r/Solo_Roleplaying

Hi all. I have almost all of the player books for Symbaroum. I'll be using the solo guide for it that I got off the Drive-Thru RPG along with some Mythic and Ironsworn tables that were suggested previously. I'm in search of some high quality maps if anyone has any. I intend to make two characters. I think I'm going to create a treasure hunter and a witch. If you guys have any other suggestions I would be happy to receive them as I have not soloed a large RPG like this before. Thank you for your time and I hope you all have a great day.

Hi there, folks.

I have been thinking lately of making a more exploratory kind of campaign, and I would like to know if you can recommend any comprehensive exploration oracle for this beginner.

Thanks in advance.

Disclaimer, I’m a 95% noob to ttrpgs.

So I did a quick 5 min research and here’s what I found. Cyberpunk red has a solo book I could use but one reviewer said it was basically ass because it didn’t provide enough help in certain aspects like balancing difficulty and stuff like that.

Then I discovered the mythic game master emulator second edition which allegedly can help any player play any rpg alone without the need to rewrite rules or anything.

So what I’m thinking is that if this mythic gm emulator is legit, I could play the normal cyberpunk red, not the solo mode, using the mythic emulator.

What I’m asking here is if you guys think this would be a good idea based on cyberpunk red works, and if you have any tips or tricks to achieve my goal of playing cyberpunk red alone.

Any help would be appreciated:)

I’m looking for something that’s one page and printable, preferably in a zine format. I really like 6x6 tales, and want something else that I can easily keep in my pocket with a few d6 or something

I’m not really interested in journaling games, but something similar to an OSR style, so dungeon crawling, hexcrawl, combat and exploration.

I’m mostly looking for something fantasy but am open to sci-fi.

Is Only war good for solo play with Mythic GME? Any recommendations for changing rules etc? And is there a tool for running combat solo? I've done it before but I wanna know if theres some other ways to handle it! Thanks

Lately I've been enjoying a different type of solo rpg that is probably not categorized by everyone as a roleplaying game. Maybe its more fair to say its a journaling game or journaling exercise. Whatever the case, its been a lot of fun and my goal with this post is to hopefully find some like-minded people and hear about your experiences or possibly set you on this path with me.

I recently read a post on this sub called "It turned out in the end I just needed to write a damn book" and it got me thinking about how I play and what I really want out of my games. My answer, as far as I can tell, is that I want to be creative and spend my time making something instead of consuming content.

Ive been in this hobby for around half a decade and Ive spent a lot of time reading rulebooks and looking for the perfect system. I spent a lot of time trying to make the perfect system too. Now I think the reason I cant find the right system for me is that I dont want a traditional rule system at all.

For me, "play" starts with me reading something that gets me inspired. I like the tone and worlds of the different Mork Borg rulesets and I like a lot of OSR style adventures and megadungeons. Once Im inspired I make a character and start imagining. The characters I make dont really have stats but they instead have distinguishing positive characteristics like above average strength, swordsmanship, or magic ability. They can also have some negative characteristics too. These are just there to make them stand out and to make writing about them more interesting and easier. Then I just make stuff up and write some of it down. I dont necessarily love writing so a lot of my writing is in short form or bullet points. I write just enough to ground the story and keep things somewhat structured.

Combat is something I struggled with for a long time. I do not like back and forth dice rolling in combat. Ive made dozens of homebrew combat systems from crunchy gloomhaven inspired rules with homemade cards to a single roll of a D3. Ive settled on something I really like even though its messy and not very structured. To start, I made 2 tables I almost always use. 1 table shows what is lost and 1 table shows what is gained. I customize these tables for each unique combat encounter but there are usually 2 to 6 results with differing degrees of likelihood. The usual results for the what was lost table includes: nothing, HP, sanity, resources, or stamina. The usual results on the what was gained table include: nothing, gold, food, a trinket, or knowledge. I like to treat combat as a fun creative writing exercise with interesting writing prompts being the focal point. More formidable encounters have a few common questions like: do I need to flee? Should I roll for more losses? Is my character badly injured? Is my character having a hard time? How dangerous is this encounter? I dont have any set in stone rules. I just do what feels interesting in the moment. I also like to treat combat as war (questing beast) and use whatever advantages I can because thats more freeing creatively. I never treat combat as rounds. I just let each question or table act as a segment of the encounter. Sometimes I do an entire combat without any tables at all.

