Green_Knight's Solo Adventures

First Impresssions: LordSworn

( Game Description )

I’ve been staring at this for several days and decided to stop making an effort, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be in the mental space for this. A big part of the narrative will be how different characters react to events; and that sounds much more like a group game (albeit a grim, challenging one that I would want to play only with people I trust, and I probably want to play other games more).

It’s an intriguing thought, the materials are well-presented, the tables offer plenty of customisation, and the gameplay sounds interesting, and yet this has been open on my computer for over a week, and every time I’ve looked at it, my heart sank.

It’s time to acknowledge that this game is preventing me from playing games that excite me, that make my heart sing. I’m not going to eliminate it from my life entirely, but I will be removing it from my hard drive for now.

Unreview: New.Unfold

( Game Description )

I don’t think I fully understand what you’re supposed to do with these instructions. It’s a reflective exercise, but I’d like to see more guidance on how to use it, because I am baffled by where I am supposed to end up, and what I am supposed to learn.

Also, and this is a personal thing, I hate postapocalyptic settings. Having your life wiped out is not, to me, entertainment, or even a reflective exercise, it’s just a very, very scary reality for far too many people.

First Impressions Froggy Hat

(This is a first impressions post because I will need time to engage with this one, and can’t do too many events in a row. It’s delightful, but chewy.)

( Game Description )

The tarot interpretations are pretty darn good - not always what I expected, but solid. And just this once, the game document is long enough to go into detail: there's keyword lists for the minor arcana and slightly more detail for the majors; 15 pages of content in total.

You can treat this as the game it’s meant to be, and have a ton of fun. I’m choosing to treat it more like my tarot card of the day, where I engage with any one concept in depth, thinking about what it means to me and what tools I have/might find to deal with it. Only now with added frogs. And hats. So it will be a while before I finish this game, but I just love the gentle kindness of it, and the concept made me laugh.

Unreview: Heartbreak Heist

( Game Description )


Calling it what it is: this is a guided journalling exercise with minimal prompts and a small gamified mechanic that can easily be nudged into the place you want it to be.

Unreview: Now what do I do?

( Game Description )

Pet death is a real possibility in this game, and it’s probably inevitable. I don’t feel positive about that.
This is a game that demands that you create the whole story, everything. You find an object related to your death. Quick, quick, think of something. And eventually, you need to tie all of these together and make a story of who killed you and how.

This will be either draining or boring or unsatisfying, or all of them. I rolled one room and bailed.

Creating mysteries for TTRPGs is a Hard Problem, and most solutions either involve ‘the GM knows but isn’t telling you’ or ‘the GM sets up a matrix of plausible events, whatever you work hard for turns out to be the solution.’

This ‘game’ has no such resolution mechanic, so you need to bring *that* to the table as well.
Combined with the harm-to-pets and some dissonances in the random tables (your character can be from the Colonial era, but the game can take place in the modern day: How the fuck am I supposed to get revenge on my murderer by scaring them to death? They’re dead anyway.) I just don’t feel like spending hours and hours licking this into shape.

I’d love to try out the ‘track’ mechanic at some point but maybe not in this game.

Playthrough/Review: Colorful Characters (Character Creation Tool)

( Game Description )

This isn’t a game in itself, though it is gamified a little, but the prompting and the ‘feels-like-a-game’ part helped me to come up with things about two characters that I was struggling with (I created a character and a general setting/situation for Combat Apothecary that I did not get to play; in that game they would have been solo, this system needs at least 3 players.).

Character Creation is not my thing. It’s not how I write. Constructs made consciously don’t come to life for me; whether that’s in books or in DnD.

The format forced me to empty my brain of any other thoughts and distractions, and to just go through one step after the next. And yes, there’s a name on the list, and an origin, but I can _tell a story_ for that, and I don’t have to worry about things like hair colour and height, which I really don’t care about at all. This is more about the *Character* than their mechanical description.

I have taken the first of these characters back into the system I’m trying to use right now (Tiny Dungeon) and was able to come up with mechanics that work for that character. Some of the traits were a little surprising, but they fit with what the character had to say about themselves and what others said about the character. This one is treefolk, so they are proficient in Heavy Melee weapons and have mastered Clubs, they know no fear (and get advantage on save tests), they’re good at wilderness survival, but they also have an eidetic memory.

I’ll create the other two tomorrow (well, one I had mostly created, the other suggests a lot of stuff due to her heritage), but knowing what they look like from the inside, I can now find better traits.

