Launch

Welcome, Reader.

This is going to be primarily a solo RPG session blog.

I've decided to try and "give back to the community" by posting some of my solo adventures. I've enjoyed many hours of blogs, podcasts and videos from many talented individuals, and if anyone at all gets a little entertainment from my stories then that's good enough for me.

I've been playing TTRPGs (with some breaks) since the early 80's by my reckoning. The home PC industry was booming and I was totally into it. So when my friend at school suggested we play a game with heroes, wizards, monsters etc, I naturally assumed he was talking about a ZX80 game.

Instead he showed me red-box D&D. The rest, as they say, is history. I borrowed his set and tried to run it for my mother. She was game. This newbie GMs first mistake was to assume that "moving west" would involve the party moving 1 square west on the map. And then, you needed to arrive exactly on the room number depicted on the map to start the encounter. So the first corridor and room were pretty long ("go west ... go west ... go west again") and dull ("this part of the room is empty") as you might expect. 

In secondary school, the library had the AD&D 1st edition DMG and PHB. I started meeting more friends with the same interests, including one friend (sadly moved away and lost contact) who had cupboards full of all the old school classics like Tunnels and Trolls, Traveller and RuneQuest - and board games galore. I would end up buying some of the classic adventures (Temple of Elemental Evil, Against the Cult of the Reptile God) as well as games (Paranoia and Dragon Warriors), and homebrewing my own games (Mortal Kombat, Monkey Magic) but 1e AD&D was the game we all played most.

At some point we joined the work force and the games slowly dried up. Jobs and girls.

Roll forward until just a little before Covid. I think it was Geek And Sundry on Twitch that I stumbled across, and they were doing some actual plays, and oh the nostalgia! The one I most leaned into was Ten Candles, which is a shared storytelling game set in a world where the sun has gone dark. Most important? Almost no prep. I tentatively messaged my old gaming buddies who were still local ... "I know this is not the sort of game we used to play, but is anyone interested?"

It went amazing.

Then my friends started to dig up and dust off their own games.

At some point in all this, I found the Roleplay Rescue blog and podcast - it's premise is "how to get back to the table" so I listened along, and occasionally the host would dabble in solo gaming. Boom, addicted. So here we are today.