thalassophiliascripte

[thalassophiliascripte]

Do you like making magic for your settings, but need ideas for what symbols you should use? Want to make sigils, but the methods available just don't hit right with you? Do you want to roleplay as a mage solving people's problems with spells and gylphs?

Well, this solo RPG may be your ticket to success in at least some of those things!

GLYPH, as stated by its itch.io page, is "...a single player adventure in runic magic, an exercise in creativity, and a supplement to add language and artistry into a variety of tabletop roleplaying games." It was made by the Oddments game company.

I've been watching the progress and creation of the RPG since its first posting and honestly, I love it! The ideas are simple, but creatively inspiring and fun to work with! The structure is minimal, but it is just enough to start your own ideas and make your work personal to you.

I'm not very good at explaining how good it is, but here's a page preview of what I have done so far!

It's only $5 and it's pretty obscure, but I highly recommend it! (This isn't sponsored or anything, I'm completely unconnected to Oddments or any of their workers.)

Here's the link:

@theresattrpgforthat

#solo rpgs #i love the concept for this

[thalassophiliascripte]

i think solo rpgs would be improved if you could get them in wacky, windows 95 word processor programs with like, buttons and effects for every time you wanted to generate a prompt

#othersthoughts #solo rpgs #yeah i'd play a game done this way #absolutely

[thalassophiliascripte]

what ifs: modular solo systems

As I've gotten further into playing solo rpgs, and further investigated the genre, I've found that my approach has been a lot of - not necessarily hacking the game itself, but often hacking different games together in order to include specific elements that I'm looking for regarding a singular experience. In this vein, I'm wondering if there's not space in the hobby for more modular systems, designed not to give a full solo experience on their own, but designed to hook together and combine in order to let a player decide where they want the core gameloop of their experience to rest.

If I ever design my own engine, I think this is what I'd want to be at the core of the design. I think it'd offer a lot of flexibility while also creating inbuilt compatibility and allowing more streamlined gameplay...though there is a part of me that relishes the active experience of finding new ways to use tools I already have access to as I play.

#mymethods #mythoughts #solo rpg #solo rpgs #the play of the game

[thalassophiliascripte]

chromium 2a

She was lucky there were more planets than just the first one in the Chromium system. The first touchdown on the gas-giant moon had been a bust—but there was plenty more for her to uncover here. Like on the mid-sized rocky planet she orbited now. The glittering expanse of stars beamed at her from the panel of glass in the hallway between her living quarters and the command-bridge of the ship.

There wasn’t a lot of time, but she leaned forward and pressed her face against it—and just breathed. The ship subroutines would include a scolding message for her in the logs tomorrow morning about her lack of attention to proper cleanliness and maintenance standards for exterior view-ports, but she couldn’t care less at the moment. If they’d wanted her to care what the computer thought, they wouldn’t have made it feel like the letters she got from her far-flung family: rare, untimely, and often with the air of disapproving of her general choices in life.

Her eyes fluttered closed as she stood alone in front of the vast expanse of space, only two meters insulated from the endless void.

Before long it was time to suit up again though. Her hair went into a braid, then a bun, then was finally tucked into the helmet of her space-suit. Seals were done up, vital monitors were engaged, and equipment were checked and double checked. She headed for the gangplank, and hit the button for the airlock door once more.

Sys.log: First Impressions

The notification system on her wrist marks a ping the moment her foot touches the planet’s dusty surface.

It seemed that unlike Chromium 1b, the notable features of 2a were located far underground. Which meant that she’d need to find a way down there in order to investigate, fulfill her exploration obligations, and find samples. She glanced out over the barren wasteland around her—it didn’t seem as though the Chromium system had birthed any life. What she had seen so far were vast isolated verandas, and the view stretching before her was yet another one.

It was so similar to what she felt standing before the viewport in her ship. It was so alien to everything she’d ever felt before. She didn’t know the last time she’d heard her own voice. The notification system pinged again. Her scanners had found a cave entrance.

She had her way down.

Sys.log: Descent

The cavern mouth yawned before her. Thick powder caked the crevices around it, evidence of powerful erosive wind that she hadn’t yet encountered. Her boots sank down into it, until it covered her boots up to the ankles, teasing at the seal where her suit ended. She wrinkled her nose and peered down into the depths. She couldn’t hear anything that wasn’t recorded and piped into the helmet of her suit—and the device worked well to filter out environmental background noise—but she thought she could hear her breathing echoed back at her from deep within the hole in front of her.