Playthrough/Review: Tic-Tac-Tomb

( Game Description )

I’m in the mood for some solo dungeon delving. I’m looking for a simple mechanic where I roll for what kind of challenge or treasure I can find, roll to overcome the trap/monster, loot a little, and move to the next room.

This mechanism sounded like fun, but the tables you're rolling on don't work for me at all. The room description and challenge are based on multiple rolls on multiple tables, though I haven’t worked out what the ‘Being’ table is FOR; it doesn’t get mentioned. You can ‘sacrifice an item’ as part of your gameplay, but you’re not actually given items unless you roll a double, which I didn’t.

This feels half-baked.

This game is also the reason I stated in my last post that journalling games are not the ones with the highest mental load. So far, the highest mental load for me has come from Oracles/Spark Tables, where you get a couple of words and have to find out what they mean in your game.

Description of the Room: It is an endemic trap cache, where one can unlock gauze.
Challenge: Choose dull Alchemy.

I don’t even. I am not feeling intelligent enough to make a story out of that. (caper_est pointed out that 'dull alchemy' probably means turning gold into lead, so there is that.) I don’t want to start there. Give me a smoky Guard Room with a Sarcophagus in which a portcullis suddenly drops. ‘None Survived’ says an inscription and, for want of a better table, 1d6 = 5 Skeletons to fight.
This may end up deadly, but at least I know where I stand. Or where I got squashed.

Playthrough/Review: You are Roadkill

( Game Description )

This actually was one of the first games I played, chosen at random. On the positive side, you don’t need to know anything about solo roleplay to play this.

On the negative side, this is depressing as fuck.

This taught me something about solo gameplay; I don’t want to play it again.

Playthrough/Review: The Disguised Frog

( Game Description )

That was unexpected. Wrote just under 1300 words, guided by the Tarot cards I pulled and the vague suggestions provided. My brain went down some very unexpected – but ultimately very hopeful – tracks.

There is, of course, a pattern to journalling games: I write out the beginning of a story, not its muddle or end (there’s always a muddle in the middle where you have to stop throwing new content into a story).

I have always struggled with writing exercises and find these games (as long as they provide enough substance and enough inspiration) extremely inspiring. Combined with the archetypes and meanings of the tarot, which I happen to know quite well by now, this was a blast.

The resulting story was weird and wonderful and I don’t know whether I shall ever write more of it and take it further, but this is the fourth game of this kind that gave me a meaningful experience.

I have not marked this as retired because I intend to play it again. Not any time soon, but this one will stay on my hard drive.

Short RPGs like this are a great way of unsticking creativity. I spend around two hours writing and rolling dice and pulling cards, there’s a definite end point, and the stakes are very low - you can’t really do this wrong.

Playthrough/Review: Combat Apothecary

( Game Description )

Well. My first DNF, but after spending about 2h and not getting to the first combat while getting more and more frustrated I decided that I had too many unplayed games on my hard drive to invest any more time into an unplayable game.


( Wot I learnt, afterwards, from other people )



It's a game where you have to bring everything yourself: the character, the setting, the gameplay, the enemies… everything. You get a small matrix of 'Environ' (18 items) with entries like 'Fort, Acropolis, Kiln' and as many 'Essence' entries. ('scorch, corrupt, undead') which includes both 'ashen' and 'cinders'.

Even if the information were presented much better (there is *so much* talk of 'lore' which from context is the same as 'essence' because there's nothing else), I'd still hesitate to call it a game.

If I have to do all of the creation myself, I'd want a much more robust system with much clearer instructions.

I did roll a basic combat just to try out the system, but other than being very very confusing indeed, I also dislike how close to the edge the character lives all the time.

In my playthrough, I was supposed to fight an undead creature, which I decided should be a zombie.
My superpower is bleed.
So basically I either bend the narrative until it cries uncle, or I can't use my class feature.

So while I like the general idea and some mechanics like not knowing when you'll meet the boss – definitely a mechanic I want to try out again – I hated the combat system and the general confusion. This is more mental load than making up a game system on the fly.

This is a random post. Sorta. It’s more a post about randomness. I will go into more depth about individual random techniques later, but I wanted to throw this up as a master post. For me, a random element is a vital aspect of ‘play’ in RPGs. In a group, that random element can be partly other players at the table, but I am having a hard time imagining a game without a random element that still feels like a game. (Choose-your-own-adventure can be fun, but they’re different things.)

