Modiphius - Solo Game Master's Guide v2 [PDF]

Zitiervorschau

SOLO

GAME MASTER’S

GUIDE

Geek Gamers

SOLO

GAME MASTER’S

GUIDE

Geek Gamers

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Credits Writer: Geek Gamers Graphic Designer: Richard L. Gale Project Manager: Chris Birch Cover Artist: Christian Quinot Interior Artwork Artists: Christian Quinot, Dim Martin For Modiphius: Chief Creative Officer Chris Birch Chief Operations Officer Rita Birch Managing Director Cameron Dicks Head of Product Sam Webb Head of Creative Services Jon Webb Creative Coordinator Kieran Street Financial Controller Luc Woolfenden Logistics and Production Manager Peter Grochulski Art Directors Kris Auburn, Rocío Martín Pérez Studio Coordinator Rocío Martín Pérez Photographer Fátima Martín Pérez Lead 3D Designer Jonathan La Trobe-Lewis Senior 3D Designers Colin Grayson Christopher Peacey Domingo Díaz Fermín

3D Designers Ben de Bosdari Joana Abbott Sean Bullough Lead Graphic Designer Michal E. Cross Graphic Designers Christopher Webb Mark Whittington Stephanie Toro Gurumendi Audio and Video Producer Steve Daldry Development Coordinator Jason Enos Developers Ethan Heywood Jono Green 2d20 Developer Nathan Dowdell QA Testers Dominic Westerland Nathan Perry Samantha Laydon Senior Project Manager Gavin Dady Project Managers Ben Maunder Daniel Lade James Barry Assistant Project Managers Haralampos Tsakiris Matias Timm

Operations Manager John Wilson Factory Manager Martin Jones Senior Production Operative Drew Cox Production Operatives Alex Taylor Anthony Morris David Hextall Joshua Froud-Silverstone Luke Gill Miles Turner Thomas Bull Warwick Voyzey Customer Service and Accounts Manager Lloyd Gyan Events Manager Gregoire Boisbelaud Key Accounts Manager Gary Moore Marketing Coordinator Shaun Hocking Customer Support Chris Dann Webstore Manager Apinya Ramakomud Bookkeeper Valya Mkrtchyan

Printed in Lithuania by Standartu • Product Number: MUH100V101 • ISBN: 978-1-80281-047-9

Geek Gamers is the host of “Geek Gamers,” YouTube’s premier solo RPG channel. Visit www.youtube.com/c/GeekGamers01 Modiphius Entertainment Ltd. 39 Harwood Rd, London SW6 4QP, United Kingdom [email protected] www.modiphius.net

The Achtung! Cthulhu and Modiphius logos are registered trademarks of Modiphius Entertainment Ltd 2022. Achtung! Cthulhu and fantasy art are copyright Modiphius Entertainment. Five Parcecs From Home artwork used with kind permission of Ivan Sorensen. The Solo GM’s Guide is copyright Geek Gamers. Any unauthorised use of copyrighted material is illegal. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photopcopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the author and publisher, except where specifically permitted by law. Any trademarked names are used in a fictional manner; no infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any similarity with actual people and events, past or present, is purely coincidental and unintentional except for those people and events described in an historical context.

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Table of Contents

Introduction1 Part One: Campaign Level: The Big Picture 1: What Is Solo RPGing, Anyway? 2: Think Like a Solo GM 3: Easy Ways to Be Your Own GM

7 9 13 29

Part Two: Session Level: Rules and How to Use Them 4: How to Start Your Solo RPG Session with No Rule Set  5: Step-by-Step: Setting Up a Solo Session with a Rule Set 6: How to Read Really Big Rule Sets 7: Let’s Talk D&D

43 45 57 63 71

Part Three: Tools of the Trade: Oracles, Dice, and Random Tables 81 8: Developing Your Story and Avoiding the Yes/No Dead End 83 9: What’s a Narrative Trajectory and Why Do I Need One? 93 Epilogue: What Happens Next?

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Appendices Appendix A: 10 Mindsets of the Solo GM Appendix B: Solo Session Checklist and Guide to Starting Appendix C: My Solo RPG Wallet Revealed Appendix D: Character Attitudes (for Heroes or NPCs) Appendix E: Tables of Connection and Disconnection  Appendix F: Quick Tables for Starting with No Rule Set Appendix G: Mechanical Adjustments of Stats Appendix H: Literary Random Table Appendix I: Recommended Rule Sets for Soloists Appendix J: Essential Random Tables Appendix N: Annotated, Inspirational, and Educational Reading

99 100 103 105 106 107 111 113 135 137 148

Addenda: A Place, Underground or, Dungeon Theory for All 

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About Geek Gamers169

Introduction

She’s the only one who could take 3 pebbles, a stone, and 5 sticks and create some awesome RPG. – Comment on Geek Gamers

Ever since I posted my first Geek Gamers video on solo RPGing, I’ve fielded hundreds of emails and questions that boil down to “How do you make this look so easy?” One viewer asked, “Do you legit just make all this up as you go?” Yes, I do. If you’re a viewer of Geek Gamers online sessions, you’ll notice that I rarely pull out random tables or turn to solo supplements, yet the sessions seem to flow easily. Choices and decision points arise along the way. Often people ask me to recommend solo systems or books, seeking the “right” apparatus to give them the sort of solo experience they desire. To be sure, some supporting resources are great (and there’s a list of some of my favorites in “Appendix N”), but no collection of books or supplements is going to bestow a magically organic and free-flowing solo RPG experience. It doesn’t work that way. So how is it that my sessions feel so immersive and flow so easily? What’s the secret? How do I make a game from my head, and why does it seem so natural? More importantly, how can you do that too? In order to be both the GM and the player, some people run solo RPG sessions using oracle tables, emulators (products designed to “emulate” a response that a GM might give to a player in any given situation), and random tables. And some people run their sessions using RPG rule sets geared toward journaling and experimental writing, with little need for dice rolling. Lately, some designers have been writing rule sets with solo play baked in—providing multiple random

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Introduction

tables to take players through NPC interactions, location discoveries, etc. Many people use these too. There is no right or wrong way to play, no right or wrong rule set to use. On Geek Gamers I tend toward traditional RPG rule sets (those written for a GM and multiple players) and a fairly limited number of randomizers and external supporting materials. Yes, I roll dice, and yes, I consult tables. But session success isn’t about the random tables I use (though as you’ll see in Chapter 8, some are better than others), and it isn’t about the oracles I use, because I hardly use any. Partially what viewers see in Geek Gamers videos is just my imagination: the way I make up stories comes from years of spending time alone as an only child and using my mind to create other worlds. Often those places had magic. They were always escapes. But the heart and soul of what viewers see is my “on the fly” story development. Now, I can’t put you inside my head to see how I think. (Trust me, you wouldn’t want to live in there!) But what I can do—and what this book aims to do—is explain some basic tenets of storytelling and narrative and apply them to working with RPG rules, mechanics, and constructs. These are the strategies I turn to in my mind when I’m playing. These are what give my sessions the compelling stories you see developing. And these concepts are what I’ve put into words for you, here in this book. This book distills many of the ideas I’ve developed over the years to inform my own solo sessions, whether on camera or off. It presents them and also translates them into a series of practices for you to take to your own table. It is a collection of solo RPG tips—strategies for play based on concepts I’ve developed—as well as a collection of RPG principles relevant to any soloist who aspires to run sessions that flow naturally, unfold surprisingly, and have a narrative life of their own. But the book is much more than a collection of tips. It’s a crash course in what makes narratives and stories work—what makes them go—and it explains how you can use these storytelling tools to make your own solo sessions shine. Do you want to feel excited when you enter a dungeon? Do you want to be surprised at what monster you might encounter? Do you want to feel the rush of adrenaline as you escape an imploding planet? If so, then this book is for you.

The Rise of Solo RPGing Although it seems that solo RPGing has taken off recently, acknowledgement of solo play came right from the beginning, and right from the source. Gary Gygax created rules for “Solo Dungeon Adventures” in 1975, and in 1979 was still continuing to talk about the game in the context of solo play. Back then, the thought was that people would play solo if they couldn’t find a proper group, or as GM prep—and so it probably was. Yet solo rules continued to appear, in various forms, throughout early editions of the original role-playing game. But these were more or less meant to simulate a GM and thus were directed at players only. What never appeared, despite the thousands of books, manuals, and modules, was any kind of intentional meta discussion for the solo GM. Look around the internet now and you’ll find hundreds of individual charts and pamphlets acting as supporting solo RPG documents for specific rule sets. It seems every day another one pops up. Some of them don’t offer much that’s new, and many of them are wonderful. But regardless of their quality, all of them share something in common: they are written in response either to specific rule sets, or generic collections of rules (such as a solo guide to OSR play or to Traveller RPG). These system-specific (or rules-specific) supplements are great if you want to keep purchasing supplements to go with rule sets, and if you don’t mind staying away from rule sets when you can’t find a solo supplement to go with it.

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Introduction

The book you are reading differs from them all. This solo RPG guide will give you a foundation for understanding how and why RPG stories work, and how to take this knowledge of story creation to play exciting and deep solo sessions, regardless of which rule set you use, and independent of any specific rule set. That’s what you’ll find here. Do you want the freedom and confidence to pick up any rule set—no matter how complicated or simple; no matter whether published yesterday or in 1980—and be able to solo it with ease? If so, this book is for you. With the principles of this book in mind, you’ll be armed to solo any rule set and tackle it like a solo RPG pro, generating compelling stories and involving adventures without resorting to random table after random table. Because let’s face it, after a while, rolling dice to give you some kind of answer from an oracle just isn’t that interesting, and certainly doesn’t feel like playing an RPG. Armed with the skills this book provides, you will have ways to drive your story forward and find the answers to your questions developing from your actual gameplay rather than from a roll on a table. Such emergent narrative is central to a rewarding gameplay experience and is parallel to what happens when groups of people experience RPG sessions together as players with a GM. Who is this book for? If you’ve thought about solo RPGing but not gotten any farther than thinking... If you’ve tried to solo but have given up after making a few characters... If you’ve watched Geek Gamers videos and wanted to be able to do that for yourself... And if you are already a seasoned soloist but want your sessions to improve.... And if all you want is a bunch of great random tables.... This book is for you. While I’ve discussed many of these ideas across the hundreds of videos on my channel, this book is much more than a transcript. The material has been organized, developed, and presented in a way that should allow you to reference it again and again before, after, and even during sessions to help you achieve the kind of satisfying experience you seek when soloing RPGs. This book is designed to set you in the right direction and keep you going. It’s designed to help you solo whether you have a library of hundreds of RPG supplements, maps, minis, and rule sets, or whether you just want to play using one book of rules. Inevitably, sessions may stall. Part Two gives you suggestions and prompts to

Introduction

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start your sessions in such a way that you will be able to help yourself if, or when, a session starts to fall flat. It’s system-neutral. Nothing here has anything to do with a particular rule set. It doesn’t matter what rules you use; these ideas will still apply. It’s genre-neutral. While many (but not all) examples are from the fantasy genre, the principles apply whether you are running something post-apocalyptic, Tolkien, steampunk, hard-core sci-fi, Lovecraftian—or anything else. It doesn’t matter what theme you play; these ideas will still apply. While I generally focus on running one or two characters in a game, of course the principles here apply even if you run a larger party.

What happens next? All good stories have something in common: they make you wonder, “What happens next?” Ultimately, the feeling of flow and immersion that viewers see in Geek Gamers sessions comes from the fact that I cause viewers to ask this question. I do this in my videos (and in my off-camera solo play) by implementing the concepts I’m putting forth in this book. What you are holding in your hands is the solo GM manual that’s never been written. This book is written for players. This book is written for GMs. You are both of them, and this book is written for you.

Part One ∂

Campaign Level

The Big Picture

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What is Solo RPGing, Anyway? It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules, which is important. … You are creator and final arbiter. – Gary Gygax, Dungeon Masters Guide (1979)

Solo RPGing is similar to “regular” RPGing. Both are… …game storytelling. …creating a simulated world and putting characters into it. …progressively revealing a story that develops organically as you play. …playable fiction: a system that produces narrative as you spend time with it. …emergent fiction. …improvisational storytelling. …interactive fiction,1 facilitated using RPG rules. However solo RPGing differs from convention RPGing in one significant way: Solo RPGing is creating a story with the help of RPG rules, conventions, and randomizers (typically dice), where you (the player) are also acting as the GM. Solo RPGing is what you want it to be, not what someone tells you it is. The way you are a solo RPGer will be different from the way I am, and may even be different from rule set to rule set, or even session to session. 1

Interactive fiction is a story that reacts meaningfully to input. This could be text-based input (as on a computer) or, in this case, die rolls and the application of outcomes from RPG rules to the story.

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Thus, this book is not so much a “how to”; if anything, this book is a “how can I do this better” book. It’s designed to help you get more out of your sessions, suffuse them with life, and gain understanding into the reasons why sometimes sessions fall flat (so they won’t the next time). It presents some general principles and advice that should help you with your sessions no matter whether you use more guided RPG rule sets or less; whether you play with traditional old school rules or more “modern” games. What happens around a table with a GM and players when things are going well is the development of a story. Whether the session completes a swashbuckling adventure on the high seas, or a trek through a nuclear wasteland to retrieve the one remaining drop of oil necessary to get a machine working, or a twilight forest glade showdown against some angry orcs, it’s all about story. But how do you create a story yourself and also play the story yourself? How can you be in the story as a character and be out of the story enough to help it progress? What moves a story forward and how can you create that movement when you are also meant to be playing the characters in the story? This book will help you answer these questions. Raymond Chandler said of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic character, “Sherlock Holmes after all is mostly an attitude.” What did he mean by that? The basis of stories are attitudes or, as I would put it, emotions and feelings. Curiosity. Fear. Surprise. These move a story forward. They make you want to know what happens next. And maintaining interest in what happens next is the central challenge of all good storytelling, and all good solo RPG sessions. If you don’t want to know what happens next, you are just rolling on tables—you are just rolling dice. And here’s the crux of why it’s easier to play RPGs with other people: when you are sitting around a table with a GM and other players, to some extent the storytelling pressure is off. The GM assumes that burden and you’ve got other players (members of your party or clan or whatever) to contribute, too. When traditional RPG sessions stumble, players are rarely the only reason. Perhaps it was the GM; perhaps it was the mix of players around the table; perhaps it was a mismatch between players and rule sets. There are many possibilities, and thus many ways to fix things the next time. But what if you are the GM as well as the player? In those cases, when something isn’t working, we tend to just abandon the session. Rules go back on the shelf,

The Big Picture

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character sheets are tossed or stuck in a drawer, and maybe that voice in our head saying that solo RPGing isn’t really possible gets just a bit louder. Sometimes it feels easier to abandon sessions than continue them. Without some ideas about why a session isn’t working, it’s impossible to fix your session. Without some strategies about how to set up sessions to increase the chances that they’ll flow easily, it’s likely we will end up with many half-started adventures. But none of this needs to happen. You don’t need to give up so easily. You don’t need to set out so aimlessly that your story won’t develop. Having a grasp of some of the larger principles and ideas behind storytelling is important to RPGs, and thus the next two chapters talk about these “higher-order” concepts. These chapters will help you understand and cultivate the mindset of a solo GM. Ultimately, it is this mindset that will help you feel confident in the solo RPGing you do, and get enjoyment from many facets of the experience.

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Think Like a Solo GM Dangle the shadow before their eyes and pretend it was the substance. – Dorothy Bowers, Postscript to Poison

The goals, rewards, and experiences of the solo GM are not the same as that of other GMs, nor are they trying to be. Having the proper mindset when sitting down to a solo session will greatly impact the satisfaction you’ll have. The ideas in this chapter represent some fundamental shifts in thinking you may need to assume as a soloist for maximum enjoyment of the unique gameplay that is solo RPGing. Even as you become more adept at soloing, it can be useful to refer back to them. (I do.) In the next chapter we’ll take a look at the specific resources you’ll need to realize these concepts, but first let’s explore what needs to change in your head before you take pen to paper and open up a rule book.

10 Mindsets of Solo GMs 1. Everything is playing 2. But you don’t need everything 3. Don’t forget the G in RPG 4. Words, not dice rolling, will get you through narrative transitions 5. “What happens next?” is the only essential question 6. Play emotion, not mechanics 7. Stats are not story; numbers are not narrative 8. History is your friend 9. Specific items can generate abstract ideas 10. Similarities and differences yield themes

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1. Everything is playing Play is older than culture … animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing. – Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Play is enchanting. Play casts a spell. It is involving, and it brings you outside of ordinary life. If you are getting involved with an RPG rule set in any way, you are playing. Going through rules and thinking about what to do and downloading a pdf— and not doing anything more than that—is not a failure. It is not a waste of time. It is part of playing. If you create characters but never use them in a session, that is still experiencing the RPG world. That is part of playing. If you read rule sets but never run sessions with them, that is still experiencing the RPG world. That is part of playing. All these things are part of the process of solo RPGing. They are part of having a solo experience. If you roll up a world, you are playing. It doesn’t matter if you never do a skill check with a character in that world or have combat or even have an encounter. You are still playing that world by creating it. Everything is playing, even if it’s just trying to find a system or generating a character and moving on. One of my first attempts at solo RPGing was to work with the original Traveller (Game Designers’ Workshop, 1981) and create a starship. I made and labeled the ship’s map and used the random tables from the “Worlds and Adventures” Book 3 to imagine places the ship would go. That’s it. I never even made characters. I never sent the ship anywhere. I was playing, and it was great! Everything is playing. If you remember just this one point and forget all the rest you will automatically be having a richer experience in your solo sessions, and you’ll stop feeling as if what you are doing is not the “real” solo RPG experience you should be having.

2. But you don’t need everything The artifice lies in the selection of detail. – James Wood, How Fiction Works

Rare is the GM who runs sessions using absolutely everything from a rule set. Or absolutely only things from one rule set, and nothing else. Likewise, as a soloist— perhaps even more so—you will rarely if ever use everything from any given rule set. You may use some rules in more or less detail; you may even ignore rules that are “important” to the rule set. (For example, often I omit encumbrance rules or just conveniently forget about having to feed or rest my characters.) It’s okay to do this, and probably even necessary. Getting into the solo GM mindset means being comfortable with picking and choosing among the rules and details that make sense for you. Editing—when it comes to rules—is a big part of being a solo GM. When it comes to rules, there are no rules.

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3. Don’t forget the G in RPG You bought the game; now it’s yours... that’s your world, you bought it. – M. A. R. Barker

As a solo GM, it helps to have some kind of external structure to make the sessions a little more explicitly gamey, because that structure can help you move the narrative forward from point A to point B. It’s okay to make your session “like” a game. There’s a reason games work… they make use of tried-and-true mechanics or physical aspects of board games to keep the experience dynamic. Some of these are: ¥ Pick-up

and deliver ¥ Press your luck ¥ Action point allowances ¥ Impulse movement ¥ Basic sequence of play ¥ Time track ¥ Modular board or tiles ¥ Character standees ¥ Tokens for items ¥ Cards for treasures, events, etc. Including a game mechanic provides some of the support that you’d get when playing with a GM. It may feel artificial and counterintuitive to a free-flowing traditional RPG session, but structured mechanics can really help the soloist direct her narrative. For example, at the outset you might decide: My session is going to end when…. Or After I do d6 (or d8 or d12) actions, the scene will switch to something else. Or After the character has investigated X of these things, he will go into the next room. This sort of structure would feel limiting in a tabletop RPG session, but for the soloist it can be a lifeline away from stagnation. Make free use of game mechanics. They will help you out if you get stuck, and you can always abandon them if you like. It’s your story; it’s your session.

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Exercise: Get out one of your favorite games—one you know well and that has the same general theme (fantasy, sci-fi, etc.) as a solo session you want to run. Now take out some game components and think about the turn order and other basic mechanics of the board game, and, with pen and paper only, map out an RPG story. Use a character, location, and enemies from the game, give that character a task, and create a story. You can even try your hand at writing a few paragraphs following a very basic story structure—setup, confrontation, resolution. Don’t concern yourself with the mechanics that would be used in gameplay (die rolling, skill checks, etc.) The setup is a basic description of the character in an environment. Look at the token or mini or standee or card from your game and describe the character you see. Make use of the imagery the game provides and any flavor text or attributes from the game to flesh out a description into a character that could be a PC in an RPG session. The confrontation is a basic description of an encounter with an enemy or NPC. Look at an enemy card or token or standee, and imagine a relationship between your PC and that enemy. Look to the map or game board for hints and clues, too. The resolution will be the character’s goal. Based on what you’ve written so far, create a goal for the character in this world. If you like what you’ve written, you could find a rule set and create a character to inhabit the world and scene you have just created. You may have just created the framework for a solo session, or even a whole campaign. And if you don’t like it, think about the reasons why you wouldn’t want to translate that into a session. Even this will be instructive for the next time.

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4. Words, not dice rolling, will get you through narrative transitions Arrange whatever pieces come your way. – Virginia Woolf

In a solo RPG, the biggest challenge is the moment you need to transition from being a player to being the GM. These are generally the times when we reach for dice. For example, consider this question: “Can I or can’t I scale this wall without being seen?” One way to answer it would be to reach for dice and an oracle table, do a roll, and get an answer such as “Yes, but…” This could mean “Yes, you are seen, but…,” and then you’d be faced with figuring out what the complication was. You might develop your story a bit more to determine that, or you might find yourself reaching for the dice again and end up in a dead end cycle of die rolling. As a solo GM, thinking more in terms of words than die rolls for these moments of transition is much more helpful. So let’s imagine that, when faced with the question of whether your character can scale a wall, you examine the situation as the character might. Look: What is around? Who is around? How high is the wall? Feel: What’s it made out of? Is this wall smooth or rough? Would it be easy to scale the wall quietly? Listen: Does it sound as if there are others around? Think: Am I fit and healthy? Am I experienced in wall climbing? Here you might examine your character’s stats. (Notice I wrote “examine” as opposed to “use with a die roll.”) These sorts of narrative questions are those of a solo GM and will provide answers arising organically from the narrative, and not externally from a die roll. A solo GM mindset will have you always thinking twice before reaching for dice.

5. “What happens next?” is the only essential question One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows. – Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America

It’s very common in a solo session, having established the rule set you are using, to start with an idea about what you want to do, and maybe even generate a character and then… nothing. You don’t have an idea of what to do with your character or how to start a story. Why does this happen? Character creation is typically the place in an RPG rule set where steps are spelled out and goals are clear. You’re making a character, after all. This is why so many soloists start with character creation: it’s where you would start when sitting down to play a game around a table with others. When sitting down to the table to solo, however, your first activity should be acting as a GM. Thus do not start sessions with character creation.

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Build a world. Develop a setting. Find an artifact, give it a history, and put it in someone’s pocket. Something. Anything. But don’t make a character. Why? Imagine this: The entrance foyer to an old library. The room is lit by a spirit illumination—“glass orbs, each containing a phantom. The orb is held in a clockwork device which, every few minutes, shakes the orb gently, agitating the phantom within and causing it to produce pulses of light that express its irritation.”2 Even with no character, this setting creates a feeling, an atmosphere. Why? An environment with no character(s) is a place that can spark your imagination to develop a story. But a character existing outside of any specific place and time is much less likely to generate a story. To follow this example, imagine a librarian standing… nowhere. This is not a generative image. With a setting, it is relatively easy to want to know more… with just a character the “more” that you want to know about them isn’t as easy to imagine without an environment already established. If a person is not located in an environment, there is nothing for them to do.

2 From

The Stygian Library: A Dungeon for Bibliophiles by Emmy Allen, published by Dying Stylishly Games, N.D.

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6. Play emotion, not mechanics Elements themselves are patterns of relationships. – Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

Story hangs on emotion. The more emotion, the more story. Story is emotion. When sessions fail, it’s because they don’t draw you in. If you don’t want to know what happens next—if you are not wondering about that question—you will find yourself at a standstill. This is true whether you are a GM running a table of players or a GM working solo. Focusing on the feeling of a place, on the emotion, will inject narrative direction because emotions and feelings are the things that make you want to know what happens next. Without that sense of wonder, sessions become mechanical chores: boring and halting. There is no flow. So how do you get emotion into the story right from the beginning? How can you create—and maintain—emotions throughout a solo session? Consider this difference in describing a party of adventurers coming upon the edge of a forest. Imagine describing it as an eerie forest versus describing it as a magnificent forest. There’s an entirely different feeling about the forest before anything has even happened there. Here’s another example: Encountering an NPC who is tense vs. one who is animated will similarly give an entirely different flavor and context to the interaction, even before anything really happens. Feelings can be injected into every description by the use of basic adjectives. To ensure that you’re maximizing your baseline descriptive capabilities, turn to Appendix E and utilize the “Tables of connection and disconnection” to find adjectives for people and places. Throughout this book I will be presenting strategies for maintaining a sense of emotion and cultivating feelings in your sessions.

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7. Stats are not story; numbers are not narrative Consider this: +1  +32  –2

This is not a story; this is a list of numbers. That’s obvious, and you don’t need me to tell you that. Now consider this: WIS +7  DEX +2  STR +1

Is this a story? No. Is it a character? Not really, though for someone versed in RPG lingo, it might be the beginning of a character type. (Perhaps an old wizard?) Now consider this: Dungeon … Orc … Wizard

This is not a story; this is a list of words. For an RPGer the list might start to suggest some kind of story. Now consider this, as we take those key words and begin to animate them: Dungeon under a mage tower, guarded by an orc, who is holding a wizard prisoner

That is not exactly a story either, but it is the beginning of one: it is the beginning of getting to a place where something is going to change or happen, and where there is a past we can reasonably imagine (How did the orc capture the wizard? Whose mage tower is it?) and a present and a potential future (Will the wizard escape? How? Does he even want to?). Now consider this: Sir Torr the warrior, bloodied and exhausted, approaches the dungeon under a mage tower guarded by an orc who is holding a wizard prisoner.

That is the beginning (or middle?) of a story. We are introducing a new character who immediately brings with him some kind of story (How did he get bloodied? Why is he approaching the mage tower? Does he know the wizard is here?) Let’s continue to develop this:

Sir Torr the warrior, bloodied and exhausted, approaches the dungeon under a mage tower guarded by Valgrub the enslaved orc who is holding Quenay the sorceress prisoner.

And now consider this: Sir Torr the warrior, bloodied and exhausted, approaches the dungeon under a mage tower guarded by Valgrub the enslaved orc who is holding Torr’s beloved Quenay the sorceress prisoner.

Finally, we’ve got a story. Why? There’s a connection, a relationship. Sir Torr is coming to rescue his beloved Quenay. This thread of connection makes the story. Note that the things that transformed a list into a story are not stats, not dice rolls, and not game mechanics. They are personal and ultimately emotional— interpersonal, even: details of relationships, details of feelings. Stats are not story. Yes, you need stats to build out characters following RPG rule set conventions, but remember that they have no meaning on their own. When you start with numbers out of any other context for your character, you can find yourself at a dead end. Story is created from emotion, not stats.

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Exercise: Here are two sets of words with different themes. Using what you have read in this mindset, create some story using these words as the basis. I’ve gotten you started in Story 1, but you don’t need to use my example. Story 1 Robotic arm … Laboratory … Genetically modified plant Robotic arm hidden in a laboratory next to a genetically modified plant.

