Welcome To Eynowd Solo

A collection of Solo Roleplaying "Actual Play" reports

Thank you for stumbling into my latest little corner of the internet!

I've decided to start this substack to let me publish the "actual play" reports of my solo roleplaying endeavours. Solo roleplaying is a corner of the tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) scene that has caught my attention over the past few years and lured me in.

What is Solo Roleplaying?

Well, like the name suggests, it's all about roleplaying by yourself.

In a normal TTRPG session, you (typically) have a group of people sitting around and playing their way through a series of experiences, out of which emerges a story from their choices. One person acts as the Game Master, or GM (also known by a bunch of other names, depending on the gaming system used, but Game Master is perhaps the most common term, so I'll stick with that). The Game Master's job is to present the game universe to the players, listen to how they react to it, determine the consequences of those actions, and carry on. The rest of the group are the players, who typically one a single Player Character (PC) each. They listen to what the GM describes, figure out how they want to deal with that situation, and let the GM know. You then basically go through the loop over and over again.

In what I consider to be a good game, the story is not predefined. While the GM may draw maps, or design the opposition, or any other sort of preparation, the best GMs prepare an open ended situation, without defining what the outcome is going to be. They then improvise what happens in the game world, which can sometimes end up with the emerging story careening off in directions the GM could not have foreseen.

In a solo RPG, there is only one person, and they simultaneously act as GM and player. They create a player character, come up with an initial situation to drop that character into, and then play to see what happens.

Most solo gamers use some sort of Game Master Emulator, a series of random tables and guidelines that lets you ask questions, roll some dice, and determine the outcome to those questions. It might be a simple question that can produce a yes or no answer, or it might produce some word prompts that need to be interpreted within the current story context.

Many GM emulator systems also have a means of determining when some sort of random event happens. These can really twist the player's expectation, and send the story line galloping off in *completely* unexpected directions. It stops you plotting out what’s going to happen in the future, and is a major differentiator between it and just writing fiction.

Solo gaming has been around almost as long as TTRPGs have been, but have really become popular in the past few years, particularly since the 2020 COVID pandemic. It provided a vehicle for gamers who couldn't get together with their friends for a regular game to still get a gaming fix in,

How Did I Get Into Solo Gaming?

2024 marks forty years since I first sat down with some friends at school and had my first TTRPG session. Little did I realise it at the time, but it was a hobby that got its hooks into my imagination and refused to let go. I've always had a very active imagination, and TTRPGs gave me a vehicle to explore stuff in a way that reading fiction never could.

In the early 1990s, I started going to gaming conventions, which introduced me to a whole new aspect of gaming. Instead of just being random dungeon crawls, or endless combat sessions, they were often highly emotionally charged, which utterly entranced me. Most of them were rules light, some to the point of doing away with the gaming system altogether, and just being about the experiential part.

I was so entraned by it all that by the end of the 1990s, I'd set off on a personal quest to figure out why I found convention games so much more satisfying than home campaigns, and what I could do to make myself a better GM and bring some of that intensity into my home games.

That led me off on some strange tangents, including to help start an Origins Award nominated fanzine, and becoming a freelance RPG author. I've got over 250,000 words spread across well over a dozen TTRPG books, although I haven't written professionally now for many years.

I've been aware of the concept of solo gaming for well over ten years. I got my hands on the first edition of the Mythic GM Emulator book sometime in the early 2010s. At the time, I read through it, completely missed the point, considered it far too mechanical for my tastes, and dismissed it again.

Due to a combination of anxiety and complete frustration, I ended up walking away from the TTRPG hobby altogether in 2014. I did keep my RPG book collection (I've got a lot of RPG books, something north of 150 different gaming systems, and many supplements for those games), mainly because I enjoy reading them and imagining what it would be like to experience those gaming worlds. What I didn't realise at the time was I was indulging in a form of solo gaming even then. Ultimately, it also provided the siren's call that lured me back into the TTRPG hobby, even though I'd sworn black and blue that I was out of the hobby for good.

A couple of years ago, a friend introduced me to Trevor Devall's Me, Myself, and Die YouTube channel. Trevor is a professional voice actor who decided to start a solo RPG show and just play to see what happened. MM&D opened my eyes as to how *good* solo gaming could be, but also provided a wonderful tutorial on how to use the Mythic GM Emulator book properly. Since then, I've collected a bunch of different GM emulators and even games *designed* to be played solo.

But that's when I ran into a problem that a lot of new solo gamers run into. While I have literally decades of gaming experience, having run several dozen sessions at gaming conventions on two continents, and even helped write RPG sourcebooks, I had trouble making solo gaming work for me. I understood the concepts, and could come up with a solid beginning to my game, but I found that by about the third or fourth scene, the wheels would suddenly fall off. All my inspiration would suddenly dry up and I'd have idea how to progress the game any further.

This happened a bunch of times, using different games and GM emulators. It was pretty frustrating.

Recently, on a whim, I decided to try start again, and make a couple of small changes to the way I was playing, worrying that this was a fool's errand and that this would get chucked in the pile with the wreckage of all the other attempts.

Thankfully though, those couple of small changes appears to have made a very big difference, because I smashed through what I'd started calling the "third scene wall", and just kept right on going. This time, things have clicked, and the story is motoring along nicely now.

So I decided to start this substack to (hopefully) share the actual play reports of the solo games that I come up with from here on.

For this first game - which, as I'm writing this is still not finished - I'm writing it out in long form, as though I was writing a novel. I’m not plotting it out like a novel though. I started with next to nothing prepared and have just followed where the dice results led me.

Whether I stick to that format for future games remains to be seen, but for now, I'm really enjoying this approach, and it seems to be working for me. I haven't written this fluidly for many, many years now and I'm loving it.

Solo gaming represents a way for me to explore the aspects of gaming that I consider vital, but I haven't had a lot of luck getting other players to understand or join me. I'll admit that I do have very particular tastes that a lot of the standard gaming tropes don't satisfy.

Hopefully, the side product of me having fun by myself might end up being entertaining for you as well.