Dice. Dicess, precioussss
Very much associated with TTRPGs. DnD uses a 7-dice polyset (d4, d6, d8, d10, d%, d12, d20) and any number of extras, especially as you level up (even magic missile uses 3d4) so if you’re playing DnD, you will have at least one set of dice and a grab bag of extras.
Many solo games use D6 instead, and I’ve gotten a few sets of 3xd6 with spots on, which I find easier to read.
Mechanics vary greatly, so there’s a lot game designers can do.
If you have hoarding tendencies, be warned: shiny mathrocks are addictive.

Playing Cards
A surprising number of solo games call for a standard deck of playing cards, with or without jokers. Sometimes you remove other cards. Especially for journaling games, this gives you a mechanic of four groups of prompts. In Ice Station Zero, this was Interior/Exterior/Crew/The Other; it’s a useful pattern.

Tarot Cards
This is playing cards on steroids. You get the four suits and their meanings, but you also get pretty pictures to spark your imagination and the Major Arcana to provide additional archetypes. There are many MANY tarot decks available, as readers of my journal will know, and the right steampunk or fairy tale or wizardry deck can get you into the mood. If the illustrations are detailed enough, you may get inspiration from a background element. Maybe it’s not the ‘2 of Swords’ that matters, but the fact the character is holding two sporks. (Trash Panda Tarot).

Jenga Tower
This is a surprisingly popular mechanism in solo games. I’ll definitely make a proper post about this because I have very mixed feelings about physical towers.

Speciality Cards and Dice
I haven’t yet encountered any games that specifially rely on a custom resource, but you can get decks with pieces of dungeons, cards that determine how an NPC will react to your character, so I felt they deserved an honourable mention.

At some point, I picked up a set of seven dice and I have been using some of them in my freeform solo play:

– Direction (d8, N/NE/E etc)
– Weather (d10, Sunny, Cloudy etc)
– Wilderness Terrain (d 12, this includes not only standard terrains but trails, towns, and castles/ruins)
– Random Emotion (d12, though some are very close, like attracted/flirting and sad/apathy, but I'm trying this out for first encounters with random NPCs)
– Dungeon Terrain (d12, from corridors to obstacles and traps)
– Dungeon Feature (d12, statues, wells, doors etc)
– Treasure (d8, potions, magical and non-magical items etc)



Scrabble Tiles
I haven’t seen this in a solo game yet, but The Far Roofs (currently on Bundle of Holding) uses Scrabble tiles.
Have not even read, yet alone played, and might be screwed: our choice is between Welsh Scrabble and German.

Books
Some people collect random snippets from books and use them as oracles. I’ve seen
– a name for a character (first name they come across)
– borrow an event (this works best with gothic/fantasy novels, but mysteries can work, too. This is where you get the trapdoor or the weird smell or the hostile villagers or _something_ and incorporate them into your game.
– spark table (you roll for a location: page/line) and use those words instead of a table of random words

I have also glanced at a number of games that are based on novels, but haven’t studied the actual mechanism of gameplay.

???
It’s entirely possible that there are further random mechanics that I haven’t discovered yet. If so, I will edit this post further.

20/1/26: Added the 'books' entry.
8/2/26: Amended the 'speciality cards and dice' entry.

Egil

(Having introduced the not-a-game tag, I promptly need ‘probably-a-game’. Indie games are weird)

( Game Description )

I came to the marketplace at noon,
You’ll hear the sorry tale too soon,
priest I met drinking, a monk.
For that meeting, I must atune,
There in Holmguard he cast his last rune.
He badmouthed the old gods and swung his fist,
considering himself immune
to any demands to attune.
I did not care that clearly, he was drunk
My own fists I raised, rough-hewn
Hoping he would change his tune
He failed to dodge. I’ve never missed.

Not a head I want to spend much time in, and I'm not sure I want to do this again.
Loved the 'roll all dice other than %' mechanic and I want to steal it at some point.

(I'd edit this, but I've committed to posting my raw notes, and it's not good enough TO polish but the second line was definitely me spinning my wheels.)



Verdict:
Honourably Retired 🚂
This one is weird 🍭

This sounded interesting and came recommended, but it’s a modified card-of-the-day draw using a pack of playing cards where the purpose is to reflect and work on yourself and hold yourself accountable.

This might work for some people, but I already draw a tarot card of the day, and I have my own procedure for that, which includes making draws ephemeral. I don't want to log what I've pulled and crunch numbers to see what came up most often.

Verdict:
Retired due to lack of interest. 🎪 (= Not my circus, not my monkeys)
Very zen. 🪷
Not a game 📟 (that's a pager, for those of us who remember them)