Story 2 Curator … Archives … Torn paper

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8. History is your friend The past beats inside me like a second heart. – John Banville, The Sea

Life doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There is always something that has come before. A dungeon has a history. A spaceship has a history. Even an orc has a history. But how can you create an entire history of a place? A person? A world? That’s so daunting. The key is not to attempt to create everything but rather to focus only on the highlights or contours—like a sketch artist drawing a face using only a few lines. You can give the suggestion of a grand history by getting into detail on the smallest of things. Here are some questions to ask (and answer) to begin crafting the history of a place: ¥ Who

was a great leader who lived here in the past, and what did she/ he/they do? (Your answer can be just a few words or sentences. Even something as brief as The elderly wizard Scentenfall ruled with his frost wand is a start.) ¥ Who or what settled this place, and why? ¥ Does this place have a religion or set of spiritual practices? If it does, who or what is its god? ¥ Who was an evil force who lived here in the past, and what did she/he/ they do? ¥ What is preserved in the museums and temples of this place? List and describe something, letting your imagination flesh out details as you go. ¥ Does this place have royalty? If so, who are they and why are they revered? ¥ Was there ever a climactic environmental event at this place? If so, what was it and what did it mean? If any of this world-building feels too grand, you can achieve the same goals with the opposite approach. Start small.

9. Specific items can generate abstract ideas The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it. – George Eliot, Middlemarch

If I have one piece of advice about starting any session (or developing any character, or any world) it is this: start with a trinket. A trinket is a narrative device that will anchor your character to the physical world in some way and create a narrative line between the item and the psychology/personality of the character. Create (or randomly choose) the smallest, most inconsequential item and give it a backstory. Once you place it in someone’s hand, you have the beginnings of a narrative. Here are some of the things you can think about and develop: Where did the person get it? Whom did they get it from, and how? (Was it given in love or in hate? Was it stolen?) Who made it? Is it cursed or blessed—and if so, how? In fact, this works for anything you encounter in a session: you can always pause to create the history of the item or place or person. The more connections you develop, the thicker the web you weave and the greater the story. The richer the story, the easier the flow. Start a character with a large and abstract history by focusing on something concrete and small.

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10. Similarities and differences yield themes Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted. … Live in fragments no longer. – E. M. Forster, Howards End

You will find themes in repetition. For example, if you roll on random tables and get multiple results related to water, think about that as a possible theme. Or if places of transition keep coming up, maybe change is your theme. Be flexible: allow random table results to be interpreted as thematic results, not just literal ones. An old coin may be a symbol of a kingdom in decline, and not just currency. A scratched, ornamental silver staff could symbolize anything from the ruined beginnings of a once-significant magical academy to evidence of a former plutocracy toppled by the republic. Always try to step back mentally and consider what the bigger picture could be, because the bigger picture is the narrative picture. Practice the mental equivalent of unfocusing your eyes: in the blurry thoughts you will “see” the larger outlines of your story. Remember that if you keep rolling on a table and getting similar results, you have two choices: either keep rolling until you get something different, or interpret the similarity as a theme. Thus, if you kept rolling on witches as the next NPC encounter (after you just came across a witch), perhaps this is a sign that you’ve met up with a coven, or reached a place where witchcraft rules. Keep a running list of themes as they develop. When you are not sure about what to do next in your session, return to your thematic list and determine if you can make a decision that relates to one of the underlying themes.

3

Easy Ways to Be Your Own GM Watching you play like this reminds me of someone who is perfect in playing a musical instrument. – Comment on Geek Gamers

It isn’t that hard to start sessions, but it can be very hard to continue them. I hear this time and again from viewers, and I get it: My desk used to be filled with notes from half-begun sessions from various rule sets. Without an understanding of narrative building blocks, you too may end up with many notes and beginnings of sessions and far fewer developed stories. And although there’s nothing wrong with reading rules and making characters (see my point earlier about “Everything is playing”), when you are geared up to start and play a solo session, it can be frustrating to get stuck right after you generate a character. This chapter presents four types of resources to help you be your own GM. Every solo RPG session of mine that achieves a sense of flow contains these four ingredients in some measure or another. They are not ingredients in the sense of a recipe, where sugar is always sugar, for example, but they are ingredients in the sense of aspects of things that must be brought together, as in the old wedding adage “something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.” The actual thing of the something can be different, but all four concepts should be present to promote a fully developed experience. With these resources in place, you will be able to find your way when you’re adrift. They will give you scaffolding for building your story. And the best part is that you probably already have them sitting in your house even if you’ve never soloed an RPG before picking up this book. Let’s take a look.3 3

To see these principles explained in a video, search for “Easy Ways to be your own GM” on Geek Gamers. To see them in play with Scarlet Heroes search for “Being Your Own GM Demo.”

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Four Essential Solo RPG Resources ¥ Generative

resources ¥ Suggestive resources ¥ Restrictive resources ¥ A rubric

Generative resources Generative resources are the broadest and most open-ended. They can provide material for both large and small creations—from starting an entire world or universe to envisioning the smallest item. They are so versatile because they are not very directive. You can pick and choose from them easily. They require no context or explanation. They can be used for macro ideas (overall sense of mission or who the motivating players are) as well as micro ideas (what a room looks like or what the terrain is). Here are some examples: ¥ Books

of random tables ¥ Websites with random lists ¥ Lists, lists, and more lists My favorite generative resources—and the ones that have gotten the most notice when they are featured on Geek Gamers—are novels and nongame books. They’re great because they are from the nongaming world, so automatically what they generate randomly feels “new”—because, in a sense, it is. As I’ve demonstrated in videos, I come up with a number, turn to that page in a novel, and start reading until I get to something that seems to fit or generates an idea. It’s quite easy, as long as you start with thematic novels—meaning novels that will work with the theme you are playing (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, whatever). Let me walk you through an example of playing with a generative resource, using The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. Published in 1794, this novel is the prototype of gothic romantic fiction and features a lone young woman confined to a medieval castle in the mountains, supernatural hauntings, and a predatory guardian. It’s among my favorites for this type of work (or just for reading). You roll three d10s and come up with 5, 3, 0. (Alternatively, you could use an online randomizer to give you the page number range you need, such as 4–567.) Turning to page 530 of the printed book (in this case a Penguin edition published in 2001), you start reading at the first complete paragraph (I’ve added italics for

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emphasis here): “The Count himself assisted in lifting the arras, with which the bed-chamber, saloon and one of the anti-rooms were hung, that he might discover if any door had been concealed behind it. …” You stop, and take note of the first mention of something that could provide an RPG direction—in this case, “concealed door.” That might be enough, but if it isn’t, you just continue reading: “but, after a laborious search, none was found, and he, at length, quitted the apartments, having secured the door of the last anti-chamber, the key of which he took into his own possession.” So if the concealed door isn’t enough of a suggestion, you then find a key. You can always keep reading until you get an idea that might work with your evolving story. You’re looking for a narrative hook, something that sparks your imagination. Now, let’s consider this random paragraph from Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860): I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met—the road to Hampstead, along which I had returned, the road to Finchley, the road to West End, and the road back to London. I had mechanically turned this latter direction,

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The Big Picture and was strolling along the lonely high-road—idly wondering, I remember, what the Cumberland young ladies would look like—when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. Or this, from the same novel: As I got near there was as strange smell stealing out on the damp night air. I heard a snapping noise inside—I saw the light above grow brighter and brighter—a pane of glass cracked—I ran to the door and put my hand on it. The vestry was on fire! Before I could move, before I could draw my breath after that discovery, I was horror-struck by a heavy thump against the door from the inside. I heard the key worked in the lock—I heard a man’s voice behind the door, raised to a dreadful shrillness, screaming for help.

Either of these passages would be a great starting point for a horror-themed adventure. They could also be used as turning points, or when you need a new scene, as backstory for an NPC, or to establish a mood for your session. Exercise: See what type of story you can generate from these passages and sketch out a trajectory for that story.

When I demonstrated this technique in my video “Easy ways to be your own GM,” everyone asked: Why does this look so easy? As with basically everything in solo RPGing, 90% of the work needs to happen before you roll the dice. What does that mean in this case? Select your book wisely: choose one that will provide thematic passages. You need to know a novel well before you roll on it because you need to select one that is likely to yield passages relevant to the themes you want to develop in your session. The randomness of a roll will ensure that you aren’t simply playing out the

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novel’s narrative, but rather selecting parts of it by chance to serve as jumping off points for your own story. But what if you’re not a big reader? To help, I’ve included a d66 literary random table in Appendix H that offers some great places to start. Consider this table as offering thirty-six random atmospheric beginnings in a variety of themes— it’s no more focused than that—but it will set you off using literature to ignite your story. Or you may wish to use the literary table as a way to flex your narrative muscle: read a random passage and generate a scene or a goal or any interaction based upon it. Perhaps you’d even want to try some journaling based on these passages and use what you write as the basis of a session. Getting familiar with using novels this way will open up your gaming immeasurably—in theory, to any setting that someone else has written about!

Suggestive resources Suggestive resources are slightly more direction-oriented than generative ones and will provide you with a bit more concrete information to use as a jumping-off point. Think of them as something you are given as a starter, and take it from there. Suggestion is the soloist’s best friend. I can almost guarantee that you have lots of suggestive resources lying around your house, because the best suggestive resources are ones that have already been developed for you—namely, components of board games. That’s right, anything from board games will work: ¥ Maps ¥ Items ¥ Equipment

or treasure cards

¥ Minis ¥ Tokens

Any component of a game, taken out of the context of its box, can provide direction and suggestion for your own adventure. Repurposing your game collection is a great way to start. For example, look at a map and see the edge of a forest? Perhaps a wayward wanderer perished here at the hands of one of the dark elves from the forest, who raided the body and left behind what they didn’t want.

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Or pull three item cards randomly from a game—such as an empty wineskin, an elven bow, a battered chest—and imagine a story that connects them. Here are some examples using those items off the top of my head: ¥ An

elven warrior, at the end of his quest to rescue his kingdom’s jewels from the goblins who stole them, perished here. ¥ The elderly wizard abandoned his apprentices in the forest, leaving behind items imbued with magic. “This is a test,” were his parting words. ¥ In the artifacts room of the museum lie three relics that tell the tale of long-ago wars—wars that are now calling you to action. There are so many ways to go if you start with a few concrete items. Let them be springboards for your imagination. Exercise: Take out a game, pull three or four components from it, and let your mind wander. Look at the images and words on the components and say “This is a story,” and then ask yourself “What is the story?” If the imagery in the game you choose isn’t evocative, read the flavor text on the cards or tokens and say “This is a story” and then ask yourself “What is the story?” (If nothing clicks, choose a different game!)

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Here’s an example using a very popular game, Terraforming Mars. Reaching into the box I draw five cards at random. Why five? No reason, other than it’s my favorite number. For the type of randomization I’m suggesting here, I’d recommend choosing at least three and no more than seven cards (or tiles, or whatever it is you are using from your game). This range will give you plenty of options, without being so many that no direction emerges. Back to my example: I’ve randomly chosen cards about an asteroid strike, power infrastructure, a mining expedition, adapted lichen, and a bribed committee. So what kind of story prompts do these cards suggest? Many directions are possible. Here’s an example of what comes to my mind right away: Members of a mining expedition are trapped underground when an asteroid strikes the planet during an expedition. They face two immediate challenges: extricate themselves from the mine shaft (dungeon crawl in space) and investigate whether the strike was of natural origins or the result of a conspiracy (suggested by the “bribed committee” card). Bribed committee is abstracted to “powerful, corrupt entity” and pairing that with the adapted lichen (“mutated organic material”) yields a monster or monsters who are going to be chasing our heroes. Let’s consider one more example from an older game that many of you may own: Mage Knight. I’d approach Mage Knight a bit differently, choosing as my random starting point any of the many modular map tiles. Reaching into my box, I draw out one showing a mage tower in the center hex, the symbol for a marauding orc to the east, mountains to the west, and a village to the southwest. That’s almost too easy: A village is being attacked by orcs and the only way to stop them is by finding the wizard who is being held hostage in a nearby mage tower. For more development, you could turn to other components in this game. Grabbing any set of character cards, I take three at random. I’ve got a mana draw, a swiftness card, and a determination card. Extrapolating from this and keeping my ideas in the context of the story I’ve already begun, I come up with this character backstory: A young lad (the determination card) who had been a student of the wizard (mana draw) has decided to enter the tower alone (swiftness) to rescue his former mentor. If you wanted to go even deeper into the Mage Knight game box, you could draw out specific enemies and more tiles for an overland journey toward the mage tower (even though on your original tile it is sitting right next to your village). Remember: you can always use board game components for an abstracted suggestion or for something literal (in this case, a dragon token = a dragon in your solo RPG session). These stories could then be ported into appropriate rule sets (sci-fi or fantasy) to support their development.

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Restrictive resources Simply put, restrictive resources are what some call oracle tables: ways of getting a yes, no, or maybe answer to a question. Perhaps you’ve seen lists such as 1–2

no, and

3–4

no

5–6

no, but

7–8

yes

9–10 yes, and

Tables such as these give a guideline/direction/response to questions that you ask and decisions that you need to make. They take random input and give a predetermined output. This is what I’d call a restrictive resource. Of course, once you have the answer, you must determine how to incorporate it into your story. Many consider oracle tables to be a very open-ended way of answering questions. Strictly defined, oracle means “revelation or response.” I have an opposite perspective, and see them as “restrictive.” So why do I consider them this way? What could possibly be less restrictive than a revelation? I consider them restrictive in two senses of the word: First, they are meant to take a broad range of possibilities—what can happen now? Anything can happen now—and limit those possibilities, restrict them, to only certain kinds of outcomes. For example, “yes, your character can break through that lock,” or “no, the corpse has no treasure,” or even “maybe the king is in this prison.” Those restrictive answers are meant to advance the narrative—to let you know what might happen next. But they are also restrictive in the sense that they can lead to a dead end. If you find yourself rolling on a yes/no table repeatedly, just hoping to get a different answer because what you got leads you nowhere, or keeps you in the place you were before you rolled, you’ve found the Dead End Where Yes Meets No. Avoiding this situation should be one of the soloist’s primary goals. We’ll discuss the dead end problem more in Chapter 8. (If you are a Geek Gamers viewer, you’ll notice that I use these kinds of tables rarely, and the dead end problem is why.) My favorite restrictive resource, and really the only one I use consistently, is this percentile table (which is also reproduced in Appendix C). I highly recommend copying this from the book and having it at the ready for your sessions. Using the strategies and skills you are getting from this book, I believe the table below is really all you need as an oracle.

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How to use it? Simply think of a question and the likelihood of that question being answered in the affirmative. For example: “Will there be a grimoire in this treasure chest?” Since that seems “unlikely” you’d roll a d100 and consult the “unlikely” row on the table. You’re in luck! You rolled a 34 which means that, against the odds, there is a grimoire in the chest. Adjective

Yes

No

A Sure Thing

01–90

91–100

Very Likely

01–75

76–100

Somewhat Likely

01–60

61–100

50/50

01–50

51–100

Unlikely

01–40

41–100

Very Unlikely

01–25

26–100

Impossible

01–10

11–100

Why do I like this table so much? For one thing, I think that percentile tables (and rolls) are useful because they give a visual sense (remember number lines from school?) of how likely things are. For another, it gives direction but is still rather openended. Phrases like “somewhat likely” still require you to rely on your imagination to define the specific outcome. Though it is restrictive, it is not too restrictive.

A rubric Rubric is not just a fancy way of saying “rules.” Rubric has other meanings including “a set of guidelines or customs or established procedures” and, in teaching circles, the traditions in place to promote certain learning objectives. I use this word because it reminds me that, like rubrics, rules are meant to be strong suggestions of customs of play, rather than strict requirements. In RPGs, rules are meant to recommend direction. Following them to the letter is not mandatory and in fact for the soloist, knowing how, when, and why to ignore rules is imperative. Improvisation is at the heart of all solid GMing. Interpretation, conversation, and flexibility are integral to RPGs. As such, it’s okay not to concern yourself with details that don’t matter to you. You don’t care about when, or if, people eat? So don’t feed anyone. You don’t care whether someone has the strength to carry an axe and a bow and a treasure they just found? So let them carry everything! Ignore all those encumbrance rules.

You want to magically show up on that cool planet you just rolled up? Guess what? You can! You don’t need to travel there; you can magically just be there. Interested in potion creation down to the measure of each last ingredient? Play that! Creating a potion could be the whole session. Want to build a spaceship even if it goes nowhere? Build it! It’s perfectly fine to use different levels of detail for each aspect of what happens. Feeling confident about skipping details or moving in and out of the level of detail you choose is an important aspect of the mindset of the solo GM (or any GM, really!). Rule sets are flexible, and as the GM you must be flexible too. Telescoping in and out narratively between the very specific and the very general adds a level of richness to solo sessions, and this sort of variability also adds a degree of realism. Think about it: we don’t go through the day paying equal attention to everything that happens. Our brains naturally filter the world in a process called sensory gating—we focus our attention on information we deem relevant. Game sessions should be no different, just because you are creating the world from a rule set. Not every aspect of the rule set will be relevant to your goals or play style.

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Putting it all together So what does it look like to use all these resources? Do you need some kind of checklist while you are playing? No—but Appendix B provides one anyway. If you watch Geek Gamers you know what sessions are like with all these ingredients baked in. In case you aren’t familiar with those videos, or want to see these resources integrated in writing, here are some examples.

Starting with generative resources Sitting down to a session, you pull out the latest set of random tables (generative) you downloaded from your favorite website and start to roll up a planetary system. You get some thoughts about a story involving an evil warlord who is attempting to destroy a planet by sabotaging the geodesic domes that cover the city and protect it from a poisonous atmosphere. You find an old map from some online space game (suggestive) and download it, noting the terrain features of a planet. Scanning your shelves you pick out an RPG rule set (rubric) that appeals and grab percentile dice (restrictive). For this session, a basic percentile table is all you’ll need or use. You’re all set. Starting with suggestive resources You sit down with your favorite fantasy board game (suggestive). You open the game box and start looking through the tiles that make up its modular board. One of them pictures a castle in the mountains—this tile has always been a favorite of yours. Deciding this is where you want to set your session, you find some relevant tables in Tome of Adventure Design (generative) and start rolling up a few details about the castle and the rulers of the land. Then you turn to the GM section of the rules you want to play (rubric) and roll on some tables there, establishing a short history about a king who lives in the castle and is dealing with an uprising to the north. You don’t really want to play this king so you file away his details for later on and take out a sheet of paper, creating a d6 list of fantasy characters from both the game and the rule set (restrictive/rubric). You write a sentence about each one that contains just enough flavor to power the beginnings of a story and roll the die. The 5 you roll is “a young elf cast out from his clan and in search of riches.” This will be your character. Now you think about how he is connected to the wizard. Your session has begun.

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Starting with restrictive resources These resources are the biggest “supporting characters” in a solo session, so it may be least likely that you’d start with them. Nevertheless, that’s not impossible to do, and may even be a great way to stretch your imagination in useful ways. Turning to Appendix J in this book, you grab your d100 dice and roll twice on the action and theme oracle tables (restrictive), on pages 140-141. Getting values of 36 and 57 you have “suppress” and “advantage.” How could these two concepts start a story? After thinking a bit you come up with a few ideas: ¥ The

session is about a kingpin in a secret society who has led a faction for years (“advantage”) but is now being challenged (“suppress”) by underlings who know some terrible secrets. ¥ The session is about a superstar galactic traveller (“advantage”) stranded alone on a dying planet (“suppress”). ¥ The session is about a group of misfits (“suppress”) in a post-apocalyptic world who have found an unlikely treasure—a secret source of clean water (“advantage”) that is worth more than gold in the harsh world they live in. ¥ The session is about a fairy queen (“advantage”) under threat (“suppress”) from neighboring demon imps. As the story opens, your party is being summoned by the queen to help. You’re not yet even sure what genre you want to play in so you decide to leave it to fate, rolling a d4 and getting a 2: the galactic traveller it will be. You decide that Classic Traveller (rubric) is going to offer the best way into your story, containing as it does a narrative-based character creation and many options for including details. You also know that you don’t want this session to be too heavy or serious. Grabbing your copy of Firefly (suggestive) you take out some cards, planning to use them to generate tasks and quests—once you can get off this dying planet! (You’ve already decided that the initial prompt you rolled won’t impact much of the session—and that’s ok. It’s your game to play as you wish.) You have Stars without Number and though you aren’t going to use its rules, it does have random tables (generative) that could be useful, along with those in The Game Master's Apprentice: Sci Fi deck that you have. You’re ready to go.

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Starting with a rubric Knowing that you want to play something post-apocalyptic, you pull out Mutant Year Zero (rubric) and turn to the chapter on creation of the Ark (a player’s home base). Even when starting with a known rule set, you know it’s a sound idea to begin by creating some specifics of an environment. Supplementing the choices given in the rules with some random tables (generative) from another post-apocalyptic RPG, you form some ideas about your character, and create that, along with a sidekick. Now you’ve got two characters in a place with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Scanning your board game shelves, you pull out an old 1980s sci-fi swashbuckling game and take out the board (suggestive). Assigning numbers to each locale on the map, you roll two dice and come up with two locations. Deciding that a “pick up and deliver” adventure will work well, you send your character on a journey from the home base to Locations A and B. Using some of the cards form your board game (suggestive), you give your character two items to be carrying. Using some oracle tables you like (restrictive), you send your character on a journey, knowing that it’s likely to be a fruitful one… at least at the beginning. As you see, these are two rather different ways to begin, but both incorporate the four types of resources, and thus provide a solid foundation for moving forward, whether your session will be a one-off or the beginning of a long campaign. Exercise: Try starting sessions using each of the four types of resources. The more comfortable you become moving among these kinds of inputs, the more easily your sessions will flow. You may also find that you have a preferred method or order of integrating the various resources.

Part Two ∂

Session Level

Rules

and How to Use Them

4

How to Start Your Solo RPG Session with No Rule Set A pattern of events cannot be separated from the space where it occurs. – Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

When considering the beginning of a new solo RPG session, most people probably think about two things right away: what rule set they are going to use and what character they are going to create. I believe that these two decisions should not necessarily be made right away, as—after a deceptively easy quick start—they can lead toward stagnation. The best way I know to avoid the common situation where you’ve rolled up a character and don’t know what to do with it is… not to start a session by rolling up a character. It might feel difficult and counterintuitive to sit down with no rules in mind, but bear with me as I describe how to do it (and if you’re really intent on starting with rules, turn to Chapters 5 and 6, which walk you through doing just that).

Starting without a rule set If you’re ready to try it right now, everything you need to know is right here. This chapter will present two different techniques to get started in ways that don’t involve a rule set or character creation.4 Grab your favorite generative and suggestive resources (see Chapter 3 if you don’t know what I mean by this), sit down, and start looking, thinking, and rolling. Describe an environment and give it a mood/feeling. Here are some quick tables to get you started with an environment and a mood. (These are reproduced in Appendix F for ease of use during sessions.) 4

I demonstrated this technique in the Geek Gamers video “Creating settings for your RPG sessions,” and you can look at that video to see some of these techniques in action.

Table 4: Environment (d6) 1

Academic (now roll on Table 4A)

2

Urban (now roll on Table 4B)

3

Natural (now roll on Table 4C)

4

Nautical (now roll on Table 4D)

5

Underground (now roll on Table 4E)

6

Cosmic/Planetoid (now roll on Table 4F)

Table 4A: Academic

Table 4B: Urban

1

Apothecary

1

Crime boss lair

2

Archive/Scriptorium

2

Abandoned warehouse

3

A research institute

3

Apartment complex

4

Rare book room in the library

4

Military facility

5

Professor’s study

5

Abandoned mall

6

Science laboratory

6

Crowded rundown bar

7

Lecure hall

7

Subway station

8

Gymnasium

8

Late-night diner

9

Teacher’s lounge

9

Large city hospital

10 Auditorium

10 Power plant

Rules and How to Use Them

47

Table 4C: Natural 1

Mountainside cavern

2

Light forest clearing with pattern of rocks

3

Ruins of a witch’s hut at the edge of the village

4

Shrine constructed in the side of a cliff face

5

Vine-covered island graveyard

6

Sand or snow dunes covered in shifting runes

7

Rural crossroads

8

Lonely moor

9

Abandoned vehicle on the side of a dirt road

10 Mountain path Table 4D: Nautical

Table 4E: Underground

1

Magical coral reef

1

Dungeon

2

Misty, uncharted island

2

Crypt

3

Rocky coast with sea caves

3

High-tech secret facility

4

Unmanned ghost cargo ship

4

Caves

5

Seaport on coastline

5

Dragon’s lair

6

At the side of a beached, dying sea monster

6

Alien city

7

Dwarven mines (abandoned, or not)

7

Pirate ship locked in battle

8

Secret entrance to mountain factory

8

Port town

9

Sewers

9

Imperial warship

10 Abandoned passageway out of a prison

10 A hydra’s underwater lair Table 4F: Cosmic/Planetoid 1

Scientific outpost on an icy world

2

Salvage yard for robotic parts and abandoned AI tech

3

Luxury space station

4

Dying alien corpse monstrosity in the alleyway of a domed city

5

Edge of an acidic pond in the wastelands

6

A security bot’s post at a secret installation

7

Smuggler’s space ship

8

Bioengineering lab

9

Space bazaar/trading plaza

10 Inner sanctum of a crime syndicate

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Rules and How to Use Them

Now, you’ll need to create a mood/feeling of the place. You can either do this yourself or roll on the tables below. Naturally, if you are looking to randomize this decision, just take your d6 and roll: 1–3: disconnection, 4–6 connection—or make an active choice depending on the feeling you want for your session. (These tables are reproduced in Appendix E for ease of use.) For places, adjectives of

For places, adjectives that draw you

disconnection (d12).

toward/connection (d12).

Roll once, or again if the first word doesn’t make sense.

Roll once, or again if the first word doesn’t make sense.

1

Deserted

1

Glorious

2

Claustrophobic

2

Harmonious

3

Dismal

3

Dazzling

4

Isolated

4

Wonderful

5

Secluded

5

Delightful

6

Shadowy

6

Inviting

7

Neglected

7

Mystical

8

Shrouded

8

Magnificent

9

Pallid

9

Tranquil

10

Eerie

10

Silent

11

Gloomy

11

Magical

12

Towering

12

Charming

Next, you’ll be putting some things inside your environment. Don’t get fancy here, just let your imagination actually visualize the place you rolled on in the prior two tables, and then you’ll be able to “see” more easily what might exist there. Close your eyes and imagine the place you just rolled as if it was real. What would be in it? Exercise: Try to describe three or more things in the environment.

You are getting very close to having enough grounding to start thinking about a rule set that might fit. Next, you can take it a bit further by starting to think about the ways people might interact with your environment.

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Exercise: Now try to describe one or two people or creatures either in the environment or who might have once been there. Think logically— nothing fancy. For example, if you’re creating a tranquil scriptorium at an ancient academy, put an old librarian here, not a gnome or fiery dragon.

