Games need rools and sometimes tools, and mine are no exception.
Me.
Even with Theatre of the Mind gaming, I find that having tools and tables, rules and regulations, journals and judgements etc. is incredibly helpful. Everything has the potential to contribute something to make the game more enjoyable. And having fun with this stuff has got be the Number One Rule, right? So here are the things I’m going to use starting out:
A Journal.
I used to write, write, and write some more for my campaigns. Almost as much fun running the campaigns for my friends, was the joy in the art of campaign creation and upkeep. I’d keep all the loose A4 sheets of notes; adventure hooks; characters I created; quotations from things that I had read; maps; chronological histories of regions; timelines of when NPCs were doing things behind the scenes…
I’ve kept folders of loose paper; entire boxes of campaign notes; snazzy books and diaries where I wrote it all down; huge sprawling documents on computers that sometimes didn’t survive.
I tried using campaign software and services like World Anvil (I’m getting there, but sometimes I don’t have time / enthusiasm to conquer the learning curves involved with those things).
I keep coming back to simple folders in my computer directory where I can dump all the info and detritus that the campaign produces. Not much beats that.
So Project Wonderland is a bit of an out on the limb experiment where I am putting everything online in the blog. Hopefully this means that everything will survive (yes. I’m looking at you, lost floppy disks with short stories, campaign notes, novel drafts, unfinished promising movie scripts, and time-sink maps that I painstakingly made with software. Or at least, I would be looking at you, if I knew where the hell you were.)
Because solo sandbox roleplaying is not face to face roleplaying, a lot of this is experiments to find solo analogues for stuff that you just kind of do automatically when you are face to face with others.
So like, in face to face gaming, once the GM describes something, he creates it in the minds of the players and from that point on the thing is basically real and as described. There’s no going back on that, although once created, anything can happen next. But there’s that deliberateness of calling it into being, manifesting the world bit by bit when describing it to the players.
With solo play, what am I supposed to do about that – talk to myself? (Well yes, I do that a lot). But how do I commit something into the game world with that finality that you get so easily from face to face gaming? The answer is: the journal. Everything I write, happens.
Now, I like breaking rules almost as much as I like making them (hmm, that might be the other way around, but anyway…) So in my journals I have two types of journal entry – In Character (IC), and Out Of Chararcter (OOC). Anything written with an OOC prefix is me thinking out loud, jotting down notes and ideas, speculating, brainfarting etc. And anything written with an IC prefix is like The Actual Story/Film of the campaign. Once it’s out there, it’s not changing. If I want to change it, I have to find a creative way to heave the story around to account for that.
Does this go wrong? Often. The main thing that goes wrong is that I forget to label stuff with prefixes. I come back and I’m like, “Did I decide if this actually happened or not?” The temptation to fudge stuff, to cheat on the story, is always there.
Game Rules
Most games are going to use a system or set of game rules, and most of these are going to involve using that game’s setting or game world (although notably, some of the best ones are hybrids or homebrews using different things from different games kludged together to produce little Frankensteins).
In most of the solo sandbox games I’m going to experiment on here on PW, part of the pleasure for me is exploring the rules systems to see what works and what doesn’t in terms of mimicing what is happening in the game world. Ideally, game mechanics support the weaving of the narrative, and are a boiling pot for story ideas.
Emulators, Simulators
I could write these solo sandbox games just like I was writing a story or a novel or a film. And sometimes, I will. But a lot of the time, I want to be entertained too – I want to be surprised by things that I didn’t anticipate, and I want to be challenged by things coming out of left field.
Enter the Emulator – in particular, the GM Emulator. While one of these things is not absolutely necessary, these days I wouldn’t be without one. Most of my early gaming years as a kid were filled with obsessing about coming up with emulation and simulation rules for things that I could just set in motion and watch how they unfolded. So when I came across some solo wargamers years ago who were using this new thing called Mythic which had just come out, I scratched my head like a lot of people but pretty quickly jumped right in because the water was very fine. (I owe a debt of gratitude to Bob from the Solo Wargaming group that used to be on Yahoo, because his explanations of Mythic and in particular his amazing campaign write-ups (which I still go back and reread these days, so good) were what got me hooked like a fish.
You can find the Mythic GM Emulator here, and there are a bunch of other Mythic resources that are equally fun depending on what you want to do with your game. Go check them out, but come back here because I haven’t finished yet.
Other Emulator/Simulator things that I use are:
Mythic
Mythic GM Emulator
Mythic Variations
Mythic Variations II
The Creature Crafter
The Location Crafter
The Adventure Crafter
UNE (The Universal NPC Emulator)
CRGE (The Conjectural Roleplaying GM Emulator)
BOLD (Universal Stories and Deeds Generator)
The Perilous Wilds
The Covetous Poet’s Adventure Creator and Solo GM Guidebook
Ironsworn
Powered By The Apocalypse
(But I warn you now, you don’t actually need any of these things, I just like collecting them.)
Tables
I love my brain but if I had to rely on it to remember everything and come up with new stuff on demand and make sense of everything and and and… well, let’s just say I wouldn’t last long before running out of steam.
So I use tables. I have tables for NPC personality traits; tables for how people might react when they meet someone else; tables for what you’ll find if you open a treasure chest in the desert; tables for what might be wrong with your vehicle or ship; you name it, I’ve got tables for it.
Why? Roll a D6:
| Die Roll (D6) | Result |
| 1 | I love tables. I like they way they feel real. |
| 2 | I like being surprised. |
| 3 | I love having to come up with reasons why something has happened. |
| 4 | I love how tables can be such a challenge to my cosy idea of where the story / game was going. |
| 5 | (Left deliberately blank for you to insert your own reason.) |
| 6 | I love The Dice Man and I re-read it every few months, and I have been known to use The Die to break my deadlock on real life situations. Don’t judge me. Wait – roll a D6: (1-5) don’t judge me, (6) you can judge me if you like. |
Software
I’m a sucker for supposedly time-saving tools that end up sucking the life out of me while I spend happy hours using them.
Scrivener
I love using Scrivener as a ‘gather everything in one place’ tool when I’m working offline. It’s great for novel writing, article research, game campaign creation, etc.
Excel
Everyone loves Excel as a way of organising tables of info and statistics, and even doing the odd bit of calculation every now and again.
Photoshop
Nobody needs Photoshop… but that’s like issuing a challenge to a fool like me. Mastering Photoshop is a lifelong quest but I will die trying. I use it to create graphics, gifs, backgrounds, icons, tokens, inspiring bits to illustrate things in my imaginary worlds, etc.
Vassal Engine
I have wargamed using Vassal for years, and it turns out that it’s a great way of playing solo too. Plus you can use it to generate maps and show movement of characters etc by taking snapshots as play unfolds. Great stuff, and free too.
This Person Does Not Exist dot com
A terrific website for producing ultra-realistic one-shot portrait photos of NPCs (and PCs too) which will never get you into copyright trouble for breaching image rights useage online because they are generated using a pretty sophisticated AI 🙂 A version of this website also exists to generate horses, cats etc. Whatever floats your boat. Keep hitting refresh until you find ones that you want to save (but save them, because they cease to exist once you move on to the next one! (thispersondoesnotexist.com)