Why Solo?

I have been playing RPG's (pen and paper role playing games) in one form or another since the 90's. Like many I was first introduced to the hobby through early editions of dungeons and dragons, although my earliest actual play experiences came through Warhammer fantasy roleplay (which I discovered along with a group of friends I played Games workshop games with) and a group of kids I knew at school who were playing Rifts.

Much as I enjoyed playing, getting a group together in a small town in rural derbyshire was hard and keeping regular meetups over any length of time was harder still. I probably spent far more time reading through rulebooks and dreaming about the worlds they depicted than I ever spent actually playing in those worlds.

This was especially true of the world of darkness books I collected through the late 90's and early 2000's. To this day I have never played in the world of darkness with a flesh and blood group, but I collected the books avidly. I loved the way the groups were depicted, especially Mage, and spent hours creating characters, designing adventures, and concocting spells without ever finding a group.

My first solo play experience came long before I knew it as an actual thing. Like many roleplayers I also enjoyed writing, and I was inspired by the (outright lie) claim that the dragon lance novels were written based on the adventures of an actual gaming group. What a great Idea I thought, and so I looked at the games I owned as a kind of system for creating stories. The most complete adventure I ran (and story I wrote) was for my GCSE short story entry, for which I ran a solitaire play through of the 'Oldenhaller Contract' adventure in the back of the Warhammer Fantasy roleplay book and chronicled my adventure as a short story. It was the only time I ever got an A* in english and it was thoroughly enjoyable, but it was an experiment that I never quite managed the time and focus to repeat (despite numerous attempts to carry those adventures on into the enemy within campaign).

As I grew older and finding time to meet with face to face groups became more and more difficult, I began drifting away from the hobby. I continued to collect and read interesting books and I even tried to join with a group of friends playing a regular D and D group, but I just couldnt keep up with the regular commitment.

With the surge of the internet, I had access to other peoples adventures, and began to enjoy reading 'actual play' reports online. It was one of these - a play through of an adventure in the dragonlance setting using the fate ruleset that introduced me to both 'Solitaire gaming' as an actual thing, and FATE, which quickly became my ruleset of choice. 

It was the gateway to a world of discovery. I quickly found and began experimenting with MYTHIC, and returned to chronicling solitaire adventures the way I had in my youth. It was a steep learning curve, and finding a system for guiding stories and campaigns in interesting and focused directions without becoming contrived is an ongoing experiment. I have had far more false starts than successful campaigns, but I am thoroughly enjoying the journey.

Why Blog?

Part of the reason I enjoy Solitaire roleplaying is because I enjoy writing. I enjoy chronicling the adventures I have, and without recording them they would somehow seem less real. I have never felt a driving need to publish my writings as I do it for my own enjoyment (my adventures sit amongst uncounted pages of story fragments and badly written poems that I have even less desire to publish). I do enjoy reading other peoples adventures however, and it only seems fair that I should share my own experiences in return.

I am not one of the worlds great writers, and my imagination travels well worn paths more often than truly novel ideas. My adventures are developing in spite of my talents rather than because of them, and because of that I feel it worth sharing a part of the journey I am on.

If anybody can get the enjoyment from reading these blogs that I have found in reading other peoples advantures then I will regard it as a success. If anybody finds inspiration from the tools I have used then I will consider the effort to be well worthwhile. And if not, then I have enjoyed chronicaling this journey on my own so far and will no doubt continue to do so.

Thank you for taking the time to visit. I hope you enjoy your stay, and please feel free to offer any costructive critisisms or comments you feel apropriate. I am learning as a writer, as a gamer, and especially as a blogger, and welcome whatever experience you care to share.