Day in the Life of an Idiot

 Last night I started a new solo RPG. It's called ALONE in the Wasteland: a Journaling Adventure to Find Your Character in a Post Apocalyptic World. So far, I'm enjoying it. To be fair, I'm only two rolls in and I had a bit of a false start, but, all the same, it inspired some really crazy science fictional dreams last night. 

I'm thinking about a way to suggest a panel on Solo RPGs at Gaylaxicon this year. One of the guests is an editor at Modiphius (Jim Johnson) who did a lot of work on Captain's Log, which is the Star Trek: Adventures solo RPG. I'd love to talk to other people who actually play these. I've played a number of them at this point. 

• The Last Tea Shop (my favorite so far)
• Flying Courier
• A Faerie Court Visitation (which I tried to complete twice, and failed both times.)
• Axe-Weilding Cleric

Most of them have been met with mixed success. I am, I'm discovering, picky. Part of my problem is that, as a writer, i want something that's more restrictive than a simple story or journalling prompt. Flying Courier was a disaster for me because it basically just asked you a bunch of questions and said, "Go." And, while I imagine that's absolutely perfect for most people, coming up with stories from full cloth is, in point of fact, my day job. So, I want something a little more structured. Otherwise it starts to feel less like play and more like work (for me!)

Meanwhile, I really wanted to love A Faerie Court Visitiation. The concept is very cool. Basically your hand has been pledged in marriage as a result of one of your ancestor's foolish deal with a fae creature. So here it is, however many generations into the future, and the promise has come due. The problem I ran into with this one is that some of the prompts were actually too specific.  At any rate, I like to be able to do the unexpected in my games, go where my heart wants to go.  Too scripted feels wrong, too. As an example, during my second attempt at this game, I pulled a Eight of Spades on what was supposed to be day 2 of this adventure. That card gave me the prompt, "After sitting through a long meeting in town at the faerie royal's side, you slump against a wall to catch your breath. Your eyes linger on the paintings and tapestries: perhaps there could be a passage behind one."  It was clear that the prompt wanted me to check behind the tapestries, but I didn't want to sneak behind the wall right now. As I wrote in my meta game colored pen: "It feels too soon in the relationship to be sneaking around."  Plus, it was a bit heteronormative? The author is careful to say "spouse" and "royal" and not be gendered, but was trying to play a young man, Finn, who got promised to wed a Faerie Prince. And Finn swooned/caught his breath a lot more than I would have thought he might as a dude.

Axe-Weilding Cleric also suffered from a sudden esclation that felt too early in the game. To be fair to that game, the point is to go crazy and chop people up, but I rolled the youth group and I was like.... mmm, yeah, I'll just end it here and not write up this particular carnage. I'd been having fun, previous to that at least, writing each journal entry as though I was in the confessional. 

The nice thing about Alone in the Wasteland is that the world has some boundaries, but they're not too prescriptive. So far, anyway. The prompts are a little "woo," being devided into Head, Heart, Hand, and Hope. But, whatever. 

I'm not sure how to distill all this experience into a programming item exactly, however. I'll put my mind to it. I mean, "What makes a Solo RPG Successful?" isn't terrible, though it lacks pizzazz. 

 
Image: My notebook pages for the set-up for the Last Tea Shop,

Mason is taking a class on game theory and design at Wesleyan. He passed on to me this cute, little solo RPG called The Last Tea Shop. Solo role-playing is becoming kind of a hot thing right now. The Star Trek game that I've been playing for years just released a Solo version called Star Trek Adventures: Captain's Log, for instance. 

I will admit that when tallgeese first told me about Captain's Log, I was a little bit baffled. Like, how are you meant to play this? Do you just sit in a room and talk to yourself? Are you just thinking through the adventure, quietly, in your head? Or are you basically writing yourself a novel/short story? The answer is, of course, that you can do ANY of these things and probably there are other ways to play that I can't even fathom. 

I bought Captain's Log, but it seems... somewhat complicated and so I haven't tried it yet.  Even though tallgeese very patently showed me how he played and walked me through how it could be done. 