Quests, progression, and momentum have been the hardest thing for me. I dont really like leveling up or getting better armor and weapons. Whats been working best for me is something similar to how the Stonetop rpg has your adventurers start in a hometown. I also got a lot of inspiration from Grimscar rpg. I love having a home for my characters thats full of NPCs I care about. My progression is entirely based around this town. It starts out in terrible shape. The people are cursed, hopeless and destitute. My quests and gold all go towards improving their lives and it also gives me an opportunity to flesh out their personalities. Seeing the town change and grow is very satisfying. I have to have some form of this in every game I play. It can be a guild, a ship crew, an adventuring party, travelling caravan etc. As for momentum, I dont have this fully ironed out yet but anytime I get stuck, I just read one of my rpg rulebooks or supplements until inspiration strikes and then I add that to the story and write for as long as I can/ want to. The story usually keeps itself going as long as theres some kind of unsolved mystery or incompleted quest on the go. When in doubt I just explore somewhere new and see what shows up.

On the weekend I walked to a local trail and spent 2 hours sitting on a bench in the woods writing about an adventurer with amnesia who woke up on an endless cobblestone path in the woods. I didnt use any random tables or roll any skill checks. All I had with me was a notebook and a pencil. It was one of the best parts of my weekend. Tonight I was feeling a bit stuck when I returned to that story so I added in some randomness with one of my books of random tables (The Dungeon Dozen vol 1.) I didnt roll on the tables, I just looked for a table and then picked a result that inspired me. My character found a town on this cobblestone path and he's going to make it his home. Will he get his memories back? I dont know. Is there a way out of these woods? Nope! There's plenty of mysteries to solve and NPCs lives to improve.

Anytime I try to talk about solo ttrpgs I always end up talking about the mechanics. I think its because that is probably the best part about all of this. I can do whatever I want. I can pick and choose which tables to use from which books, I can steal adventure hooks from my favourite adventure modules, I can make up my own D3 or D6 random tables. I can decide how much randomness I want at any given time and I can add or take away any mechanics I want. I can even steal npcs and plot hooks from everything I watch, play, and read. I love this hobby and it has gotten me through some hard times. I am incredibly grateful for this community and for all of you who also play solo rpgs and share your experiences. I wouldn't have gotten into it if there weren't other people telling stories about their adventures and enjoyment.

Please let me know about how you like to play or whats going on in your current game! What are some of your favourite ways to keep your story going and interesting? Thanks for reading.

I wanted to get some advice from people here who have more experience with solo RPGs.

I’m able to create scenarios, exploration, and even combat, but I’m really struggling with character interactions. It feels like my imagination just “shuts off” when it’s time to handle dialogue, personality, and character dynamics.

Sometimes I just stare at the scene without knowing how the characters would naturally react or talk to each other. Did any of you go through this when you started? How do you practice or improve this part?

I’d appreciate any tips, exercises, methods, videos, or anything that could help me unlock that creativity.

Hello! I recently started playing solo ttrpgs and wanted to know how do you guys handle working with pre-written adventure modules ?

I’ve played Free League’s Forbidden Lands in solo for like half a year now (full sandbox, no module) and i wanted to give Coriolis: The Great Dark (Fractured Library module) a try

Hey everyone - I am looking for some help in coining a term here…ideas welcome!

I want to define the genre of solo RPGs that

- Are quick to learn (1-10 minutes from pickup to play)

- Can be played in 1+ sessions of around 30-45 min

- Often offer strategic or story depth

- Often focused on a very specific theme (building a dungeon, mapping a dwarf mine, telling the story of an old vampire, summoning demons from a deck of cards, etc)

These would be games like Delve, Thousand Year Vampire, Wreck this Deck, Apollo Mine/Dwarf Mine, How to Host a Dungeon, etc.

There are terms that get close or define some of this category of solo RPGs. Journaling games, but not all these games are journaling games. Micro or rules lite RPGs, but many of these games are far from micro or rules lite (30, 40, 50+ page PDFs). I was considering Lunch Break RPGs but after some feedback it doesn’t look like that fits too well either.

Does anyone have any fun ideas for a term for this type of game?

Hello felllow gamers.

I'm working on a few concepts for a solo rpg. I want to create something I would enjoy playing myself but also appeals to others. My intention is to offer it to the community for free on completion.

Would anyone be interested in a solo sci-fi RPG based around this idea?

DRIFTFALL

Driftfall

noun

A sudden emergence of matter from distorted space and time.

Usually referring to alien wreckage, ships, stations, debris fields, or other salvage suddenly appearing within the Solar System.

Setting:

Earth. Roughly three hundred years in the future.

Humanity has colonised the Solar System.

Then a dead planet arrives.

It was not discovered.

It was sent.

