Solo Tabletop RPG Review & Actual Play – Lisergia

Lisergia
Designed & Written by Cezar Capacle

You can purchase this game here

When someone hears about a tabletop rpg, they typically think of character/class-based systems where adventures are had, treasure of some sort is discovered, and a story is told. You would be right in almost every circumstance except this one. Lisergia goes in a direction I’ve never seen a ttrpg go before. In some ways, you could argue it’s not a ttrpg but a freewriting tool. I would push back that this limits what a ttrpg can be, and I think it’s much broader than people contemplate. One of my favorite things with ttrpgs, whether I play solo or with a group, is the spontaneous emergence of ideas. I’ve always loved David Lynch’s take on this: thoughts emerging from a massive pool, and we are just receivers. Lisergia is a game that plays to that idea.

Lisergia is a game about the surreal & the absurd. You are a drifter. There is no character sheet or stats. There is no point. No goal. No quests. The game expects nothing from you except what you wish to put into it. There are four core premises: Unproductivism, Irrationality, Automatism, and Randomness. So often in modern Western existence, you are chastised for not engaging, doing nothing, or zoning out. Our leisure time has been stolen with the demand that we turn a hobby into a side hustle or take up interests that focus only on numbing our pain from the daily toil. So Brazilian game designer Cezar Capacle has given us something that carves out space for nothingness.

You create your world by rolling d666 and marking a series of coordinates on a map. You draw lines; these create landmasses. Additional rolls make straits, breaking up the large continents into smaller ones. Islands and lakes follow. Outside of Lisergia, this is a great geography randomizer for worldbuilding in any game.

Now you are ready to play. Play consists of rolling on tables that provide location names, experiences, trinkets, and more. Everything is broadly defined enough to not take on an exact meaning. The book suggests automatic writing, using autocomplete on your phone or computer, and incorporating random ideas from others to further break up gameplay. The goal is to get into a flow state where you stop thinking about what you will write next and simply write. This is a fantastic tool for getting out of a slump or simply warming up before working on an ongoing writing project.

A way to create an endpoint for the game is to roll a Corollary when you decide you are finished with a scene. The game comes with a series of abstract paintings with numbered squares. Roll d666 and either physically cut or digitally cut & paste the corresponding square to your Totem board. You’ll also randomly roll d66 to place the square. If you play through 36 scenes, you will fill in every square on the board and have a randomized abstract Totem to represent your game.

What do scenes look like in Lisergia? I’ve included my short playthrough as an example of what can emerge from this game. I highly recommend this to people who have an open mind and want to try something new with ttrpgs or their writing.

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Scene 1
Location: The rough crevasse
Experience: Bones growing
Avatar: Brewer
Creature: Bull

Torrents of water spill into the rough crevasse that rends the ocean mere kilometers from the island coast. While water flows in the massive hole, giant bones jut out of it, the ribcage of some drowned giant. From my rowboat, I look with my spyglass and see a brewer tapping one of the arching bones, draining its marrow. His bull pulls the cart across the sloping ivory to a hut perched atop one bone spire. He’ll ferment the marrow to make bone ale, a soupy savory drink they love in these parts. I think of the many nights I’ve spent burbling in the delirium of a bone ale stupor.

I’ve been waiting for Sekils here for hours, yet he hasn’t shown himself once. Always late, even though he schedules these meetings. I sit alone, floating and watching the waterfalls over the skeletal remains until the sun grows heavy on the bottom and descends to make way for the moon. I row back to the shore.

Scene 2
setting: a forge of active window
experience: the noise of emotions
action: construct an isolated puzzle

The boat beaches on the northeastern shore and trudge across the sand towards a pillar of gray-blue smoke spiraling up into the sky. Its source is a glass forge, long abandoned and with only one product remaining. I walk across the concrete factory floor, footsteps echoing with each beat toward the moving stained glass window. It tells its sad story, the sound of weeping coming from the mosaic-woman captured within. She kneels before a tombstone and weeps. Her cries vibrate the window and I take note of how precariously it leans against a table. Then one heavy sob sends it toppling over, shattering into infinite fragments scattered across the ground. 

I forget all about Sekils and spend the rest of the day trying to piece her back together. By dusk, I’ve brought the larger glass shards together but there are still gaps. I can see the stained glass woman again, but she’s fuming, staring at me with a face of red glass. I can hear what I assume to be curses in some unknown tongue of the glassbound. I doff my hat and go on my way into the wide open night.

Scene 3
setting: A religious pond
experience: tender violence
avatar: fighter
element: spiral

The sound of a struggle catches my attention and I scale one of the dunes to find the source. From atop the sandhill, I see two shirtless men grappling with each other, they slosh about in a whirling tide pool. The pond is home to a shrine on one of its banks, a wooden box with a blue gabled roof. From my vantage point I can see some icon nested inside but I can’t make out which one it would be. I don’t care to get closer else I get pulled into this test of strength creating all this noise.

The men seem like they have been at this for awhile, panting like dogs but not letting up their hold on each other. They circle as the water swirls around them, occasionally one will lose his footing but the other is there with a hand extended to pull him back up. They whisper something through their heavy breaths. I try to focus and it almost sounds like they are whispering, “I love you” back and forth. Their struggle appears endless. When will they become too exhausted to carry on? When will the whirlpool claim them and away they go down the drain? How will they know who wins?

Scene 4
setting: the cheery waterway
experience: the way no one goes
creature: dog

I take the long way round the tide pool and eventually find the dirt path back towards town. There’s a crossroads though where a rickety wooden signpost crookedly leans. One sign reads “Town” while the other reads “No Go.” I don’t recall seeing this in the morning on my way to the boat where I waited for Sekils, but such is the way around here. What isn’t in the day can be so in the night and vice versa. 

A large black dog slinks around the bottom of the singpost, settling on his rear, a hind leg feverishly scritching away. He says, “Come drink from the river of happiness. Forget your responsibilities and float away.”

I know better than to consort with a dog at a crossroads in the middle of the night. I turn away and continue back toward town. Somewhere in the distance, down the path no one takes, I can hear a bubbling creek full of laughter and giggles. And things under the surface waiting to pull you down there with them.

Scene 5
setting: the lightning dome
experience: sliding on a cream of denial
line: “Do you worry about butterflies?”

Sekils sits on the lightning dome watching spiderwebbed bolts cut jagged paths across the cloudy night sky. I join him and notice his aluminum ointment tube, rolled up from the bottom a few centimeters, the pale cream extruded onto an extended palm, then rubbed into his cheeks and neck. 

“Do you worry about butterflies?” he asks me between the booming crackles that strike the rod at the center of the dome. 

“I’m not sure why,” I respond. “The butterflies seem to know what they are doing. Why do you ask?”

Sekils takes a heavy breath. “Because the world is dying and the butterflies will die with it.”

More of the cream, his face pasty, ghost-like. “It will all be okay,” he says to himself. I sit quietly next to Sekils and look for pictures in the clouds as they light up.