She flexed her fingers and activated the flashlight at the end of her gloves and the one embedded into the center of her helmet, between her eyes, and began her descent.

The walls crooked full of ragged rocks, with faults and cracks that seemed the result of whatever pressures and winds arose on the surface. She wouldn’t be surprised if this was a planet eternally wrecked with storms. She’d likely landed in the only patch of calm weather in a very long time.

Her feet sank into the powder as she pressed inward and downward, hunting for the elusive signal that her scanners had detected. The hologram of a map flashed on her wrist, the ghost bones of some ancient pattern surrounding her, promising her something worthwhile to add to her report. Her feet slid beneath her, and she kept going.

Sys.log: Ruin Filled Caverns

She wanted to chalk it up to her imagination when she first noticed—but after a handful more steps into what could only be the remnants of a long forgotten city, she gave in to the realization that the walls themselves were glowing. It was not a strong glow, she had seen brighter bioluminescent algae on Myril, but it was enough that she could make out the corners and contours of every crumbling building and disintegrating wall.

There had been people here once. Her hypothesis about the Chromium system was wrong—but not entirely. For whoever had lived her once was long dead. Dust and the fine powder from the surface dulled the glow, and proved that she was the first person to set foot in these caverns for at least a millenia, if not more. She looked around more closely, trying to figure out if she could uncover why the city had been so totally abandoned.

Stepping closer to the wall, she realized. The powder down here was different than the surface. Down here, the powder came away black on the fingertips of her gloves. Char. Soot. Things had burned down here, and there was every likelihood that the fine powder that sifted across the dusty surface was comprised partly of bones. She shuddered, and stepped back toward the middle of what used to be a street.

Walking through the ruins was less the awesome experience she’d had on other planets, and more the acknowledgment of an unknown mausoleum. A tragedy had taken place here, and she would do nothing to undermine the profound solemnity that such a truth required.

The walls had been carved with art, beautiful runes in angular shapes that she could not read—perhaps that no one left in the universe could read. She had not seen any other signs of life on this planet, after all, and the evidence of storms on the surface could have been the result of any extinction level event.

She swallowed, and looked around once more. She’d snagged a pebble that had fallen from one of the walls as a sample of that glowing rock—and that was all there was left to do here.

She made it back to her ship quickly, and the glowing pebble bid farewell to its home planet, and found itself tucked next to the strange chrome fruit as evidence of her ventures through the Chromium system.

NEXT PLANET

#solo rpg #alone among the stars #myadventures

[thalassophiliascripte]

chromium 3b

The third planet she visited in the Chromium system, labeled Chromium 3b by her navigational software, wasn’t really a planet—hence the ‘b’ designation. It was a moon, orbiting one of the handful of gas giants in the system, and it was completely covered in ice. Yet the ship scanners detected something interesting, and so she’d be finding her way down to the planet’s surface, somehow.

She sat in front of the bridge computer, tapping her fingers against the console. The imaging system was slowly compiling all the information the ship could glean about the makeup of the planet, so that she could attempt to figure out how on earth she was supposed to document the hostile surface of a planet whose winds carried ice-knives that would be able to chop her up into little pieces.

The console played the little jingle she’d composed during one of the inter-system flight periods as it finished compiling. She squinted at the screen.

It seemed this planet too had vast spaces underneath the crust of the planet—she realized what she would have to do. It was time to pull out the transporter matrix again. Not her favorite tool to use in the field if she could avoid it, but a tool that she could be content using all the same, and it would be able to get her down to the hollow spaces inside the planet without needing to try and navigate the treacherous atmosphere.

She typed in the command for the computer to unfold the matrix from storage, and then left to go put on her space-suit once again.

Sys.log: First Impressions

It was like standing in the lungs of the planet. Dark, for the most part, save where her finger-lights and helmet flashlight shone, with each ray of light catching the glittering formations of ice that made up the walls around her. She breathed out, and pretended she could see the water vapor crystallize in the air.

She trekked through the cave, keeping an eye out for any unusual features. The twisting cavern led down, further into the bowels of the planet, and she took a moment to consider whether she truly trusted the depths below—or whether it would be best to explore in the other direction, where it would be easier for the ship’s transporter matrix to pick her up.

