(no subject)

[darchildre]

A cool thing about solo rpgs is that you can accidentally create mysteries for yourself that you have no way of solving beyond continuing to play the game.

So, my newest game is, basically, "What if Sherlock Holmes, but with ghosts?" where I'm playing an occult detective who investigates hauntings in a vaguely Victorian setting. He's been hired by a collector of antiquities to figure out why all this weird stuff is happening in the dude's house. So I'm examining his most recent acquisitions, because maybe one of them is haunted. I roll to see if anything particularly catches my interest, roll a yes and also doubles, which in the system I'm using gets me a Random Event.

The oracle results for the object include the word "modern", which is already weird because it's an antiquities collection. I also get "contain", so I decide it's a jam jar, filled with something, and pick iron nails mostly because I've recently been in my dad's woodshop. So this dude has a random jar of nails in his collection of spooky old things. Okay. And then the random event is the collector doing something, and the oracle gives me "close", so as soon as I notice the nails, he closes the door to the cabinet so I can't examine them further and pulls me away to do something else.*

And I was already interested in the larger mystery of this dude being haunted but now I am desperate to find out what the fuck is up with this jar of nails. Literally, I woke up this morning and my first thought was, "But what is going on with that dude and his weird jar of nails, though?"

Fortunately, this is one of the games that I've set up so I'm able to play on my phone, so possibly I will learn more about the jar of nails during boring moments at work today.

*Tangentially, this is why solo rpgs are so good if you can get them running right. I can clearly trace the rolls and associations that led to that chain of events in the game, but also it feels like something the game did without my control. I both created that and did not create it, and the feeling of the game creating things on its own for me to explore is one of my favorite things about this kind of gaming.

Comments

[maharetr]

I read your post getting more and more intrigued by both the mechanics and the story, and then I hit your footnote and was literally like: "Yeah! That, that's so cool!" out loud in my room. I play D&D in a group online, which I'm thoroughly enjoying, but I've also been gradually building a small pile of solo PDFs as they catch my eye, and your posts are helping get me closer and closer to pulling one out. Thank you for that <3 (damn executive dysfunction getting in the way etc)

[darchildre]

Hooray! I love solo roleplaying and am always glad to encourage it in others. It is very different to playing with a group, but it has its own special joys.