You can take it one step further by asking yourself some questions about how all the pieces you’ve created got to where they are—their history and what happened before, how they are related or connected or have been brought to this place. After all this, you should start to have the beginnings of a story—and once you have a story you can then go in search of a rule set, and other generative, suggestive, and restrictive resources that will support your gameplay. Here are two examples from some die-rolling that I did using the tables in this book so you can see how far I got, even before I had a rule set. Example First random roll. Grabbing 2d6 of different colors and a d12, I roll a 3, 6, 3. This translates to a natural environment of sand or snow dunes with shifting runes. The atmosphere is either “dismal” or “dazzling.” I decide on the latter—I’m thinking of this as sandy rather than snowy. Closing my eyes and focusing, I put three things in this environment: Robotic manikin gatekeeper; ensorcelled sand forming itself into anthropomorphic shapes; a golden disc. Why did these images come to mind? Hard to say except I’d been reading5 Dune earlier in the month, so maybe aspects of that book were in my head. Who knows? It doesn’t matter, and that’s the beauty of starting this way. Now, I need to think about one or two people/creatures who are either in this environment or who had once been here. My imagination is sparked to think about the past, and this is what I come up with. My character (as not yet clearly defined, by the way), is carrying with her a rare key that is meant to unlock the golden disc that has long lain at this magical site of sandy runes. Legends from the nearby kingdom tell of a god trapped within the sands who is seeking release. My character has been tasked with the mission of delivering this key to free whatever the disc might hold, and deal with the consequences, whatever they might be. I’m getting the feeling the setting for this story might be 5

One of the best things a solo RPGer can do to strengthen their imagination muscles is to read widely in the genres/themes of RPGs they like to play, be it sci-fi, fantasy, noir, steampunk, etc.

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something post-apocalyptic, with the “dazzling” and golden elements of this scene the only things of glory left in the world. Perhaps my character’s mission will be to free the trapped god to restore glory to the world. Now I’m ready to think about what rules I can use to support this story. Second random roll. With my 2d6 and d12, I roll a 4, 5, 8. This yields a nautical environment that is a coastal seaport. It is either “shrouded” or “magnificent,” and I decide it’s “shrouded.” I immediately see many things with which to populate it, including a foggy alleyway with a pub at the end and gaslights on the street. I’m seeing cobblestones and getting a Victorian feel. A battered ship has sailed into port the day before (it’s around midnight now) and the sailors are congregating at this pub, full of stories of a mysterious sea monster. There are already many paths to take with a story, and I don’t even have a character or rule set yet. Following these steps will allow you to create the beginning of a story and then you can select a rule set to play that story out.

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Starting without a character It makes sense that many people want to start a solo session with character creation, even though doing this can become a trap. It’s a natural impulse for many reasons: First, generally speaking, as a player you have a kind of character in mind, as well as an idea of how you want to play that character. As Gary Allan Fine put it in Shared Fantasy, “If the player doesn’t care about his character then the game is meaningless.” Thus, it makes sense that you want to create one. Furthermore, character creation is appealing because the character creation rules are usually the most concrete and linear of a rule set, and as a soloist the easiest to follow without someone else acting as GM. They are also often found at the front of rule sets. Very tempting. Bear with me as I try to explain why to resist the impulse to start this way. Stories evolve out of situations (“Once upon a time there was…”). And people emerge from environments (“…a princess who lived in a castle…”). Starting with a character and placing that character into… nothing… is not the best way to set yourself up for success. It’s no wonder so many solo sessions end once the character sheet is completed. But when you create the place before you create the people, you’ll automatically be generating a container—a setting for the character to be in, to leave from, and to return to. I believe the easiest way to start a session without a rule set is to develop your story out of an environment. Once you have the environment, you can place characters into it and they will automatically have narrative choices based on the setting you’ve created. If you follow this plan, you’ll also have somewhere to return to when your are in doubt about what to do next, by bringing your character back to the environment and letting the PC do what it might naturally do there. There are so many ways to start sessions that aren’t character creation. I’ve listed ten of them below (starting with my favorite, the environment). You can use this table to think of a starting point that makes sense based on a plan already in place for your session, or choose or roll on the d10 table below as your starting point.

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10 ways to start your session that aren’t character creation 1. Develop the natural environment. Who built it? Who lived there before? Is it peaceful? war-torn? abundant? destitute? 2. Have an NPC tell a story. How the world got to be the way it is The story of the gods that rule this world How magic came to the land 3. Build out the history of a trinket that your character will eventually carry. Who created this trinket? How did the character obtain it? How it become cursed, or blessed? 4. Create a political or history of a place. What factions are aligned with one another? Who is at war? Where are points of greatest conflict right now? 5. Describe the architecture of a place. Is it formally built? Interconnected or scattered? Is it a place of work, or play? Was it built by a civilization that no longer survives? 6. Plant a formal garden and describe it. What lives here? Are these creatures sentient? Are they friendly? aggressive? valuable? 7. Describe an archaeological dig and three things it unearths. 8. Write the song that a traveling bard is singing. What’s it all about? 9. Describe a treasure chest and three things found inside it. 10. Describe an enemy lair, including why they are there. Remember, heroes facing an obstacle in a location that is part of a larger environment—this is the foundation of RPGs. Just because the word “heroes” comes first does not mean you start there. Only once you have developed something from one of the ten prompts above, should you begin character creation.

Create characters without stats (at first) Character creation for a soloist should follow different “rules” than you would in a traditional TTRPG session. Most importantly, I challenge you to create a character (initially) without stats. Why? doing so will force you to envision other things about your character, such as: ¥ Background ¥ Personality ¥ Motivations ¥ Wants

and desires ¥ Traumas ¥ Connections (to people, places) These are all narrative aspects to a personality. Remember: numbers are not narrative in and of themselves. Giving your characters an energy/attitude/approach provides them with some narrative stickiness—a springboard for story, a place of return when you are stuck and don’t know what to do next. It also gives you some direction in modifying die rolls. For example, if you know your character is a survivor of the dwarven wars avenging his father’s murder at the hands of the neighboring trolls, you’ll have many choices and options that seem to make narrative sense when he encounters a wandering bard.

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the bard to relay a story of past wars. ¥ Investigate whether the bard knew his father—and if so, how. ¥ Implore the bard to use magic to discover clues to his father’s murderer. ¥ Search the troll lair for his father’s remains. ¥ Kidnap the king troll as retribution. He would have many natural options beyond simply rolling on an oracle table, and if you did turn to an oracle table, you might have some sense of how to “weight” the answer. But if all you know about your character was simply a series of stats, and he encountered a bard, perhaps you could roll to see if the bard was friendly or not, and then perhaps whether there would be a combat encounter or not—but you’d get no further.

Exercise: Roll on the table below three times, and imagine three different characters based on the words that come up. (If it helps you to get started, choose a race and/or class before rolling. But work up a character description based on the descriptive word you get.) Character Attitudes (for heroes or NPCs) 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,4 1,5 1,6

willing excited reluctant resentful pleased outraged

2,1 2,2 2,3 2,4 2,5 2,6

focused confident scared ambivalent wary amused

3,1 3,2 3,3 3,4 3,5 3,6

focused optimistic determined worn down elated troubled

4,1 4,2 4,3 4,4 4,5 4,6

uncomfortable cautious powerless defiant frustrated obligated

5,1 5,2 5,3 5,4 5,5 5,6

reluctant suspicious worried fatigued obsessed curious

6,1 6,2 6,3 6,4 6,5 6,6

uneasy thankful skeptical rebellious misunderstood daring

Note: this is a d66 table. Choose two d6 of different colors and read the first and second. If the roll you get doesn’t make sense, try reversing the numbers or rolling again. This table can also be used when rolling up NPCs. It is reproduced as Appendix D for ease of use.

Let’s say you rolled up: troubled, frustrated, fatigued. These make sense together and could easily serve as the starting point for character development. But let’s say you roll up: excited, worn down, cautious. At first glance, these attributes seem at odds with one another, yet conflicting descriptions are also an opportunity to create story. Maybe some of these words describe the past of your character: they used to be excited but then something happened and they became worn down and now they’re cautious. Play with the words you get. Allow your mind to wrap a story around them. Keep the feeling of your character in mind as your story progresses. Let this feeling influence die rolls or oracle results in thematic ways. For example, a worried character may lose a value or two on a die roll concerning something that’s a risky situation, or a resentful character may gain a value or two on a roll concerning an NPC interaction (thus increasing the chance that the situation will be aggressive or confrontational). Following this plan will leave you with a character in a location that is part of a larger environment and an obstacle (or goal in mind). You have begun. Now you’re ready to turn to rules and stats.

5

Step-by-Step: Setting Up a Solo Session with a Rule Set I could watch you play solo RPGs all day. – Comment on Geek Gamers

With hundreds of thousands of published RPG rules to choose from, and zillions of supplements, it makes sense that many solo players will want to start with rules. But how do you begin?

To walk yourself into a session This chapter will take you inside two examples of the beginning of solo sessions using two different kinds of rule sets. The first is from Scarlet Heroes by Kevin Crawford that is explicitly designed for solo play, but it also works as a traditional RPG. Even if you don’t own Scarlet Heroes, seeing how I develop a session will demonstrate some of the principles from the rest of this book. The second example comes from Index Card RPG, second edition, by Brandish Gilhelm. These rules are not designed for solo play at all but are solo-friendly in ways that I will explain.

Scarlet Heroes The first thing I do when opening this book (and many others) is skip character creation—and even the basic rules and mechanics of the game. I look for something that has to do with the world or world-building, because I want to create an environment into which I can put people and other places. (If you aren’t sure why I do this, refer to the “10 Mindsets of a Solo GM” in Chapter 2 and the discussion in Chapter 4.)

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So, in this case, that means starting at the section called “The World of the Red Tide,” on page 42.6 As I’m going to create something using as many random die rolls as possible, I’ll note that there are ten Peoples of the Isles listed. (I will leave you to discover the history of the world of Red Tide on your own, except to note that there is a curse hovering over the land.) First, I’ll roll a d10 and get a 10: Skandr.7 Next, I read the background on Skandr and make note of some details that are of interest to me: the Skandr are pirates who live far from their native home. They were taught the art of stonemasonry by ancient dwarves, are esteemed for their craftsmanship, and have raised a settlement at a place called Nordheim. Then, I’ll turn to page 52 and read about Nordheim, making note of some interesting details: it’s a pirate refuge and a haven for the Skandr. It’s cold and coastal. There’s a massive stone fortress designed to defend against raids by the ice-Shou from the cold hills. Trading continues, against environmental odds. Already I’m having some ideas about a story: maybe my main character is going to be a trading apprentice, a wayward young wanderer who has happened by this desolate spot, only to be taken in by a seasoned pirate intent on expanding the reign of his influence. Or I could go in a different direction: maybe my main character lives in the hinterlands of Nordheim, and lurking in its ice floes is a Kappa, a water dwarf seeking vengeance for perceived slights against his people, who taught the Skandr how to become stonemasons. Perhaps this creature represents a boss monster of sorts who must be vanquished from the land, and my character is the designated warrior sent on this mission. Or here’s yet another direction: perhaps I’d like to do more of a dungeon crawl and my main character is sent into the depths of the fortress to recover rare minerals or stones needed to complete a retaining wall to the north, which the Skandr are desperately trying to build before the ice-Shou burst through. These are just a few different adventures inspired by the scant details from the source material.

6 7

All page numbers refer to the 2014 print edition of Scarlet Heroes. These entries are not numbered; I just counted them up and, happily, there are ten of them. If the amount hadn’t corresponded to the number of faces on any existing die, I’d have used an online randomizer to get a number, or rolled a die with more faces until I got a number that was represented in the list. This is a technique you can and should use for any lists you encounter that aren’t numbered.

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So let’s say I settle on one of them—we’ll go with the second scenario for this example: My character is in the wilderness, tracking a Kappa who has been terrorizing the village. The very next thing I’d do—again, even before character creation—would be to turn to page 96 and roll on the “Adventure Tags” random table. I’ve already created an overarching story but I want something to add a little depth. So I roll a 15, “Massacre site,” and now I try to add it to my story. Perhaps my character has stumbled on the massacre site of his brothers, who sought to destroy this Kappa before him. Seeing it would engender a particular rage and personalize the quest. Or let’s say we rolled a 3, “Brutal terrain.” That might imply that the quest would involve management of resources and a fight against an unfriendly environment as much as a specific monster/enemy. And if you don’t want to make the suggestions yourself, you can read what Scarlet Heroes offers as prompts for those adventure hooks. For all general entries, sections for selecting random enemies, friends, things, complications, and places are provided. (This is just one of the many reasons why Scarlet Heroes is such a great place to start for the soloist.)

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But let’s stick with our character. He’s already seeming like a trapper, so we should make a note of that—but we’re still not going to character creation. Not just yet. Next let’s take a look at the NPC creation tables on page 113. A fist full of dice—one of each type you’ve probably got—and some quick rolling gets these results: 2, 3, 4, 1, 6, 6. 2. Youthful and vigorous 3. Wed comfortably, if of an appropriate age and role 4. Acquaintance with dark magic or its practitioners 1. Lustful, rapacious for suitable companionship 6. Concealment of a dire shame or crime they were party to 6. An air of constant, almost paranoid attentiveness8 Eliminating results that don’t fit, and embellishing those that do, you’d end up with this NPC: A youthful practitioner of magic who has gone to dark arts, against the law of the land, in an attempt to catch this Kappa. He’s failed, and is hiding in the wilderness, constantly scanning the horizon, wary of the city guards, who seek to imprison him for his transgression. You could then decide if he was going to be friendly or unfriendly toward your character (rolling on the “Reactions” table on page 117) and, based on the result, take it from there. Or, if you really liked the flavor of the NPC character sketch, you could turn him into your hero. If you needed more help to get going, you could turn to the “Wilderness Events” chart on page 124 and roll on that. (Possible rolls are “get lost” or “mudslide; lose important non-magic item” or “a winding tunnel leads to a dungeon.”) There is a lot to choose from here and you still haven’t even decided on a character! Only after I’d done all of this would I go back to see what parts of character creation were speaking most plainly, almost demanding to go into this story. Doing character creation at this point lets you use the details of the backstory you have created as the defining character aspects; die roll results recede as supporting details. This is how it should be.

8

Scarlet Heroes “Quick NPC Creation,” p. 113.

Index Card RPG Index Card RPG is not designed for solo play, so you may have to do a bit more work to get a session going. Yet the abundance of random tables makes the book very manageable for the soloist. Perhaps most remarkably, in a mere 200 pages, the author provides a fully developed sci-fi as well as fantasy world. For the purposes of this example, we’re going to use his science fiction world, the Warp Shell. As usual, I skip right over the character creation part of the book. … I even skip over the Warp Shell World primer (though that is a very reasonable place to start). However, I can’t resist the d10 “Warp Shell Locations” table on page 186, so this is where I’ll begin. 9 Rolling an 8, I come up with “The bridge of a barely functional freighter ship.” Next, I turn to the “Warp Shell Obstacles” table on page 187 and roll a 15, “The indomitable advance of a planet-eater.” That’s probably enough right there to get you going. Here are some possible directions: You play a maintenance worker on a damaged freighter, limping away from a skirmish that left everyone else on the ship dead, and the ship itself in limbo, being pulled inexorably toward a magnificently evil planet eater. What will you do? Where will you go? How will you prevent disaster? Are you really alone on the ship? Another direction would be to take this same basic structure from a different angle entirely. You’re a highly valued scientist who has just presented a bold new 9

All references are to the 2018 print edition of this book.

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creation to the academic and political higher-ups: a planet-eating monster to unleash on your world’s enemies. Just as you finish your presentation, an underling runs breathlessly into the room, pointing repeatedly at the window above. You glimpse the silhouette of the damaged freighter from which you escaped decades ago. It contains the remnants of a lethal virus that will—if the freighter lands—cause inestimable damage to your world. What can you do to stop it? And at what cost? Yet another direction would be to envision your character as the captain of a destroyed warship, being transported by a freighter to the planet from which an evil galaxy-destructing force lives. Are you there as a savoir? A trophy? All these very different stories arose from the same random die rolls! But let’s go back for a moment to the first one: the maintenance worker. If you wanted to get a better grip on that scenario or session, you could turn to the “Warp Shell Goals” table on page 188. You roll an 18, “Wage a risky mining op to retrieve a droplet of dark matter from a dead star.” That could become a side mission, and also might inform your character creation. Perhaps your character is not just a maintenance worker but, rather, a former scientist who has fallen on hard times. Exiled from the scientific community for some reason or another, you make your way as a maintenance officer on this ship. But you can’t quite escape your past. Your duty to humanity to retrieve the droplet of dark matter is a pull greater than anything, even an evil planet-eater. Now with this background—and no character created yet!—you must surely already have an idea about your character. If you need any help, you could turn to the “Hero Origins” table that comes next. But you can also see how creating this environment already gives the character an anchor, a resting place, a home of sorts. Another option for Index Card RPG would be to turn to the monster section and choose one—either randomly or intentionally—and then create a narrative connection to your story based on what you read about that monster. The author of this book has done a lot of work for you throughout, and the monster section is no different. Each account contains various actions and descriptions of effects, all written in evocative language. With these details, you can weave together the beginnings of a story. Again, all of this can be done prior to character creation. In both of of these examples, you see how utilizing what an author has already provided can be so beneficial yet both of these recommended sets are fairly limited in the amount of available material. Yet sometimes you want something that just has more. More modules. More lore. More backstory. Rule sets with tons of content present their own set of challenges for the soloist, and we’ll take a closer look at the best ways to work with them in the next chapter.

6

How to Read Really Big Rule Sets The core of the tale we could imagine; it is the fringes that are mysterious. – G. K. Chesterton

With solo RPGing you can pick and choose from among rules in a rule set—or even combine rule sets. The more you feel something is right, the more it will integrate into your story. And the more it integrates into your story, the better it is for your session. But perhaps you’re saying to yourself: All this advice is well and good if you are dealing with relatively small rule sets, but how is it relevant if you’re not into indie publishers or one-off adventures? You want something BIG. You want to run a campaign. You want to delve into the meatiest, crunchiest, largest rule set there is. How do you do that? These are great questions and I have some answers. First off, the principles that I’ve put forward thus far apply whether the rule set is large or small, traditional or nontraditional. That said, there are some specific strategies I recommend when approaching large-scale rule sets. I will start by using Starfinder Core Rules as an example here. Not because Starfinder is the biggest RPG or the most popular or the most complex. But because—at around 532 pages for the core rules, with many supplements available, and published by a mainstream publisher—it is representative of some of the issues that large rule sets engender. The page numbers cited are from the first edition of the book (which is what I’ve got)—but it makes no difference if you have the second edition or even another large rule set entirely: the principles still hold.

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Skip over character creation Hopefully by now you can see why character creation might not be the place to start when sitting down with a rule set—it’s not the easiest way to create a story. Whether your rules are 8 pages or 800 pages, this principle applies. Skip right over this chapter or section, even though it’s likely to be up front and detailed with a step-by-step process.

Look for anomalies Everybody who creates an RPG—even if it is a team of developers working for a big company—is going to try to differentiate their rules from all the others. It may be the way magic or combat works, or even character development. It’s going to vary between rule sets. As a reader, you may not even know what that variation is until you see it. But you should be looking for it. As a first step, peruse the table of contents. Core rules or the GM guide or player’s guide—it doesn’t matter. Skip over character creation, but look at other entries—in particular, subentries—and settle on something that seems different from other rule sets you’ve seen. (Hint: if you see the word “creating” or “developing” in a chapter title, that might be a good place to turn first.) For example, in Starfinder

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there’s an entry for “hybrid magic items.” It isn’t often that you find examples of hybrid magic and technological items. You’d identify this as a point of interest and make a note of it. Turning to that section, you’d see descriptions of hybrid items as well as some rules about them (for example, that they count as magic items when determining how many you can use/carry). There’s a price list and some intriguing descriptions— magical aeon stones that spin around your head and provide benefits such as increased perception or negating your need to breathe. Note anything that seems most interesting to you.

Let the seed of a big idea germinate from the specifics of what you’ve read The price list might give you an idea. What if you played a character desperate to get your hands on a hybrid item but having no money to do so? What if you decided to steal the money? That’s an idea right there. You could easily expand out from that to create a story about why you needed the item: Are you stealing it to save someone? To prove yourself to someone? Next, you’d expand the idea. The germ of this idea is a heist—so now you’ll have to figure out some basic elements to keep your story going. The most essential is knowing about a location to rob. Now it’s back to the table of contents to see if something strikes a narrative chord.

When you’ve taken your idea as far as you can, go back to the table of contents for more inspiration So now you’re looking for an environment. A quick scan of the table of contents shows some candidates right away: a chapter on starships, a subhead called “environment,” and a chapter on setting. You look at the setting chapter, but it seems too broad—it’s giving a whole galactic history. Perhaps that will come in handy later, but not at this stage, when you are just germinating an idea. The “environment” section falls within the game mastering chapter. You see categories such as: “space,” “atmospheres,” and “biomes” with some descriptive material. This content is a bit more localized and may come in handy shortly, so you make a note of it but move on. You’re searching for something even more specific because you remember that it’s easiest to build a large-scale narrative when you begin very small. It helps to get specific first, so you have an anchor point when you get general later.

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Next, you turn to the chapter on starships—specifically the “sample starships” section. The early parts of this chapter present heavily detailed rules for building starships: where to install a shuttle bay, how to use biometric locks, how a crew member can use sensors to scan a planet. All potentially fascinating, but much too overwhelming and detailed for you right now. Maybe later on, if your session develops into a campaign. The second part of this chapter offers the most potential for what you need right now. It outlines various types and functions of ship models commonly found within the Pact Worlds and allied planets. These include Thaumtech Omenbringers, piloted by tortured undead, and in some cases transport ships for the undead, to the organic Hivonyx Titan Hauler, which with its beetle-like frame can mold itself to accommodate any type of cargo. Produced by a pacifist collective, these ships are peacemakers. You could read through this section and choose a ship environment that spoke to you, or you could count up the entries—I count five different styles with multiple different ships for each style—and choose randomly. The nature of the descriptions yields a “feeling” of play. You could decide that the ship was either the site of the heist, or your method of travel, or the destination for the stolen hybrid magical item. It doesn’t matter—you’ve established a narrative trajectory. A goal. A place of natural movement from point A to point B. (Chapter 9 discusses the importance of a narrative trajectory.) With location details from the ship and the larger concept of a heist, you’ll be well on your way to making a character who can fit into this growing story. Yes, you’ve left behind a myriad of details that the rule set offers. That’s OK. Just because you don’t use some rules now doesn’t mean you never will. The rules will always be there for you to use as you please. Let’s say this heist adventure turned into the beginning of a longer campaign. You might find your ship docking at a planet for repairs. Then you could return to the rules for ship maintenance that looked enticing initially but didn’t yet have a place in your story. The rules you decide not to use, as much as the rules you decide to use, dictate the success of your sessions. Let’s take a look at another rule set with lots of content, Mutant Crawl Classics. Scanning the table of contents of the 2nd Edition, you see that there is a lot of

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world-building content here—chapters on mutations, artifacts, patron AIs, and artificial intelligences. Following the concept of seeking an anomalous entry, you see a section within the artifacts chapter that is devoted to “artifact checks.” This doesn’t seem like something you’ve encountered before, so you turn there. A quick scan of this section makes it clear that to understand why there are artifact checks, you need to know something of the world in which this rule set takes place. Fair point, so you turn to the beginning of the book and learn some basics: you inhabit a post-apocalyptic world where some unspecified “Great Disaster” has occurred and survivors are either “pure strain humans” or mutants. In this past life, certain technology (aka: the “artifacts” of the “artifact check”) remain to be discovered. When picked up by a savage mutant, a check is needed in order to figure out what it is and how to use it. These details alone are enough to get started and suggest possible directions such as: ¥ Discovery

of an artifact that unleashes a remarkable power your mutant must seek to command ¥ Discovery of an artifact that must have a power cell to charge it in X days or the planet will be destroyed ¥ Discovery of an artifact that promises riches to whomever brings it to the nearest city Based on whatever you decide, you could then go on to envision a character and how that character might interact with the found object. And based on these specific details (let the seed of an idea germinate from the specifics of what you’ve read), you could start to envision some outlines or contours of the world in which the story takes place. If you need a bit more to get started, you could turn to the bestiary, noting the evocative monster descriptions. Based on one of those, and connecting it to the artifact you discovered, you’d have the beginnings of a narrative trajectory. Perhaps the artifact belonged to the monster, who had lost it; perhaps the monster could be enlisted as an ally if you return the artifact to it. Possibilities abound using just some basic descriptive material already in the rules. Finally, let’s take a look at Achtung! Cthulhu. Even though it is not designed for solo play, this 2d20 game from Modiphius Entertainment rests on a system that has many narrative elements baked into character creation and action, and a larger-thanlife setting that pits ordinary humans against the forces of the Cthulhu Mythos as

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they battle for control of Earth. As such, it is a great home for soloists to inhabit. The 2d20 mechanic, fundamental not only to Achtung! Cthulhu but also other RPGs such as Mutant Chronicles, Robert E. Howard’s Conan, John Carter of Mars, and Dune, is dynamic and narrative based. While a detailed discussion of this mechanic is beyond the scope of this book, it boils down to rolling at least two d20s—with others available for “purchase” using assets in the game—and attempting to roll under an attribute + a skill number. The number of successes on the d20 is compared to the difficulty level set by the GM. Excess successes create “momentum” which can be spent in the future to purchase more d20s for other rolls. Characters can also purchase other d20s by adding to a GMs pool of “threat” that represents things that can go wrong in an adventure. This back and forth between successes and momentum and threat provides a connecting thread for the player/GM to manage events and outcomes in a dramatic way. Detailing global events both real and fictitious such as World War II and the Lovecraftian mythos, the rules cover everything from secret intelligence communities to otherworldly monsters. That seems like a lot: so, where should the soloist begin? When working with a rule set whose lore and background is so well established, you’ll find that using what the books give you is the easiest way to start. Once you have a few scenes or sessions of play, you’ll then find it is easier to go off on your own and branch out. Here’s a look into how I’d approach these rules. First, I’d turn to the Gamemaster’s Guide and read about the six major factions active in this world. The histories and tensions among them provide natural places for your story to develop, detailing already-existing conflicts and competing goals. Remember, for rules written in a rich and pre-existing world, it helps to lean into the lore. I’d go with a familiar narrative and game construct of “pick up and deliver.” My character will start the session in medias res—in the middle of a story. In this case, I’ll put my character (who is from one faction) in the middle of a location that is the territory of another faction. Perhaps I’m someone from Section M who infiltrated the Black Sun as part of the Section’s mission to foil its efforts. As one of the front line opposition, my immediate mission is to recover a part of a secret weapon in development. This gives me a small goal, and one which I can develop using details from the Gamemaster’s Guide and Player’s Guide, as we’ll see. A review of the table of contents in the Gamemaster’s Guide shows that there’s a section detailing “a collection of known mythos tomes.” I like the idea of a nonmagical courier or infiltrator being tasked with recovering a magic object and bringing

it somewhere. This introduces multiple points of tension from the outset: travel between two places; being in a foreign place; dealing with a magic object whose properties may not be able to be controlled. I decide that one of these randomly chosen tomes is going to be the fulcrum of my story, and as such I want to select it last, so its revelation can put my narrative into motion. It’s time now to turn to the Player’s Guide and create my character. In the story I’m developing, I decide I want my character to be an “infiltrator.” The rules describe this character type as “talented at getting into places they shouldn’t. They excel at evading detection, bypassing security and grabbing valuables and secrets from secure locations.” (p. 58) I give my character a special talent of “assassination”— being deadly against foes, which may help as I am going to be a solo adventurer (for now!) in a deadly world. Turning back to the Gamemaster’s Guide, I read up on the Black Sun and decide that the action for my session is going to start with my character—let’s call her Diana—crouched outside the stone walls of the Castle hideout of the Black Sun leaders. This castle is in the Dreamlands, “a place outside of wakefulness” where the “laws of physics do not apply, making the impossible possible.” (p. 31).