She wasn’t here to stay in her comfort zone. The depths of the planet called to her, and she would simply have to deal with whatever mysteries lay beneath as they made themselves known.

Sys.log: Oceans Inside Glaciers; Further Ruins

She didn’t expect the moment where the ice turned to stone. Nor did she expect the moment where water began to lap at the stony shore next to her boots. The cavern had opened up around her nearly a mile behind her, as she’d continued to walk. She peered out at the darkness, wondering how far into the distance the water stretched. Was it a lake, or something more?

If she weren’t in her suit and helmet, she would have tried to taste the water to figure out the truth. As it was, she had to settle for running a chemical composition test on her limited personal scanners, and waiting to see the results.

Saltwater.

On any other planet, this would be a sign that the body of water before her was large enough to consider an ocean—but with the limited vision and limited sensors and scanner arrays available to her, she would just have to hypothesize. Though her perceptions of the planets she explored counted for much, they did not count for the totality of the professional judgment. She frowned and set off along the shoreline.

A twisted obelisk carved from ice and a pale white stone loomed out of the darkness at her, and she slowed down to regard it with curiosity. She hadn’t seen anything like the stone before, and the ice had all but vanished at this depth.

She circled around it, trying to gage the detail, the size, and the embellishments that had clearly been carved into it. Upon reaching the other side, she stopped and stared. There was a statue embedded into the obelisk, a statue with humanoid proportions and with shapes that in every way reminded her of another human.

It was lithe, the figure, and vaguely mammalian, with unusually smooth skin. Like a human, the figure has hair on its head. Unlike a human, there was a third joint on each of six delicate fingers, and a thin web that stretches between each finger at the first knuckle. A tendril emerged from the base of the alien statue’s elbows, and twisted around the forearm, only to break free and flex alone at the wrist. She raised herself onto her tiptoes trying to get a better look at the statues’ face.

It blinked at her.

His eyes were as icy as the rest of planet, with a pupil that looked as though it were caught in the middle of mitosis, part way through division or consolidation, something half and double all at once. He smiled at her with sharp teeth, and one hand curled into a fist to rap against the ice that trapped him inside the obelisk.

She stepped back in shock, and the alien’s face shifted to look something like regret, fingers splaying out to press against the glass with a remorseful tilt to his head. He tapped the glass again, but this time with one elegant finger.

He wanted to be free, she realized. Her heart hammered in her chest. She could set him free, if she wanted to—if she thought he wasn’t a threat. He was the first humanoid that she’d seen in months, maybe even years, if she allowed herself to think about how long it had been anywhere other than in her bed on her ship during assigned sleeping hours. Here was the chance for her not to be so alone anymore. He was the chance for her not to be so alone anymore.

She swallowed, and began to investigate the obelisk that trapped him. It’d be so nice not to be alone anymore.

NEXT PLANET

#solo rpg #alone among the stars #myadventures

[thalassophiliascripte]

chromium 1a

Sys.log: First Impressions

She spotted the orchard as she was resting. There was a cold biting breeze that scuffed along her neck, psychosomatic proof that she was alone and that her surroundings must be as cold as they appear through the glass of her visor, and she looked toward the horizon with her weary shoulders slumped. There was a bitterness in her heart, and she didn’t know what to do with that. It was new—perhaps the only new thing in the world.

Cold steam erupted from the mounds of glittering diamonds beyond the tangle almost-trees, curious and twisting in the faint far light of the white-green star that served as this system’s sun. Whether the distance tainted it those curious colors, or there was something about this planet’s atmosphere, she didn’t know. If she stayed long enough she’d probably discover the reason—but she rarely ever stayed long enough. She shivered and, out of misplaced curiosity or perhaps a lack of anything better to do, set off toward the cluster of curious features.

It only almost looked like an orchard, and looked less like one with every step she took closer; though between the smooth surface of the planet, and the endless starry skies above, it could never have been an orchard she’d ever seen before. What passed for trees thrust from the ground in a twisting briar-bramble of awkward limbs and uncanny boughs, gleaming with the mercury-chrome slickness native to this planet that was done better than any factory product she’d ever seen among the forge-world close to the galaxy’s core.

