About
What is Solo Stories?
The purpose of this blog/site is to give a little back to the community of online solo RPers and hopefully do my bit to help those who follow to find their way into the hobby. Posts will be playthroughs and reviews of whatever solo TTRPG is currently on my table. Happy soloing!
What is 'solo role play'?
A normal first reaction to hearing about Solo Role Play is "How does that work? How can I be surprised if I'm deciding what happens next?" You might wonder how on earth you get started, or whether you need to be an aspiring writer to get anything out of the hobby.
There are Youtube channels and Discord servers and all sorts of places you can go for advice, but when I got started I found that the single most useful resource was other people's actual play blogs. Seeing the story threads interspersed with the mechanics and little insights into the writers' thought process; seeing all these different players with their own take on solo gaming, it helped me realise that there's no right or wrong way to play and that getting started is as simple as sitting down with a book and throwing your character into a tricky situation.
And when I played my first game I quickly found that, despite many years of trying and failing, I can actually write an interesting story! All I need is a prompt or a dice roll to shunt my brain off its well-worn narrative rails and inject some randomness into the process. Soon I was surprising myself and enjoying the solo ride just as much as I enjoy the shared play experience. I think anyone can have this moment of revelation.
Like all hobbies the hardest bit is getting started, the key is not to overthink it. Hopefully this blog helps with those first tentative steps!
Who are you?
Hi! I'm Andrew. I'm a nerd who got into tabletop roleplaying via tabletop wargaming and D&D podcasts.
If you would like to interact with a near-real-time version of me you can find me on Mastodon @fst0pped@tabletop.social.
Tools and tricks
For shorter journalling games or games where paper and pen help the vibe, I write first on paper and then type up onto the website. However, for longer form play (like Ironsworn) I'll use a notetaking app on my PC and convert to HTML with a Markdown > HTML converter. Links to some of my favourites below:
- Obsidian - A hugely flexible markdown-based note taking app. Designed to be used anywhere, I have this set up to sync across devices via GitHub but you can pay for a subscription to the Obsidian vault if you don't want the technical hassle. Other note taking apps are available, but this one is mine.
- Iron Vault - A plugin for Obsidian that turns it into a virtual tabletop for playing Ironsworn. Includes the moves and oracles, and has features for managing progress tracks and world truths. Even has a built-in dice roller that will automatically pick up your stats and prompt you through the process of building a dice roll. An amazing tool which is still actively under development.
- Iron Journal and PocketForge - Progressive webapps for playing the Ironsworn family of games. Loads of useful features to help you with moves and oracles, to build and track your character's development, the NPCs you encounter and even to make and update maps of your world to chart your travels. I found these incredibly useful in the beginning, and the only reason I'm not using them now is that I like the security of GitHub for backup and sync of my ongoing campaigns.
Obviously mucking around with HTML and CSS is also one of my hobbies. This site started life on Neocities and while I thoroughly enjoyed building a website like it's 2003, I ended up rubbing up against some of content policy restrictions while adding things like comments. There are tools that have made working with a static site much easier, significantly reducing the friction to sharing here and increasing the odds that I keep coming back and posting updates.
- Mastodon comments web component - Web component that lets you link a Mastodon toot to your post and surface any replies to that toot as comments on the post. A very neat solution for getting comments onto static blog, and a nice use of the Mastodon API.