Solo Roleplaying And So Can You!
A Practical Guide To Solo Gaming
2026-03-17
Contents
About
Look I am no expert okay? On anything. Least of all solo roleplaying.
But I’ve done it, and have had fun doing it, so I would say that I am experienced and successful at it.
Don’t believe me? Art thou a doubter? I anticipated that, you Dubious Thomas, you Missourian, and am prepared to present to you a couple of game logs that I have published over the years:
- https://tilde.town/~dozens/castiron/
- https://tilde.town/~dozens/clericthief/
- https://tilde.town/~dozens/pistol/
What does this prove? Why, nothing at all of course.
A couple weeks ago ~aisha, over on tilde.town, was lamenting that she really wanted to try out solo roleplaying but didn’t know how to get started.
All this article is, is an answer to that implicit question.
Each subsequent section is designed to convey you along a journey through the methods and procedures of solo roleplaying, from the most simple to the more complex, and will provide you links to external resouces.
- The “link box” looks like this, and contains “entries”
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An entry will have a blurb or explanation…
- and a url
Okay that’s enough introduction, let us begin.
Definitions
Let us begin with the preliminaries. What follows are some essential definitions and justifications.
SOLO: By yourself, on your lonesome. Why? Why not! Because it’s there! Any reason really. Maybe you’re tired of other people at the moment. Or you’re struggling to schedule time with your friends and or enemies. Or you want to play a game or setting that you know your friends and or enemies are uninterested in, tedious bores that they are. Or you have 30 minutes RIGHT NOW and want to play a firebending dwarf wizard immediately. Again, any reason will do really.
ROLE: An identity or persona you adopt, often unlike your own in some way1, from whence comes the joy of having experiences that are not your own.
PLAY: A structured activity of imagination and skill designed for fun.
1 An identity somewhat unlike your own, but also potentially much like your own! This is not contradictory. See “Your Approximate Self” below.
The Least You Can Do
The least structured and most fast thing you can do is this:
Imagine yourself in some fantastical situation.
For example:
Exploring a vast underground cavern. It full full of mystery and wonder!
Sailing the seas on a pirate ship. Whoa an enemy ship! Whoa a giant whale!
Exploring a poisonous jungle. There are insects bigger than an elephant!
Now you’re on a spaceship!
Uh-oh! A danger happens! What do you do??
There, now you’re playing a game in your mind.
- Top 10 Games You Can Play in Your Head, by Yourself
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This is a very earnest book about imaginative play that is disguised as a joke.
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44166209-top-10-games-you-can-play-in-your-head-by-yourself
Structured And Fast
A lot of the styles of play discussed in this article fall on the Fast/Slow + Structured/Unstructured continuum.
| Fast | Slow | |
|---|---|---|
| Unstructured | Imagination | Journaling |
| Structured | Gamebooks | Classic |
A simple game of imagination is both fast and unstructured: there are no rules to speak of, and no prep required.
“Classic” gaming, by which I mean choosing a game full of rules and procedures meant for group, guided play, and then adapting it to solo play, is slow and structured. One would expect a reasonable amount of prep involved in creating a character, learning the rules, and more.
Gamebooks and Journaling games fall somewhere between the two extremes.
How Every Game Works
This is how every game works:
Describe the situation
Describe what you do in response
The world is changed in some way
Repeat
🔥 HOT TIPS 🔥
Make sure there is always something at risk.
Something is always happening!
Nothing never happens!
- What’s So Cool About Outer Space
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At one point Jared Sinclair removed all of their content from itch.io, including What’s So Cool, which contains the above advice, “Something is always happening! Nothing never happens!” Fortunately, the spirit of What’s So Cool lives on and can be seen in the What Is So Cool About Jam. It is full of little pocket guide / quickstart rules for myriad scenarios and settings.
- https://itch.io/jam/what-is-so-cool-about-jam/entries
Gamebooks
The next least structured thing you can do is play some gamebooks.
This is “interactive fiction” and perhaps a form of hypertext. There are basically like the CYOA books you read as a kid.