A fallen alien empire used impossible technology to propel its entire homeworld across interstellar space toward humanity.

Their civilisation had already lost.

Their own sun had already been drained dry.

Their world was already dead.

But the thing that destroyed them was still alive.

The Skalv.

A genetically modifying species that consumed the empire that once fought them.

The dead planet arrived surrounded by Syphon: an automated containment system. Orbital weapons. Drones. Shields. Defence systems still carrying out their final orders centuries later.

Syphon's mission: Keep the Skalv contained.

But Syphon's entire system feeds on solar energy.

Our solar energy.

Since the planet arrived, Syphon has been drawing power directly from our Sun to maintain the quarantine.

And slowly, the Sun is dying.

Now wreckage from that lost civilisation sporadically appears throughout the Solar System through unstable distortions in space and time caused by the planet’s impossible journey.

These events are known as Driftfalls.

Ships appear.

Stations appear.

Sometimes the wrecks have only experienced minutes while centuries have passed outside.

Humanity salvages them.

Reverse engineers them.

Weaponises them.

The player takes the role of the captain of a salvage ship operating around the quarantine zone.

Taking contracts to investigate Driftfalls. Recover technology. Explore alien wrecks. Manage crew and equipment. And hopefully survive long enough to get paid.

The tone is industrial sci-fi mixed with exploration, and survival. There will be a irreverent feel to the game too.

Alien meets Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The Expanse meets Red Dwarf.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker meets Office Space..

It's something I'd like to play myself, but what do you think?

After many many many months of prepping more than playing or just straight up not knowing what to do at all, I finally completed my first multi-hour session and I thought I'd share my notes here (in PDF form on Google Drive) if folks are interested! I don't know many people irl who'd care and I just wanted to share because I'm happy with it.

I'm using D&D 5.5e paired with the oracle and generators form Solo Adventurer's Toolbox 1& 2, as well as a solo hex map generated on HexRoll 5e.

If anyone has feedback or tips I'd really appreciate it! Looking forward to more fun with my boy, Hal

As an indie creator, we are hearing a desire for VTT to allow game play. What are your thoughts for solo play?

hi,

I love the narrative richness that the duality roll results bring to the table (success with fear, failure with hope hope, et cetera).
On the flipside, however, I sometimes find it taxing to come up with an added narrative twist after each roll. When playing solo, all the heavy lifting is on me. How do people handle this?

Thanks for any feedback and suggestions.

Edit 19 May: great advice, thank you all for the rich feedback! Several good leads to follow up on, and I can see some of them already working nicely for me.

I've been working on what I hope is a pretty useful, free plugin for obsidian. I call it Hexmaker (Hexmap World Creator), its a full worldbuilding suite that lets you create a map and populate it with encounters, quests, towns, and regions. I've been using it a lot for solo rpg'ing, and I hope that some here might find it useful too.

An overview of a hexmap created with the tool, the world is populated with several biomes.

https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/hexmaker

It's system agnostic, I've been using it with basic roleplaying and mythic to run some little adventures in my world. It's a lot of fun, where previously I'd be digging around in notes trying to find out what links to what, I just click and fly around the map whichever way I like. Everything in it (towns, quests, hexes) is all just markdown notes in your own vault. It generates a lot of them, but they're always right at your fingertips. I find worldbuilding using it has a sort of multi-scale feeling. I can dig into the little details of a town or lay out a quest across multiple hexes, or make sweeping changes to the landscape, and they all fit neatly into the bigger picture right away.

I've kept the scope of the tool intentionally focused on relatively high-level stuff. There's nothing that, by default, generates dungeons, or calendars, or towns. They're all just blank notes that you could figure whichever way you like. That said, I've set up my own configuration to include a lot of random tables that help me to speed up these processes, and I find that the random table/workflow tooling extremely useful in various situations.

In the future I am thinking that I may make other plugins that slot in to assist with these, but I like the idea of keeping everything modular to allow users to combine and use whichever parts of that sort of suite they find most useful to their own flow.

The icons I used as the default set are public domain curtesy of hexographer. I also included an easy way to upload and use your own icons within the plugin. You can make your own terrain palette from scratch if you'd like.

Disclosure, I've used AI to help me create and extend the plugin features (though never any content or icons or anything visual), though I've remained in the loop and in the code the whole time through.

I'd love to get some feedback and hear if there's anything I can add to help make it better or easier to use. I'd like to make more tooling to help make it even better. I hope someone finds it useful at least.

I've been working on what I hope is a pretty useful, free plugin for obsidian. I call it Hexmaker (Hexmap World Creator), its a full worldbuilding suite that lets you create a map and populate it with encounters, quests, towns, and regions. I've been using it a lot for solo rpg'ing, and I hope that some here might find it useful too.

