Adventures In Solo Roleplay

Over the years, I have had an interest in role-playing games and have had some great times in various systems and with different groups, especially with a group of friends over Discord during the pandemic. At times, similar to tabletop wargaming, finding time to play with my friends or groups of friends can be a bit of a Nightmare, like trying to get all the planets to align.

        a few months back I stumbled into a series of Tabletop games that are designed for multiplayer and have an element of Solo play to them, and have dabbled, so I had a Google wondering if there was similar with RPG's (seeing as when i was younger like most of my genaration the choose your own adventure books like fighting fantasy was a thing) I came across the Lone Roller and their story of Talti, it seemed a bit silly, the idea of using a game to create a story but i enjoyed listening to it and i decided to use chat GPT to be a DM i saw a reddit post about it. While I played a short 5th Ed game, I got frustrated with it as the enemies and the dungeons were repetitive or broken, the AI constantly wanted to please but changed the rules do i had to break the narrative to informit of such, so I scrapped that one (Silias the Divine sorcerer hunter of the fey, the idea was really cool, but the play sucked i want to do it properly as i think that will be an awesome story). 

        I then stumbled upon the Wasteland story from PJ's solo roleplayers podcast, which is a solo RPG using the Fallout 2d20 system (I had played previously and had enjoyed it) and liked his pacing. He was using the Mythic GM by Tana Pigeon as an oracle, which was a new thing to me. It was interesting and not as silly. He then released the Solo roleplayers podcast, where he chats about it, and he does actual plays. It was at this time (July 2025) that I stumbled upon a guest he had, Tales of the Manticore, which is a dark fantasy tale using older editions of DnD to play it, and as he says

 "Tales of the Manticore is a hybrid between a dark fantasy audio drama and a solo D&D RPG. The dice make all the important decisions and, as a writer, my job is to interpret them and tell their story. Part fiction, part game, it’s the story where ”Chaos rolls.” 

I really got sucked into the story to the point where I emotionally invested in some of the characters, and I still have trust issues listening to the podcast after some of my favourite characters were killed.

It was around this time that I decided to look into what's about solo RPG-wise, and as my Crazy brain went, it was an all or nothing. I downloaded a couple of simple one-page RPGs off of itch.io, found a solo supplement off of Drive Thru RPG and backed a couple of solo-themed Kickstarters, then got overwhelmed and did nothing. Fast forward to December, I decided to get out some of the RPGs I downloaded and try them out, and it was a lot of fun, so I have decided to share the experience on Blogger.

When I have a session, I will do a write-up of what I have played. Please feel free to comment and make any suggestions on games you enjoy.