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Apr. 24th, 2021 12:08 pmI started playing Journey last night, which is a really lovely solo journaling rpg. (So a game where you have a premise and some basic restraints, and a way to generate random prompts - usually dice or a deck of cards - and then you write something.) I've been intrigued by journaling games for a while - someday, I will actually play Thousand Year Old Vampire - but this is the first one I've actually played.
It's a game built for people who really like worldbuilding or who want to imagine themselves wandering around in a fictional setting without a huge amount of story. You pick a setting and a form to travel through it (this is your PC, who as defined or undefined as you like), then roll dice to determine places or beings that exist in the setting, then draw cards to generate aspects of that place or being that you can explore. The prompts are necessarily very general, so you can build any kind of setting that you're interested in.
I had originally thought about playing the game to better define certain bits of the settings of one my other non-journaling solo rpgs, but I decided instead to create a new setting because I've had a tiring crabby week and thinking about actually having to make the new stuff fit into the stuff I've already built felt exhausting. Therefore, I've decided that this (and possibly other subsequent games of Journey) are going to be set in a fantasy world designed specifically to be soothing and appealing to me. You could certainly play Journey in such a way as to generate a world where scary or exciting things happen but I am choosing to use this as a gentle and relaxing exercise.
So far, I have spent some time wandering around a city where it's always twilight and everything is lit by paper lanterns and possibly there are moth people. It's been very pleasant.
It's a game built for people who really like worldbuilding or who want to imagine themselves wandering around in a fictional setting without a huge amount of story. You pick a setting and a form to travel through it (this is your PC, who as defined or undefined as you like), then roll dice to determine places or beings that exist in the setting, then draw cards to generate aspects of that place or being that you can explore. The prompts are necessarily very general, so you can build any kind of setting that you're interested in.
I had originally thought about playing the game to better define certain bits of the settings of one my other non-journaling solo rpgs, but I decided instead to create a new setting because I've had a tiring crabby week and thinking about actually having to make the new stuff fit into the stuff I've already built felt exhausting. Therefore, I've decided that this (and possibly other subsequent games of Journey) are going to be set in a fantasy world designed specifically to be soothing and appealing to me. You could certainly play Journey in such a way as to generate a world where scary or exciting things happen but I am choosing to use this as a gentle and relaxing exercise.
So far, I have spent some time wandering around a city where it's always twilight and everything is lit by paper lanterns and possibly there are moth people. It's been very pleasant.
