Ex Libris - The Solo Game Master's Guide

A look at some of the gaming books in my collection.

Welcome to another new feature here on my substack. I own a stupidly large amount of RPG books. I’ve lost count of how many different RPG systems I own, but at last check - if you include different editions and all my PDF only games - it’s upwards of 150.

So I thought, from time to time, I might review some of the books in my collection that I think are worthwhile, especially for solo gaming.

I’m starting with this review I actually wrote about eighteen months ago now, after I had finished reading this book. I first put it up on a Discord I was a member of at the time, and have sat on it for a long time. Croaker originally asked if he could publish it on his blog, but never got around to do it. So I decided to publish it myself here.

It’s quite long, so if you make it through to the end, you have my thanks.

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Solo Game Master's Guide – Some Thoughts

The Solo Game Master's Guide is a book written by Geek Gamers and published by Modiphius Entertainment. It aims to provide guidance on how to tackle solo roleplaying sessions, and how to avoid many of the common traps that new solo gamers tend to fall into.

For those who might not have come across Geek Gamers on YouTube, she's an American woman who has a channel where she does solo roleplaying, and posts videos of her games, as well as solo gaming philosophies and techniques. (Full disclosure: I find her videos extremely difficult to watch, as she has the camera pointed straight down at the table, so the only thing you see of her is her hands gesticulating wildly, while typically using a crochet hook as a pointer to what ever book or deck of cards she is currently using. I find the style to be insanely frustrating, so I end up bailing on the videos).

The front half of the book has some excellent advice, especially if you're new to the whole concept of solo RPGs. Some of it was fairly obvious to me, but there were a few points where I was thinking, "Huh! Never considered it like that before!". I’ve done a little solo gaming, and wanted to better understand the ideas before delving much further.

Geek Gamers puts forward ten key points the outlines her basic philosophy towards solo gaming. The first and most important one is "Everything Is Gaming". In other words, every time you do anything at all with an RPG book – including just reading it and imagining stuff – you're gaming. I really liked this point in particular, because I thoroughly enjoy pulling one of the plethora of gaming books from my shelf and just immersing myself in the game universe, imagining what stories I can come up with. I did this during my eight years of gaming retirement, and even still bought RPG books during that time. I never really considered it gaming, but in hindsight, I now see that it was.

So, reading a book and imagining stories in that world is gaming. Creating a character or two is gaming. Testing the game's various subsystems are also gaming. It all counts, so anyone who says that buying a book and never using it at a table is a waste is mistaken :)

Another key point is that words, not numbers, are the essence of gaming. A lot of people seem to believe that solo gaming is all about just rolling on random tables and going through the mechanics (hell, a lot of regular RPG players seem to be stuck in this mindset as well, in my experience), but Geek Gamers argues that the mechanics should always take a backseat to the developing story. The story and the questions that arise from the intersection of a character and the situation they find themselves in will always get you through more rough spots than dice and mechanics ever will. When I first read this, I was damn near cheering, because it's a mindset that I've had for years. Yet so many people think that once they've generated the mechanical aspects of their character, they're done, without ever thinking up backstories, or even a single goal for their character. That's rubbish, and it throws all the intellectual and emotional load onto the GM's shoulders, and is one reason why so many GMs burn out. Story should always come first and the numbers side of the character is only their to help determine if they succeed or fail at getting what they want. The player should be just as responsible for their character's story as the GM.

Another light bulb moment for me was her position that a solo gamer should not start by generating a character. She maintains it's far better in the long run to start with aspects of world creation, even if it's as simple as creating an artefact and giving it a bit of a backstory. Why is this important? Because it begins to create a framework for your future character to build upon and interact with. Something like an artefact – say, a magic sword or ring, or a spaceship – can easily be something that your future character might have once owned and wants back, or it might be something they've heard of and would desperately like to own. Stuff like this goes to creating motivations for your character. That is what is going to drive your solo game along: the simple question of how are they going to go about getting whatever it is they want. If you start with rolling up a character, you get the mechanical aspects sorted out, but then you often get stuck with the dreaded "what the hell do I do now?" question. That yawning abyss can often be impossible to cross and kills a lot of solo games. (A few months back, I created a character for the Bookmark NoHP RPG, and once I was ready to start playing, I had absolutely no idea what to do next with the character, and ended up staring at a blank page in my notebook for a couple of hours before putting it away. I've never gone back to it since).

There's also more good advice about how it's better to focus on emotions, instead of the mechanics. This was another point that had me practically jumping about and singing “Hallelujah!” It mirrored my own thinking on the topic, and yet, it seems to be something that so many gamers never think about. By exploring your character’s emotional response to the situations you find them in, you can create a far richer and reward experience overall.

After that, there was some advice on the four different ways you can drive your story forward: generative resources, suggestive resources, restrictive resources, and your rubric.

Rubric is the easiest to grok: it's basically your rule set.

Generative resources are things like random table oracles for what you find when you get somewhere. Anyone who's familiar with games like Ironsworn or Ironsworn: Starforged is familiar with these things. Classic Traveller (and I presume the different later editions) have a lot of tables for generating star systems, or cargoes or what have you. That all falls under this heading.

