my font menus.)
Other Games/Campaigns:
I managed only one solo game from the Solo but not Alone 5 bundle, and I got stuck on it: it's not a bad game, it's a mechanic I like, but I have no connection to giant mecha, could not get into the story, and spent a week staring at the game without actually playing. It is now part of my Giant Mecha month in 2028.
Abovementioned Scarlet Heroes campaign, which I will write up when I have more to say about it and a complete freeform thing that I had the seed for last month, and actually started to roll dice.
I still don't have a ruleset or a stat block for my protagonist, but I spent a fair amount of time on Google Maps Streetview wandering around a landscape that vaguely matches the one he finds himself in, and thinking about what he would do. He's not out of the woods yet. Well, he's out of the literal woods, but now he's on a road where he's pretty visible, and he had no idea whether his enemies are still around.
Summary:
I'm a bit sorry I did not have time to absorb the rules of Lichdom and actually play; that one is on ice until I have more brain. Which is unlikely to be in March.
Next Focus:
Mythic. This is a big one. The Mythic Game Master Emulator is the gold standard that gets recommended a lot; the Mythic Fate Chart is used widely to ask yes/no questions.
But there is so much more to it, and I haven't got a chance to read everything Mythic I have.
I've already read some of the articles in the Mythic Magazine and part of the main book; but this is a whole ecosystem with advice for adventures and locations and characters and… yeah. It's a lot. What I've read has been very good, which is why I have so many of them, but there is no hope in hell to even skim, let alone absorb, all of it in one month.
By the end of the month I want to have a better mental model of what's out there.
Next Game:
Mythic doesn't just have the yes/no chart, and spark tables (single words you're supposed to make a story out of), it has a whole solo gameloop. The first time I looked at it I found it unintuitive – part of the game loop is that you have to design future scenes. Now I understand that it's more complex than that, but at the time, the flow of the game seemed all wrong. Today, with a lot more solo experience under my belt, I am more confident I can make it work; I have no idea whether I'll like it, but I want to play a little to find out.
While it's very early days, I am happy with the project so far. Setting myself a monthly focus helps me not to drown in games and ultimately play nothing. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the many many many games I own, I can look at my list and go 'I'll get around to this in [month] and move on.
I was expecting to find 'choose your own adventure' type games not for me, and they are not for me. Success.
State of the List:
Blocked out until May 2028
Did I do what I intended?
Yes. Not as much of it as I’d hoped.
Actual Focus:
Published adventures. Which was my goal.
Did I engage?
Yes. I also started playing one of the mechanics from Scarlet Heroes, the Wilderness/Hexcrawl. While it's no longer 'Scarlet Heroes Month' I feel that making _some_ time for the previous month's focus isn't a bad use of my time.
Did I play my focused game(s)?
I played two solo adventures (one was very short), booted one, and started reading into a third, just did not have time or brain enough for it.
I have one, possibly two more gamebooks in my possession; and while I may play them at some point, this is not what I enjoy. Finding this out was one of the goals for this month.
Other solo-related things:
I have downloaded every itch.io bundle I have. Sorta. I have a saved page for 'download this' (a summer bundle that appears to have been free), but no evidence that I own the bundle, and the download links don't work. If I ever feel like it, I might chase it up - how did it happen, not necessarily 'give me access to these games' – but it's not a priority. I have so many games, and I managed to grab several of them as freebies anyway.
I am, as we speak, in the process of reviewing the first six pages of the second bundle I downloaded (I've reviewed the first I downloaded already, which thankfully was only three pages long; but I had originally downloaded it before coming up with my organising system, so pages 1-6 are just one folder into which everything got dumped.)
I will go through this today, and then the project 'download and sort itch.io files' will be DONE.
Go me. (I then need to go back to the Fonts, which was almost finished, but of course I acquired a few more fonts in the meantime. I also want to do the Great Purge and shorten my font menus.)
Other Games/Campaigns:
I managed only one solo game from the Solo but not Alone 5 bundle, and I got stuck on it: it's not a bad game, it's a mechanic I like, but I have no connection to giant mecha, could not get into the story, and spent a week staring at the game without actually playing. It is now part of my Giant Mecha month in 2028.
Abovementioned Scarlet Heroes campaign, which I will write up when I have more to say about it and a complete freeform thing that I had the seed for last month, and actually started to roll dice.
I still don't have a ruleset or a stat block for my protagonist, but I spent a fair amount of time on Google Maps Streetview wandering around a landscape that vaguely matches the one he finds himself in, and thinking about what he would do. He's not out of the woods yet. Well, he's out of the literal woods, but now he's on a road where he's pretty visible, and he had no idea whether his enemies are still around.
Summary:
I'm a bit sorry I did not have time to absorb the rules of Lichdom and actually play; that one is on ice until I have more brain. Which is unlikely to be in March.
Next Focus:
Mythic. This is a big one. The Mythic Game Master Emulator is the gold standard that gets recommended a lot; the Mythic Fate Chart is used widely to ask yes/no questions.
But there is so much more to it, and I haven't got a chance to read everything Mythic I have.
I've already read some of the articles in the Mythic Magazine and part of the main book; but this is a whole ecosystem with advice for adventures and locations and characters and… yeah. It's a lot. What I've read has been very good, which is why I have so many of them, but there is no hope in hell to even skim, let alone absorb, all of it in one month.
By the end of the month I want to have a better mental model of what's out there.
Next Game:
Mythic doesn't just have the yes/no chart, and spark tables (single words you're supposed to make a story out of), it has a whole solo gameloop. The first time I looked at it I found it unintuitive – part of the game loop is that you have to design future scenes. Now I understand that it's more complex than that, but at the time, the flow of the game seemed all wrong. Today, with a lot more solo experience under my belt, I am more confident I can make it work; I have no idea whether I'll like it, but I want to play a little to find out.
While it's very early days, I am happy with the project so far. Setting myself a monthly focus helps me not to drown in games and ultimately play nothing. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the many many many games I own, I can look at my list and go 'I'll get around to this in [month] and move on.
I was expecting to find 'choose your own adventure' type games not for me, and they are not for me. Success.
