The Solo Roleplayer's Network

 I wanted to draw you attention to another project I have been involved in!

A while back I started talking about my great enjoyment of solo rpg podcasts, such as Tale of the Manticore, Legend of the Bones, and Stories from the First Watch.

Then I started my own: Swords Against Madness.

Since then I have joined a community of creators of these amazing solo-game inspired pods (as well as comics) and really found my tribe. 

Recently, with PJ Sack of A Wasteland Story as the idea man, and Jon from Tale of the Manticore as the voice of wisdom, and me as the tech monkey, over a dozen solo roleplaying podcasters set up a The Solo Roleplayers Network with a website where you can check out a wide variety of podcasts inspired by solo TTRPGs.

 There are so many amazing games being shared here (and I listen to all of them!)

• My own Swords Against Madness: psychedelic sword & planet played with Swords & Wizardry.

• Tale of the Manticore: a rich novel-like dark fantasy played with B/X D&D; TotM is the template on which most of the other podcasts are built for good reason.

• Legend of the Bones: a well-told dak fantasy heavily influenced by medieval Norse, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon history using B/X D&D.

• A Wasteland Story: a gritty, hard-hitting solo role-playing story set in the Fallout universe (matching tone with the original Interplay games) using the Fallout 2d20 role-playing game. 

• A Game of One's Own: featuring a range of indie TTRPG games played solo and turned into audio dramas to showcase them, including Mountaintop Isolation, Dragon Dowser, To the Bitter End, Pitcrawler, Death of the Author, Hedge Witch, Universe at Your Door, Forgery, Why We Fight, and Knockoff

• Errant Adventures: a series of solo games played in Ironsworn, Starforged, and Traveller, often intrigue-heavy science fiction adventures. 

• Stories from the First Watch: a grimdark fantasy with a rich story played in B/X D&D.

• Legends from the Fireside: an extremely old-school D&D adventure that really captures the 80s gaming vibe played with Old School Essentials. 

• Soul Operator: a surreal survival horror story focused on human relationships in the face of Lovecraftian horror played with Welcome to the Habitrails.

• Reflections in the Darksome Mirror: a tense and dark fantasy survival story played using the Darksome Mirror TTRPG. 

• Echoes of Eshaton: a post-apocalyptic primal punk scifi game played as short mini-series and snapshots that build on each other to paint a picture of a world rising from the ashes with Degenesis.

• The Lone Adventurer: a high-octane manapunk spy and crime thriller using D&D5e, Blades in the Dark, Chasing Adventure, and Warbirds - changing system to suit the needs of the narrative.

• Roll by Myself: a long-form game that alternates between actual play and audio drama based on it featuring two-session plays of solo journaling games such as Grandpa's Farm, Blood on My Name, and Deadline: A Clockwork Press. 

• The Chronicles of Nephes: an high-fantasy epic with intense storytelling played in  Nuovarden 

• The Solo Roleplayers Podcast: A podcast that is a mix of actual plays, interviews, and how-tos on playing solo TTRPGs. Includes playthroughs of Shadowdark, Forbidden Lands, Starforged, and Crown and Skull,among others.

And more being added all the time,

Game Review: Chasing Adventure

Author: Spencer Moore

Publisher: Self-Published

Engine: Powered by the Apocalypse

Marketplace: DriveThruRPG (free vers), game hompage

 Back in November I found myself with a very long series of waits on my hand on buses, in cafes, and in Hospital waiting rooms. I am trying to cut my screen time way back, so I decided instead I would grab Mythic GME and a book off my shelf and play a solo game over the course of the day.

I decided to give Dungeon World another whirl. I was not disappointed: I rather enjoyed the narrative complexity that came out of a storygame played solo (even if my players are still not interested in them.) I came up with a fantastic tale of a young princess, a squire, and an apprentice magician playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with dwarf terrorists in the Underdark. I gave the overall experience a 7/10, it was a good solo run, but in a lot of places it was marred by some of the flaws of the system, such as how easy it was for a bad roll or two to turn into an quagmire of bad events, and the fact that magic was often fickle and ineffectual. I made a pile of notes about how I would tweak the game in the future.