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At this point, I’d turn to some generative resources (random tables, for example. See Chapter 3 if you aren’t sure what I mean), and build up the environment. The final piece will come by turning to p. 115 of the Gamemaster’s Guide. Here, there’s not only a list of various mythos tomes and arcane sources, but some special rules to go with them. I decide to choose a random object and build the rest of the story around it. There are 19 general entries here so I roll a d20 and get an 8, which corresponds to “Dee’s Hidden Treasures.” Reading further, I see that these are “a series of secret essays, treatises, theorems and alchemical researches by the great Elizabethan philosopher and mystic John Dee.” (p. 116). The special rules indicate that these contain spells and formulae to combat ancient entities with “dyverse remedies against daemons, fyndes, faeries, and other unnaturall creatchures of the darkness.” I now have the beginnings of a story that could go in many directions. Decisions (or die rolls) could tell me whether my PC is being pursued, why and how she’s come into possession of this tome, whether she’s on a mission of delivery for good or evil, and a myriad of other details. The mention of specific enemies narrows the bestiary field for when inevitable encounters occur. In sum, I’m set up to begin a session with some basic tasks and goals that eventually can be integrated into a larger story. As you can see from these examples, approaching large-scale rule sets is not that different than approaching those with ten pages. At the heart of the task is looking for something small, localized, and specific to use as a hook for your larger story. Larger rule sets which offer complex and detailed settings can be a help if you are confident in the ways you extract what you need and want from the multiplicity of options.

7

Let’s Talk D&D The spirit of a game cannot be expressly defined in a sentence or a paragraph… – Gary Gygax, Role-Playing Mastery

If you’ve been reading this book cover to cover, you may be wondering why I haven’t discussed Dungeons & Dragons until now. Partially it’s because Dungeons & Dragons is no different than any other rule set I’ve discussed in terms of how to approach solo play. Using any and all of the concepts already presented in this Solo Game Master’s Guide will allow for rich and satisfying D&D gameplay. Yet at the same time, D&D is also so different from other rule sets that it requires its own chapter.

What’s the same? Like any of the rule sets already discussed, Dungeons & Dragons is an RPG created for multiple players with one player acting as a game master. In the case of D&D, this person is called the DM (Dungeon Master). While there have been explicitly solo modules created for D&D since its inception, if you want to interact with the vast majority of D&D content, you’ll need to make modifications to its original intent and presentation.

What’s different? Dungeons & Dragons was first published in 1974 and has been continually expanded and developed since then. The tropes and mechanical conventions of role-playing games can be traced back to D&D, and its publication is widely regarded as initiating the entire RPG industry.

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Dungeons & Dragons rules have completely changed over decades of play and arguably D&D has the most published content of any RPG. Dungeons & Dragons provides premade adventures as well as a number of campaign settings (such as Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and adaptations of Magic: The Gathering places such as Ravnica), as well as many others. Additionally, official rules expansions such as Xanthar’s Guide to Everything provide new mechanics, feats, subclasses, and more. Fan-made material is also extensive. The wealth of material can be overwhelming to any DM—whether you are playing solo or not. Much of it can be very useful, but can also get you into the weeds of rules and stats, which can become a burden, especially if you are interested in a more narrative-based gameplay. To take full advantage of D&D as a game, it is not just enough to use the d20 system (which has been released as Open Game Content and may now be found in many other rule sets). To play D&D is to play within a D&D world, and navigating the myriad options are where the soloist can use some guidance. Following the steps below, and combining them with the other strategies in this book, will enable any soloist to approach D&D material with confidence.

First, choose your edition Dungeons & Dragons has been published in many editions and it’s beyond the scope of this book to explain the differences among them. The most important thing to note is that you should choose a rule set and remember that if you are moving between editions, you may have some challenges. This means that if you are playing 5th Edition, you can fairly easily use material from any of the earlier (lower-numbered) editions such as 3.5 or AD&D or “Basic” (sometimes thought of as the 2nd Edition). But if you are working with the 1st Edition (sometimes called “original”), it is far more difficult to use things (monsters, magic items, spells) from higher editions (such as 3.5 or 5). For soloists just starting out, I would recommend 5th Edition as all the rules are easily available (and some for free, from Wizards of the Coast at dnd.wizards. com).10 At a minimum, make sure you have access to the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook. The Monster Manual is nice to have but not essential, as you will likely also be using a campaign supplement or premade adventure that will contain monsters of its own. Additionally, there are many ways to find monster stats online such as roll20.net. 10 Additionally,

if you are interested in detailed monster stat modification for any number of monsters and PC levels, you can use Donjon’s excellent 5th Edition Encounter Size Calculator, available online.

Next, choose a setting and/or supplement While it’s possible to play a solo session of D&D using just the player and GM guides, using supplements will provide some built-in direction and theme, and these leg-ups will be useful for solo play. Finally, remember the key points of working with a very big rule set Chapter 6 goes into the step in detail, but here’s a quick reminder for working with a very big rule set: ¥ Skip

over character creation for anomalies ¥ Let the seed of an idea germinate from the specifics of what you’ve read ¥ When you’ve taken your idea as far as you can, go back to the table of contents for more inspiration ¥ It’s easiest to build a large-scale narrative when you begin very small, getting specific first, so you have an anchor point when you get general later ¥ The rules you decide not to use, as much as the rules you decide to use, dictate the success of your sessions. ¥ Look

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With all this in mind, let’s turn to 5th Edition. I decide I want to start by using Xanthar’s Guide to Everything, and I crack it open. Looking over the table of contents, what strikes me as something I haven’t seen before (point 2, above) is a section called “This Is Your Life” on page 61. It’s in the “Character Options” chapter, and although I know I’m not starting my session by creating a character (see point 1, above), I’m intrigued. Flipping to that section, I see a series of tables designed to “account for all of the circumstances that shaped your character during the years between your birth and the start of your career as a member of a class.” These include random tables about origins, childhood memories, life events, past adventures, and so on. There’s a wealth of material here and I decide that I’ll roll up the backstory of someone related to my character in some way—the details of that relationship will emerge with the die rolling and will also form the basis of the quest or adventure I’ll play in my session. One of the character options is “hermit” and I choose that one, thinking immediately that a basic quest or narrative trajectory (see Chapter 9 if you aren’t sure what that means) could be my character going in search of the hermit. Why? I don’t know, but I’ll allow those reasons to emerge from the tables. For the purposes of this example, we’ll call that character Hermit X. I decide to make my character “old,” and per an associated chart, I roll for 1d12 “life events” and get a 7. The requisite number of life events are then rolled up, leaving me with a character whose life consisted of meeting two important people, having two magical encounters, a job, participating in one war, and saving the life of a commoner who owed Hermit X a debt. What stands out immediately is the event of saving the commoner’s life, and I decide that the commoner will be the PC I’m playing and the session quest will involve finding/locating/saving Hermit X. The Xanthar rules state that the important NPCs should be created and rolled, but I’m not going to do that now, preferring instead to focus on Hermit X’s magical encounters. Two d10 rolls later I know that Hermit X was charmed or frightened by a spell and also affected by teleportation magic. Logic dictates that these descriptions refer to the same event, namely that Hermit X was transported somewhere against his wishes and there he remains. My character’s overarching quest will be to find him and bring him back to… well, we don’t know anything about our location, do we? Now is a good time to find out. With so much D&D source material, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of places in the D&D multiverse to go. For the purposes of this discussion, I turn to the “Dragon of Icespire Peak” adventure that is part of the Dungeons & Dragons

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Essentials Kit. I don’t plan to use this for any adventure it contains, but rather for a beginning site and a destination site. I note fifteen locations in the table of contents and roll a d20, rerolling any value that doesn’t work. (Note: Any time you need something like this, you can go to random.org and type in a range of numbers to get a random one.) My rolls of 3 and 9 yield “Circle of Thunder” and “Loggers’ Camp.” It seems most thematic to the story I’m developing to have my PC, a commoner, originate at the loggers’ camp and Hermit X at the Circle of Thunder. Looking at the site description of the logger’s camp I note a few things: First, it is balanced for third-level characters so I’ll need to make some adjustments to monster/NPC stats when dealing with encounters, if there are any. (See Appendix G for suggestions on how to do this.) Second, consulting the Sword Coast map on page 5 of the book shows that it is due west of the Circle of Thunder, and travel will be through Neverwinter Wood as well as possibly along a river. I’m disregarding the included quest and instead rolling on the d6 camp location table to find out that my character begins this story in the ruins of an old cabin. The book states: “All that remains of this cabin is a ruined fireplace whose chimney has mostly collapsed.” I read further, “A character who searches the chimney finds a totem buried in its debris.”

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I have two options with regard to the Circle of Thunder: one is to skim the adventure notes on that location to see whether any information about it might inform my backstory; the other is to ignore any information about it until my character actually gets there. Either way, what I’ve set up initially is an overland adventure through the Neverwinter Wood. I’ve already got a lot of story ideas floating around in my head without even rolling up my character, but it’s clear that the time has come to do that. As I’ve already spent a great deal of time in this book discussing character creation, I won’t detail that here—other than to say that because I know my character is meant to be a “commoner,” I decide a human rogue best fits that bill. Following my own character creation advice (see Chapter 2), I turn to pages 160–61 of the Player’s Handbook to roll on the d100 trinket table. A 44 gets me “a mechanical canary inside a gnomish lamp.” Now I continue with character creation, focusing on stats, equipment, and the like. At this point, I’m filled with ideas. The table opposite gives a sense of what I’m thinking thus far, and possible directions to go next. If you wish, you can use what I’ve written as your own solo adventure seed and proceed with any of these paths. I’ve intentionally listed six different paths, so if you wanted to randomize you could choose one of them with a d6 roll. Regardless of which of these paths you chose, it would be up to you as both the player and the GM to determine how much “D&D flavor” you put into the session. Working very closely with the source material is going to result in a session that feels like D&D—from a thematic standpoint, at least. (Remember: solo RPGing doesn’t feel like traditional RPGing from a game mechanics standpoint, nor is it trying to).

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The idea

Where it came from

What I’d do next

My character is connected to dwarves.

They have a mechanical canary, suggesting mining.

Look through the adventure book to see if there is any dwarven site described and learn more about that, trying to connect those details to my character backstory. (As it turns out, there is a dwarven site.)

My character is connected to gnomes.

They have a gnomish lamp.

Look through the adventure book to see if there is any gnomish site described and learn more about that, trying to connect those details to my character backstory. (As it turns out, there is a gnomish site.)

Search for the totem.

The adventure book states that characters should search for the totem and they will succeed on DC 15 Intelligence.

Attempt the test and, if successful, find a random table to generate details about the totem. For failure, turn to page 34 of the adventure and modify the encounter to be playable with my PC alone.

Learn more about Circle of Thunder.

Thus far, I haven’t done Notice that many cave structures are described. so but it’s part of my narrative story line.

Connect the mechanical canary to the cave structures at the Circle of Thunder.11

Reading basic description of Circle of Thunder cave structures.

Remember that Hermit X had two significant encounters in their past life.

Reviewing my notes on Roll up one or both of these Hermit X NPCs and based on those rolls, find a way to connect them to my PC. These relationships may guide where the story goes next.

11 Only

Head out from logging camp immediately toward the caves, with the thought that Hermit X may be prisoner inside one of them.

possible after reading basic description of Circle of Thunder site.

In sum Working with D&D material is in some ways easier than using other rule sets because so much supporting material is already out there, from solo DM guides designed specifically for 5th Edition to free tools allowing you to scale encounters for a solo hero. But working with D&D material is also harder than working with other rule sets for precisely the same reason: so much already exists about the world and lore that it can be daunting to start and challenging to make a session feel like your own. Players may feel an explicit or implicit pressure to mount an entire campaign or create an entire world to fit it into the D&D multiverse. Hopefully this chapter demonstrated a way to start small and either continue small or take the small story and have it be the seed for a much more in-depth campaign setting and developing lore. Both the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Player’s Handbook are filled with information vital to the soloist. Some of my most-used tables in the Dungeon Master’s Guide are:

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Events (p. 79). Entries on this table can be used as the basis for an adventure or for adding flavor to a setting of a location encountered during an adventure. ¥ NPC Bonds and NPC Flaws and Secrets tables (p. 91). I use these primarily to help create relationships among the PCs in my party (and not necessarily for NPC backstory). If the characters in your party have some kind of interpersonal relationship, you have the basis for more narrative threads. ¥ Villian’s Scheme and Villian’s Methods tables (pp. 94–95) can be used to create an immediate adventure goal or instigating incident. ¥ Weird Locales (p. 109). Entries in this table can be used to generate a unique starting point for your adventure, a location from which you can build out a story using techniques discussed earlier in this book. ¥ Magical Item Backstory tables (pp. 142–43). Rolling on these after rolling on any of the myriad Magic Item tables (pp. 144–49) is a great way to get an adventure underway. Once you have a magical item created with its own backstory you can simply deem it missing and have your PC go in search of it. The random backstory for the item that you created will give all the cues you need to place the item somewhere in the world. ¥ And, of course, the Trinkets table (pp. 160–61), from the Player’s Handbook. For all the reasons stated in various places in this book, giving your PCs trinkets is an excellent way to begin. ¥ Framing

Part Three ∂

Tools of the Trade

Oracles, Dice, and Random Tables

8

Developing Your Story and Avoiding the Yes/No Dead End Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves. – Virginia Woolf

One of the main challenges of solo RPGing is when you get to a point where you need some help or direction and feel as if you have no natural place to go. Often you turn to dice for an answer, any answer. Rolling dice can happen when you fear creating narrative without the crutch of rules. It’s natural to want to turn to some external source—a place where you can seek a “surprising” answer or a “random” direction. We do this because we’re trying to approximate a live GM across the table—even though a GM would be unlikely to say “yes” or “no” and nothing else. If you roll some dice, you might get an “answer” but no real narrative direction. For example: Is the wizard friendly? You roll evens. Yes, he is. But so what? You have been given an outcome but that is different than being given some narrative direction. Here’s the thing: if you’re asking too many questions and expecting a die roll to answer them, you’re having narrative difficulties. Which way should I go? Roll some dice. Is the liquid toxic? Roll some dice. Where’s the unicorn? Roll some dice. Is this planet habitable? Roll some dice. It can be a mistake to think that rolling dice is going to automatically lead you somewhere else. Often, rolling dice just leads to a dead end, especially when you are rolling in search of an answer to a yes-or-no question. A dead end is a place with no story, where the die roll doesn’t lead to a new narrative strand, and you are just left with a simple answer of “yes” or “no.” Even if

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you use oracle tables that offer answers slightly more complicated than just “yes” or “no,” being given phrases like “no, but” can still leave you quite stuck. Continually rolling dice will bring you to a place where the answer you get doesn’t lead to something that hints at a direction. Continually rolling dice puts you in danger of losing your narrative trajectory. (Not sure what a “narrative trajectory” is? Chapter 9 discusses it in detail.) So how many times is too many times to roll on a table consecutively? Definitely three times in a row. Probably two in a row. Here’s a suggestion to avoid this problem. Instead of just rolling on a table, come up with two separate narrative strands: if it’s this, then that will happen; if it’s that, then this will happen. For example: If it’s yes, the party will continue along the coast. If it’s no, the party will investigate the ruin at the edge of the forest.

Or, with more complexity: If it’s yes, the next encounters will be looked upon favorably by the gods and our chances of peaceful interactions will increase; we are likely to meet a friendly NPC and make more progress toward our goal. If it’s no, we are more likely to have a treacherous journey.

Provide answers to yes/no questions before rolling, if you possibly can. Here are a few examples: Yes: The party will enter the sanctuary and look for the cleric’s acolyte. Maybe: The party will search the graveyard for the missing relic. No: The party will continue on to the village and try to get more information.

For the solo RPGer, words and sentences like these are stronger bridges for transitions than die rolling.

So remember: talk (to yourself ) before you roll. The more you have worked out before you roll on a table, any table, the more useful the table will be. Be wary of rolling a die when you are depending on its answer for story. When you are consulting a table to answer a yes or a no question, this is a risky time—you are in danger of getting stuck. You might not get the answer you want, or one that makes sense, or one that gives a direction that advances the story in a meaningful way, and this can cause you to just reach for the dice again and again hoping for something that will lead somewhere. Sometimes you need a bit more than a die roll will give. Don’t look to tables to provide direction; look to tables to provide embellishment. If you don’t already have some sense of what happens next, you’re just rolling on tables—you’re just rolling dice. But what if you really want to use oracle tables? I get that; I do. Be sure to use or create ones that give some narrative direction. (Consult the Appendices for an annotated list of my “solo RPG wallet,” which discusses my favorite oracle/random tables from supplements and game systems. I’ve also curated a group of some of the most useful random tables I’ve found, as well as created some of my own. You’ll find all of these in the back of the book for ease of use at the table.)

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In the meantime, let’s take a closer look at what random tables really are, how to spot a good one, and how to create individualized and helpful ones for your own sessions.

Random Tables That Mean Something Random tables have been a part of RPGs from the very beginning. Chainmail (1971), from which the original RPG sprung, contained a random table for GMs to roll on to determine the effect of a man unhorsed from his mount during melee combat. That table was pretty simple: a die roll of 1–2 would result in “not stunned”; on any other roll, the unit would become stunned for a certain number of predetermined turns. This table offered a limited number of outcomes—not really random at all. But what about a random table with 100, or even 1,000 entries? Surely, that is more random. Isn’t it? Actually… no. Random means something that is chosen without any conscious decisionmaking. Thus the first thing to understand about random tables is that they are not really random at all. In fact, every random table we encounter or create is pretty much the opposite of random. Whether it is a list of 3 possible outcomes, or 3,000 outcomes, the values have been consciously placed there by a game designer… or you, acting as designer. Although the outcome of a table roll is randomized by rolling dice, the possible results are predetermined. Not really “random” at all. So what, then, is a random table, really? A random table is a semi-unpredictable thematic group of things from which to choose. It is unpredictable because typically you use a randomizer such as dice to give you the value/outcome. It is only semi-unpredictable because the entries are selectively chosen for the table, and even the die or dice you roll have idiosyncrasies and predetermined bell curves based on the type of die. As we’ve learned, rolling dice during a solo RPG session can be tricky. Unlike board games—which provide a structure for die rolling where the meaning of the roll is predetermined by the designer—RPG rule sets are much more open-ended. Rolling on random tables, just like rolling on oracle tables, puts the player-GM at risk of a narrative dead end. To be most effective for a solo session, the random tables used should themselves generate narrative results.

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There is no need to generate your own random tables for any session. If the rules you are using don’t have enough random tables, with a little bit of research you can no doubt turn up many random tables online or in books and PDFs that will fit just about any theme. But if as a soloist you decide to make your own random tables, consider the steps below to make a table that will yield a narrative direction—or at least give output easy to fit into your story. Considering trying to make a random table that will not simply produce a choice of things or places, but will in some way result in a choice of direction or emotion. How can you accomplish this?

First, name the table The most important thing to do is to give the table an evocative name. The name should suggest a past, present, or future, and it should pair an emotional or thematic description with the concrete thing being rolled. For example, a table called “Ravaged ruins” is at the outset more inspiring than just a table called “Ruins.” “Ravaged ruins” already suggests some temporality—something happened in the past, the remains of which you have encountered. Built into this is the concept that there is something predating the arrival of your party to this spot. Consider this short list: Wandering monsters troll blink dog imp gorgon

Now, consider this list: Escapees from the orc's torture chamber troll blink dog imp gorgon

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You can see how just changing the labeling of the table takes you much further into a story than a table called “Wandering monsters.” Even if the lists contain the same entries, you are located more within a story when rolling on the “Escaped prisoners” table. Proper naming gives a sense of the past, and as such allows for an imagined future. That imagined future is your game session. Remember: an effective name pairs an expressive word with a concrete element. Concrete elements are things like: ¥ Terrain ¥ Buildings ¥ NPC ¥ Monsters

The table title should come from something that can be named within the story or as a part of an adventure hook or narrative device. Here’s a list of descriptive words to pair with a concrete element: Descriptive Words (to pair with a concrete element) 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,4 1,5 1,6

peaceful scary treacherous rejuvenating ancient broken

2,1 2,2 2,3 2,4 2,5 2,6

secret withering bleak fallen incandescent cataclysmic

3,1 3,2 3,3 3,4 3,5 3,6

enchanted demolished rusted shimmering effervescent mysterious

4,1 4,2 4,3 4,4 4,5 4,6

idyllic crumbling bucolic rocky gentle broken

5,1 5,2 5,3 5,4 5,5 5,6

uncharted barren pastoral bleak misty delightful

6,1 6,2 6,3 6,4 6,5 6,6

perilous sacred solitary eerie otherworldly wondrous

Note: this is a d66 table. Choose two d6 of different colors and read the first and second. If the roll you get doesn’t make sense, try reversing the numbers or rolling again.

Generating a list of “Peaceful terrain” to encounter is already more stimulating than just “Terrain.” Or even a list of “Incandescent NPCs” populating a tavern gives you a sense, a feel, for what the environment will be like. Take some of the words from the list above and pair them with concrete things and see what you get.

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Second, nest the table and add even more details Let’s continue with this overland example and say you want to make some tables to generate a “random” map. Your first step would be to create a general “terrain” table using different entries that worked with your rule set. For this example, I’m going to list: 1

Tundra

2

Coastal area

3

Mountain

4

Plains

5

Sea

6

Swamp

You can then create sub tables with evocative words—words of feeling or emotion. For the purposes of this book, I’m going to keep things short, but in practice you could go as detailed and lengthy as you wanted. So, for example, you’d create this table: 1

Peaceful

2

Scary

3

Treacherous

4

Rejuvenating

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Oracles, Dice, and Random Tables Finally, you’d give each of the four sub tables its own table of details, as follows:

Table 1A: Peaceful

Table 1C: Treacherous

1

Garden outside a palace

1

Molten lava

2

Farm

2

Poisonous goo

3

Magical circle

3

Sheer and crumbling rock face

4

Cottage in a clearing

4

Dart trap

5

Pond

5

Spider’s nest

6

Path toward a topiary

6

Dragon’s lair

Table 1B: Scary

Table 1D: Rejuvenating

1

Troll skulls smoldering in a fire

1

Fountain of life

2

Ogres meeting in the woods

2

Crystal mines/energy source

3

Dead bats at the entrance to a cave

3

Wandering sage resting under a tree

4

Ravens circling a corpse

4

Healing potions for sale

5

Nightmarish apocalyptic visions appearing in the land

5

Abandoned adventurer packs

6

Treasure chest

6

Bloody entrails arranged in a circular pattern

Now let’s take a look at some combination of rolls to see how this would work. Grabbing a d4 and 2d6 of different colors, you roll a 4, 2, 6: scary plains with bloody entrails arranged in a circular pattern. Now that’s a location! Here’s another: 1, 6, 3 yields a peaceful swamp with a magical circle. Perhaps that pairing is a bit unusual but you can still use this as a jumping-off point to imagine what kind of magical circle could be created in a swamp and what creatures created it, and so on. And let’s give one more example: 3, 3, 6 yields a dragon’s lair in treacherous mountains. Common enough, perhaps, but a place that has some depth to it. If you were using these rolls to pregenerate a map for an adventure, you could even use these rolls to attach a light story for your adventure. Consider this, a story generated using the suggestions from the table:

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Waking up one morning your adventurer looks around at the smoldering remains of his campfire and notices a series of small bloody bones arranged in a circle. Low on supplies, he knows he needs to travel east toward a rumored magical circle of bounty in a nearby swamp. This area has been the site of a war between will-o’-the-wisps who populate the area and other fairies. All these small creatures have been in hiding from the wyvern terrorizing the nearby villages from his mountainous lair.

With just this bit of story, you’ve already begun to create a quest: perhaps your adventurer will be tasked by the fairies to rid the area of the dragon. Perhaps you’ll do this in exchange for food and supplies as you continue a larger journey. Or perhaps there will be a twist in the tale and you’ll go toward the dragon’s lair, knowing that in some way the dragon needs your help. Let your mind go and you’ll be surprised how many possibilities can be generated from some basic tables. Using these techniques to create random tables that yield more than a list of words will be a bit of work up front, but can pay off when you are in sessions. Remember, a quick table nesting formula is: place/name list

feeling/emotion list



list of details (keyed to the feeling/emotion list)

9

What’s a Narrative Trajectory and Why Do I Need One? The novel you are reading wants to present to you a corporeal world, thick, detailed. – Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler

The more your rolls and responses are connected to a larger narrative, the more rewarding the outcome of the rolls will be. But how do you ensure that there is some larger narrative undergirding everything you do? The easiest way is to develop a narrative trajectory from the outset. But what is a “narrative trajectory,” and how do you create one? Trajectory is another way of saying “path,” or some kind of progression from one point to another to another. A narrative trajectory is my way of saying that you should have a story progression in mind—even just a loose one—right from the beginning of your sessions. Think about it: rare is the GM who comes to the table totally unprepared. Some may strategize excessively, with notes and plans and maps and encounters arranged in advance; some may approach the game more casually—but the vast majority of GMs don’t just hope that everything will happen on the fly. They have an idea of where things will go. Now, sometimes even the best GM planning goes off the rails. The marvelously detailed magical portal and mystical chamber in the GM’s dungeon never gets discovered, or the wizened sea hag with secrets to share isn’t encountered in the forest because nobody went to the forest. But even if the room isn’t explored or the NPC isn’t met, they are still there in the narrative creation of the GM. And the GM’s mind knows it. As a soloist you also don’t know what will happen, and that’s a lot of the fun. But it’s still important to have a sense of the story’s direction (even if your story

doesn’t end up there). Having a very basic narrative trajectory planned out—even if you abandon it, even if it ultimately doesn’t fit your story—is essential to avoiding a stagnant session. Earlier chapters talked about ways to start your sessions; here we’re going to delve a bit deeper into what happens during the course of sessions, and how to ensure that your adventure keeps moving along. Just like walking through a dense wood, the key to progress is having an identifiable path. As we just defined it, the path in an RPG story is called the “narrative trajectory.” You create a narrative trajectory by imagining your character in a place or situation (point A), and then imagining where that character might end up next (point B). Here are some examples of characters and situations, and the narrative trajectory that might be associated with them: elven warrior just back from battle  the tavern (to learn more about the rumors) ¥ A wanderer following a path and discovering an injured boar  the Shrine of the Boars (for reward) ¥ A locked dungeon door  anywhere within to find the dragon’s hoard. ¥ An

Oracles, Dice, and Random Tables

95

But the movement doesn’t have to be literal. Here are some other examples of narrative trajectories: ¥ A

private eye sifting through evidence in the alien library reading through accounts of the apocalypse ¥ A stowaway in the cargo hold looking through a porthole at the shipment. ¥ Mutants

All a narrative trajectory needs is at least one solid point (place, goal, activity) beyond the starting point. If you are ambitious or inspired you may come up with many points at the outset. As long as you have an anchor point and somewhere to go, you’ll have a dynamic scene and something to do. There’s a reason why the concept of a “dungeon crawl” is the heart and soul of TTRPGs. In fact, that trope is so ubiquitous that the idea of a dungeon now almost automatically leads you to think about exploration, surprise, multiple levels, a history, and interconnectivity. The entire phrase “dungeon crawl” describes a narrative trajectory. Think about the many times you’ve had a character crawling through many rooms of a dungeon in search of treasure and encountering wandering monsters, and you begin to realize how deeply these narrative trajectories are baked into our RPG expectations. They must be just as intrinsic to your own sessions, particularly when starting out. Dungeons are so central to RPGing that I’ve written an entire chapter about them. As it’s a bit beyond the scope of solo RPGing, I’ve placed it as an addenda to this book. In it, I discuss the psychological, narrative, and structural functions of dungeons in roleplaying and present ideas about why they have persisted as the central adventuring location for almost 50 years. Hint: this has to do with story development.12

12 You

can find the essay on p. 155.

