From full table to table for one - solo and journaling RPGs

Somewhere tonight, someone is sitting alone at a table with a notebook, a pen, and two dice. She is playing a vampire centuries old, and the rules are merciless: only five memories fit inside that head. A new one has just arrived. So she draws a line through an old one. The first love, written in her own handwriting, three sentences long. Gone.

No game master reading it out, no fellow players watching. Just her, the book, and the line. And yet this is unmistakably a roleplaying game.

A hobby for company

The roleplaying game was born as a group activity. No people, no table, or so it seemed. But as early as 1976, two years after the first D&D box, something strange appeared: Buffalo Castle, written by Rick Loomis for the game Tunnels & Trolls. Numbered paragraphs, choices, dice. For the first time, you could enter a dungeon without anyone sitting across from you. The booklet even predated the famous Choose Your Own Adventure series.

Six years later, two Brits turned it into a phenomenon. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone appeared in 1982 through a children's book publisher, with dice, combat, and a promise on every cover: YOU become the hero. The cautious first printing of five thousand copies sold out in a blink, and the Fighting Fantasy series eventually conquered more than seventeen countries. A generation of children learned to die alone and start over, one finger held between the pages as a secret ward against death.

The oracle

Gamebooks gave you paths, but pre-baked ones. Anyone who wanted to play a truly open roleplaying game alone, with a world that responds, needed something else: a replacement for the game master.

In 2003, Tana Pigeon delivered it, with Mythic Role Playing. Her solution is called an oracle, and the idea is deceptively simple. Ask the game a yes-or-no question: is the door locked? Roll the dice, and the oracle answers, sometimes with a surprise that pushes your story somewhere you would never have taken it yourself. The game master, it turned out, did not have to be a person. It could be a table, plus your willingness to take the answer seriously.

Fifteen years later, Shawn Tomkin poured that thinking into a full modern game. Ironsworn (2018), given away for free, sent you through a frozen north as a lone oath-bearer, bound to vows you write yourself. It won an ENnie and is credited, alongside Mythic, with driving the current solo wave. By now, nearly every corner of the hobby has its own solo form; open Solodark today and you crawl into the Shadowdark alone, torch in hand.

The inner world

Then something unexpected happened. A new generation of designers turned the game inward. Not exploring a world, but a life; not drawing a map, but keeping a journal.

Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings, funded through Kickstarter and released in 2019, became the face of that wave. You play not a hero but a memory running out of room. Five memories, three experiences each, and every century forces you to choose what to forget. The game won two gold ENnies in 2020 plus silver for Product of the Year, and it still sits on our shelves.

In those same years, Chris Bissette built The Wretched: you as the last survivor on a salvage ship, with a deck of cards, a microphone, and a block tower that grows more unstable as your situation worsens. Bissette released the engine underneath as the Wretched & Alone SRD, and in 2020 dozens of games followed on that system. That was the year the world locked down and a great many players suddenly sat at the table alone; the genre exploded. How all those small games found their players is a story we read in the previous chapter: through counters that started running. By now the solo shelf runs wide: from a lone Viking in Kinless to a librarian in an infinite archive in The Librarian's Apprentice.

Is this even a roleplaying game?

The question always comes, so let us treat it honestly. For years, playing alone was seen as a sad substitute, something for people who could not find a group. That prejudice is stubborn and wrong: solo play is not a replacement but a form of its own, the way a diary is not a failed letter.

There is fairer criticism too. The boom of 2020 produced gems and a flood of rush jobs alike, prompt lists without a heart. And the best journaling games dig deep, into grief, loneliness, and loss; that is their power, but it asks the player to keep half an eye on themselves. A game that makes you cry is not broken, but it is not a casual evening either.

The line

Back to the table for one. The same idea runs through this whole series: a character becomes real through one concrete detail and one desire. At a full table you can hide behind that, behind the joke, behind the group. Alone, you cannot. There is no one to perform for. What remains is the desire itself, and a story that only exists because someone writes it down.

The vampire must forget. The player does not. The notebook stays behind, every crossed-out line still in it, and that may be the most beautiful thing about these games: even what is lost has been kept.