- Sherlock Holmes Solo Mysteries
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https://archive.org/details/sherlock-holmes-solo-mysteries-07-the-royal-flush
- Joe Dever’s Lonewolf
- Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy
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Steve Jackson developed Fighting Fantasy and Advanced Fighting Fantasy and wrote a whole series of gamebooks for them.
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e.g. The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain: https://archive.org/details/isbn_9781407184258/
Answering Prompts And Journaling
The next most least structured thing you can do is play a “solo journaling” game in which you read prompts and think about them and then write stuff down about it.
This in my opinion is where things really start getting great. This isn’t just freeform daydreaming. There’s some structure. But it also isn’t following somebody else’s pre-written path for you. It instead is the perfect mixture of both! You get the benefit of the author providing a setup, a situation. And then being turned loose to, instead of “Go to 48”, respond howsoever you want.
- Thousand Year Old Vampire
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A wildly immersive and evocative game about being a doomed vampire
- The Wretched
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The original deck of cards + tumbling block tower (i.e., Jenga) solo journaling game of dread and suspense.
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The original game: https://loottheroom.itch.io/wretched
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The SRD (System Reference Document) https://sealedlibrary.itch.io/wretched-alone-srd
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The jam: https://itch.io/jam/wretched-jam
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The Sealed Library is the first known game based on The Wretched: https://sealedlibrary.itch.io/the-sealed-library
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Another good Wretched & Alone game: https://litzabronwyn.itch.io/bloom
- Anamnesis
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A game inspired by The Wretched that gained a lot of popularity in its own right.
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Inspired tons of hacks (https://itch.io/c/3862482/anamnesis-hacks-supplements) and a game jam (https://itch.io/jam/anamnesis-jam/entries)
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ratfactor’s submission to the Anamnesis jam, for which they drew an entire original, and very cute tarot deck: https://ratfactor.com/hoo/game/wrapper.html
- Alone Among the Stars
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A delightful small game about exploring stuff in space
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A collection of hacks: https://itch.io/c/486917/alone-at-the-table
- PRINCESS WITH A CURSED SWORD
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A small game that uses tarot cards to guide your princess through exploring the ruins.
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A whole bunch of hacks here: https://itch.io/c/1130591/princess-sword-games
- Fox Curio’s Floating Bookshop
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Cute as hell game about sailing up and down the river on your floating bookshop
- Koriko: A Magical Year
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Be a witch having a magical year
- Mechs Into Plowshares
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https://anomalousentertainment.itch.io/mechs-into-plowshares
- Lisergia
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A surreal “drifting” game that bridges the gap between imaginative play and structured play.
- The Librarian’s Apprentice
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Explore an infinite, liminal library
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https://almostbedtimetheater.itch.io/the-librarians-apprentice
- Last Tea Shop
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A cozy game about tea and conversation
- A Visit to San Sibilia
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Visit the eternally shifting city
Your Approximate Self
This is an okay time to introduce the idea of an approximate self
When you play a journaling game (or any solo game honestly) there might be some mental overhead required to invent a total stranger of a character out of thin air.
Much easier is to play some approximate version of yourself.
Maybe a version of you that is slightly more adventurous or suave or reckless or brave or heartless or whatever.
The benefit of this is that you already have a pretty good idea of who you are so you can make a few tweaks to your base model (“you”) and then start playing now!
- The Ink That Bleeds
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Paul Czege’s manifesto on solo gaming, with a focus on immersion, bleed, and the approximate self
- The Ink That Bleeds Review – An Immersive Dive Into Immersive Journaling
Continuity Of You
Here’s a 🔥 HOT TIP 🔥
If you always play some approximate version of yourself in your games then there’s always SOME degree of continuity of character from game to game
You can use the same notebook to play 5, 10, 15, 20 games! Or more!
Maybe the character in each game is always the same person. Maybe not. Maybe they’re aware of previous games they played in. Maybe there are other recurring characters from game to game.
What a weird wacky world these characters live in!
- A Town Of You
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A Town Of You is a single-player journaling game played by importing and exporting your OCs.
