In 2023, I tried out two new features on the blog. The first was Looking at Art, where I would feature a single painting or sculpture, engage with it as someone with little background in art history & critique, and then do some research to better understand the piece. That proved to be an overwhelming task, and I decided to stop a quarter into the year. I did learn a lot, but the specifics of these mediums are so outside my current understanding that I was overwhelmed.
The second, which proved more fruitful, was diving into solo tabletop roleplay games. I had gotten into ttrpgs in the early 2010s having never played them as a child. Growing up homeschooled in an evangelical household, anything associated with Dungeons & Dragons or the like was forbidden. So, for a few years in my 30s, I got into tabletop roleplay; I even went to the Origins gaming convention in Columbus, Ohio, for three years. However, as with many communities in the States, there were a lot of toxic actors, and when Me Too became a thing, even more hypocrisy was uncovered. The fun of the game was gone. So, I moved away from the hobby.
As a result of COVID-19, solo tabletop gaming became popular. It’s also hard for adults to meet regularly with groups, so when you want to stretch your creative muscles, these play experiences are great. They have also reminded me how important it is to engage in creative play as an adult. I know I’m not winning any Pulitzers any time soon, but I have improved my writing in plotting and description over the last year with these games. These games stood out from everything I played and provided me with many fun hours.
Ex Novo
Read my full review and actual play here
Purchase here
There are a lot of worldbuilding & mapmaking solo games. It makes sense as it’s a style of play that lends itself to the solitary. Ex Novo provides the tools to map out a settlement and develop it over a varying number of years. It is also a game that can be played with up to 4 players, leading to a different experience than the solo one. Through a series of phases, players lay the foundations of the regional geography & how people came to live here. Then, through dice rolls and the consultation of guiding prompts, you go through the history of your settlement. At the start, the length is determined, which means the longer you play, the further your setting is developed. By the end, you have a fun story of a fictional place but also something that can easily be integrated into the campaign of another RPG system.
Welcome to the Habitrails
Read my full review and actual play here
Purchase here
Welcome to the Habitrails was a fantastic, surreal horror experience. You play a character who has woken up in a strange, liminal space, a walled-in suburb. There are others here who are just as confused as you, but everyone is trying to keep living while searching for a way out. Think the viral Backrooms horror or the recent experimental feature Skinamarink in terms of tone. Using a standard 78-card tarot deck, the player draws cards and consults an oracle to find matching prompts. If you draw major arcana cards reversed, that opens up additional prompts, so the content in the game is significant. Each suit represents a different aspect of this strange community, and as you play, you’ll build up a robust series of NPCs and mysteries. I posted an extensive playthrough for this, which includes my complete adventure.
Little Town
Read my full review and actual play starting here
Purchase here
This was a natural pick for me as a Twin Peaks fan since childhood. The system is built on elements from Powered by the Apocalypse games and the improvisational mystery system Carved from Brindlewood. There’s also a healthy dose of pieces from the Mythic GM Emulator. As you would expect, you play a character in a small town where a crime has occurred. You might be a visiting special agent or local high schooler, among other options. Using random tables and a countdown mechanic, you attempt to uncover the truth behind your mystery and will likely discover even more strange things. This comes with two supplements: Eldritch Town and Eerie Town, the former bringing Lovecraft to the table and the latter adding a dash of the X-Files. There’s so much to explore here, and the game does an excellent job of evoking the tone and themes you would want from a Twin Peaks experience.
Artefact
Read my full review and actual play here
Purchase here
Artefact asks you not to play the story’s hero but a unique object used by multiple heroes across time. You begin by choosing your type. Perhaps you’ll be a Weapon, or you could be a musical Instrument, a Deck of Cards, or even an important Tome. Whatever you choose, you will go through phases where the player is given a choice of prompts and tells of the early days of the object, its greatest glory, and how it fell into obscurity. Each Keeper, the person who possessed you for a short while, has options to add more replayability to this system. Artefact is very evocative but depends on a player who is ready to engage with their imagination and bring great ideas to the prompt. Like Ex Novo, this is a great solo game for GMs of group campaigns who want a fun way to develop items to add for their players to encounter.
Fake Guru Real Vice
Read my full review and actual play here
Purchase here
Built off The Wretched and Alone system, Fake Guru Real Vice uses a Jenga-block-style tower as the centerpiece of the game’s fiction. Drawing from a standard deck or tarot deck leads to prompts, some of which ask you to pull from the tower as a metaphor for making a choice dangerous to your status. In this particular game, you play a popular media figure who made a career by giving people advice, some of it likely dubious. Your dirty secrets are coming out and may jeopardize your wealth & standing. You play to learn if redemption is possible or if your actions are simply too much and your star has faded. I chose to play as a televangelist based on watching them growing up, and I had a great time. If nothing else, I made myself laugh hard by building an increasingly absurd list of transgressions that my character was trying to justify.