In March, I had to move house, and as I packed, hauled boxes by the dolly-full between houses, and unpacked every day for a month, I found myself binging a lot of solo semi-actual play podcasts that I was behind on, including the entire third season of the amazing The Lone Adventurer by Carl White. TLA tells a cohesive story of spies, thieves, and manapunk fighter pilots that is deeply engrossing. And one of the things he does that I really enjoy is that he periodically changes game systems to suit the kind of adventure he wants for the specific arc of the story. When he wants Bondesque action he plays D&D5e; when he tells crime stories he uses Blades in the Dark; when he is engaging in a long skyship voyage he plays Ironsworn; and airship battles are played in Warbirds. And for each he works very hard to explain the system and how it is producing the story he wants. After a few episodes in a given system, you have got a pretty good sense of how to play it and how it plays.

For one recent segment of The Lone Adventurer, Carl switched over to Chasing Adventure, a PbtA fantasy adventure game that was designed to work similarly to Dungeon World, but was intended to smooth off DW's rough edges, be mechanically a little lighter and more free-flowing, and a little less beholden to Dungeons & Dragons. Listening to Carl play got me quite intrigued, I went out and grabbed the free version immediately, and liked it enough to buy the full version a few days later.

The Far Horizon: A Setting Doodle

 I've been toying with a new way of writing campaign ideas down that is fun and idiosyncratic.

Start with the name of a god or faction, and describe its members. Then name how they are troubled by another group in a way that lets you flow into the next paragraph.

So, for example:

The Faction, who are a shifty group of people that terrible at coming up with names. They are insanely jealous of ...

The Appellomancers, wizards who have the power to rename things and transform the thing at a fundamental level. They are in an intellectual feud with...

...and so on. if you have a neat quirk or characteristic that didn't fit this format, add it as a footnote to your document.

I did an extended brainstorming session in this fashion, and found that it does a great job of getting you into a creative flow, and forces the creation of a more cohesive world.

My first experimental setting created in this manner I call The Far Horizon: an arctic tundra and mountain range that has recently been flooded by settlers and refugees. 

Here's what I came up with on my first attempt at using this method:

Product Review: One Shot in the Dark: Return to Duervar (& OSitD Expansion Module Maker Kit)

Author: Jon Cohen

Engine: One Shot in the Dark

Publisher: Tale of the Manticore

Marketplace: DrivethruRPG 

(Expansion Module Maker Kit DriveThruRPG)

I have recently had the privilege of being a playtester for Jon Cohen on One Shot in the Dark: Return to Duervar and I really had a blast doing it.

By way of full disclosure, Jon and I have been collaborating along with a few others to create a network for solo semi-actual-play podcasts, and he has been a voice actor on my podcast, so it is fair to say I consider him a friend and colleague. And I am a massive Tale of the Manticore fan. Portion your salt appropriately.

One Shot in the Dark is an ultra-light solo RPG scenario that allows you to have a pretty satisfying solo dungeon crawl in 15-50 minutes using a deck of cards and some D&D dice. You can read my review of One Shot in the Dark here. Suffice it to say that it is a great way to scratch the dungeon crawling itch, makes very few demands on your time, and costs as much as a large coffee. It is good fun, and I have played it a few times over the years.

Broken Wings

Q: How do you make god laugh?

A: Announce your plans. 

This month has seen me go to the funeral of two beloved relatives and between them fight my way through two different stomach bugs. My great hope of making May the month I breathe life back into Welcome to the Deathtrap went completely down the drain. I am even going to have to be a week behind on episode 19 of Swords Against Madness.