Along each branch fractalled nodules of fist-sized fruits, colored darker than the branches, like steel or charcoal stained glass. Upon reaching the cluster, she reached out with her off-white gloves and attempted to pluck it from the stem. The stem bent back and forth, and then tore with a crack that sounding like shrieking metal, like the Demetrius had sounded on her first, ill-fated, pilot’s drive.

The fruit squished slightly under her tightening fist. The juice stained her fingers light lilac-purple, as it burst open. She blinked. She hadn’t noticed how hard she was squeezing.

Well—that could have gone better. She’d always been told to be more gentle when dealing with new specimens. She picked another fruit from the tree, reached for the satchel at her side, and tucked the new sample inside.

Then she scanned the area around her. Time to move on, and explore more of this strange planet. She’d need to make a classification soon, and time was running out.

She clicked open her audio-visual recorder, and began a new section of her exploration. The screen crackled sharply. She was supposed to voice over her explorations. It was easy to stay silent in an environment like this.

Sys.log: Strange Trees. Possible Cryo-volcanic Activity

Right—she’d seen those mounds earlier. They’d be a fine place to continue her exploration of this cold and gleaming planet. She found herself hoping nothing would go too badly as she trudged toward the hissing hills.

That thought was enough to damn her, of course.

As she set off across the curiously smooth terrain, trying not to track her reflection’s mirror movement too closely, the ground shuddered and moaned beneath her feet, with a similar twisting and shrieking to the twisted fruit trees. In her hurry not to trip and lose her footing, she missed the singular instant that her reflection fell out of synchronity with her, the moment where—if you peered deeply into her double’s tinted vision—you might be able to see her reflection’s face, twisting and snarling with hatred. Juice still dripped from the gloves of her space-suit.

Despite the heaving ground, she was able to keep herself steady with the ease born from spending summer after summer on the oceans of and quaking shores of her homeplanet, Myril. She was just lucky that this planet didn’t have any seas to threaten destructive force after the planet’s desperate anger. The smooth flat landscape, with its scarce hills and rare gentle swells, would make it hard to run from a tidal wave, if one came. The quake was over as soon as it began, and she was left regaining her equilibrium. If that was the worst this planet had to offer, she would be fine.

After the last of the aftershocks had passed, she let her guard down too quickly—in her defense, with all the monitors on her suit reading plunging temperatures, and the ship’s sensors claiming the planet had a rocky, oozing, half-solid core, she hadn’t been expecting the icy geysers to be volcanic.

But, as it turned out, she’d landed on a planet which seemed to hate her. The mounds she’d been about to climb began to hiss and sputter more urgently than before, and bits of frost belched from the pockmarked holes in the ground. She’d thought they were some sort of strange geyser before—she’d been wrong.

The ground roared as it expelled vitriol at her.

The core of the planet was just as sluggish and frozen as her ship sensors had promised. She’d underestimated the other strange signs, the other curious energy readings, the eerie stillness of a world so static and unchanging. Something had held it in stasis, and she’d disrupted that in moments.

Icy chunks of metal spewed into the sky, and she turned and sprinted for her ship. There was no time to make it all the way to the mounds, to see what they were made of, why they sparkled in the minty starlight—she had to stay alive.

The gangplank rang underneath her feet as she sprinted for the button, hit the airlock, and began emergency takeoff procedures. She couldn’t stay here a moment longer than she already had. Not if she wanted to leave with her life.

The little chrome fruit glittered bright and tarnished silver in her bag where she slung it by the doors, shaking—and that too went unnoticed, as she guided the ship back into interplanetary orbit.

NEXT PLANET

#solo rpg #alone among the stars #myadventures

[thalassophiliascripte]

hi

i'm playing a game of solo trpg Starforged. i wrote an intro for it. you can read it, if you want

“ViviCor Platoon 1.2.1.93. By the Investors’ will, advance.”

“You heard the orders! Advance!” The Vivipar Corporation lieutenant’s voice boomed over the discord of the battlefield, amplified by the bio-augments leased to the Trust’s field officers. With a hoarse roar, the remaining soldiers of the 93rd clambered clumsily out of the trench they’d dug into, slowed down by the bulky exochitin armor they wore. A salvo of enemy shells hit mere meters off, sending shrapnel pinging off boney plates and vaporizing one of the platoon. The remaining members charged heedlessly forward, firing their shardthrowers in a desperate attempt to cover their advance. Plasma torches sparked, crimson flames clashing with the deep green of the enemy’s magia blades. The lieutenant stood back, barking orders pointlessly in an attempt to influence the desperate struggle. Then, in an instant, a piercing shot rang out, a viridian afterglow the only evidence of the enchanted bullet that pierced through the breast of the officer.