Epilogue

What Happens Next? The solo RPGer is trying to enact a seemingly impossible dance between being a player and acting as the GM... at the very same time. In this way, being your own GM is playing both sides of the game: you are creating the structure against which you are also operating, and within which you are playing. Sounds circular? It is. The challenge for a soloist is to be able both to distance yourself from the gameplay at the very same time as you are immersing yourself within it. ¥ To

inhabit polar opposite ends of a spectrum. ¥ To experience the newness of discovery as well as the satisfaction of inhabiting a world generated from your own mind. ¥ To plan but also be surprised. ¥ To create the story but still feel as if you are experiencing the story for the first time. Sounds tricky? It is. It’s also rewarding, maddening, challenging, and relaxing. It’s my hope that understanding and employing the principles I’ve set forth here will help keep you in that childlike place of wonder, of pure play, to which all serious gamers aspire. You are the player and you are the GM. I hope both of you have enjoyed this book.

Appendix A

Appendix A

10 Mindsets of the Solo GM 1. Everything is playing 2. But you don’t need everything 3. Don’t forget the G in RPG 4. Words, not dice rolling, will get you through narrative transitions 5. “What happens next?” is the only essential question 6. Play emotion, not mechanics 7. Stats are not story; numbers are not narrative 8. History is your friend 9. Specific items can generate abstract ideas 10. Similarities and differences yield themes

99

100

Appendix B

Appendix B

Solo Session Checklist and Guide to Starting Checklist of resources (Note: you may not be able to gather all of these until you have settled on your rule set) Generative Suggestive Restrictive Rubric

Random tables from the internet or books Components from board games The percentile table in this book and/or other oracles The rules you’re using

8 steps to starting with no rule set 1. Create an environment/mood. Refer to tables in Appendix F. 2. Decide on a direction of connection or disconnection. Refer to tables in Appendix E. 3. Put three items in your environment (you may get these from your generative resources). 4. Put one or two people in your environment (you may get these from your generative resources). These four steps should result in enough seeds to start a story, even if you don’t have a character in mind yet. Next, create your character (using words, not dice) 5. C  ome up with a general concept for your character (perhaps drawn from some of the archetypes of your rule set, if you have one, or perhaps drawn from the environment and story you are developing). 6. Give your character a trinket (you might roll this from a generative resource, or just create it). 7. Give your character an attitude (from the table in Appendix D).

8. R  ead over what you’ve got and connect your character to your environment. At this point you should have the beginnings of a story and something for your character to do. Now you can start to give your character stats and follow the other details of character creation in the rules you’ve decided to play.

4 steps to starting with a rule set Remember this: the rules you decide not to use, as much as the rules you do use, dictate the success of your sessions. In other words: be selective in the rules you use. 1. S kip over character creation and start with the world-building sections. Read through those to get a sense of the place. 2. Look for anomalies in the rule set—something about the rules that you haven’t seen in other rule sets. Think about whether you can hang a story or concept onto that anomaly. 3. Look for some random tables and start rolling. See if you can connect any random rolls to some specifics of what you’ve read about the world. 4. Let the seed of an idea germinate from the specifics of what you’ve read, remembering that it’s easiest to build a large-scale narrative when you begin very small. When you’ve taken your idea as far as you can, go back to the table of contents for more inspiration.

102

Appendix B

The One-Two Method, whether you are starting with rules or not 1. Create a setting a. Get some random tables and roll up a place—an environment. Is it a city or a town or a dungeon or a castle? Is it a warship or a laboratory or a torture chamber or a battlefield? Is it a pirate ship or a witch’s cottage or a farm or a library? Roll and roll and roll on tables until you have a three-dimensional sense of a place—its atmosphere, its smells, its feelings, maybe some locations in the place, if you like. b. If one of the locations speaks to you, listen to it. Develop that one. If it is a structure, describe its architecture. If it is wilderness, describe everything you see or hear, including the weather. Keep developing your place until you get the suggestion of something else… a story, a mission, a task, a journey. This “else” is forming your narrative trajectory. Then, and only then… 2. Put a character in your place a. Give your character something to do. Describe how they feel about doing this thing. Describe people they may already know in the world. b. Give them something to hold or carry. Roll on a random trinket table. Figure out how whatever you roll up makes sense with the story you have already created. Hang that trinket on the narrative thread you have developed. c. Only when you have a sense of your character in a place should you… d. Start the die rolling! Generate stats/rules, etc. Get out a character sheet and fill it with race, class, and the other attributes that typically go into an RPG character.

Appendix C

103

Appendix C

My Solo RPG Wallet Revealed

13

If you’ve watched any Geek Gamers videos, you’ve likely seen me reaching into an old red leather wallet to pull out a bunch of cards—a collection of various oracle tables I have gathered from many sources over the years. Many people have asked for details about the sources of the tables I use, so here are the sources and a brief discussion. Where possible, I have reproduced the tables in this book. If it isn’t here, it’s because I could not obtain permission from the copyright holder. As always, please respect copyright laws when seeking out these sources. My favorite oracle table is a simple percentage table. It offers little specific direction, but I find it’s the one I turn to most often when playing. Adjective

Yes

No

A Sure Thing

01–90

91–100

Very Likely

01–75

76–100

Somewhat Likely

01–60

61–100

50/50

01–50

51–100

Unlikely

01–40

41–100

Very Unlikely

01–25

26–100

Impossible

01–10

11–100

This is my favorite and most used table for a few reasons: the way the “yes” and “no” responses are laid out reminds me of number lines from elementary school. It’s quite easy to envision just how much 90% is over 100% when you think of a number line. Similarly, it is easy to envision how little 10% is. This visual cue helps me when trying to assign likelihood. Additionally, the table offers just enough choices but not too many. As I’ve said elsewhere in this book, spending too much time rolling dice and thinking about 13 Find

“My Solo RPG Wallet Revealed!” on Geek Gamers to see all these tables discussed.

104

Appendix C

rolls can be counterproductive. For me, this table offers the perfect mix of general and specific direction to help my narrative move forward. Zanthrum d20 RPG Solo Engine created by Riccardo Fregi (2017–20) is the source of a very detailed d20 table that provides granular outcomes of rolls. With descriptive differences such as “very unlikely” or “definitely unlikely” and “definitely very unlikely,” this will appeal to anyone who wants to be provided with detailed directions to chew on and interpret when making decisions. Ironsworn: A Tabletop RPG of Perilous Quests by Shawn Tomkin (2018) provides a d100 “Ask the Oracle” table that reminds players to draw conclusions and envision options. As with everything in Ironsworn, allegiance to narrative outcomes is of paramount importance. Explicitly connecting die rolls to story formation makes this table a solid bet for the soloist. These tables are reproduced in Appendix J. Scarlet Heroes by Kevin Crawford (2014) offers a number of general oracles. Of particular use to the soloist, the main d20 oracle provides not only “yes,” “no,” and “yes, but” and “no, but” outcomes; most importantly, it also provides a short oracle table to give direction to the “but” outcome. The d6 narrative descriptions of “complications” to these rolls provide a suggestion of narrative direction and lead the soloist away from a yes/no dead end. These tables are reproduced in Appendix J. The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox by Paul Bimler (2016) provides a unique two-step oracle whereby the player first assesses the likelihood of something occurring and, based on that narrative assessment, gets a number that is used as a modifier to a d20 yes/no/maybe roll. MUNE (The Madey Upy Namey Emulator) available at the Homebrewery provides a more involved oracle system, beginning with a simple d6 yes/no/but table. The system asks you to keep track of the times it is used and, after three rolls, to include a roll on an “intervention type” table that gives broader instructions for narrative twists (including “advance plot,” “regress plot”). It also provides a d10 table to use for moments “when everything is not as expected.” See Appendix J for the table.

Appendix D

105

Appendix D

Character Attitudes Character Attitudes Table (for heroes or NPCs)(d66) 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,4 1,5 1,6

willing excited reluctant resentful pleased outraged

2,1 2,2 2,3 2,4 2,5 2,6

focused confident scared ambivalent wary amused

3,1 3,2 3,3 3,4 3,5 3,6

focused optimistic determined worn down elated troubled

4,1 4,2 4,3 4,4 4,5 4,6

uncomfortable cautious powerless defiant frustrated obligated

5,1 5,2 5,3 5,4 5,5 5,6

reluctant suspicious worried fatigued obsessed curious

6,1 6,2 6,3 6,4 6,5 6,6

uneasy thankful skeptical rebellious misunderstood daring

106

Appendix E

Appendix E

Tables of Connection and Disconnection For places, adjectives of disconnection (d12)

Roll once, or again if the first word doesn’t make sense. 1

Deserted

7

Neglected

2

Claustrophobic

8

Shrouded

3

Dismal

9

Pallid

4

Isolated

10 Eerie

5

Secluded

11 Gloomy

6

Shadowy

12 Towering

For places, adjectives that draw you toward/connection (d12)

Roll once, or again if the first word doesn’t make sense. 1

Glorious

7

Mystical

2

Harmonious

8

Magnificent

3

Dazzling

9

Tranquil

4

Wonderful

10 Silent

5

Delightful

11 Magical

6

Inviting

12 Charming

Appendix F

107

Appendix F

Quick Tables for Starting with No Rule Set Table 4: Environment (d6) 1

Academic (now roll on Table 4A)

2

Urban (now roll on Table 4B)

3

Natural (now roll on Table 4C)

4

Nautical (now roll on Table 4D)

5

Underground (now roll on Table 4E)

6

Cosmic/Planetoid (now roll on Table 4F)

Table 4A: Academic

Table 4B: Urban

1

Apothecary

1

Crime boss lair

2

Archive/Scriptorium

2

Abandoned warehouse

3

A research institute

3

Apartment complex

4

Rare book room in the library

4

Military facility

5

Professor’s study

5

Abandoned mall

6

Science laboratory

6

Crowded rundown bar

7

Lecure hall

7

Subway station

8

Gymnasium

8

Late-night diner

9

Teacher’s lounge

9

Large city hospital

10 Auditorium

10 Power plant

108

Appendix F

Table 4C: Natural 1

Mountainside cavern

2

Light forest clearing with pattern of rocks

3

Ruins of a witch’s hut at the edge of the village

4

Shrine constructed in the side of a cliff face

5

Vine-covered island graveyard

6

Sand or snow dunes covered in shifting runes

7

Rural crossroads

8

Lonely moor

9

Abandoned vehicle on the side of a dirt road

10 Mountain path Table 4D: Nautical

Table 4E: Underground

1

Magical coral reef

1

Dungeon

2

Misty, uncharted island

2

Crypt

3

Rocky coast with sea caves

3

High-tech secret facility

4

Unmanned ghost cargo ship

4

Caves

5

Seaport on coastline

5

Dragon’s lair

6

At the side of a beached, dying sea monster

6

Alien city

7

Dwarven mines (abandoned, or not)

7

Pirate ship locked in battle

8

Secret entrance to mountain factory

8

Port town

9

Sewers

9

Imperial warship

10 Abandoned passageway out of a prison

10 A hydra’s underwater lair Table 4F: Cosmic/Planetoid 1

Scientific outpost on an icy world

2

Salvage yard for robotic parts and abandoned AI tech

3

Luxury space station

4

Dying alien corpse monstrosity in the alleyway of a domed city

5

Edge of an acidic pond in the wastelands

6

A security bot’s post at a secret installation

7

Smuggler’s space ship

8

Bioengineering lab

9

Space bazaar/trading plaza

10 Inner sanctum of a crime syndicate

Appendix F

109

Descriptive Words (to pair with a concrete element)(d66) 1,1 1,2 1,3 1,4 1,5 1,6

peaceful scary treacherous rejuvenating ancient broken

2,1 2,2 2,3 2,4 2,5 2,6

secret withering bleak fallen incandescent cataclysmic

3,1 3,2 3,3 3,4 3,5 3,6

enchanted demolished rusted shimmering effervescent mysterious

4,1 4,2 4,3 4,4 4,5 4,6

idyllic crumbling bucolic rocky gentle broken

5,1 5,2 5,3 5,4 5,5 5,6

uncharted barren pastoral bleak misty delightful

6,1 6,2 6,3 6,4 6,5 6,6

perilous sacred solitary eerie otherworldly wondrous

110

Appendix F

Terrain Type How it works: Rolling d4, and two d6. Examples: 1, 3, 6 = peaceful mountain with a path toward a topiary; a roll of 2, 1, 4 = scary tundra with ravens circling a corpse. 1

Peaceful (roll on Table 1A)

1

Tundra

2

Scary (roll on Table 2A)

2

Coastal area

3

Treacherous (roll on Table 3A)

3

Mountain

4

Rejuvenating (roll on Table 4A)

4

Plains

5

Sea

6

Swamp

Table 1A: Peaceful

Table 1C: Treacherous

1

Garden outside a palace

1

Molten lava

2

Farm

2

Poisonous goo

3

Magical circle

3

Sheer and crumbling rock face

4

Cottage in a clearing

4

Dart trap

5

Pond

5

Spider’s nest

6

Path toward a topiary

6

Dragon’s lair

Table 1B: Scary

Table 1D: Rejuvenating

1

Troll skulls smoldering in a fire

1

Fountain of life

2

Ogres meeting in the woods

2

Crystal mines/energy source

3

Dead bats at the entrance to a cave

3

Wandering sage resting under a tree

4

Ravens circling a corpse

4

Healing potions for sale

5

Nightmarish apocalyptic visions appearing in the land

5

Abandoned adventurer packs

6

Treasure chest

6

Bloody entrails arranged in a circular pattern

Appendix G

111

Appendix G

Mechanical Adjustments of Stats

14

For many soloists—myself included—it is too much to run a party of four or five adventurers (as well as manage the GM portion of sessions). I often run two characters and the adjustment suggestions below are based on that. PC generation Start characters with Level 2 stats and bonuses. Monsters/NPCs Easier encounters: Limit yourself to Level 1 and Level 2 monsters/NPCs. Divide HP by 4 and take the lowest possible damage from any hit (for example, if a monster does d8 + 4 damage, count that as 5 damage). Medium encounters: Limit yourself to Level 1 and Level 2 monsters/NPCs. Divide HP by 2 and take the lowest possible damage from any hit (for example, if a monster does d8 + 4 damage, count that as 5 damage). Harder encounters: Limit yourself to Level 1 and Level 2 monsters/NPCs. Divide HP by 2 and roll for damage using 1 level lower die. (For example, if a monster does d8 + 4 damage, roll d6 + 4 for damage).

14 My

solo gameplay does not focus on adjusting stat blocks in too much detail. This appendix will give some general rules for making adjustments. Players interested in more detailed formulas for specific rule sets can refer to some of the references mentioned in “Appendix N.” As always, do what feels right to you based on your play style, the rule set, and whether or not you want your character to be likely to die.

112

Appendix G

Other ways to mitigate combat and encounter difficulty As always, feel free to pick and choose among these ideas, regardless of what your rule set states: 1. A  llow your character to flee at any point during combat (with or without being subjected to a final attack). 2. Always grant your character initiative. 3. Always grant your character surprise. 4. Never let your character be ambushed. 5. Create (or modify from the rules) a “luck” mechanic—something that creates rules for die rerolling or ignoring outcomes. To maintain a sense of tension, I suggest having some kind of limit to these rolls, or at least a way of having them run out before some kind of rest. You may also wish to institute a (nonlethal) penalty for using luck. 6. Create a rule for monsters fleeing after they are reduced to a certain amount of hit points. 7. Eliminate critical hit rules for monsters/NPCs. 8. Adjust the healing rules in some manner favorable to your PCs.

Appendix H

113

Appendix H

Literary Random Table (I read these so you don’t have to!)

Many fans of Geek Gamers comment on my use of literature (predominantly nineteenth-century novels) to roll on and generate random situations, settings, atmospheres, and feelings for an RPG session. Using literary sources puts a unique twist on the experience and is satisfying and different. Without a pretty deep knowledge of the genre, it can be hard to play this way because finding the right novels to roll on doesn’t happen by accident. Herewith, a literary table for you. Most entries are taken from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction. This table may be used in many ways: to start an adventure; to change a scene; for overall inspiration. Whenever you need to roll up some thematic atmosphere; as a “memory” for a character. However you want and need to advance what you’re doing. It is, generally speaking, an “atmospheric” table. Most (but not all) of the entries would loosely fit a description of “gothic.” They are not specifically in classic fantasy but I tried to keep the themes general enough that they could work with most fantasy or horror games. As an exercise, you may wish to use this table as inspiration for sessions before you have a rule set, before you have decided on a theme even. To do so, read the passage and let your mind wander. Maybe a story idea will be sparked. Maybe not. Even if a story idea is sparked for which this random passage doesn’t fit, that’s ok. In fact, that’s great. You’ve used this material to get you going. Alternatively, for a writing exercise, roll on the table and generate a story or series of scenes based on the prompts in the passages. NOTE: This is a d66 table. It is used by taking two d6 of different colors or sizes, and designating one of them “first” and one of them the “second.” Rolling a 2 and a 4 (for example) would bring you to entry 2,4; rolling a 6 and a 1 would bring you to entry 6,1, etc.

114

Appendix H

1,1 A certain amount of interest was excited in the village when it was known that the famous witch, who was still remembered by a few, was to be exhumed. And the feeling of surprise, and indeed disquiet, was very strong when it was found that, though her coffin was fairly sound and unbroken, there was no trace whatever inside it of body, bones, or dust. – M. R. James, “The Ash-tree”

1,2 One evening his host was turning over a drawer full of odds and ends in the smoking-room. Suddenly he put his hand upon a little box. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you know about old things; tell me what that is.’ My friend opened the little box, and found in it a thin gold chain with an object attached to it. He glanced at the object and then took off his spectacles to examine it more narrowly. ‘What’s the history of this?’ he asked. ‘Odd enough,’ was the answer. ‘You know the yew thicket in the shrubbery: well, a year or two back we were cleaning out the old well that used to be in the cleaning here, and what do you suppose we found?’  – M. R. James, “A School Story”

1,3 We stood holding the coat and that bundle of handkerchiefs, and looking, very fearfully, I must admit, about us. There was nothing to be seen: a line of dark firs behind us made one skyline, more trees and the church tower half a mile off on the right, cottages and a windmill on the horizon on the left, calm sea dead in front. … Yet in all this quiet, an acute, an acrid consciousness of a restrained hostility very near us, like a dog on a leash that might be let go at any moment. Paxton pulled himself out of the hole, and stretched a hand back to us. ‘Give it to me,’ he whispered, ‘unwrapped.’ We pulled off the handkerchiefs, and he took the crown. The moonlight just fell on it as he snatched it. We had not ourselves touched that bit of metal, and I have thought since that it was just as well. – M. R. James, “A Warning to the Curious”

Appendix H

115

1,4 All that is known is that, on the afternoon of the 23rd, an English traveller, examining the front of St. Wulfram’s Church at Abbeville, then under extensive repair, was struck on the head and instantly killed by a stone falling from the scaffold erected round the north-western tower, there being, as was clearly proved, no workman on the scaffold at that moment. … Only one detail shall be added. At Karswell’s sale a set of Bewick, sold with all faults, was acquired by Harrington. The page with the woodcut of the traveller and the demon was, as he had expected, mutilated. – M. R. James, “Casting the Runes”

1,5 There was one object close by which added to his gloom. About a yard away, in the rear of the tree, behind himself, and extending to his left, was an open grave, the mould and rubbish piled on the other side. At the head of this grave stood the beech-tree; its columnar stem rose like a huge monumental pillar. He knew every line and crease on its smooth surface. The initial letters of his own name, cut in its bark long ago, had spread out and wrinkled like the grotesque capitals of a fanciful engraver, and now with a sinister significance overlooked the open grave.  – J. Sheridan LeFanu, “The Vision of Tom Chuff”

1,6 What strange light is that which now gradually creeps up into the air? Red and terrible—brighter and brighter it grows. The lightening as set fire to a mill, and the reflection of the rapidly consuming building falls upon that long window. There can be no mistake. The figure is there, still feeling for an entrance, and clattering against the glass with its long nails, that appear as if the growth of many years had been untouched.  – James Malcolm Rymer, Varney the Vampyre

116

Appendix H

2,1 After midnight, these gloomy, narrow streets became the haunt of numerous homeless vagabonds, and escaped criminal and malefactor, moreover, made the quarter their rendezvous. If the day had been a lucky one, they made merry over their spoils, and when sleep overtook them, hid in doorways or among the rubbish in deserted houses. Every effort had been made to dislodge these dangerous guests, but the most energetic measures had failed to prove successful. Watched, hunted, and in imminent danger of arrest though they were, they always returned with idiotic obstinacy, obeying, as one might suppose, some mysterious law of attraction. Hence, the district was for the police an immense trap, constantly baited and to which the game came of their own accord to be taught. – Emile Gaboriau, Monsieur Lecoq

2,2 She put something which glittered into his hand, and he something into hers, which I saw to be money, for a single coin fell from her trembling hand into the grass. The scene passed: I should have remarked, by the way, that on the rough walls of the enclosure I could distinguish bones, and even a skull, lying in a disorderly fashion. Next, I was looking upon two boys; one the figure of the former vision, the other younger. They were in a plot of garden, walled round, and this garden, in spite of the difference in arrangement, and the small size of the trees, I could clearly recognize as being that upon which I now look from my window. The boys were engaged in some curious play, it seemed. Something was smouldering on the ground. The elder placed his hands upon it, and then raised them in what I took to be an attitude of prayer: and I saw, and started at seeing, that on them were deep stains of blood. The sky above was overcast. The same boy now turned his face toward the wall of the garden, and beckoned with both his raised hands, and as he did so I was conscious that some moving objects were becoming visible over the top of the wall—whether heads or other parts of some animal or human forms I could not tell. Upon the instant the elder body turned sharply, seized the arms of the younger (who all this time had been poring over what lay on the ground), and both hurried off. I then saw blood upon the grass, a little pile of bricks, and what I thought were black feathers scattered about. – M. R. James, “The Residence at Whitminster”

Appendix H

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2,3 “Do you think the chimney-piece is as solid as it looks?” Henry proceeded. “When you came in, I was just wondering whether this figure here had not accidentally got loosened from the wall behind it.” He laid his hand on the marble forehead, for the third time. “To my eye, it looks a little out of the perpendicular. I almost fancied I could jog the head just now, and when I touched it.” He pressed the head inwards as he said those words. A sound of jarring iron was instantly audible behind the wall. The solid hearthstone in front of the fire-place turned slowly at the feed of the two men, and disclosed a dark cavity below. At the same moment, the strange and sickening combination of odors, hitherto associated with the vaults of the old palace and with the bed-chamber beneath, now floated up from the open recess, and filled the room … [T]he manager returned with a wax taper in his hand, which he lighted as soon as he entered the room … Looking into the cavity, by the dim and flickering light, they both detected a dark object at the bottom of it. “I think I can reach the thing,” the manager remarked, “if I lie down, and put my hand into the hole.” … He stretched himself at full length on the floor, and passed his right arm into the cavity. “I can’t say exactly what I have got hold of,” he said, “But I have got it.” Half raising himself, he drew his hand out. The next instant, he started to his feet with a shriek of terror.  – Wilkie Collins, The Haunted Hotel

2,4 Membrane after membrane was torn. It blazed a soft yellow, a lambent light under a film of velvet; it filled the caverns behind the eyes with light. All that inner darkness became a hall, leaf smelling, earth smelling, of yellow light. And the tree was beyond the flower; the grass, the flower and the tree were entire. Down on his knees grubbing he held the flower complete. Then there was a roar and a hot breath and a stream of coarse grey hair rushed between him and the flower. Up he leapt, toppling in his fright, and saw coming toward him a terrible peaked eyeless monster moving on legs, brandishing arms.  – Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

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2,5 Despairingly she looked all round. She was completely encircled by the tremendous ice walls, which were made fluid by explosions of blinding light, so that they moved and changed with a continuous liquid motion, advancing in torrents of ice, avalanches as big as oceans, flooding everywhere over the doomed world. Wherever she looked, she saw the same fearful encirclement, soaring battlements of ice, an overhanging ring of frigid, fiery, colossal waves about to collapse upon her. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world.  – Anna Kavan, Ice

2,6 She looked out upon the wild grandeur of the scene, closed nearly on all sides by alpine steeps, whose tops, peeping over each other, faded from the eye in misty hues, while the promontories below were dark with woods, that swept down to their base, and stretched along the narrow vallies. The rich pomp of these woods was particularly delightful. … [S]he viewed with astonishment the fortification of the castle spreading along a vast extent of rock, and now partly in decay, the grandeur of the ramparts below, and the towers and battlements and various features of the fabric above. From these her sight wandered over the cliffs and woods in to the valley, along which foamed a broad and rapid stream, seen falling among the crags of an opposite mountain, now flashing in the sun-beams, and now shadowed by over-arching pines, till it was entirely concealed by their thick foliage. Again it burst from beneath this darkness in one broad sheet of foam, and fell thundering into the vale.  – Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

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3,1 Much of the day, as I told you, had been passed among the grisly records of these old family crimes and hatreds. … When all grew quite silent, I began to feel a dismal sort of sensation, and lighted the pair of wax candles which I found upon the small writing table. How wonderful and mysterious is the influence of light! What sort of being must be those be who hate it? The floor, more than anything else, showed the great age of the room. It was warped and arched all along by the wall between the door and the window. The portion of it which the carpet did not cover showed it to be oak, dark and rugged. My bed was unexceptionably comfortable, but, in my then mood, I could have wished it a great deal more modern. Its four posts were, like the rest of it, oak, well-nigh black, fantastically turned and carved, with a great urn-like capital and base, and shaped midway, like a gigantic lancehandle. Its curtains were of thick and faded tapestry. I was always a lover of such antiquities, but I confess at that moment I would have vastly preferred a sprightly modern chintz and a trumpery little French bed in a corner. … There was a great lowering press of oak, and some shelves, with withered green and gold leather borders. All the furniture belonged to other times. I would have been glad to hear a step stirring, or a cough even … but there was a silence and section in this part of the mansion which, somehow, made me feel that I was myself a solitary intruder on this level of the vast old house. … I peeped through the dense window curtain: there were no shutters. A cold, bright moon was shining with clear sharp lights and shadows. Everything looked strangely cold and motionless outside. The somber old trees, like gigantic hearse plumes, black and awful. The chapel lay full in view, where so many of the strange and equivocal race, under whose ancient roof-tree I then stood, were lying under their tombstones. Somehow, I had grown nervous. A little bit of plaster tumbled down the chimney, and startled me confoundedly. Then some time after, I fancied I heard a creaking step on the lobby outside, and, candle in hand, opened the door, and looked out. – J. Sheridan LeFanu, Wylder’s Hand

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3,2 The sand-hills here run down to the sea, and end in two spits of rock jutting out opposite each other, till you lose sight of them in the water. One is called the North Spit, and one the South. Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain season of the year, lies the most horrible quicksand. … At the turn of the tide, something goes on in the unknown deeps below, which sets the whole face of the quicksand shivering and trembling in a manner most remarkable to see, and which has given to it, among the people in our parts, the name of the Shivering Sand. A great bank, half a mile out, nigh the mouth of the bay, breaks the force of the main ocean coming in from the offing. Winter and summer, when the tide flows over the quicksand, the sea seems to leave the waves behind it on the bank, and rolls its waters in smoothly with a heave, and covers the sand in silence. A lonesome and hurried retreat, I can tell you! – Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