An overview of a hexmap created with the tool, the world is populated with several biomes.

https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/hexmaker

The tool is system agnostic, I've been using it with basic roleplaying and mythic to run some little adventures in my world. It's a lot of fun, where previously I'd be digging around in notes trying to find out what links to what, I just click and fly around the map whichever way I like. Everything in it (towns, quests, hexes) is all just markdown notes in your own vault. It generates a lot of them, but they're always right at your fingertips. I find worldbuilding using it has a sort of multi-scale feeling. I can dig into the little details of a town or lay out a quest across multiple hexes, or make sweeping changes to the landscape, and they all fit neatly into the bigger picture right away.

I've kept the scope of the tool intentionally focused on relatively high-level stuff. There's nothing that, by default, generates dungeons, or calendars, or towns. They're all just blank notes that you could figure whichever way you like. That said, I've set up my own configuration to include a lot of random tables that help me to speed up these processes, and I find that the random table/workflow tooling extremely useful in various situations.

In the future I am thinking that I may make other plugins that slot in to assist with these, but I like the idea of keeping everything modular to allow users to combine and use whichever parts of that sort of suite they find most useful to their own flow.

The icons I used as the default set are public domain curtesy of hexographer. I also included an easy way to upload and use your own icons within the plugin. You can make your own terrain palette from scratch if you'd like.

Disclosure, I've used AI to help me create and extend the plugin features (though never any content or icons or anything visual), though I've remained in the loop and in the code the whole time through.

I'd love to get some feedback and hear if there's anything I can add to help make it better or easier to use. I'd like to make more tooling to help make it even better. I hope someone finds it useful at least.

Whenever I begin a new adventure, I always feel unsure about how to handle the opening. Do I let the oracles decide the mission? Do I come up with a starting plot myself and let it evolve naturally? Do I make it depend on the kind of character I created?

How do you usually approach it? Do you have any methods or mechanics that work especially well for you?

Hello everyone,

I'd like to share my new channel The Lone Pip with you all. I am quite new to solo ttrpgs and came from solo board gaming. I got pulled in by 4AD and played 2d6 dungeon first but was intrigued by Blackoaths offerings. I found that there was little content showcasing the actual gameplay of their games and thought "well I guess I'll have to do it myself".

Please take a look. Even if you don't subscribe I would really appreciate any and all feedback as I feel that I am sort of just posting into the void.

I would also like to shout out the 3 channels on that helped me most when searching for and understanding ttrpgs:

Ithaquas Bane

Maia's Solo Room

The Tabletop Engineer

Thank you all and be well!

Like many others here, I need help getting into solo roleplaying. I’m an experienced board gamer, but when it comes to RPGs, I’m a complete beginner.

As soon as I started looking into roleplaying games, it quickly became clear to me that this hobby is just as much of a rabbit hole as board gaming… and that my problems are very similar here as well: so many interesting options and systems, but where do you even begin — and more importantly, what actually works well for solo play?

It’s rare to get a larger group to the table. In board gaming, solo play is usually easy to set up, but with RPGs I currently find it difficult to judge what works and what doesn’t.

What I want is:

• an immersive world and story,
• meaningful decisions,
• character progression and leveling,
• exploration and surprises.

What I don’t want is to be the game master.

I’m used to playing against a system, not being the system. I have no problem with detailed rulebooks or managing mechanics and systems. But the adventure itself — the challenges, mysteries, combat encounters, and everything else an RPG can offer — should ideally be handled by the game/system and still be able to surprise me.

At the same time, I also don’t want a “gamebook” experience like the Call of Cthulhu solo adventures, where — at least from what I understand — it’s basically more or less a “playable novel.”

Now I’ve come across several RPGs that really appeal to me:

• Alien
• Blade Runner
• Fallout Wasteland Wanderer (which is solo)
• Arkham Horror
• Star Wars
• The Walking Dead
• Witcher
• Lord of the Rings (The one ring) etc.

Some of them apparently even include solo rules. But what does that actually look like in practice?

• Can I also play multiple characters?
• And does that even make sense?
• Do I get to experience the full game, or are there limitations?
• How exactly does the game master work, or how is it “controlled”?
• How do systems like Game Master Emulator work, and what other systems like that exist?
• Does using AI make sense in this context?
• Is the solo experience transferable to most RPG systems, or are there significant limitations?

As you can see, I have a lot of questions, and that’s also why I haven’t bought a starter set or core rulebook yet.

I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts 😊