Dark Space/Cthulhu Dark
Read my full review and actual play starting here
Purchase here
Despite just starting my solo TTRPG reviews & actual plays in 2023, I was contacted by three publishers about reviewing and playing their games. Two have already been played, and one is in the works for 2024. Dark Space was the most impressive of the two I played in 2023. This is a collection of evocative scenarios that can be played with various systems but are written & geared towards the rules light Cthulhu Dark ruleset. Inspired by media like Alien, Dead Space, and Firefly, Dark Space is intended for group play but can quickly adapt to solo play, as you’ll see with my actual play. I was worried I would feel constrained by the scenario, but it freed me up to go into greater detail while creating lists to roll on to ensure plenty of random elements. This is one of my better pieces of writing derived from gaming in 2023.
Notorious
Read my full review and actual play here
Purchase here
Notorious was the second solo game I played in 2023, and I immediately loved it. Players are Nomads, bounty hunters in a heavily Star Wars-inspired universe. While an intergalactic war rages across the galaxy, you will take up a bounty and travel to distant planets to track your quarry. Your reputation plays a significant role mechanically, helping you garner allies and intimidate foes before the fight begins. Which factions you align with will also create roadblocks or open new avenues. The game even ensures that the showdown with your target will play out with as much drama as you would expect from these stories. While springing out of The Mandalorian, Notorious is more than fan service to that show. There’s also been a crowdfunded expansion, Notorious: Outsiders, that should be dropping in 2024. I plan on trying this system out again with these new additions.
Dungeon World Solo
Read my full review and actual play starting here
Purchase here
Dungeon World was one of the Powered by the Apocalypse games I played a lot back when I engaged in groups online in the 2010s. Several posts on r/solo_roleplaying stated it was easy to adapt to solo play, so I tried it out. Using Parts Per Million’s solo play guide, I created a fun fantasy world centered on an actual town built underground in a dungeon. Partnered with the Class Warfare supplement, a book that allows for creating modular character classes, I took my rogue to a ruined jungle temple and a sinking tower full of magical artifacts. I plan to return to this world in the new year through solo Dungeon World or other fantasy systems. It played so smoothly and was a very pleasurable experience.
Mork Borg: Solitary Defilement/Frontier Scum: Lonesome Drifter
Read my full review and actual play starting here & here
Purchase here & here
The Old School Renaissance (or OSR) is a design movement within tabletop RPGs to evoke the type of play “old timers” remembered during the peak of Dungeons & Dragons and similar systems. Because I came to gaming in my 30s, I don’t have that nostalgia, so I never really played those games. Mork Borg, rules-lite OSR title, has turned me around on that. This is (overly?) stylized brutally dark fantasy system and world born out of the creators’ love of Swedish Death Metal, a genre I don’t necessarily care for. However, I had a hell of a great time playing and trying to see how far I could get my character before they were turned into a smear. I had great fun again playing the Old West hack Frontier Scum, which had some great methods of getting rid of the racist tropes in the genre. There are many more Borg hacks, including Dukk Borg, which blends Ducktales and Mork Borg, or Corp Borg, an apocalyptic office game, so expect to see more of these games popping up in 2024.
Mythic GM Emulator 2nd Edition
Purchase here
I don’t have a review for this one because it’s mainly a collection of modular tools that enable solo play for any tabletop RPG. Developed by designer Tana Pigeon and supplemented by a wonderful monthly magazine, Mythic provides solo players with methods of asking Yes/No questions and receiving answers to guide their play, randomization for scenes based on player expectation, and methods of creating and tracking plots & characters in an improvised manner. Mythic can seem overwhelming at first glance, so I recommend implementing one piece at a time until you feel comfortable with it. This is such a rich & robust way of engaging in roleplay, and the solutions Pigeon has come up with in the pages of the magazine are so creative and make you want to sit down and play right away. The book also has copious d100 lists to cover whatever might come up in your game. Mythic is a genre-less tool, so no matter what you’re keen to jump into, it will help give you an experience that surprises you. I love how it stretches my creative skills and has led to my stories going in directions I didn’t anticipate initially. Even if you don’t do solo tabletop RPGs, Mythic is an incredible writing tool.
Ironsworn/Starforged
Read my full review and actual play for Ironsworn here
Read my review and actual plays for my Starforged games starting here, here, and here
Read my actual play of Supersworn starting here
Purchase here (free) & here
Of everything I played, nothing captivated me as much as Ironsworn. Designer Sean Tompkin smartly made the base system of his game free. Its setting evokes strong Viking fantasy air, but the mechanics are easy to lift and place into the genre of your choice. A few years later, Tompkin added a dungeon delving supplement, Ironsworn: Delve, and then a science fiction spin-off with Starforged. This can be an overwhelming system at first glance; it owes its existence to the Powered by the Apocalypse player-facing fiction-first concept. Many Moves are triggered by player action, but these Moves are clustered into groups. You don’t use most of them every session, but a core five or six. There are a handful of Moves covering social interactions & building bonds with people or communities. There are countdown clocks & progress tracks that create looming threats in the background you can race against time to avoid. The Delve mechanics also help you build mysterious settings to explore that are revealed as you play in them. I love how this recreates the surprise and wonder of playing a game by someone else.
The fan community is incredible, with all sorts of variants & supplements having been created to provide more options. This year, I played regular Ironsworn, homebrewed my own world for Starforged, played three separate story arcs with that, and used elements for a superhero hack called Supersworn. It should be no surprise that Ironsworn will be coming into 2024 with us. I can’t wait to see what else the fans and Tompkin come up with, and I will love incorporating it into my games.
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