3,3 We pulled up before an antique and solid inn, build of Caen stone, in a fashion richer and more florid than was ever usual in such houses, and which indicated that it was originally designed for the private mansion of some person of wealth, and probably, as the wall bore many carved shields and supporters, of distinction also. A kind of porch, less ancient than the rest, projected hospitably with a wide and florid arch, over which, cut in high relief in stone, and painted and gilded, was the sign of the inn. This was the Flying Dragon, with wings of brilliant red and gold, expanded, and its tail pale green and gold, twisted and knotted into ever so many rings, and ending in a burnished point barbed like the dart of death.  – J. Sheridan LeFanu, “The Room in the Dragon Volant”

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3,4 After several days, your vision strays and unfocuses and you blink slowly, attention drawn to a door at the very bottom of the mirror. The door is as big as the machine. The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so minute you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent—the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well, so that it is only by the barely perceived hairline fracture of its outline that it can be distinguished beneath the desert, ocean, mountains, that glide across its surface. The door is a mirror, too, you realize, and after so long of not focusing on anything, letting images run through you, you find yourself concentrating on the door and the door alone. In many ways, it is an ordinary door, almost a nonexistent door. And yet, staring at it, a wave of fear passes over you. A fear so blinding it paralyzes you. It holds you in place. You can feel the pressure of all that meat, all that flesh, all the metal inside the machine amassed behind that door. It is an unbearable weight at your throat. You are buried in it, in a small box, under an eternity of rock and earth. The worms are singing to you through the rubble. The worms know your name. You cannot think. Your head is full of blood. You dare not breathe… . The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside.  – Jeff VanderMeer, Shriek: An Afterword

3,5 When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third. … He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.  – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

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3,6 The force of the sun obliged me to seek refuge in a cave; in the rear was a pit, in the pit a stairway which sank down abysmally into the darkness below. I went down; through a chaos of sordid galleries I reached a vast circular chamber, scarcely visible. There were nine doors in this cellar; eight led to a labyrinth that treacherously returned to the same chamber; the ninth (through another labyrinth) led to a second circular chamber equal to the first. I do not know the total number of these chambers; my misfortune and anxiety multiplied them. The silence was hostile and almost perfect; there was no sound in this deep stone network save that of a subterranean wind, whose cause I did not discover; noiselessly, tiny streams of rusty water disappeared between the crevices. Horribly, I became habituated to this doubtful world; I found it incredible that there could be anything but cellars with nine doors and long branched-out cellars; I do not know how long I must have walked beneath the ground; I know that I once confused, in the same nostalgia, the atrocious village of the barbarians and my native city, amid the clusters. In the depths of a corridor, an unforeseen wall halted me; a remote light fell from above. I raised my confused eyes: in the vertiginous, extreme heights I saw a circle of sky so blue that it seemed purple. Some metal rungs scaled the wall. I was limp with fatigue, but I climbed up, stopping only at times to sob clumsily with joy. I began to glimpse capitals and astragals, triangular pediments and vaults, confused pageants of granite and marble. Thus I was afforded this ascension from the blind region of dark interwoven labyrinths into the resplendent City.  – Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal”

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4,1 They continued to wind under the woods, between the grassy knolls of the mountain, and, as they reached the shady summit, which he had pointed out, the whole party burst into an exclamation. Behind the spot where they stood, the rock rose perpendicularly in a massy wall to a considerable height, and then branched out into overhanging crags. Their grey tints were well contrasted by the bright hues of the plants and wild flowers, that grew in their fractured sides, and were deepened by the gloom of the pines and cedars, that waved above. The steeps below, over which the eye passed abruptly to the valley, were fringed with thickets of alpine shrubs; and, lower still, appeared the tufted tops of the chestnut woods, that clothed their base, among which peeped forth the shepherd’s cottage, just left by the travellers, with its blueish smoke curling high in the air.  – Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

4,2 It was rather colder than she had thought; that year’s spring had begun mildly … the morning had been still and warm and the sea turquoise blue under a delicately faded sky. But the sun had gone in, and now it was after four. A damp, heavy wind was blowing sluggishly from the sea, and swirls of mist, like clammy steam, hung on the brambles beside the lane. Already they looked soggy, and a film of moisture was covering the rough stone fences and darkening the earth that bound them together… . Perhaps if she hurried and kept warm, the sun would come out presently. She knew it would be setting in less than an hour, but continued to nourish the hope, obstinately, without examining the reason, which was that it happened to be, at the moment, the only hope she had. A crimson stain began to cover the inside of her hands… . A cold, heavy water-drop ran from her hair down the inside of her collar. She began to realize that she was really wet, and, in spite of walking as fast as she could, was beginning to feel cold. She knew that she ought to go home. But if she arrived dripping, she would be noticed, and questioned, and discussed.  – Mary Renault, The Friendly Young Ladies

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4,3 On my right hand there were lines of fishing-stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach. To the left a group of barren islets, suggesting ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses, had its foundation set in a blue sea that itself looked solid, so still and stable did it lie below my feet; even the track of light from the westering sun shone smoothly, without that animated glitter which tells of an imperceptible ripple. And when I turned my head to take a parting glance at the tug which had just left us anchored outside the bar, I saw the straight line of the flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness, in one leveled floor half brown, half blue under the enormous dome of the sky. Corresponding in their insignificance to the islets of the sea, two small clumps of trees, one on each side of the only fault in the impeccable joint, marked the mouth of the river… . Here and there gleams as of a few scattered pieces of silver market the windings of the great river; and on the nearest of them, just within the bar, the tug steaming right into the land became lost to my sight, hull and funnel and masts, as though the impassive earth had swallowed her up without an effort, without a tremor… . She floated at the starting-point of a long journey, very still in an immense stillness, the shadows of her spars flung far to the eastward by the setting sun. At that moment I was alone on her decks. There was not a sound in her—and around us nothing moved, nothing lived, not a canoe on the water, not a bird in the air, not a cloud in the sky. In this breathless pause at the threshold of a long passage we seemed to be measuring our fitness for a long and arduous enterprise, the appointed task of both our existences to be carried out, far from all human eyes, with only sky and sea for spectators and for judges.  – Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer

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4,4 I stood up and looked round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone, loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour. But all else of the world was invisible. My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to hover. The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and was thick with verdigris. It chanced that the face was towards me; the sightless eyes seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips. It was greatly weatherworn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space—half a minute, perhaps, or half and hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail drove before it denser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a moment, and saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that the sky was lightening with the promise of the sun. – H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

4,5 When finally I became untangled from this nightmare, I found myself lying with my hands tied, in an oblong stone niche no larger than a common grave, shallowly excavated into the sharp slope of a mountain. Its sides were damp, polished by time rather than by human effort. I felt a painful throbbing in my chest, I felt that I was burning with thirst. I looked out and shouted feebly. At the foot of the mountain, an impure stream spread noiselessly, clogged with debris and sand; on the opposite bank (beneath the last sun or beneath the first) shone the evident City of the Immortals. I saw walls, arches, facades and flora: the base was a stone plateau. A hundred or so irregular niches, analogous to mine, furrowed the mountain and the valley. In the sand there were shallow pits; from these miserable holes (and from the niches) naked, gray-skinned, scraggly bearded men emerged. I thought I recognized them: they belonged to the bestial breed of the troglodytes.  – Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

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4,6 Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple. “Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” He whispered. “Quietly,” they said “or we shall wake them.” But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page or two. “Now they’ve found it,” one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. … But they had found it in the drawing-room. Not that one could ever see them. The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing-room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat softly. “The treasure buried; the room …” the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure? A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun… . Death as the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened… . “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat gladly. “The Treasure yours.”  – Virginia Woolf, “A Haunted House”

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5,1 Black terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter turmoil, and above the chatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep basso. Fiendish things were in the air, and lodgers told over the beads of their rosaries as they caught the odor from beneath the doctor’s closed door. The lounger I had hired, it seems, had fled screaming and mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of ice: perhaps as a result of excessive curiosity. He could not, of course, have locked the door behind him; yet it was now fastened, presumably from the inside. There was no sound within save a nameless sort of slow, thick dripping.  – H. P. Lovecraft, “Cool Air”

5,2 The moon was full and broad in the dark blue starless sky, and the broken ground of the heath looked wild enough in the mysterious light to be hundreds of miles away from the great city that lay beneath it. […] I wound my way down slowly over the heath, enjoying the divine stillness of the scene, and admiring the soft alternations of light and shade as they followed each other over the broken ground on every side of me. So long as I was proceeding through this first and prettiest part of my night walk my mind remained passively open to the impressions produced by the view; and I thought but little on any subject— indeed, so far as my own sensations were concerned, I can hardly say that I thought at all. […] I had now arrived at that particular point of my walk where four roads met […] when, in one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me. I turned on the instant, with my finger tightening round the handle of my stick. There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it is had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white… .   – Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

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5,3 The noise was very loud now and the thicket very dense so that he could not see a year ahead, when the music stopped suddenly. There was a sound of rustling and broken twigs and he made hastily in that direction, but found nothing. He had almost decided to give up the search when the song began again a little farther away. Once more he made after it; once more the creature stopped singing and evaded him. He must have played thus at hide-and-seek with it for the best part of an hour before his search was rewarded. Treading delicately during one of the loudest bursts of music he at last saw through the flowery branches a black something. Standing still whenever it stopped singing, and advancing with great caution whenever it began again, he stalked it for ten minutes. At last it was in full view, and singing, and ignorant that it was watched. It sat upright like a dog, black and sleek and shiny, but its shoulders were high … and the forelegs on which they were pillared were like young trees and the wide soft pads on which they rested were large as those of a camel. The enormous rounded belly was white, and far up above the shoulder the neck rose like that of a horse. The head was in profile … the mouth wide open as it sang of joy in thick-coming trills, and the music almost visibly rippled in its glossy throat. He stared in wonder at the wide liquid eyes and the quivering, sensitive nostrils. Then the creature stopped, saw him, and darted away and stood, now a few paces distant, on all four legs, not much smaller than a young elephant, swaying a long bushy tail. […] When he called to it it came nearer. It put its velvet nose into his hand and endured his touch; but almost at once it darted back and, bending its long neck, buried its head in its paws. He could make no headway with it, and when at length it retreated out of sight he did not follow it. To do so would have seemed an injury to its fawn-like shyness, to the yielding softness of its expression, its evident wish to be for ever a sound and only a sound in the thickest center of untravelled woods. He resumed his journey: a few seconds later the song broke out behind him, louder and lovelier than before, as if in a paean of rejoicing at its recovered privacy.  – C. S. Lewis, Perelandra

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5,4 As a rule Carson was kept too busy to be bored, but at the same time his work could never by any stretch of the imagination be called exciting. That was why he took such a keen interest in everything that went on—even though a great many people detested him for it—and it was the reason why he had become even more curious when he discovered something going on which was, if not actually wrong, at least highly unusual… . The mistakes it became clear to Carson, were being very carefully planned. He had taken to working late two or three times a week, choosing the nights at random and tramping through the various buildings which had lights burning, ostensibly to check on the efficiency of his own men. Without, of course, being able to join them, he had discovered liaison meetings in progress between engineers and design staff, some of whom had nothing in common to liaise about, and an occasional production meeting which went on for hours without using or producing minutes or paperwork of any kind. Even the wastepaper baskets contained only a few empty cigarette cartons. Paperwork, the proof that something was in fact going on, was virtually non-existent except for his pitifully small list of drawing issue notes, materials requisition forms and the like bearing the identifying numbers of the suspect components. Carson knew that something was going on but he did not know what it was or whether it was small, medium or large as projects went. He still did not know exactly, but today’s discovery had rendered his ignorance less abysmal. It had to do with space travel, perhaps a new method of propulsion effective over interstellar distances. And it was important—there could be no doubt about that—and secret. So secret that even the Ewing-Hart security section had been kept in the dark about it. But even as a child Carson had never been comfortable in the dark.  – James White, Tomorrow Is Too Far

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5,5 He saw the flying object again. It was not a hypership, nor even an ordinary air-jet. It was a jet-down. He could see the faint glow of the ion trails coming out at the vertices of a hexagon, neutralizing the gravitational pull and allowing the wings to keep it aloft like a large soaring bird. It was a vehicle that could hover and explore a planetary terrain. The jet-down was closer now, nosing about like a blind beast sniffing out its prey. Would it occur to them to search this group of trees? Would they land and send out an armed soldier or two to beat through the copse? And if so, what could he do? He was unarmed and all his quick-twist agility would be useless against the agonizing pain of a neuronic whip.  – Isaac Asimov, Prelude to Foundation

5,6 Among those secluded nooks there is very little stir or movement after dark. There is little enough in the high-tide of the day, but there is next to none at night. Besides that the cheerfully frequented High Street lies nearly parallel to the spot (the old Cathedral rising between the two), and is the natural channel in which the Cloisterham traffic flows, a certain awful hush pervades the ancient pile, the cloisters, and the churchyard, after dark, which not many people care to encounter. Ask the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham, met at random in the streets at noon, if they believed in Ghosts, they would tell you no; but put them to choose at night between these eerie Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops, and you would find that ninety-nine declared for the longer round and the more frequented way. The cause of this is not to be found in any local superstition that attaches to the Precincts—albeit a mysterious lady, with a child in her arms and a rope dangling from her neck, has been seen flitting about there by sundry witnesses as intangible as herself—but it is to be sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it from dust out of which the breath of life has passed; also, in the widely diffused, and almost as widely unacknowledged, reflection: “If the dead do, under any circumstances, become visible to the living, these are such likely surroundings for that purpose… .” – Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood

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6,1 One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal endued with life. When, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries. I revolved these circumstances in my mind and determined thenceforth to apply myself more particularly to those branches of natural philosophy which relate to physiology… . To examine the causes of life, we must have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy, but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body… . I do not remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness has no effect upon my fancy, and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the must insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analyzing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness and sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.   – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

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6,2 Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, white-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious greensward; in some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copse-wood of various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun; in others they receded from each other, forming those long sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the eye delights to lose itself, while the imagination considers them as the paths to yet wilder scenes of sylvan solitude. Here the red rays of the sun shot a broken and discolored light that partially hung upon the shattered boughs and mossy trunks of the trees and there they illuminated in brilliant patches the portions of turf to which they made their way. A considerable open space, in the midst of this glade, seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the rites of Druidical superstition; for, on the summit of a hillock, so regular as to seem artificial, there still remained part of a circle of rough unhewn stones, of large dimensions. Seven stood upright; the rest had been dislodged from their places… . One large stone only had found its way to the bottom, and in stopping the course of a small brook, which glided smoothly round the foot of the eminence, gave, by its opposition, a feeble voice of murmur to the placid and elsewhere silent streamlet. – Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

6,3 Your gaze glides across the living room, the marks where the couch used to be, the bare spots of the missing holographs—only to discover something white and small in the space behind the door. You walk over to it. A piece of paper, crumpled into a ball, almost hidden by the curling edge of dead carpet. You pick it up, slowly uncrumple it … in the lower left corner, the white paper is stained rust red, as if with old blood. The scrawled letters form words, the words form lines, the lines form a poem. Your eyes scanning across the page give the poem life.  – Jeff VanderMeer, Veniss Underground

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6,4 He waited for the bright start to come into view again and, with trembling hands, brought it into telescopic focus. He put in all the magnification he could, and around the bright speck of light was the telltale fog of turbulent gases caught, as it were, in mid-flight. It was a nova! From dim obscurity the star had raised itself to bright luminosity, perhaps only a month ago. It had graduated from a spectral class low enough to be ignored by the computer, to one that would be most certainly taken into account. But the nova that existed in space didn’t exist in the computer’s memory store because Brennmeyer had not put it there. It had not existed when Brennymeyer was collecting his data—at least not as a brightly luminous star. “Don’t count it,” shrieked Trent. “Ignore it!” But he was shouting at automatic machinery that would match the novacentered pattern again the Galactic pattern and find it nowhere and continue, nevertheless, to match and match and match for as long as its energy supply held out. The air supply would run out much sooner. Trent’s life would ebb away much sooner. Helplessly Trent slumped in his chair, watching the mocking pattern of star light and beginning the long and agonized wait for death. If only he had kept his knife. – Isaac Asimov, “Star Light”

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6,5 Her visitor, she saw as she opened the door, was seated in the armchair before the fire, dozing it would seem, with his bandaged head drooping on one side. The only light in the room was the red glow from the fire—which lit his eyes like adverse railway signals, but left his downcast face in the darkness—and the scanty vestiges of the day that came in though the open door. Everything was ruddy, shadowy, and indistinct to hear, and more so since she had just been lighting the bar lamp, and her eyes were dazzled. But for a second it seemed to hear that the man she looked at had an enormous mouth wide open—a vast and incredible mouth that swallowed the whole of the lower portion of his face. It was the sensation of a moment; the white-bound head, the monstrous goggle eyes, and this huge yawn below it. Then he stirred, started up in his chair, put up his hand. She opened the door wide, so that the room was lighter, and she saw him more clearly, with the muffler held to his face just as she had seen him hold the serviette before. The shadows, she fancied, had tricked her.  – H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man

6,6 With that they galloped away and were swallowed up by the darkness. At the same time, in a different part of Fantastica, something happened which went completely unnoticed… . On a remote night-black heath the darkness condensed into a great shadowy form. It became so dense that even in that moonless, starless night it came to look like a big black body. Its outlines were still unclear, but it stood on four legs and green fire glowed in the eyes of its huge shaggy head. It lifted up its great snout and stood for a long while, sniffing the air. Then suddenly it seemed to find the scent it was looking for, and a deep, triumphant growl issued form its throat. And off it ran through the starless night, in long, soundless leaps.  – Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

Appendix I

135

Appendix I

Recommended Rule Sets for Soloists Is there a best rule set for starting? I don’t think there is a best rule set for starting, but I do think some are easier to approach than others. If you are new to roleplaying, I’d recommend beginning with a rule set that has some solo scaffolding baked into it. Scarlet Heroes by Kevin Crawford is perhaps the easiest. With many random tables and rules for wilderness, urban, and dungeon encounters, as well as an array of enemies and treasures and basic oracle tables—all in one volume—that book is a great starting place. Those with somewhat more experience might try Ironsworn—and its supplement, Ironsworn Delve. It is designed for solo, co-op, or guided play. Containing a rich lore, narrative-based die mechanics, and an abundant selection of oracle tables, this is one of my favorite sets to play solo. I find it a bit more complex than something like Scarlet Heroes, as the player is expected to do a lot of narrative heavy lifting from the beginning and the mechanics are less familiar to RPG players than those of Scarlet Heroes. Sci-fi RPGers might look to Starforged by Ironsworn creator Shawn Tomkin. If you’re looking for a rule set that has no solo support at all, Basic Fantasy is a good choice. It is a fairly rules-light system designed to feel like playing the original RPG. With massive online resources (such as free character, NPC, dungeon room, and treasure generators), the content is easy to access and whittle down to what you need, while not being overwhelming. Symbaroum is a newer rule set that I’ve found excellent for solo play. With many supplemental resources, fairly easy mechanics, and lavishly illustrated books containing a plethora of lore, it is very easy to step into this world. Finally, Forbidden Lands—with its boxed set of GM guide, player’s guide, map and random adventure generator—appeals to board game players and is very easy to modify for soloists.15 Here are some others: 15 I’ve

done solo videos on all of these, and you can go to Geek Gamers to see them in action.

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Appendix I

Achtung! Cthulhu Its 2d20 system (discussed elsewhere in this book) is narrative based. Combined with a rich IP, these rules offer a lot for soloists. Ancient Odysseys A solo-design pen-and-paper dungeon crawl with RPG elements, you’ll need to run 2 or more characters, but the rules-light system is intuitive and allows for a lot of homebrew action. Basic Fantasy Discussed elsewhere in this manuscript, this rules-light game system is modeled on classic 80s RPGs, has tons of free content, and will feel familiar to fans of “old school” game mechanics. Not designed with the soloist in mind, it’s a great place to experiment using the strategies in this book. Hulks & Horrors Classic sci-fi (though you wouldn’t know it from the name), this rule set is small enough to be manageable, yet offers classic sci-fi options to build space ships, create planets, and explore galaxies. Great DM advice for sandbox sci-fi gaming. Maze Rats Very short rules; lots of random tables; 2d6-based mechanics. Perhaps the easiest rule set of all mentioned here yet deceptively deep because of the sheer number of random tables. A gift to soloists. Mörk Borg Dark fantasy/horror, “doom metal,” this lavishly illustrated short rule set is heavily stylized yet simple to learn. You’ll either love or hate the style, but with such strong lore behind it, it’s easily playable by the soloist. Rogueland Based on Knave (cousin to “Maze Rats”), this rules-light game has a d20 mechanic with inviting art, a short rule book, and enough random tables to quickly set up a one-shot. This indie game is charming and compatible with many OSR products.

Appendix J

137

Appendix J

Essential Random Tables

I’ve combed through dozens of RPG resources to bring you some of the most useful random tables I know. In keeping with my emphasis on allowing narrative in solo RPG to develop organically from gameplay, the random tables I consider “essential” tend to focus on macro issues—providing suggestions of themes and story structure, or encouraging the use of short word prompts to develop story details. The basic percentile table below is my most used restrictive resource, because it requires open-ended input (thoughtfully worded questions that will advance your story) and provides close-ended output (a yes/no answer). This mix of the general and the specific in an easy-to-understand table makes it perfect for the majority of situations I find myself in when playing. I also find that using a percentile output gives an intuitive result. It’s easy to “get” what a 25% chance means vs. a 75% chance—more so than understanding intuitively what 3 out of 12 or 9 out of 12 means, for example. (At least for me!) Basic Percentile Table Adjective

Yes

No

A Sure Thing

01–90

91–100

Very Likely

01–75

76–100

Somewhat Likely

01–60

61–100

50/50

01–50

51–100

Unlikely

01–40

41–100

Very Unlikely

01–25

26–100

Impossible

01–10

11–100

138

Appendix J

General Oracle Decide how likely the answer is to be “yes” (column one, “likelihood”) and roll d20. “No, but” should be considered generally negative except perhaps there is a glimmer of something positive; “Yes, but” should be considered generally positive but with some complication. Yes or No? Likelihood

No

No, But

Yes, But

Yes

Almost Impossible

1-17

18

19

20

Very Unlikely

1-14

15-16

17-18

19-20

Unlikely

1-10

11-14

15-17

18-20

Unknown

1-5

6-10

11-15

16-20

Likely

1-3

4-6

7-10

11-20

Very Likely

1-2

3-4

5-6

7-20

1

2

3

4-20

Almost Certain

Appendix J

139

The “But” is related to 1d6 Complication 1

A twist to the relationship between people in the situation

2

An adjustment to the physical environment.

3

An error in an assumption some NPC is making.

4

A fact the hero thinks they know is actually wrong.

5

The failure of a piece of gear, either for the hero or an NPC.

6

Sublimely bad or good timing by a sudden event.

Reprinted from Scarlet Heroes, with permission of the author.

One of the most significant solo-friendly RPGs of recent years is Ironsworn. Below are three great tables from that work.

Ask the Oracle When you seek to resolve questions, discover details in the world, determine how other characters respond, or trigger encounters or events, you may… a conclusion: Decide the answer based on the most interesting and obvious result. ¥ Ask a yes/no question: Decide the odds of a ‘yes’, and roll on the table below to check the answer.  ¥ Pick two: Envision two options. Rate one as ‘likely’, and roll on the table below to see if it is true. If not, it is the other. ¥ Spark an idea: Brainstorm or use a random prompt. ¥ Draw

Odds

The answer is ‘yes’ if you roll...

Almost Certain

11 or greater

Likely

26 or greater

50/50

51 or greater

Unlikely

76 or greater

Small Chance

91 or greater

On a match, an extreme result or twist has occurred. From Ironsworn (found at www.ironswornrpg.com), created by Shawn Tomkin, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).

140

Appendix J

Action Oracle Use this table to inspire a discovery, event, character goal, or situation. A roll on this table can be combined with a Theme (see below) to provide an action and a subject. Then, interpret the result based on the context of the question and your current situation. 1

Scheme

26 Withdraw

51 Persevere

76 Betray

2

Clash

27 Abandon

52 Serve

77 Secure

3

Weaken

28 Investigate

53 Begin

78 Arrive

4

Initiate

29 Hold

54 Move

79 Affect

5

Create

30 Focus

55 Coordinate

80 Change

6

Swear

31 Uncover

56 Resist

81 Defend

7

Avenge

32 Breach

57 Await

82 Debate

8

Guard

33 Aid

58 Impress

83 Support

9

Defeat

34 Uphold

59 Take

84 Follow

10 Control

35 Falter

60 Oppose

85 Construct

11 Break

36 Suppress

61 Capture

86 Locate

12 Risk

37 Hunt

62 Overwhelm

87 Endure

13 Surrender

38 Share

63 Challenge

88 Release

14 Inspect

39 Destroy

64 Acquire

89 Lose

15 Raid

40 Avoid

65 Protect

90 Reduce

16 Evade

41 Reject

66 Finish

91 Escalate

17 Assault

42 Demand

67 Strengthen

92 Distract

18 Deflect

43 Explore

68 Restore

93 Journey

19 Threaten

44 Bolster

69 Advance

94 Escort

20 Attack

45 Seize

70 Command

95 Learn

21 Leave

46 Mourn

71 Refuse

96 Communicate

22 Preserve

47 Reveal

72 Find

97 Depart

23 Manipulate

48 Gather

73 Deliver

98 Search

24 Remove

49 Defy

74 Hide

99 Charge

25 Eliminate

50

75 Fortify

00 Summon

Transform

From Ironsworn (found at www.ironswornrpg.com), created by Shawn Tomkin, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).

Appendix J

141

Theme Oracle As with the Action oracle, this is an interpretative table which you can use to answer questions or generate new situations. Combined, the Action and Theme tables provide creative prompts suitable for most situations and questions. 1

Risk

26 Barrier

51 Stranger

76 Rival

2

Ability

27 Creation

52 Passage

77 Problem

3

Price

28 Decay

53 Land

78 Idea

4

Ally

29 Trade

54 Creature

79 Revenge

5

Battle

30 Bond

55 Disease

80 Health

6

Safety

31 Hope

56 Advantage

81 Fellowship

7

Survival

32 Superstition

57 Blood

82 Enemy

8

Weapon

33 Peace

58 Language

83 Religion

9

Wound

34 Deception

59 Rumor

84 Spirit

10 Shelter

35 History

60 Weakness

85 Fame

11 Leader

36 World

61 Greed

86 Desolation

12 Fear

37 Vow

62 Family

87 Strength

13 Time

38 Protection

63 Resource

88 Knowledge

14 Duty

39 Nature

64 Structure

89 Truth

15 Secret

40 Opinion

65 Dream

90 Quest

16 Innocence

41 Burden

66 Community

91 Pride

17 Renown

42 Vengeance

67 War

92 Loss

18 Direction

43 Opportunity

68 Portent

93 Law

19 Death

44 Faction

69 Prize

94 Path

20 Honor

45 Danger

70 Destiny

95 Warning

21 Labor

46 Corruption

71 Momentum

96 Relationship

22 Solution

47 Freedom

72 Power

97 Wealth

23 Tool

48 Debt

73 Memory

98 Home

24 Balance

49 Hate

74 Ruin

99 Strategy

25 Love

50

75 Mysticism

00 Supply

Possession

From Ironsworn (found at www.ironswornrpg.com), created by Shawn Tomkin, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).