“Platoon 1.2.1.93. Your contract has been terminated. Your leased equipment is due for repossession.”

ViviCor Trooper 93.Eta had fallen back in terror when he heard the sniper shot, and this gave him the precious distance he needed to escape the coming massacre. In an instant as the 93rd’s torches sputtered out and the synthflesh holding their armor on sloughed off, the tide turned on them, crushing them underfoot. 93.Eta scrambled away, picking up the first functional weapon he could find as he turned tail and ran. Running was all he could do, after seeing his own face twisted in a dozen different agonies as his identical allies were slaughtered. Heedless of the shot and shrapnel, he rushed to the first piece of cover he could find, a crashed Alliance dropship smoldering in a crater. As his artificial adrenalin feed slowed and his grafted arm twitched its way towards turning on him, he took the blade he had found, a shattered dagger of some metal unknown to him, edge like a razor, and shore the biomods from his rigged limb, leaving him with a skeletal prosthetic and a searing pain. This he jammed into the dropship’s uplink port, desperately hoping whatever protocols his rig had would interface with Alliance tech. Whether luck or fate, the ship’s sublight engines roared to life, stone screeching against metal as its hull was wrenched free from the planet’s surface. Whatever guidance routines had been punched in before it was shot down took hold, rocketing the dropship into orbit as 93.Eta clawed the body of the pilot out of the cockpit and slumped back in the seat, too exhausted to do anything besides let the automated systems go to work as he drifted into unconsciousness.

#starforged #othersadventures #oh this looks really interesting - there's a lot going on already!

[thalassophiliascripte]

Itch.io Solo Games Bundle!

If you're looking for new games, don't forget! The Solo But Not Alone 4 bundle runs until March 8!

#games

[thalassophiliascripte]

cannot tell you how much i love solo rpgs. there are so many options out there, there is so much creativity both with what you can create and what you can play. there's space to do something mechanics heavy and there's space for journalling and witing focused rpgs. they allow for introspection and exploration without the need to share what you discover about yourself and your character with anyone else, the experience can be yours and yours alone if you so choose it. it's a space to develop creative writing without the pressure of it being A Story To Tell because you can label it as just a fun lil game you're playing, nothing serious. it's creativity for the fun of creativity! it doesn't matter if that plot point doesn't make sense, you're just playing for you and no one else. there's no one else's whims to consider. you're not dependent on the availability of other people to play with you but there are still wonderful communities around solo rpgs that you can share your experiences or rpg's that encourage or allow you to play solo and compare notes/interact with what other people have created. when i had friends who wouldn't invite me to game nights my solace was playing solo rpgs because there's no way to feel left out of a game that you're playing solo. there are rpgs that are creating horror stories and rpgs that are about a mouse going on an adventure in the garden. there are rpgs that can be long and arduous and keep going forever and rpgs that you can do in a couple of hours. there are SO MANY cool options and it's such an accessible way to start playing rpgs or writing and creating them and i love them with all my heart

#othersthoughts #i've been delighted by the lack of pressure in what i've been playing so far #it's really refreshing and relaxing compared to my other hobbies not to have any of that outside pressure

[thalassophiliascripte]

How I Take Solo RPG Notes

Some people have asked me what kind of notes I keep when I do solo roleplaying games. I have been kind of vague about it in the past because it's hard to describe but I thought I'd show some snippets from a game I'm starting up using my 3x3 system.

Here's my character notes:

The stats for 3x3 are very simple. The three traits I chose are just typical druid stuff for a high fantasy style game. For her background, I used the Cotton Eyed Joe Method of Character Creation I came up with a while ago.

I tend to play from primarily the character's point of view rather than switching between GM and player. I think of what questions she would have and then I generate details. It mimics her discovering the world in a sense.

For those following along with the 3x3 main card, the IT is the inspiration table on the back.

I pause whenever there's a new question or some action that needs some rolls to resolve. Here I decided on a mind check because I wasn't sure how much she'd know about babies.