I have not let my creativity slack off, however. I took the time to put my notes on the Death in Space campaign I told you about earlier in the month into a downloadable format for anyone interested

Broken Wings includes:

• A pitch for a campaign set on Amissa based on scrounging in ancient industrial ruins.
• 6 PC Origins that fit on my interpretation of Amissa
• 20 Alternate PC backgrounds for a desert planet
• 6 Alternate equipment packages for characters who live on a planet

 And rules for incorporating them into a running game of Death in Space whether it is set on Amissa or not.

Download it Here

Artful Vaguness in Setting Design

 Earlier this month, I started a campaign of Death in Space with a few friends. Life and scheduling conflicts have forced me to put playing Undeadwood on hold. 

After my solo game last Christmas, I've been itching to play more Death in Space. I love flavour of dark science fiction that DiS brings. 

More importantly, The Tenebris System is an amazing starting point for a campaign setting. It has plenty of the ideas to get you rolling, but vague enough that you can put your stamp on it without too much difficulty. In fact, The Tenebris System is a brilliant case study of the technique of Artful Vagueness. 

Artful Vaguness:

Artful Vagueness is the skill of using suggestive or open language to elicit a response in a way that encourages the other party to use their creativity in answering.

The PDF Blues

Recently I found myself browsing DriveThruRPG with an increasing sense of frustration and disappointment. There are a lot of amazing titles on DTRPG, So many I could never read and review even all the ones that I would really want to in a lifetime. But at the same time I am having trouble finding ones  that I am willing to buy, because I can't get them in print.

And as I have spent the last couple of years adjusting to new challenges after suffering a brain injury, I have had less and less time to devote to doing the reading and reviewing that I should like to do. And I know that this blog has suffered for it.

When my I am in a state where I am healthy enough to read and review a product, I want it to be something special. I want that rare break in the pain and fatigue to be time best spent. And part of that is that I want to be able to hold the book in my hands, appreciate the art, the layout, and the design as the creators had hoped and intended. And when I test it in Solo play, I want to be able to do so away from screens.

Finding Art for Undeadwood

Every week both before and after I run a session of Undeadwood Weird West RPG, I work on the book. It has been a truly enriching and enjoyable experience taking so much time to build up a game, and fine tune it. I now have 6 months of playtesting under the belt, too, and I will very soon be ready to both update them development podcast, and release the full version of the game. 

It will come bundled with a VTT-ready 3D map of the sample adventure, a form-fillable character sheet, and a couple of other extras to make sure I am giving people a great head start with the game. 

If you are interested, there is a preview version of available on Drive-Thru RPG at the moment. That will eventually be updated to serve as a quick start kit for the game.

One of the biggest joys in building Undeadwood has been the way I have been hunting for art to fill the manual.  I have been pouring over pulp magazines dating from the 1870s through to the 1950s to find images to integrate into the manual. Because of it, I feel that I have created a very visually pleasing book. 

Uncredited cover from Spicy Western Stories,
A Western Pulp that ran 1936-1942

I wanted to share with you all the method I use for finding the art I am using in undeadwood so that you can use it to find artwork for your own role-playing game materials. 

Now, there is a caveat to this. I am working within the framework of Canadian copyright law. It is a slightly more restrictive form of copyright law than many countries have, but also less constrained than American copyright law. Check your own local laws before you proceed. 

Magazine cover by Rudolph Zirm (1894-1952)

In Canada, a work of art falls into the public domain 50 years after the artist's death if they died before 1973. After 1973 we updated the laws so that the work does not pass into the public domain until 70 years after the Creator's death. This means that currently, anyone who passed on before 1972 has had their work enter the public domain. Anyone who died in 1973 or later will not have their work enter the public domain until the 2040s. 

If a work is uncredited it passes into the public domain 75 years after the date of publication. 

Music and video recordings are not included in this: they enter the public domain 90 years after publication, meaning any recording after 1935 is still not available in the public domain in Canada. 

In order to find large color pieces, I started by looking for exciting pulp covers. Thankfully, there is an amazing blog that publishes nothing but on a daily basis: pulpcovers.com. Every piece of art is well tagged, and if the artist is known it will be mentioned in the tags or in the comments below the piece. 