142

Appendix J

Plot Twists Sometimes you need something to shake up the action. You can decide at the outset of a session that any time you roll (say) doubles on a table you will also introduce a plot twist. Or you could decide that you’ll roll a d20 at the beginning of every scene and on a 1, have a twist. Or something else entirely. The table below is an efficient way to come up with a twist. It’s both totally open-ended (you’ll need to fill in the blanks of the actual twist as it relates to your story) as well as specific. First Die

Second Die

1

An NPC

1

appears.

2

Your PC

2

alters the location.

3

An organization

3

helps the hero.

4

A physical event

4

hinders the hero.

5

An emotional event

5

changes the goal.

6

An item

6

ends the scene.

Credit: OSR Solo Rules written by Peter Rudin-Burgess Creative Common License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Distance Whether in a dungeon or in the wilderness, sometimes you just need to know where something is. Here’s a short but very useful table to help with that. How Far Away is a Thing? 2d4 The Same Place

For Distant Things

2

Almost touching you

The same patch of grass (or mountainside...)

3

Within arm’s reach

The same village (or lair or dungeon...)

4

Just steps away

The same clan (or duchy or faction...)

5

Just around the corner

A mile or so away

6

In the next room

About 10-25 miles away

7

A few levels up (or down...) About 100-200 miles away

8

Somewhere in the dungeon Very far away

Adapted from Scarlet Heroes, with permission of the author.

Interventions MUNE (Madey Upy Namey Emulator) has some simple yet versatile rules to be used in conjunction with rolling on oracle tables, based around the concept of “interventions.” Interventions are defined as “those moments when a DM springs a trap on us, introduces a helpful NPC out of the blue, or adds another ogre to the already huge pile of enemies to defeat.” Playing on your own, you can introduce an intervention roll in whatever manner you wish. MUNE suggests keeping track of rolling 6s on oracle tables and introduce an intervention every three times that happens. If you are into dice rolling, my suggestion is to set aside a fistful of your favorite dice and toss them after using an oracle or whenever you feel stuck. If any land on their high numbers (6 for d6, 8 for d8, etc.), you then roll for an intervention. “Entity” is defined as a person or group of persons (not necessarily specific NPCs) who exist within the world of your story. “Plots” are defined as unresolved story hooks that might have come up and you dropped. Rolling plot will allow you to try to tie in some of these to your main story, in either a helpful or disruptive way.

144

Appendix J Intervention Type d6

Type

1

New entity

2

Entity positive

3

Entity negative

4

Advance plot

5

Regress plot

6

Wild

Table for When Everything is Not as Expected d10 Result 1

Increase simple element

2

Decrease simple element

3

Add simple element

4

Remove simple element

5

Increase major element

6

Decrease major element

7

Add major element

8

Remove major element

9

Wild positive

10

Wild negative

NOTES: Roll on this table when you’re stuck or you get a roll on some other table that doesn’t make sense. Look to it for guidance but guidance in the form of narrative inspiration, not a specific answer.

“Elements” can be anything in the physical environment or items carried or even NPCs encountered. You’ll need to be flexible and open-minded when interpreting the results. When you roll a “wild positive” or “wild negative,” allow your mind to drift to the very first positive or negative action/thing/event that comes to mind, and build on that.

Table from MUNE (The Madey Upy Namey Emulator), used by permission of author. See empaitirkosu.wordpress.com Notes are my adaptation of description, adapted by permission of author.

Appendix J

145

Ask the Stars

A poetic and evocative random table that you can roll on anytime you need some inspiration. Grab 2d12 and read first the answer to your question and then (with the second die) a suggestion of direction or theme. Thus a roll of 2 and 10 would yield a hard no to your question, with themes or ideas of direction/struggle and guilt/autonomy (whatever made sense in your story). For even more variety, you can roll 3d12 and read all columns separately. d12

Answer

Symbol

Position

The Fang (hostility/fear)

Rising (growth/possibility)

The Wings (freedom/nature)

Entombed (memory/death)

3

The Cage (protection/obligation)

Twinned (intimacy/dependency)

4

The Hand (creation/misdirection)

Waning (hunger/decay)

The Mask (persuasion/shame)

Rooted (stability/plenty)

6

The Eye (judgement/secrets)

Bowed (submission/mercy)

7

The Child (learning/greed)

Colliding (change/violence)

The Traveller (wandering/chance)

Burning (honesty/pride)

9

The Elder (authority/tradition)

Veiled (faith/deceit)

10

The Fleet (direction/struggle)

Exiled (guilt/autonomy)

The Council (opposition/cycles)

Crowned (ambition/ruin)

The Legion (unification/identity)

Reflected (reversal/vanity)

1 2

5

8

11 12

Hard No

No

Yes

Hard Yes

“Ask the Stars” by Chris McDowall, available at www.bastionland.com. Used with permission.

146

Appendix J

NPC Traits Table 1

Strong

Puts up an obstacle—physical, logistical, narrative. Might describe a formidable adversary and someone who will remain in the adventure to create roadblocks along the way. May also represent a kingpin who introduces minions or others from an organization that is attempting to block progress. In some way "larger" than the PC and narratively can be represented by introducing a longer-term negative effect or additional challenge.

2

Weak

Needs something; easily overcome... but why? Narratively introduce something that slowly takes something away from PCs. Perhaps causing PCs to lose time or direction or slowly lose health. Metaphorically or literally, something poisonous from within.

3

Fast

In combat or social interactions, add a positive modifier to a stat or give a reroll to represent speed and extra dexterity. Narratively, someone who puts pressure on the mission/quest/PCs. Narratively can be represented by introducing a longer-term timing effect or additional challenge that requires completion in a way that is time-sensitive.

4

Slow

In combat or social interactions, give yourself a positive modifier or extra benefit to represent the NPC being easily tricked and overcome. Narratively, something that represents an ongoing drag on the PCs. A burden. An unwelcome diversion (side quest? labyrinth?)

5 Fragile Similar to Weak, the NPC is (on the surface) more easily overcome, yet their fragility may also be invasive and have lingering impact. 6

Sturdy

Has something "extra"—not combat-related, but narratively. More information. More access. A surprising contribution, but not easily obtained. PCs will want to interact and get this thing from the NPC, but will need to do so at a cost.

7

Brutal

Goes out of their way to inflict harm, obstacles, and impediments to party including but not limited to physical suffering. Steals items; inflicts extra damage; springs traps.

8 Cautious In combat, more easily surprised or ambushed. Narratively may represent danger ahead; something underestimated that the PCs need to reevaluate. Additional information, possibly negative, that the PCs need to deal with. 9

Bold

Narcissistic. Can be appealed to give extra help, but only at a significant cost.

10 Fearful Possessor of information that PCs need, but not likely to help without getting something in exchange (protection, aid). May represent an NPC who joins the party in exchange for help. Adapted from Disciples of Bone and Shadow, 2nd edition by Alex T. (Blackoath Entertainment & Exalted Funeral, 2019), used by permission of the author.

Appendix J Rogue Magic Perform an [Action d12] on an [Object d12]. d12

Action

Object

1

Strengthen/mend

Stone/wood/dirt

2

Weaken/damage

Water

3

Combine

Wind

4

Transform

Fire/light

5

Learn/detect

Sound

6

Shield from

Mind/senses

7

Control with mind

Animal/plant

8

Conceal

Weapon/tool

9

Destroy/disappear

Armor

10

Summon/create

Food/medicine

11

Teleport

Self/ability/characteristic

12

Choose any action

Choose any object

Credit: Used by Permission of Caverns of Heresy

147

148

Appendix N

Appendix N

Annotated, Inspirational, and Educational Reading Writing Emotional Structure, Creating the Story Beneath the Plot: A Guide for Screenwriters by Peter Dunne (Quill Driver Books, 2007). This guide for screenwriters lays out the central importance of emotional development for successful storytelling. More than any writing book on this list, Dunne’s demonstrates how emotional highlights can stand in for entire histories, what it means to create narrative intimacy, and ways to achieve writing that feels magical. A must-have for the solo GM who hopes to have a literary sensibility in their gameplay. 500 Ways to Beat the Hollywood Script Reader: Writing the Screenplay the Reader Will Recommend by Jennifer Lerch (Simon & Schuster, 1999). Focused on writing scripts for film, this book conveys information in brief nuggets, and will help immensely with character creation, scene development, exciting conflict, and implying complexity with just a few strokes of the pen. Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time by Jordan E. Rosenfeld (Writer’s Digest Books, 2008). This book walks writers through the elements of a well-written scene, including plot development, subtext, dramatic tension, and involving the senses and settings. It analyzes different types of scenes— including action, flashback, and dramatic scenes—and presents a breakdown of related issues: multiple points of view, emotional threads, transitions, and minor characters. For the solo GM this book is essential, as sessions are comprised of various scenes. The lessons of how, when, and why to employ various story-making techniques will add richness to your play experience. If you were to purchase only one writing-related book, I would recommend this one. Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern (W. W. Norton, 1991). Rich examples from the craft of writing with a focus on fiction. Brief entries about essentials from myth and motif on style, suspense, voice, and theme offer nuggets of information perfectly sized to try in your sessions.

The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer by Sandra Scofield (Penguin, 2007). This writing guide details the function, structure, and pulse of scenes in fiction. Given that RPG sessions are made up of scenes, Scofield’s deconstruction of what goes into an effective scene has a great deal of relevance for the GM. Chapters on beats, focal points, and tension are particularly resonant with the craft of GMing. Stein on Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies by Sol Stein (St. Martins, 1995). This book makes the case for emotional expression as a guiding force of narrative, and its discussion of tension, point of view, background/foreground, and plotting will enlarge the GM’s perspective on what goes into sessions. Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer (Abrams Image, 2013). A guide to the imagination covering the ecosystem of story, strong beginnings and endings, narrative design, and worldbuilding, lushly illustrated by Jeremy Zerfoss. Intended for writers of fantastic fiction, this offers the solo GM crucial lessons about pacing, surprise, and narrative twists.

150

Appendix N

Places and Spaces The Garden Book (Phaidon, 2000). A lavishly illustrated, full-color, oversized compendium of the world’s most influential garden designers. This book is a collection of photos of gardens from around the world, established over centuries and across continents. Its accompanying commentary places the gardens in historic and stylistic context. Roll on this to establish a random location for your action, and you’ll have years of gaming surprises ahead! A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein (Oxford, 1977) and The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander (Oxford, 1979). These architectural theory books present a way of tying the physical world to the experiential and to the emotional. While not specifically about RPGs, the concepts they present (what makes someone feel at home, or alienated; how communities are formed) provide useful musings for the soloist when contemplating the overall themes and emotions of a session or campaign. I use them often. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (Beacon Press, 1969; tr. La Poétique de l’espace). This classic book of philosophy explores the significance of various kinds of space—from forests to drawers, chests, and wardrobes. Dictionary of Symbols by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, translated by John Buchanan-Brown (Penguin Reference, 1996). At more than 1,100 tightly printed pages, this reference book analyzes the rich symbolism of mundane and fantastic items, animals, artifacts, gems, and so much more. Covering both Eastern and Western mythologies, this comprehensive book is the one I reach for first when fleshing out backstory for artifacts, magical creatures, and many dungeon denizens.

Gaming Dungeon Masters Guide for Advanced D&D by Gary Gygax (TSR Games, 1979). The title page proclaims it a “special reference work,” and it certainly is. In my video on this book, I called it the one gaming book I’d take to a desert island. Compiled from all the then-existing material, it is a mix of random tables, GMing advice, and gaming mechanics. An absolute must-have for the serious RPGer. GM’s Miscellany: Wilderness Dressing (Raging Swan Press, 2015) and GM’s Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing (Raging Swan Press, 2014), Two books filled with system-neutral random tables. The wilderness book contains tables for sea encounters, caves, wood folk, borderlands, and basically any outside area. The dungeon book has hundreds of tables for rolling on anything from archways to legends to trap doors to riddles. Highly recommended to flesh out your interiors.

Appendix N

151

Hamlet’s Hit Points: What Three Classic Narratives Tell Us about Roleplaying Games by Robin D. Laws (Gameplaywright Press, 2010). Laws, a longtime roleplayer and role-play designer and theorist analyzes three narratives (Hamlet, Casablanca, and Dr. No) with an eye toward showing RPG players how narrative emotional rollercoasters work. The discerning GM will be able to import some of these tricks into gameplay, though be advised the work is literary analysis and is not specifically designed to teach GMing tricks. The Monsters Know What They’re Doing: Combat Tactics for Dungeon Masters by Keith Ammann (Saga Press, 2019). Based on his blog of the same name, this book analyzes monster behavior and abilities, giving the GM useful information in making monster combat and interactions more realistic. From goblins to mages to owlbears to yetis to ghouls and lesser demons, all the major monsters (and many of the minor ones) are here. Keyed to 5th Edition, it has enough general information to be useful for any rule set using standard fantasy monsters. Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Second Edition by Kevin Siembieda (Palladium Books, 2017). I recommend this not specifically to play the rule set (though there is nothing wrong in trying to do that), but because its lengthy entries on certain fantasy tropes—thief, ranger, priests, and wizards, as well as discussions of magic potions, scrolls, and curses—is great background reading for a soloist using any fantasy rule set. Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, edited by Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (MIT, 2007). Although only a fraction of this book is devoted to tabletop RPGs, the chapters on interactive fiction, video games, interactive storytelling, and how stories come to life in mixed media are superb background for thinking like a solo GM. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (MIT Press, 2003). A comprehensive collection seeking to define and expound on all aspects of games as interactive systems. Focused on game design techniques specifically, it nevertheless provides useful context for any GM wanting to understand the component parts to a variety of board and video games. While role-playing games are mentioned, they are in no way emphasized or paramount in this large book. Tome of Adventure Design by Matthew J. Finch (Frog God Games, 2001– 2011). More random tables on everything from monster design to villain plans to planar and alternate worlds. Keyed to Sword & Wizardry and Pathfinder but easily used elsewhere. Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, edited by Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (MIT Press, 2016). This massive edited collection

152

Appendix N

covers topics specific to the development of wargaming, but for the RPGer it offers valuable insight into the mechanics of the origins of tabletop RPGs. Essential for those utterly committed to understanding game mechanics; of limited interest to the average RPGer.

Solo Gaming CRGE: Conjectural Roleplaying Gamemaster Emulator by Zach Best (self-published, 2014). A universal emulator used to answer yes/no questions based on a “loom of fate” roll that incorporates a predetermined sense of where the narrative is going— to knowledge, to conflict, or to endings. Based on the outcome of this roll, the player is directed toward other tables that further refine rolls and outcomes. It also contains instructions for tracking scenes and narrative threads. System agnostic, this supplement works best for players who want ongoing tracking mechanisms for their gameplay. The Covetous Poet’s Adventure Creator and Solo GM Guidebook by Frank Lee (self-published, 2014). Rules agnostic, this supplement presents a structured “adventure creator” that provides the basics of creating a story and plot in advance of gameplay. It follows an Act/Scene structure that guides players toward creating lists of possible events, complications, and actions. Included charts direct players

Appendix N

153

toward suggestions for completing the adventure, and included d1000 tables provide a myriad of details for themed play in many different areas including horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. Of all the supplements presented here, this one is the most prescribed system—its rules need to be followed in order to work. DM Yourself by Tom Scutt (self-published, 2020). Keyed for 5th Edition, this book’s explicit goal is to be able to “play adventures as close to the way they were written as possible.” Intended for someone running a single D&D character through prepublished adventures, it has advice on character creation and balance, how to “read” published adventures as a solo GM, dungeon mapping, scaling enemy stats, dealing with hidden information. Of use primarily for players interested in sticking as closely as possible to prepublished 5th Edition adventures. Elminster’s Guide to Solo Adventuring by Oliver Gibson (DMs Guild, 2016). Keyed for 5th Edition, this 12-page supplement is designed to enable players to use any official or community D&D content while playing solo. It contains very useful decision trees for exploration and social interaction that walk soloists through ways to modify the Difficulty Class (DC) of encounters. Additionally, it contains a simple grid pairing character level of published adventures with a suggested character level for a single hero. Recommended for soloists wanting to use D&D content without grafting an entire system of modifications onto gameplay. Mythic Game Master Emulator by T. Pigeon (Word Mill Publishing, 2006). Arguably the most popular and oldest emulator, Mythic presents the concept of a “fate chart” that is used to guide interpretations of yes/no answers, and from those outcomes direct a dynamic narrative. Introducing the concept of a “chaos rank,” this emulator works to subtly direct narratives based on what has happened in the past and what is likely to happen in the future. A staple of solo play, this system is rules-agnostic. It does require keeping a running list of rolls and chaos level as well as a consistent return to the fate roll throughout play. Best for soloists who want an underlying way to move the action along narratively. Solo Adventurer’s Guide by Guilherme Bento (DMs Guild, 2019). Keyed for 5th Edition, the heart of this 22-page guide is a mechanic that owes a great deal to Mythic Game Master Emulator. The system involves keeping track of a “chaos level” that impacts the way outcomes are read on the “destiny check” table. It also includes formulas for adjusting the difficulty level of encounters (based on total monster XP) to account for a solo adventurer. Finally, it includes useful general advice for solo RPGing including the practical (keep lists) and the theoretical (“what should I do if my mind is blank?”). This supplement works best for those who are comfortable with tracking systems that need to be maintained as you play.

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The GameMaster’s Apprentice by Nathan Rockwood/Larcenous Designs. Card decks—covering themes such as fantasy, sci-fi, steampunk, horror, and more—which offer system-neutral randomized values including: events, story seeds, symbols, locations, virtues and vices, sensory details, and more. The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox by Paul Bimler (DMs Guild, 2016). Keyed for 5th Edition, this 167-page book contains numerous random tables to generate results for dungeon, wilderness, and urban encounters as well as NPCs, story elements, and downtime activities. There is a useful question/answer mechanic that I discuss in Appendix C of this book, as well as some general advice about solo RPGing. Loot tables, monster reaction tables, and an extended gameplay session round out the book. Many of the random tables are based on tables appearing in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, as the author states. This book would best be used by someone who wants to do a lot of rolling on tables throughout gameplay, and who wants tables similar to those appearing in the DM Guide extracted in a shorter document. Players interested in a formula for adjusting monster stats to account for a lone PC will find that here.

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A Place, Underground or, Dungeon Theory for All “Come on Sirs, ye shal enter into the Dungeon, for then shall ye be sure to be Lordes of the Castell.” Richard Grafton, Chronicle at Large (1568)

Dungeon: A place, underground and often among ruins, where characters adventure Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules (1980) When it comes to fantasy roleplay, no trope is more ubiquitous than the dungeon. Dungeons nurture the emotional experiences of player-adventurers; they advance the stories that make RPGs unique; and promote the feelings that allow playercharacters to transcend the confines of stone and steel. The dungeon has become the central place in tabletop gameplay where our experience of something familiar and concrete conveys abstract concepts far beyond its walls. As we’ll see, dungeons promote profound engagement by players. Central to the system of the game space, players’ thoughts and feelings about the dungeon become intertwined with patterns of memory about the game that then turn into expectations for the next gaming experience. We think of our bodies and characters in the confined space, and experience the temperature and sounds and smells of the dungeon. Even the very phrase “dungeon crawl” now has emotional valence and the nonconscious feelings it engenders influence our thoughts and perceptions about gameplay. Working on our memories of past games, dungeons call up a range of emotions from joy to surprise and even trust that our GM will keep us safe and engaged.

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Players’ intense experiences become so entwined with the dungeon setting that the emotional fabric of the game has become inextricable from the dungeon. Thus to the extent that roleplaying games function as social and cultural systems16 as well as storytelling experiences, we may claim for dungeons an essential role in generating many types of RPG elements—mechanical, psychological, emotional, and cultural.

Dungeonography Underneath the earth, action gets underway. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

We are for better or worse, different people in different places. Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

Dungeons & Dragons dungeons “were invented so D&D adventurers could explore them. The dungeon is uniquely suited to an imaginary excursion. It’s limited in scope, so the game master can plan it in detail. It’s alien to our everyday experience, so it can contain all sorts of surprises. It’s dark and claustrophobic, so it triggers all those instinctive human fears of dismal, confined, unknown spaces. And it’s underground, where we humans have planted so many corpses—who knows what they’re up to?”17 The fantasy dungeon is its own invention and “nothing truly like a D&D dungeon exists in mythology or fantasy literature before the publication of D&D.”18 To understand dungeons is to understand something fundamental about the gaming experience, yet oddly there has been relatively little written which theorizes broadly about dungeon significance. It’s almost as if accepting the fact of “dungeons” (and dragons) obviated the need for examining the role of the dungeon itself. After all, they are part of the genre-defining game’s name. Truly, how much speculation about the reasons for their centrality really needs to happen? 16 For

an extensive discussion of this, see Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy (University of Chicago Press, 1983. 17 Steve Winter, “Howling Tower: Respect the Lowly Dungeon,” March 12, 2012. Retrieved from https://koboldpress.com/howling-tower-respect-the-lowly-dungeon/ August 20, 2021. 18 Steve Winter, “Howling Tower: Respect the Lowly Dungeon,” March 12, 2012. Retrieved from https://koboldpress.com/howling-tower-respect-the-lowly-dungeon/ August 20, 2021.

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Those stone walls. Those pit traps. Those portcullises. All of them create a pattern of associations and impressions that foster players’ bodily and emotional investment in the game we’re playing. Dungeons are the shared social and psychological space that gives meaning to play and distinguish RPGing from all other forms of gaming. The hobby has taken care of GMs looking for material to help populate their dungeons, and the richest source of supplemental material for RPGs worldwide surely must be tables and lists for random dungeon dressing. Unexplained sounds and weird noises. Odors. Furnishings. Containers. Lighting. Wandering monsters. You name it, and you can find it—as long as it has to do with the what of a dungeon: what’s inside. What it looks like or what it smells like or what happens when you walk through it. Physical things. Otherworldly things. Things you can remove, like treasure. Things you can’t, like traps. Adventuresome things. Threatening things. Compelling things. These dungeon elements have remained steadfast through the almost-century of RP gaming culture. A 2007 random dungeon system, for example, provides lists of elements that would be very familiar to players of the original game—varieties of doors, locks, decorations, pools, sounds.19 Not too far off from their original presentation in 1974 with Gygax’s “The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures,” Volume 3 of the original Dungeons & Dragons. Tricks, traps, monsters, treasures, secret passages. All ingredients expected by roleplayers of today. Indeed the very constancy of these fantasy20 dungeon concepts is essential to their appeal. After all, when it comes to physical structures, “the fewer elements there are, the richer the relationships between them, and the more of the picture lies in the ‘structure’ of these relationships.”21 As “nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences,”22 players’ relation to the constructed dungeon environment is at the forefront of the gaming experience. But what of the why or the how of dungeons? Why are they so important? How do they function within an adventure—not literally, as the place for the encounters, 19 “Engineering

Dungeons: A Random Generation System,” by Robert Doyel (Troll Lord Games, 2007). 20 Clearly, fantasy. Real dungeons, built in castles starting around the 10th century, served much more limited purposes—chiefly for housing prisoners but also, perhaps, as storage. See Lise Hull, Understanding the Castle Ruins of England and Wales (McFarland, 2016) for an overview of castle life. 21 Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 81. 22 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960), p. 1.

but psychologically, as the space for the story? These questions and more will be addressed here. It’s commonly accepted that the word “dungeon” derives from the French word donjon, which actually referred not to an underground lair but rather to the central freestanding tower in a castle that we know in the English language as the “keep.” Often castle prisons were situated under keeps, which is perhaps how the term “dungeon” came to be associated with the underground portion itself. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century European novelists promulgated some of our most enduring dungeon concepts. Torture chambers. Lurking horrors. Torches that suddenly blow out. We can thank writers such as Byron, Dumas, Walpole, and so many others for imbuing these classic images in our collective imagination. In fantasy gaming, megadungeons have come to function as mythic places with their own themes and feel. Characteristics of these very large and complex places include: ¥ Mysterious

purposes, often shrouded in legend ¥ Adherence to their own ecological and physical rules ¥ Nonlinearity ¥ Being “a place where the normal laws of reality may not apply, and may be bent, warped, or broken”23 23 Megadungeon

analysis and concepts from “The Dungeon as a Mythic Underworld,” part of “Philotomy’s Dungeons & Dragon’s Musings” by Jason Cone (2007). www.grey-elf.com.

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Even casual students of role-playing games know of their origins in the wargaming rules of the late 60s and early 70s. Gary Gygax added the “Fantasy Supplement” to his and Jeff Perren’s Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures (1971), and a first step toward D&D was made. Yet even when rules for classic fantasy fare— goblins, wizards, trolls, lyncanthropes, dragons, and more were added—Chainmail remained solidly in the miniatures wargaming province. Magic and mages were not enough to change the fundamental experience of that game from a classic miniatures wargame to a role-playing game with “possibilities [...] far beyond any previous offerings anywhere!”24 In a way, this introduction of fantasy creatures and elements was the least significant change to wargaming rules. Just think about how many RPGs exist today that have nothing to do with fantasy. Arguably, the gaming experience could have expanded to roleplay without goblins, orcs, and wizards. Another shift that became almost but not quite enough was the introduction of man-to-man combat. The transition of battles fought with “faceless figures” to battles of “miniature personalities, each with his or her own biography,”25 represented a significant change in wargaming. Western Gunfight Wargame Rules (1970), where each miniature represented a single person, was the first such radical departure. Don Featherstone’s review of those rules brought a great deal of interest such that “players began to write articles about the theoretical implications of that shift to a situation where ‘the players take on the attitudes of the character they use.’”26 Wargamers in the Twin Cities were also adopting man-to-man combat during the late 60s and early 70s,27 and depending on what source you read, it was Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson or the two of them playing together who first imported this idea into a fantasy setting.28 For what it’s worth, Arneson himself credited another Minneapolis-Saint Paul area wargamer, Dave Wesley, with a key innovation. Arneson describes a play session of “little medieval games, a very dull period of war games.”

24 Gary

Gygax, Dungeons & Dragons: Men & Magic, (TSR, 1974), p. 1. Peterson, The Elusive Shift (MIT Press, 2020), p. 17. 26 Jon Peterson, The Elusive Shift (MIT Press, 2020), p. 16. 27 Marco Arnaudo, Storytelling in the Modern Board Game, (McFarland & Company, 2018), p. 46. 28 Gary Gygax wrote “Dave’s stress on the individual participant, the use of character role in Chainmail and the obviation of a board or table place the new creation beyond its progenitor and into the realm of innovation.” As quoted by Lawrence Schick, Heroic Worlds: A History of Role-playing Games (Prometheus Books, 1991), p. 132. Arneson, in the same publication, is quoted as saying that “the Chainmail connection was the use of the Combat Matrix and nothing more.” p. 131. 25 Jon

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[Wesley] had a dull set of rules and after our second game, we were bored. To spice it up, [Wesley], who had been doing the set-ups and refereeing, gave each of us a little personal goal in the battle.”29 And thus, the individual quest was born. But still… though “small-scale encounters” with “highly defined characters” became more of a presence in wargaming, the around-the-table play was far from the emotionally rich experience of RPGs as we understand it today.30 Clearly, more than just fantasy creatures and individual units were needed for the special sauce that was to become Dungeons & Dragons. It was indisputably Dave Arneson who contributed the paradigm shifting ingredient that sparked the creation of RPGs as they came to be played. Arneson’s Blackmoor Campaign first introduced the “revolutionary idea of taking the players’ character out of the sunny landscape of the battlefield and throw[ing] them into a deadly maze full of monsters and traps.”31 It was this concept, the dungeon concept, which ultimately transported gameplay beyond the scope of wargaming and into the realm of roleplaying. Arneson introduced the idea that dungeons under Castle Blackmoor were a place where heroes “went looking for adventure and treasure.”32 Then, and only then, when dungeons were firmly rooted to storytelling and play, did gaming change forever. ¥ The

addition of the dungeon—not the orcs nor the wizards nor the dragons—set gaming on a totally new path. ¥ The addition of the dungeon—not the one-on-one player-character experience—was groundbreaking. ¥ Placing characters underground—something Gygax himself never suggested33—was the missing piece that led to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. For his part, Gary Gygax summed up the shift as 29 Dave

Arneson, personal interview, as transcribed in Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy (University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 13. 30 Marco Arnaudo, Storytelling in the Modern Board Game, (McFarland & Company, 2018), p. 47. 31 Marco Arnaudo, Storytelling in the Modern Board Game, (McFarland & Company, 2018), p. 50. 32 Dave Arneson, ‘Blackmoor Gazette and Rumormonger 2” (1972) as quoted by Jon Peterson, Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012), p. 68. 33 Jon Peterson, Playing at the World (Unreason Press, 2012), p. 68.

