Solo roleplaying, as old as the hobby itself, gives the tabletop RPG's open-ended storytelling to players without a group, and its journaling games have turned roleplaying into a literary, even confessional, form.
Hallmarks
- One player, no game master
- Oracles and random tables that answer the player's questions about the world
- Prompts that push the story in directions the player did not choose
- A written record, whether notes, a map or a full journal, as the game's output
- Reflective, often melancholy themes in the journaling strand
- Compact, often independently published rules, many sold as PDFs
What it is
A solo roleplaying game is a Tabletop Roleplaying Games played by one person, with no Game Master. The problem it solves is simple to state and hard to design: in a roleplaying game, the referee supplies surprise, the part of the world the player does not know. Solo games replace that referee with tools. Oracles answer yes-or-no questions with weighted dice ("Is the guard asleep?" "Yes, but…"). Random tables generate rooms, monsters, names and twists. Prompts force the story in unexpected directions. The player interprets the results, narrates what happens and records it.
A typical session looks like this. The player's knight reaches a ruined chapel and asks the oracle whether anyone is inside; the dice say "yes, and…", so someone is there and something more is true. A roll on a table suggests "betrayal" and "relic". The player decides that a former companion is prying a saint's bones from the altar, and writes it down. No one planned the scene, and that is the point: the dice supply the surprise a referee would, and the player supplies the meaning.
The genre has two broad strands. Adventure solo play runs familiar dungeons and quests through oracles or through dedicated systems built for lone heroes. Journaling games make writing the play itself: each prompt asks the player to compose a diary entry, a letter or a memory, and the finished game is a document, often a moving one.
Origins
Solo play is nearly as old as roleplaying. In 1975 the first issue of The Strategic Review, the forerunner of Dragon, carried Gary Gygax's "Solo Dungeon Adventures," tables that let a lone player generate a Dungeon crawl room by room as they explored. The next year Flying Buffalo's Rick Loomis wrote Buffalo Castle for Ken St. Andre's Tunnels & Trolls: a dungeon broken into numbered paragraphs, giving players a more directed experience than purely random dungeons. It is regarded as the first standalone solo RPG product, and Tunnels & Trolls went on to publish a long line of them.
The idea exploded as the Gamebooks & Interactive Books. Fighting Fantasy (1982), by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and Joe Dever's Lone Wolf (1984) put dice-and-character-sheet adventures in millions of pockets, while TSR, Inc. published Blizzard Pass (1983), D&D's first solo module, with hidden text revealed by an invisible-ink pen.
Evolution
Gamebooks were authored stories with finite branches. The modern solo RPG began when designers tried to generate the story instead. Tana Pigeon's Mythic Game Master Emulator (2003) was the landmark: a Fate Chart that answers a player's questions according to how likely the answer is, a Chaos Factor that rises as the story spins out of control, and meaning tables that turn random word pairs into plot. It could sit on top of any system, and it became the standard tool for "GM-less" play.
The 2010s produced systems built for solitude from the start. Shawn Tomkin's Ironsworn (2018), a dark-fantasy game released free and developed with feedback from online players, borrowed the "moves" of Powered by the Apocalypse design and structured play around vows sworn on iron; its supplements Delve (2020) and Starforged (2022) followed. At the same time journaling games flourished on the indie storefront itch.io, which by 2023 listed more than a thousand of them. Tim Hutchings's Thousand Year Old Vampire (2019) became the form's emblem: the player writes a vampire's centuries through prompts, while its limited slots for Memories force forgetting. It won gold ENNIEs for Best Rules and Best Production Values in 2020. The pandemic years, when groups could not meet, are widely credited with accelerating the genre's growth, and many Old-School Renaissance (OSR) publishers now include solo tables alongside their dungeons.
How to tell it apart
Versus the gamebook. A Gamebooks & Interactive Books is authored: its outcomes were written in advance and its branches end. A solo RPG generates events the designer never wrote, and it can continue indefinitely. Buffalo Castle sits exactly on the border.
Versus group roleplaying. The solo player is both the audience and the referee, deciding how to interpret each oracle. Group RPGs negotiate a shared fiction; solo play is closer to writing with dice.
Versus the computer RPG. A Western Computer RPGs (CRPG) also lets one person play alone, but the software enforces the world and its possibilities. The solo tabletop player can attempt anything, and must decide honestly what the world would do.
Versus the GM-less group game. Many story games remove the referee but keep a table of players; solo games remove the table too, though many (Ironsworn among them) support both.
Where to start
- Buffalo Castle and the Tunnels & Trolls solos — the 1970s beginning.
- Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf — the gamebook bridge.
- Mythic Game Master Emulator — the oracle that can run any RPG solo.
- Ironsworn — a complete, free solo fantasy game.
- Thousand Year Old Vampire — the journaling game at its most literary.
Marginalia
- In 1975 the first issue of The Strategic Review carried Gygax's "Solo Dungeon Adventures," tables for generating a dungeon as you explore it.
- Buffalo Castle (1976), written by Rick Loomis for Tunnels & Trolls, is regarded as the first standalone solo RPG product.
- TSR's Blizzard Pass (1983) was D&D's first solo module; nearly half its 309 entries were printed in invisible ink revealed by a special pen.
- Tana Pigeon's Mythic Game Master Emulator (2003) answers yes-or-no questions with a Fate Chart and a rising Chaos Factor.
- Shawn Tomkin's Ironsworn (2018) was designed for solo, co-op and guided play and won a 2019 ENNIE for Best Free Game.
- In Tim Hutchings's Thousand Year Old Vampire (2019), losing memories is the game: the vampire cannot remember what it no longer holds.
Quick answers
- What is Solo & Journaling RPGs?
- Roleplaying for one: a notebook, a few dice and an oracle that answers 'yes, but…', so that a lone player can explore a dungeon, swear an iron vow or write a vampire's thousand years of forgetting.
- What are the hallmarks of Solo & Journaling RPGs?
- One player, no game master; Oracles and random tables that answer the player's questions about the world; Prompts that push the story in directions the player did not choose; A written record, whether notes, a map or a full journal, as the game's output; Reflective, often melancholy themes in the journaling strand; Compact, often independently published rules, many sold as PDFs.
- When did Solo & Journaling RPGs emerge?
- 1975–76 solo dungeons and Buffalo Castle; GM emulators 2003; journaling boom late 2010s.
- What are the key works of Solo & Journaling RPGs?
- Tunnels & Trolls, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf and Dungeons & Dragons.