Uncredited magazine cover for Western Short Stories
Which was in syndication from 1936-1957

Another option is to simply download a pile of pulp magazines to scour for images you like. Archive.org has a vast pulp magazine archive. To be on the safe side, I don't download any from earlier than 1950 for that purpose. 

If the artist is known, the next trick is to go to pulpartists.com and check the biography of the artist. Out of respect, I tend to do my homework on the artist in their life. It's always good to know a little more, and it feels less like a ghoulish activity. 

Interior magazine art by James McKell (1884-1956)

Magazines from before 1936 often didn't publish the artist's name anywhere in the magazine. And before the 1950s they often only credited the cover artist and none of the interior art. It pays to look up the staff artists for magazines of that era to do your own due diligence. If the artwork is signed, it's not considered anonymous even if the magazine does not present a clear signature for you to work with. (Google lens is very helpful for hunting down signatures) Some artists can be quite hard to pin down; either because they use pseudonyms, or were very private people.

Most of them are somewhat easier. If they aren't featured in pulpartists.com, certain Arts auction sites or newspaper archives can be very helpful. 

Once you feel safe that the artist is in the public domain, it pays to look at any other art of theirs available on the internet. And to look at magazines where they were frequently featured artists. It may give you a larger selection to work with. As pulpcovers.com tags by artist, this can be very useful for finding a selection of art you like. I absolutely fell in love with the art of Albin Henning, and was very fortunate to find almost four dozen of his pieces on the internet and in archived PDFs of pulp magazines. 

Now, the photostats of pulp magazines are rarely good quality, and often have a great deal of print on them. Especially in work published after 1930-40 or so, where book design trends had changed. pulps from the 1920s and earlier tend to have better separation of texted image. 

If your image is in a PDF rather than being simply a downloadable image, you may need to use the print screen button on your keyboard to collect a copy of the image at the highest zoom you can manage.

This is where Photoshop or GIMP can be very handy.  I recommend looking up tutorials on repairing images, as it would be hard to provide a good tutorial here. 

Once I got this method down it was easy for me to find hundreds of excellent, thematically appropriate art for my projects, and I thought it might be a helpful tool for the rest of my amateur designers.

An Atari-inspired Campaign for Traveller/ Cepheus Engine

I have been tinkering with a new campaign to play at home with friends and family inspired by my current binge of old Atari games and retro sci-fi. I wrote it specifically for Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition from Stellagama Publishing, but it should run with almost any form of Traveller with a few tweaks.

8 want something lighthearted that captures the kind of fantastical popcorn Space opera that you see in the premise of 80s SF movies like The Last Starfighter or in the manuals and comics that came with early console games.

The bad guys are vile, the good guys fly cool ships, and the stakes are very high. It is definitely not like the Third Imperium... although I decided to keep some of the best ideas of that setting.

Here's my pitch:

Cepheus: IRATA

Game Review: Along the Leyline

Author: Cole Wilkinson 

Publisher: Piranha Squirrel Productiind
Engine: Custom variable die roll over
Marketplace: DriveThruRPG

 I was recently sent a copy of Along the Leyline with the most Gen-X review request I'd ever seen. 'Here's a role playing game I made, I like your reviews. Have a copy, review it if you like.' It made my withered 80s kid heart grow two sizes. 

And so I was quite happy to sit down and peruse Along the Leyline and I have to say, I am glad that I have this game in my collection. Of all the games I've picked up in the last year, it is in the running for my favorite alongside Death in Space and for very different reasons.

While Death in Space is a beautifully designed book with a simple and elegant rule system and incredible production values, Along the Leyline is what what "roll your own" looks like! It is built with such incredible love and enthusiasm that it is impossible not to be charmed by it, even if it is full of simple hand drawn sketches, doesn't use any fancy layout or information design, and has rules that feel a little kludgy. Those just make the effort put into creating this from an army of one feel all the better. 