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follows: “The idea of measured progression (experience points) and the addition of games taking place in a dungeon maze struck me as being very desirable.”34 Look at any early rule set and you’ll see a variation on this dictum: “Each game session is called an adventure. [...] An adventure begins when the party enters a dungeon, and ends when the party has left the dungeon and divided up treasure.”35 The rules leave no ambiguity about the importance of the dungeon, saying that “the success of an adventure depends on the DM and his or her creation, the dungeon.”36 Now-familiar gaming parameters were established early on: the DM reveal of the dungeon; encounters of monsters, NPCs wandering around in the dungeon; dungeon levels of increasing peril. All of these channel gamers’ experiences and emotions through the same formula, and the same place—the dungeon.

Dungeon-centrism The sense of space is the basis of all social experience. Dave Morris, The Sense of Space

The specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free. Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

But exactly why and how did going underground elevate the game experience? It’s almost counterintuitive: taking characters outside the theoretically limitless expanse of wilderness and battlefields and placing them in confined spaces expanded, rather than restricted, the possibilities for RPGs.

34 Gary

Gygax on Dungeons & Dragons (“Designer’s Forum”), The Dragon #7 (June 1977), p. 7. Arneson has been cited as the source for the concept of experience points. See Robert Kuntz, Dave Arneson's True Genius (Three Line Studio, 2017). 35 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rulebook (TSR, 1981), p. B3. 36 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rulebook (TSR, 1981), p. B60.

And why is it, some 50 years after the fact, that dungeons still proliferate not only in RPGs of all genres and scopes, but are themselves a staple of RPG’s close cousin, the board game?37 In one of few written pieces theorizing about dungeons, the blog “Deeper in the Game” identifies some central dungeon facets: scarcity—the idea that not all is revealed to players and exploration is paramount to the gaming experience (to find treasure, someone in need of rescue, even monsters). ¥ Constraining resources—the idea that being down in a dungeon restricts access to things you don’t already have and requires player-characters to improvise. ¥ Strategic play—the idea that corridors and room constraints limit options for movement and this can impact combat encounters. ¥ Information

37 A

glance at the “confined corridor combat” GeekList on Boardgamegeek shows how these concepts have proliferated in the board game world and encompass every game theme imaginable from steampunk to science fiction to post-apocalyptic and more.

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The impact of these three elements “gives players fun in three different categories— Exploration, Logistics, and Tactics”: this gameplay has become the hallmark of dungeon crawls.38 Gary Gygax attributed the success of D&D to the fact that “it strikes a chord. It enables people to experience what Joseph Campbell called the heroic quest.”39 He added “There is something in the human subconscious that thrives on such fiction. The FRPG is merely an extension of that deep-seated part of our minds that hears and answers the call to adventure by picking up a game.”40 We may easily find many dungeon metaphors in Joseph Campbell’s monomythic structure, the crossing of a threshold perhaps being the most obvious.41 Interestingly, Campbell also mentions dragons as a motif, seeing in them one of the ultimate ends to quests: “The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination. Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed—again, again, and again.” Campbell also writes of dragons as symbolic of passages from one state of being to another and as the ultimate representation of current evils to be vanquished, saying that “For the mythological hero is the

38 Concepts

and quote from “Deeper in the Game” blog. “Dungeons Part One: Theory and Design” accessed August 12, 2021 at https://bankuei.wordpress.com/2014/07/16/ dungeons-theory-and-design/ For a different take on the significance of the dungeon crawl—attributing its importance to the classic dungeon challenges (time, traps, light/darkness, wandering monsters), see “A Primer on Dungeon Crawling,” by “Josh”, Nov 1, 2020 on “The Elf Blog”. Accessed August 20, 2021 at https://www.osrelfgame.com/post/a-primer-on-dungeoncrawling. Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition has defined the Three Pillars of Adventure slightly differently—Exploration, Social Interaction, Combat. Two of these are detailed in the dungeon; social combat is left to the DM. See “Stocked Examples of B1 Dungeon,” by Chris Doyle in Into The Borderlands: A Fifth Edition Conversion & Classic Homage (Goodman Games, 2018), p. 92 39 Gygax 2004 interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, as cited by NPR Morning edition, March 5, 2008, “’Dungeons & Dragons’ Creator Gygax Dies.” Retrieved August 20, 2021, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87912373. 40 “The Dungeon Master: An Interview with Gary Gygax,” by Harvey Smith, Gamasutra, November 1, 2002. 41 Many of Campbell’s motifs—the call to adventure, the road of trials, the rescue from without—can be mapped onto traditional RPG adventuring elements. See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces orig. published 1949, Bollingen Foundation. For a lengthy discussion of Campbell and D&D, see Robert Kelly Leopold, “The Player Character’s Journey,” (thesis, Department of Communication and Performance, East Tennessee State University, December 2019).

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champion not of things become but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo.” 42 Surely the Greek concept of katabasis—a descent into the underworld and a return with heightened knowledge—comes to mind when contemplating the dungeon crawl structure and its enduring appeal.43 The dungeon enables all three aesthetic categories of interactive story experiences proposed by Janet Murray: feeling of being present in another place and engaged in the action therein” ¥ Agency—“the feeling of empowerment that comes from being able to take actions in the world whose effects relate to the player’s intention” ¥ Transformation—“the game experience takes the player on a journey”44 ¥ Immersion—“the

Put another way, “Instead of story elements (such as internal and external conflicts) the location itself builds tension” or, as I’d put it, the location itself is the story.45 The players in the dungeon are creating the stories that make RPGs different than any other game. Gygax himself was emphatic on this point, saying that “I do not, and I stress NOT, believe that the RPG is ‘storytelling’ in the way that is usually presented. If there is a story to be told, it comes from the interaction of all participants.”46 In my mind, this includes the dungeon itself.

42 Joseph

Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New World Library, revised edition. 2008. Original publication 1949), p. 90, p. 78, p. 289. 43 Much could be written about the heroic journey underground in FRPGs as it relates to classic myths such as that of Osiris or Orpheus or Persephone but that’s beyond my scope here. 44 As summarized by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, “Interaction and Narrative,” in The Game Design Reader, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, eds. (MIT, 2006), pp. 649-650. See also Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (Free Press, 1997). 45 “Exploration Play,” at All Dead Generations, December 22, 2018. Retrieved at https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/2018/12/exploration-play.html August 20, 2021. While the perspective of this writer differs from mine, the entire essay on “The Classic Dungeon Crawl” is worth reading. 46 “The Dungeon Master: An Interview with Gary Gygax,” by Harvey Smith, Gamasutra, November 1, 2002.

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Dark Thoughts Darkness becalms us in a constant, receptive awareness. Darkness offers an intelligent stillness that fills and tills our psyche in a manner both difficult and beautiful. Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted

Our soul is an abode. Alain De Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

Under. Ground. Underground. Darkness. Mystery. The physicality of dungeon space supports the most basic of narrative tropes: the slow reveal. “By concealing most of the information about the adventure and by doling it out only in small installments, Arneson imbued his new style of gaming with the sense of progressive revelation that we know to be a key trait of fiction,” Arnaudo writes.47 “If a shape is nothing but a sum of limited views,”48 the dungeon’s incremental disclosure of itself is the perfect setting for narrative development. The psychic and physical closeness of the corridors and rooms imbue each encounter with an intensity of feeling. Pioneering space theorist Bill Hiller wrote, “We should not expect the built environment merely to be the material backdrop to individual and social behavior, as it is often taken to be. It is social behavior, just as the use of language is a social behavior.”49 As one early player said, “If a player doesn’t care about his character then the game is meaningless.”50 Dungeons make players care. The physical intimacy of the dungeon allows players to feel. Indeed it encourages and demands player feeling. And to the extent that the “the emotional draw behind D&D was in immersion, identification, and exploration,”51 the dungeon became the place where feelings happened—the psychic and psychological space where the player and his character melded.

47 Marco

Arnaudo, Storytelling in the Modern Board Game, (McFarland & Company, 2018), p. 50. 48 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 34. 49 Bill Hiller, Space is the Medium (Space Syntax, 1996), p. 68. 50 Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy (University of Chicago Press, 1983), p 185. 51 Marco Arnaudo, Storytelling in the Modern Board Game, (McFarland & Company, 2018), p. 73.

Dungeons nurture emotional connection to the game, doing what successful built environments do, namely facilitating and conveying meaning.52 And this meaning, this feeling—much more so than realism—was key to RPG success. As one 1970s player put it, “What’s important isn’t actually that the details are realistic, but rather that [...] the emotions and feelings and the things you run across are realistic.”53 Given that “our very sense of who we are and have been is inextricable from our sense of where we have been and are,”54 it makes sense that players form such strong identification with dungeons. Dungeons provide an emotional valence, intimacy, and excitement and thus encourage players’ personal investment. If “every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there,”55 we can see how after decades of gameplay in dungeons, their associative power triggers certain player expectations. Having such intense experience whilst playing in dungeons, players then bring these expectations to the table the next time. And they are rewarded, and thus seek more dungeons. 52 For

more discussion on this, see Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (Vintage, 2006). 53 Quote from a 1970s D&D gamer, as printed in Gary Allan Fine, Shared Fantasy (University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 82. 54 Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World (Harper, 2017), p. 83. 55 Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 55.

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A discussion of the myriad ways in which our brains process our built environment is beyond the scope of this essay but suffice it to say, we know “experience is grounded in our sensory perceptions and in our internal thoughts [...] and when something happens in the world or in our minds, that ‘something’ is always situated, in our bodies, in a given time, and in place.”56 In other words, “our cognition is the product of a three-way collaboration of mind, body, and environment. Inherent in the very fact of human embodiment—life lived in a body—rests the notion that the physical environments that a body inhabits greatly influence human cognitions.”57 RPGing represents the essence of a “place-bound experience”58 and the more experiences we have in these dungeon places, the more our gaming memories become intertwined with the feelings we’ve gotten from these constricted, dark, underground places. Each time we recall gaming sessions our understanding of ourselves as players and player-characters is bound up with our dungeon experience. For “even when we pay no conscious attention to the built environment or focus only on selected aspects of it,” it will “influence [our] thoughts, feelings, and responses by activating memories, emotions, and other kinds of cognitive associations.”59 No wonder the dungeon (as metaphor? as abstraction? as symbol? as archetype? as sacred site?) is ubiquitous in tabletop gaming. Dungeons have become something almost comforting to gamers, a familiar yet inspiring site for countless adventures. Dungeons give our characters life and purpose and without them RPGs would never have existed, nor persisted, for almost half a century. Dungeons nurture our stories. Dungeons are our stories. And we might even say that that place, underground, defines us—as players, as player-characters, as storytellers—but most importantly as human beings with feelings. We are the dungeon; the dungeon is us.

56 Sarah

Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World (Harper, 2017), p. 45. Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World (Harper, 2017), p. 47. 58 Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World (Harper, 2017), p. 85. 59 Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World (Harper, 2017), p. 59. 57 Sarah

About Geek Gamers

“There are layers within layers of significance to a woman’s decision to write under a pseudonym,” wrote Carolyn G. Heilbrun in 1988, well before the advent of YouTube, the medium that turned “Geek Gamers” into one of the leading voices in solo RPGing. Geek Gamers started by accident—a kid-friendly way to spend time with my oldest who was then just reaching the age when things outside our house were far more appealing than anything within. Our first video was filmed on an iPad mini, and sat there, unwatched, for about a year. She had to persuade me to post it to YouTube, and when we did I optimistically named the channel in the plural, as I hoped it would become a mother-daughter collaboration. To date, my eldest has only made one vocal appearance on the channel in that very first video, but the name stuck. (Search +“geek gamers” +“legions of darkness” to find that vid.)

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I mined my existing game collection for the early vids—often on games that had no internet video presence at all. The catalogues of MetaGaming, Avalon Hill, SPI, and the like were well represented. Eventually I got around to filming one of my favorite games, “James Bond Assault!” (Victory Games, 1986). I did what the game suggested—incorporating the James Bond 007 RPG into my gaming session. This became my first “solo RPG” video, posted April 1, 2017, and the channel really took off from there. In the video “Easy Ways to Be Your Own GM,” I outlined the 4 essential resources for solo RPGing and the idea for this book was born. To date, that’s my most popular video and I’ve seen the ideas in it taken up by bloggers and vloggers across social media to give a framework to this curious thing we do. In the “real word,” I am a non-fiction book editor with a PhD in Victorian Literature who has taught literary theory to adult learners returning to college. I’ve written book chapters and articles on Virginia Woolf and Audre Lorde, and have served as a judge for the 2021 Zenobia Awards. They promote historical board game designs by underrepresented groups in the hobby including women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ designers. After spending my career as a book editor, it has been quite meaningful to be on the other side of the editor-author equation. Chris Birch, founder of Modiphius Entertainment, supported my vision for this book from the outset. Richard Gale's design sense and keen eye brought physical life to a project I had envisioned for so many years only in my mind. I am deeply grateful to them both. To answer a question I’m asked often on the channel: I am a “regular” GM only for my kids and even then quite infrequently. Nevertheless, it is to my family that I owe my deepest debt of gratitude, as they are the foundation for all I am able to accomplish. I thank each of them deeply. For a wealth of gameplay demos and discussion on solo RPGing well beyond the scope possible in this book, please go to www.youtube.com/c/GeekGamers01.

[ P.S.M\

Index

500 Ways to Beat the Hollywood Script Reader 148

A Achtung! Cthulhu 67, 68, 136 adventure 161, 163 agency 164 Ancient Odysseys 136 Annotated, Inspirational, and Educational Reading 148 rules, anomalous 64, 67 Ammann, Keith 151 anomalies 64, 67 Alexander, Christopher 21, 45, 150, 161 Allen, Emmy 20 Architecture of Happiness, The 156, 165 Arnaudo, Marco 159, 160, 165 Arneson, Dave 159, 160, 165 Asimov, Isaac 130, 133 “Ash-tree, The” 114 Ask the Stars 145

B backstory 26, 62, 74 Bachelard, Gaston 150 Banville, John 25 Barker, M. A. R. 16 Basic Fantasy 135, 136 Bento, Guilherme 153 Best, Zach 152 bestiary 67 Between the Acts 117 Bimler, Paul 104, 154

Blackmoor 2, 160 board game 33, 35 Borges, Jorge Luis 122, 125 Bowers, Dorothy 13

C Calvino, Italo 93, 121 Campbell, Joseph 163, 164 cards, random 35 “Casting the Runes” 115 Chainmail 86, 159 Character Attitudes 54, 105 character, background 53 their history 49, 74 character creation 19, 45, 51, 62, 64 in a place 102 without stats 53 Chandler, Raymond 10 Chesterton, G. K. 63 Chevalier, Jean 150 Chronicle at Large 155 Collins, Wilkie 31, 117, 120, 127 Cone, Jason 158 confrontation 17 Conrad, Joseph 124 “Cool Air” 127 CRGE: Conjectural Roleplaying Gamemaster Emulator 152 Covetous Poet’s Adventure Creator and Solo GM Guidebook, The 152 Crawford, Kevin 57, 104, 135

172 D dark thoughts 165 De Botton, Alain 156, 165 dead end problem 36 descriptive words 88, 109 detail, level of 38 dice rolling 18, 83, 85 Dickens, Charles 130 Dictionary of Symbols 150 Disciples of Bone and Shadow 146 distance, random 142 DM Yourself 153 Doyel, Robert 157 Doyle, Arthur Conan 10 dragons 163 Dune 49 dungeon crawl 95, 155, 163 dungeons 95, 155-167 dungeon-centrism 161 dungeonography 156 Dungeons & Dragons 71, 155, 156, 159, 160, 161 Dungeon Master’s Guide 9, 72, 150 Monster Manual 72 Player’s Handbook 72 Xanthar’s Guide to Everything 72, 74 Dunne, Peter 148

E Eliot, George 26 Elminster’s Guide to Solo Adventuring 153 Elusive Shift, The 159 emotion 21, 23 emotional draw 165, 166 Emotional Structure, Creating the Story Beneath the Plot 148 encounter difficulty, mitigating 112 encumbrance rules 15 Ende, Michael 134 environment 45, 46, 48, 51, 57, 100, 107, 165 167 academic 46 cosmic/planetoid 47

Index natural 47, 52 nautical 47 underground 47 urban 46 “Exploration Play”

F Featherstone, Don 159 Fregi, Ricardo 104 Friendly Young Ladies, The 123 Finch, Matthew J. 151 Fine, Gary Alan 51, 156, 165 Firefly 40 Forbidden Lands 135 Forster, E. M. 27 Frankenstein 131

G Gaboriau, Emile 116 Game Designers’ Workshop 14 GameMaster’s Apprentice, The 40, 154 game mechanics 16, 21 mechanical adjustments of stats 111 Garden Book, The 150 Gaston Bachelard 156 Geek Gamers 1, 29, 45, 57, 113, 169 getting stuck 85 Gheerbrant, Alain 150 Gibson, Oliver 153 Gilhelm, Brandish 57 GM’s Miscellany: Dungeon Dressing 150 GM’s Miscellany: Wilderness Dressing 150 Grafton, Richard 155 Gygax, Gary 3, 9, 71, 150, 159, 160, 163

H Hamlet on the Holodeck 164 Hamlet’s Hit Points 151 Harrigan, Pat 151 “Haunted House, A” 126 Haunted Hotel, The 117 Haupt, Lyanda Lynn 165 Hero with a Thousand Faces, The 163, 164

Index heroic quest 163 Heroic Worlds: A History of Role-playing Games 159 Hiller, Bill 165 history 25, 26 Homo Ludens 14 hook 70 Howards End 27 How Fiction Works 15 Huizinga, Johan 14 Hulks & Horrors 136

I Ice 118 idea seed 65, 67 idea, story 76, 77 If on a winter’s night a traveler 93 immersion 164, 165 “Immortal, The” 122 improvisation 37 Index Card RPG 57, 61, 62 inspiration 145 “Interaction and Narrative”

intervention 143, 144 Invisible Cities 121 Invisible Man, The 134 Ironsworn 104, 135, 139, 140, 141 Ishikawa, Sara 150 items 26 Ivanhoe 132

J James Bond 007 RPG 170 James, M. R. 114, 115, 116

K katabasis 164 Kavan, Anna 118 Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 151 Knave 136

173

L Labyrinths 125 Laws, Robin D. 151 Lectures in America 19 Lee, Frank 152 LeFanu, J. Sheridan 115, 119, 120 Lerch, Jennifer 148 Lewis, C. S. 128 Literary Random Table 113-134 locales, weird 79 location as story 164 lore 68 Lovecraft, H. P 127

M Mage Knight 35 Make a Scene 148 Making Shapely Fiction 148 map 33 Maze Rats 136 McDowall, Chris 145 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 165 Middlemarch 26 mindsets of solo GMs 13, 99 Modiphius Entertainment 67, 170 monomyth 163 Monsters Know What They’re Doing, The 151 Moonstone, The 120 Monsieur Lecoq 116 mood 32, 45, 48, 100 Mörk Borg 136 Morris, Dave 161 MUNE (Madey Upy Namey Emulator) 104, 143 Murray, Janet 164 Mutant Crawl Classics 66 Mutant Year Zero 41 Mysteries of Udolpho, The 30, 118, 123 Mystery of Edwin Drood, The 130 Mythic Game Master Emulator 153

174

Index

N narrative aspects to a personality 53 narrative development 165 narrative direction 83 narrative questions 18 narrative trajectory 66, 67, 74, 84, 93, 94, 95 Neverending Story, The 134 NPC creation, quick 60 NPC traits 146

O one-two method 102 oracle table 36, 85, 103, 139 oracle, action 140 oracle, general 138 oracle, theme 141

P Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game 151 Pattern Language, A 150, 161 percentile table 37, 137 Perelandra 128 Perren, Jeff 159 Peterson, Jon 159, 160 Phenomenology of Perception 165 Pigeon, Tom 153 place 52 adjectives of connection and disconnection to place 48, 106 play 14 Playing at the World 160 plot twists 142 Poetics of Space, The 150, 156 Postscript to Poison 13 Prelude to Foundation 130

R Radcliffe, Ann 30, 118, 123 Renault, Mary 123 “Residence at Whitminster, The” 116 resolution 17 resources 30, 100

generative 30, 39, 70, 100 suggestive 30, 33, 39, 100 restrictive 30, 36, 40, 100 Rockwood, Nathan 154 Rogueland 136 rogue magic table 147 Role-Playing Mastery 71 Rosenfeld, Jordan E. 148 “Room in the Dragon Volant, The” 120 Rooted 165 rubric 14, 30, 37, 41, 100 rule set 45, 57 large rule sets 63 recommended rule sets 135 starting with a rule set 57, 101 starting with no rule set 100, 107 rules as suggestions of customs of play 37 rules, opting to use or not use 66 Rules of Play 151 Rymer, James Malcolm 115

S Salen, Katie 151 Scarlet Heroes 57, 59, 60, 104, 135 Scene Book, The 149 Schick, Lawrence 159 “School Story, A” 114 Scofield, Sandra 149 Scott, Sir Walter 132 Scutt, Tom 153 Sea, The 25 Second Person 151 Secret Sharer, The 124 Sense of Space, The 161 session checklist 100 sessions, half-begun 29 sessions, failing 11 setting 20, 51, 102 setting for the character 51 Shared Fantasy 51, 165 Shelley, Mary 131 Sherlock Holmes 10 Shriek: An Afterword 121 Siembieda, Kevin 151

Index Silverstein, Murray 150 slow reveal 165 Solo Adventurer’s Guide 153 Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox, The 104, 154 Solo RPG Wallet 103 Space is the Medium 165 Starfinder 63, 64 Starforged 135 “Star Light” 133 Stars without Number 40 starting with a rubric 41 with generative resources 39 with restrictive resources 40 with suggestive resources 39 without a rule set 45 without character creation 51, 52 stats 22, 23 Stein on Writing 149 Stein, Gertrude 19 Stein, Sol 149 Stern, Jerome 148 story 22, 23 story idea 76, 77 story development 10 story progression 93 storytelling 2, 9-11, 148, 151, 156, 160, 164 Storytelling in the Modern Board Game 159, 160, 165 structure 16 Symbaroum 135

T T., Alex 146 table, literary 113 table, When Everything is Not as Expected 144 tables, essential random 137 tables, naming 87-88 tables, nesting 89 table, percentile 137 tables, random 86, 87 Terraforming Mars 35

175

terrain 88, 89, 110 themes 27, 32, 33, 141 Timeless Way of Building, The 21, 45, 150 Time Machine, The 125 The Woman in White 31, 127 Tome of Adventure Design 39, 151 Tomkin, Shawn 104, 135 Tomorrow Is Too Far 129 transformation 164 Traveller RPG 3, 14, 40 trinkets 26, 52, 76, 79

V VanderMeer, Jeff 121, 132, 149 Varney the Vampyre 115 Veniss Underground 132 “Vision of Tom Chuff, The” 115

W Wardrip-Fruin, Noah 151 “Warning to the Curious, A” 114 Wells, H. G. 125, 134 Wesley, Dave 159, 160 Western Gunfight Wargame Rules 159 White, James 129 Winter, Steve 156 Wonderbook 149 Wood, James 15 Woolf, Virginia 18, 83, 117, 126 world-building 25, 57, 67 Wylder’s Hand 119

Y yes/no 36, 83, 138 yes/no dead end 83 yes, but 138, 139 likelihood 37

Z Zanthrum d20 RPG Solo Engine 104 Zenobia Awards 170 Zimmerman, Eric 151 Zones of Control 151

The Dune: Adventures in the Imperium roleplaying game takes you into a far future, beyond anything you have imagined, where fear is the mind killer, so be sure to keep your wits about you. Expand your game, and the power of your House with this collection of Dune: Adventures in the Imperium supplements and accessories.

S ta n da r d E d i t i o n Core Rulebook

C o l l ec t o r ’ s E d i t i o n Core Rulebooks

A beautiful 336 page hardback full colour interior core rulebook, offering everything you need to create your own character and noble House to adventure in the Imperium. Learn to harness the spice and battle your way to power.

Show your allegiance to the most powerful Houses of the Imperium or collect the set of these three stunning special edition covers for the Core Rulebook.

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House Atreides MUH052163 House Harkonnen MUH052164 House Corrino MUH052165

P l ay e r ’ s J o u r n a l MUH052167

An elegantly designed 160 page journal to record your character details, House and adventures everywhere from Caladan to Arrakis. Contains lined, square and blank paper beautifully rendered in matching graphics with character and House sheets.

Gamemaster’s Toolkit MUH052168

A four panel decorated screen with 32 page booklet offering all manner of gamemaster support. The perfect way to build your story and perhaps even your legacy on the dunes of Arrakis.

A r r a k i s D i ce S e t MUH052171

A beautiful set of custom dice, spot wormsign on these sand coloured dice and bring the power of the Makers to your game.

A r r a k i s M e l a n ge D i ce S e t MUH052177

A pre-order only set of custom dice, blue as the Eyes of Ibad, see the far future and navigate the murky world of Dune with the clarity of the spice Melange.

Find out more at https://www.modiphius.net/pages/discover-dune-roleplaying-game

Solo GMs rejoice!

At last, a comprehensive tableside companion just for you.

Create immersive solo RPG experiences with this dedicated guide from the acclaimed host of the Geek Gamers YouTube channel. This long-awaited solo GM guide is a crash course in solo storytelling: a toolkit to help your solo sessions shine as brightly as hers do. Inside this book, you’ll discover: • System-neutral tricks for wondering “what happens next?” • How to avoid the dreaded ‘yes/no’ dead end (and making oracles work for you) • The biggest mistake most new GMs make... and what to do instead • The 10 mindsets of a successful solo GM • 70+ pages of essential random tables and lists • Step-by-step examples of soloing many popular rule sets including Achtung! Cthulhu, Index Card RPG, and the world’s most popular tabletop roleplaying game—along with the principles that make these sessions work “Geek Gamers delivers a treasure trove of tips and tools to help you take the role of amazing characters and explore incredible worlds—no gamemaster required! Whether you’re an experienced solo RPGer or new to this hobby, you’ll find your path to great stories with Geek Gamers as your guide.”  – Shawn Tomkin, creator of Ironsworn “An exhilarating pathway to becoming a seasoned RPG soloist.” 

– Martin Knight, creator of D100 Dungeon

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