- https://kumada1.itch.io/a-town-of-you
Games That Are Solo On Purpose
There are some games that are like full blown roleplaying games but that are also designed for solo play
- Ironsworn
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Probably the very best free game that there is in terms of gameplay and production. Created for solo, coop, or guided play; and has tons of great tables
- Tunnels & Trolls
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One of the original ttrpg games, and famously included rules and material for solo play. I don’t know that I necessarily recommend it though because I always found the rules kind of complex and confusing.
- Risus
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Risus straddles the line. It was not designed explicitly for solo play. But it is extraordinarily fast to start playing, and does have a fair bit of solo content. It is one of my favorite “I want to start playing NOW” games.
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Risusiverse: https://www.risusiverse.com/
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Solo Adventures (no GM required): https://www.risusiverse.com/home/adventures#h.9jk3638mco7j
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Ring of Thieves (gamebook): https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/172019/risus-ring-of-thieves-a-free-fantasy-solitaire-adventure
Adapting Classic Ttrpgs For Solo Play
It is possible to solo games that are not designed for solo play at all!
Remember our fast/slow + structured/unstructured framework? This style of play occupies the far corner of the structured and slow quadrant.
This is one of the hardest but sometimes most rewarding types of solo play.
It requires some extra work but with a little effort and experience you can play any game.
You might want to do this to try out new games without having to convince other people to play with you.
Or even if you do convince others to play with you, maybe you want to test out the mechanics before running the game to get a feel for it.
You will need some oracles and probably some tables and maybe a “GM Emulator”.
Oracular Spectacular
An oracle is something that answers a question.
If you flip a coin, or shake a magic 8 ball and look at it, etc, that is using an oracle.
A yes/no oracle can be as simple as flipping a coin, or rolling a six-sided dice: the higher the number the better or more emphatically yes the answer is, the lower the opposite.
| d6 | Result | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | No, and | It’s worse than you thought |
| 3 | No | Just no |
| 2 | No, but | It’s not as bad as it could have been |
| 5 | Yes, but | Yes but there’s a complication |
| 4 | Yes | Just yes |
| 6 | Yes, and | Even better than expected |
- Recluse
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I think this is one of the very best, most simple yes/no oracles there is. It allows for degrees of success and failure, and for surprises! I use it all the time.
- One Page Solo Engine
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This is really fun because you can use a deck of cards, which is simply fun. And it includes scene interupts and altered scenes.
- Mythic GM Emulator
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Kind of the gold standard for this kind of thing. It has everything! Its killer features are the chaos factor, scene interupts, and list and thread management.
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Here’s a video I made about using 1st edition Mythic GME to run a co-op game: https://tube.tchncs.de/w/8u9AAGdT9hxk2fbZ1vDejh
Tables
Random tables can be very helpful to have on hand while doing solo play. They can help you populate a city, or determine random encounters in the wilderness, or build an NPC.
You can get very far by just searching online for “good osr tables,” but here are a few links to get started.
- Cairn
- Knave
- Maze rats
- Ironsworn
- Cut Up Solo
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This series is really fun. The author takes a bunch of genre fiction and then just jumbles up all the text so you can browse or roll and get some inspiring snippets and phrases to direct your play. You can of course to this kind of bibliomancy with any book on your bookshelf!
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https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/browse?keyword=cut%20up%20solo
Commitment and Investment
One of the benefits of solo play is that you are entirely in charge of how you play, and for how long you play.
A single session may stretch on for hours, or it may span mere minutes. You are in control of your own destiny here!
Other
Need some names? https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/
Need a city, or a town, or a dungeon? https://watabou.itch.io/
Need another, more different dungeon? https://donjon.bin.sh/5e/5_room/
Want to draw your own dungeon real quick? https://app.dungeonscrawl.com/
Standard notation for solo logging: https://zeruhur.itch.io/lonelog
A big bundle of solo games: https://itch.io/b/770/solo-but-not-alone
Now Go
One last brief word of encouragement.
The best advice I can give you, about anything really, is to begin.
Just do it. Do it. Don’t let your dreams be dreams. Do it.
If there’s something you want to do, don’t let fear or uncertainty prevent you from starting. Just start. It’s the only way anybody ever did anything, and then got better at it.
So read this article (or just the bits that are interesting to you) and then pick a way to get started, and begin.
Go now. There are other worlds than these.
The End
?