I pair my skill rolls with the oracle I have on the card as well. Just as an additional jumping off point beyond merely a success or a failure.

Here the mind check was just to see if her perception/investigation check was a success or not. I was struggling some with these inspiration prompts but decided to do the best I could.

At this point I have a vague idea of where this story might go. The child might be the illegitimate child of a god who was being hidden by a devoted cleric. A beast sent by the god's partner was sent to attempt to kill the child and the cleric but both survived. I'll see if Rayel is able to help either of them in the end and what the gods involved decide to do about it.

This is all in Notion btw. It's nothing fancy. I try to keep it simple or I get lost in the architecting and not the playing.

I hope this is at least a jumping off point for people! It's quite fun!

#othersmethods #oh interesting!

[thalassophiliascripte]

For this weekend's dive through the archives, "The Forest Depths" by Urisdice. This is an odd one, as I wasn't involved in that zine project in any way, I just really liked it, and wanted to make a little AP comic of the first section of the game.

Also, "Tritone" may be the best pun name I've ever come up with.

#othersadventures #the forest depths #OH THIS IS SO GORGEOUS #the colors are phenomenal #the designs #the atmosphere #the music that cuts around the action #that panel with the squid and tritone is just magnificent #the game seems like such a revere and ethereal experience

[thalassophiliascripte]

So you're looking for a system other than D&D...

Have you tried solo RPGs? Because it's not just "how can I play D&D alone" there's a whole world of cool stuff out there….And I want to tell you about it.

(I'm quite sick today so please forgive any incoherence or typos.)

First off, it's totally fine if you're more of a party person over a solo person. I just know a lot of people aren't aware of solo games, how they work, or the breadth of diversity you find among them.

If you ask about solo games, the first one mentioned is almost always Ironsworn. It's freeeee and comes with a lot of resources. The PDF is over 200 pages, so I understand if you don't want to dive in with Ironsworn quite yet.

Ironsworn has a large community, including support for Foundry and Roll20, along with many derivative works. It offers a gritty default fantasy setting, but encourages you to ignore that if you prefer another world… maybe one from another RPG you enjoy the lore from…?

BUT maybe you want something that isn't as much of a commitment (and maybe a little sad)?

Many Wretched and Alone games use a tumbling block tower to simulate a random ticking clock. It might represent your failing mental health, the barricade crumbling, the ship sinking…

One of the creators of the system has a great thread highlighting their favorite games. Just search Wretched an Alone on Itch.io to find even more.

And if you don't want to go buy a Jenga tower, there are some great random simulators out there. I've been able to play W&A games on road trips, using a deck simulator, a dice simulator, and a tumbling tower simulator. Here's tower replacement I like. It replicates the odds of a tumbling tower falling without being too complicated.

Carta is another cool system where you use a standard deck of playing cards to create a map that you explore. As you explore, you usually have to manage resourses to avoid something bad, but not always.

Here's a collection of several games made using Carta.

Dead Belt takes this concept and RUNS with it. You have a few things to track as you explore abandoned randomized ship decks, searching for a good payload. Upgrade your gear and do it again.

Does the thought of managing your character sound exciting? Do you enjoy soulslike games, like Elden Ring and Bloodborne?

Rune is a fresh release with a lot of third-party support already. It's pretty easy to pick up and play too.

Apothecaria and Apawthecaria have you making potions for the local village. Go out exploring, collect ingredients, and see if you can solve the greater mysteries of the land.

Interested in horror, but want a more narrative-driven experience? In Dwelling, you'll spend the night sleepless and alone in a haunted house. This is a very neat game.

Songs of the City is a delightful tarot game that you play once a day for a week. It's another narrative-driven game where you draw cards and cast magic to see small neat changes in the city you reside in.

Anamnesis, Anamnesis, Anamnesis. I talk about this game a lot because it's magical in its simplicity. There's nothing to track and it's an incredible way to generate character ideas or tell a story.

And now there are more Anamnesis games coming out (including mine) You don't need the original games to play any of the games you see here.

There are so many more games I want to talk about, but alas, this cold is making me stop there.

If you've written a solo game, streamed one, reviewed one, or have one you really like, I invite you to share it!

#i am trying one for the first time and it's so much fun! i was not expecting it to be this much fun tbh