The Rabbit Hole
I went down a solo and standard playing card RPG rabbit hole after playing “The Wolves of Langston”, a 5e D&D solo adventure. I had a blast sitting at the table with some whiskey, a character sheet, and my tablet and after my first play-thru I wanted more. I started with the PDF but recommend a hard copy for that old school feel.
I was left wanting more, as well as curious about non-dice mechanics and pining for something with a mapping aspect since I’m a sucker for grid paper, a ruler and a new mechanical pencil.
- Four Against Darkness is a light dungeon crawler where you control four characters and roll for room shape, contents, and possible monsters, treasure, traps. Combat is fun and crunch-light. Tons of supplements and derivative works for different settings/themes, character levels, monsters, and expanded tables.
- D100 is similar but you’re a single character and combat is much crunchier with damage and gear per body part, with the ability to repair armor. I played a bit but got more into D100 Space.
Then I remembered a solo RPG Kickstarter I backed, Ironsworn. The system is fun but since I’m not a fan of low fantasy (give me magic! give me elves!) I didn’t play it much BUT he did release a sci-fi version that’s very Firefly/Star Wars aligned called Starforged so I bought that and played a bit and it was a BLAST.
Next, as someone that goes through a deck of cards a week due to constant shuffling and fidgeting I wondered if anyone had incorporated a standard deck into an RPG. The answer is yes. I checked out non-solo RPGs that use playing cards and really liked the world building and weirdness of Unbound and may steal some of the ideas for other games. It moves a lot of the world building out of GM prep and into the session zero as as group activity, with each person rolling a random world aspect that the group then weaves into a cohesive setting.
Another set of tables generates a shared core truth that binds the group together, followed by individual goals that others can suggest for your character. It’s just prescriptive enough to give the group a focus yet wildly open to how they achieve it.
Index Card RPG
That led me to Index Card RPG, which uses the classic six dice and stats but uses index cards to map out the adventure, with each index card representing a single location, reward, or situation, with a single value to use for all checks. One card might be a goblin camp that you have to move through, with a target check of 12. Want to go full murder hobo, beat a 12. Your bard craving some strange, clear a 12 for that sweet cross-species debauchery.
The target value can be adjust down by -3 (EASY) or up +3 (HARD), depending. That frisky bard recognizes some chill goblins from the last Fire Goblin festival (like Burning Man but cleaner), drop the 12 to 9. The murder hobos forget they were cursed by a peddler they swindled, that the next time they raised their weapons against the innocent their weapons would turn into flower bouquets and their armor into pastry dough, bump that 12 to 15.
While adventures are prepped with key locations players can still go off script. If they decide the wizard wasn’t paying them nearly enough to deal with horny goblins they can do the usual role-playing and once they pick their next move the GM can whip up a new card with the next encounter.
Less pouring over characters sheets for that one magic skill or spell and more creativity in the approach. Probably less fun for min/maxers that enjoy spec’ing out the ultimate killing machine. That’s what Baulder’s Gate is for.
Dungeon Solitaire
And that brings us to what I really wanted to share, Dungeon Solitaire (scroll down a bit on the page), a relaxing solo card-based fantasy adventure loosely based on the classic solitaire layout that uses a scoring system based on how much “treasure” you escape with to create tension. And you must escape, if you die or your torches go out, no points for you.
Just like solitaire it’s easy to mindlessly play once you know the mechanics.
There’s a slightly deeper system that uses tarot cards that I might try. Or I might spend the next three years perfecting my own highly stylized version, at least talking about it :)
May all your rolls be interesting…