Atari Philosophy - Yars Revenge and Cairn 2e

I have been dealing with general chaos, sick family, family functions, friends in need, and an endless series of stressful diversions this month. While I get by fairly well on meditation, art, prayer, exercise, and reading, some times a guy just needs a diversion to help you blow off steam.

I am also trying to further disconnect from Social Media, because I don't see the point in just making myself angry for no profit. And what else does social media do these days? It sure as hell doesn't inform you of anything. So I have been looking for a habit to build to replace the habit* of popping on to X on my phone.

And I have found a great activity for both!

I recently picked myself up an Atari Pocket Player Pro, a little handheld device that was released for Atari's 50th anniversary by My Arcade.

Any time I need to take a quick brain break, instead of checking my feeds, I grab the gadget, and I play round of an old favourite like Asteroids, Warlords, Solaris, Yar's Revenge, or Missile Command. It takes me only a few minutes to have a satisfying round of Yar's Revenge, unlike a modern game it is easy to put down, and I will come out of it feeling happy and satisfied, rather than grouchy.

This is not a review of the particular device, but if you want some quick observations I will leave some as a comment. Why I'm bringing it up here is that I had a revelation about why I still love and enjoy these games so much, and why, even given the incredible limitations of the technology of the time, they were so darned good.

My Holiday in Outer Space: Cepheus Engine and Mongoose Traveller

Is is January 12 already?!

2025 has been absolutely crazy for me, readers! And not necessarily in a good way. I haven't had much time for hobbies since my Christmastime Dead in Space solo game. But I have had some new things land in my lap and on my hard drive over the Holidays.

Cairn 2e arrived on my doorstep as a late gift last week, and it looks amazing! I am trying to steal some time for a solo game to sink my teeth into it so that I can give you all a fair review. I was also able to replace my ruined copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia with the generosity of everyone who picked up Strange Ways last month.

But the more interesting thing that landed in my lap was synchronicitous.

Spending My Holidays in Outer Space

This Christmas I wanted to travel to outer space, so I brought my hard copy of Death in Space along. Death in Space is awesome, and I played a lot this holiday, but I wanted a bit of variety... 

For years I have had wanted to give Traveller a try as well. Originally written by Marc Miller for the impring Game Designer's Workshop in 1977. It was one of the first role-playing games, and was designed to be able to handle a wide range of different kinds of Science Fiction. It's fans have supported the game with such devotion that it has been in publication pretty much constantly since 1977 in some form or another, and the game remains backwards compatible with products released in the 70s today.

It's biggest influence was the book Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (the second of a trilogy), and a lot of elements, including how hyperspace works in traveller, the Sword Worlds faction, and elements of the history of its original setting, The Third Imperium of Man are lifted straight out of Space Viking.

Interestingly, a lot of pop sci-fi makes reference to Space Viking, but if you missed it (which is easy to do) you wouldn't catch them. For example, Space Viking includes a planet called Hoth and a starship called the Rozinante, which are borrowed respectively by Star Wars and The Expanse.

You can read the book on Project Gutenberg if you are curious. I did as part of my hoiday in space, and I don't think you'd be sorry.

I also made sure that Cepheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition, was on my tablet so that I could finally give myself a taste of Classic Traveller.

If you missed it in my Old-School Science Fiction Roundup, Cepheus Engine is a thrid-party retroclone of Marc Miller's original Traveller RPG, with a few minor quality-of-life tweaks. It was created a few years ago in order to have an open-source version of the game during a lull in its production by its current IP-holder Mongoose Games.

My wife took an interest in Cepheus Engine when I described its life-path character generation Although she didn't enjoy it in practice it led to us both taking a deep dive into the history and various versions of the game.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I saw that Bundle of Holding had a Traveller Bundle featuring a stack of manuals including both the 2024 update of the core rulebook, and the light-weight Traveller: Explorer Edition.