Suggestive resources are things like cards from board game sets that you can use to spark ideas of what you find in a room, or picture books that you can use to get inspiration for what a place looks like. Other ideas might be tarot cards, runes, or the myriad of new age oracle decks that are on the market. One of her more innovative ideas is using a novel in a similar genre to the game you're playing, using dice to randomly select a page, then reading through it looking for things that spark ideas of things that your character might come across. The idea being you're looking for something that suggests an idea of what happens next.

A restrictive resource is your typical yes/no oracle, which should be familiar to anyone who's tried something like Mythic GM Emulator, or Ironsworn's Ask The Oracle table.

By combining the four different types, she postulates that you can get through many of the hangups that other solo games run into.

The next section in the book talks about getting your game started, and she goes on at length about not starting with character creation. This reinforces her earlier point about not starting with the mechanical aspects of character creation. She thinks that for a solo game, you're far better rewarded by doing some world generation first – or at least starting with the game world section of the rulebook – so that you can get a feel for what the place is like and come up with a bunch of hooks that your character can connect to, in order to bring them into the story more readily. You can either use random tables or oracles, or you can just find parts in the game's setting that catch your attention as you're flipping through the book. What you're aiming for is to build up a collection of places, people, and events that you can connect your character to, once you get around to creating it.

Even with character creation, she suggests you're far better off concentrating on the more narrative aspects of character creation like backstory and motivations, leaving the numerical stat part of creation until the end. Again, this is all part of her premise that it's far better to concentrate on the feeling of the game, rather than the mechanics, as that is what's going to get you through the tough spots, as you can ask questions about what's happening and go from there.

By this stage, we're about halfway through the book, and it's been packed full of pretty good advice, and ideas that I can wholeheartedly agree with and support.

But it's here we suddenly get to the Epilogue. The first time I read though it, I was thinking, "Wait; what? How can this be the epilogue?" But sadly, it is.

Everything after this point is just a collection of appendices, mostly just dot point summaries of stuff from earlier in the book, or some example oracle tables, including several tables that had already appeared in the front half of the book. A couple of them are even lifted wholesale from other places, including the Action/Focus oracles from Ironsworn SRD.

Another oracle, which takes up a fair chunk of the back half of the book is a literary one, where she's pre-chosen paragraphs from novels, and included them in a d66 style table. The aim of this is to use it as a suggestive resource, without having to pick a novel and go through the hassle of skim reading pages looking for interesting stuff. Whether this is useful is left as an exercise for the reader.

There's also a bit of a discussion on which systems she recommends for solo gaming, and a treatise on dungeons and why their ubiquitous to the gaming hobby. Both of these sections are fairly easy to ignore, especially if you already know what system you'd like to play with, or if you're like me and got bored with dungeons back in the 1980s.

But on the whole, I found the back half of the book to be a real cop out, with no real meat to it. Yes, random oracles are useful things. Ironsworn: Starforged has fair chunk of its book dedicated to various oracle tables, but they all have a unique purpose within the game's context, and they all feel useful. The tables in this book are a mismatched set that cover a lot of the same ground. They feel like they're just there to fill the space, especially as some of them are literally repeated from the front half of the book.

Originally, I had intended to buy a hardcopy of the book, but it wasn't available on Amazon at the time, and the shipping Modiphius was charging more than doubled the price of the book, especially with the exchange rate factored in. In the end, I settled on a PDF version from DriveThruRPG instead.

In hindsight, I'm glad I did. Paying about A$80 for this, including shipping, would have been a waste of good money. The fact that this feels like only half a book to me means that it's not worth anywhere near what they're asking for the hardcopy. Modiphius would be better off offering it as a POD book on DriveThruRPG for those who want a printed version. This would have likely lowered the price for the book too, as the shipping costs for DriveThru’s POD books to Australia are very reasonable¹.

So overall, there is definitely some worthwhile advice in it and that’s worth the read. I just there was just not enough of it to justify the cover price. Overall, I felt the whole package was a bit of a letdown, and could have been so much better.

Who is the game for and who isn't it for?

It’s hard to say with a degree of certainty who this book is aimed at.

I think that it was largely aimed at people who have only played D&D 5e, and have heard about solo gaming but had no idea how to go about starting to play that way. While some of the advice is good for anyone interested in solo gaming, it does come across as being aimed at people with no solo gaming experience at all.

It’s of far less value for those who have been solo gaming for a while, and understand the ideas. People in this cohort would most likely find the back half of the book to be a waste of space, as they would already have their own set of oracles to use.

On the whole, if people are interested into getting into solo gaming, I feel they’d be better off checking out a couple of the excellent solo gaming actual play channels on YouTube, including Trevor Devall’s Me, Myself, and Die, or Matt Risby’s The Bad Spot Podcast. Not only are these games highly entertaining, they show off some excellent techniques on how to tackle solo gaming, and make viewers believe that it’s entirely possible to create engaging and entertaining gaming experiences on your own.

1. In the months since I originally wrote this, DriveThruRPG now has the option for Australian customers to get their print-on-demand books produced in Melbourne, which makes shipping costs and waiting times much lower than they used to be (our orders used to be printed and shipped from England). Print quality is excellent too, and they usually show up within seven days of ordering.