Having tried out The Last Tea Shop, I think I have a better handle now. 

The basic premise of The Last Tea Shop is that you, the player, are the proprietor of a tea house that exists on the road between life and death. You are the last homey house, as it were, before people fully cross over. This sounds like it could be a horror set-up, and, you could absolutely play it that way. I leaned into the Mushi-shi vibe? Where, like, it's a little spooky, but is mostly weird, but gentle. The player's guide, which is little more than a few pages, leads you into building your tea shop, first. You roll a single six-sided dice and choose things from a table of options. For my setting, I ended up with "a seemingly endless field of moss," but then when I rolled my list of ingredients (for the teas, because this is also, in part, a resource management game,) I decided that my tea shop had to be on a riverbank, with pine forest to the north and the misty, Other Side, on the opposite bank, to the south. 

Then you roll for your first customer, who comes down one of two paths, and you are given a set of questions to chose from (or you can make up your own) to ask them. You make them tea from your resources--there is a list of teas and their magical properties. You also roll for weather and "emotion" to give you a sense, maybe, of which tea might fit the mood.

Basically, you write yourself the story of how things go. You also get one ALONE TIME scene because, once per game, you are allowed to go on a foraging expedition to replenish your stock. I decided to do this before any customers arrived, because I wanted to have more tea brewing options. And, since I decided I was by a stream, I figured I could make the case that quartz hunting wouldn't be all that difficult.  I really enjoyed writing my fully solo adventure for some weird reason. Almost more than my interactions with the customers, at least AT FIRST. 

Interestingly, I initially wrote MYSELF, as I am, into the story. It was kind of just the easiest thing? But, by the second visitor, I realized that these were the NPCs. Ultimately, this story was ABOUT the tea shop owner and so I started to make up more of who I was and why I, specifically, was there.

At any rate, the game progresses as you roll for how many days pass between each visit. By chance, when rolling this, I got a series of sixes, so I'm already 3/4ths of the way finished. Once you reach 24 days or more a final scene is triggered. 

I was just texting with Mason about this, this morning, because the thing that is surprisingly clever about the way The Last Tea Shop is set-up is that because the game isn't done until you cumulatively roll to 24 (or more) is that by the third visitor, you start to decide somethings about your own world.  Like, because I kept having trouble matching teas to the rolled "mood/weather" I decided that my character was new to this job and kind of bad at it. So, when, by chance, my third roll landed me on a visitor with the title "Trickster," I decided this was the Management coming to test me.


Image: Third encounter "The Trickster" whom I had appear as a raven.

So, it's been fun. I haven't finished the encounter with the raven yet. It got late last night and, when you're writing out dialogue and scene setting, it takes time. But, I would like to play this all the way through and see what the ending brings me. 

The drawing and doodling is not required, but I decided it made things fun.

I have also been religiously crossing off my ingredients as I use them, since part of each encounter is deciding what to brew your visitor. (For the raven, for instance, I am making a drink called Rainbow Tea, which flashes pretty lights in the air. I'm hoping the raven will appreciate shiny gifts.) Because that drink requires a gingko leaf, I crossed it off my ingredients so that my next tea can't be the same thing. 

I am deeply surprised by how fun this is. But, I have to wonder if part of my enjoyment is that it doesn't take more than the tiniest bit of a nudge for me to start storytelling. I watched a YouTuber play this game, and she said something that seemed very true to my experience, too, which is that at some point worldbuilding just starts happening. Like, I decided that my character, the proprietor, has no tea cups. But, when visitors arrive, so does their tea service. So, for my second visitor, I discovered this set with gingko leaves was his grandmother's set.


Image: My weird brain deciding things.... in this case a doodle of "his grandmother's cup."

If you are wondering how to pass some long, quiet winter's evening, I highly recommend The Last Tea Shop (the link at the top takes you to a place you can purchase it for $5.) It has rules for two players, too, so you aren't REQUIRED to play it alone.