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Solo rpg recommendations

I am not an expert on solo RPGs, but I have played a quite a few. These are some I have especially enjoyed.

World-building

Some solo RPGs are focused on building a world, rather than role playing within one. It's the genre I have most enjoyed. They're especially easy to put down and come back to, and the results are useful for other TTRPGs. Like, I made a history for my Blades in the Dark character's dagger with Artefact. I didn't share that with anyone really, but it helped my play a bit. And I enjoyed it!

These are especially recommended if you enjoy The Quiet Year and want something like that to play solo.

Artefact

You're a thing.

In Artefact you create the history of a magical item. From its origin, to the numerous people its been owned by, to the stretches of time where it was lost and forgotten. There's also a mini-game where you can do the history of a group of critters who live among the object in one of its fallow periods. (Like a colony of mice who use a shield as the roof to a community center.)

I, The Land

You're geography.

In I, The Land you really do role-play as a piece of land. You got flora and fauna, there's big and little things that happen upon you, and you react (or don't). I've been surprised by twists and unexpected events more in this than any of the others in this section. This is a really neat game!

It uses playing cards for randomness, and the one complaint I have is that the deal is weird. First you draw four cards from a fully shuffled deck, then you need to draw four cards from each suit. It's awkward to do live. Luckily, I can make websites and I made one to do the deal for you.

Lineage

You're a royal historian.

In Lineage you write the history of a royal family. From its bare beginnings through its rise to a golden age or two, to its inevitable collapse. This one can go a very very long time. I've never actually reached the ultimate end of a family. You'll amass quite a collection of flawed ancestors for a royal character.

Traditional

I only have one entry for a solo RPG that plays like a traditional TTRPG, but it's so good maybe it's all you need.

Ironsworn / Starforged

Ironsworn and Starforged share a system, which is a bit unforgiving, but impressively put together for running a traditional TTRPG game by yourself. There's a bit of set-up before you get to play, but the play is really, really good.

Two things stand out for me in how well it works:

  • Not having to roll for enemies during combat or deal with enemy stat sheets saves a lot of headaches.
  • You get to role-play a lot. I was worried that it would be too dice-dependent, but no!

Ironsworn is low-magic, high-peril fantasy. Starforged is in space. Pick your setting.

IRL

There are some solo RPGs that are less sit at a table with dice and paper and more you're doing stuff in the world. If you can not feel weird about it, here are two (or one and a collection, rather).

Tend

You're a world-weary knight who needs to eat. Make yourself something. Eat it. Yum.

Variations on Your Body

Made by The Quiet Year's brilliant author, Avery, these are four games that you play in your mind as you go about the world, no paper or pen needed. These are the farthest removed from normal RPGs on this list, and more contemplative than "fun". But if it's your cup of tea, drink deep.

December adventure day 31

Last year's December Adventure I had one project: a set of scripts to run GoToSocial bot for a song-listening club I'm in with a dozen people. That version of the club (for there have been a few) is coming up on it's one-year anniversary, and I'm proud of it. All its flaws and peculiarities remind me that of how it was handcrafted for a finite time for some friends. We'll lose steam at some point, and it will be an archive of something we shared. I like that.

This year's adventure ended with me working on porting some of that code to Rust. Because the code is not something I work on a lot, I find (for me) that Rust makes code easy to come back to. After weeks or months away from Rust code that I wrote, it's easier for me to see what I was up to and why. I still get tripped up by some interactions between async code and ownership, but the confidence I gain from a happy compiler is worth the stumbling.

But the jewel of this year, the completed project, was the creation of another GoToSocial bot, @tomes@phantasmal.work. The scripts that run it take an epub file as input, split it into 5,000–9,000 character posts, and publishes them one by one each day until the end. I was inspired by DailyLit, a service I used years ago to read a number of books by email. I've been having trouble putting aside time for reading, so I decided to bring reading to somewhere I was: the Fediverse.

Currently @tomes is posting its way through O, Pioneers! by Willa Cather, a book I chose because it was a relatively short novel I hadn't read yet. And what a pleasant choice it turned out to be. If I never load up another book for @tomes, this will still feel like a rousing success.

As I posted, I re-learned what I learned last year:

  • that 20 minutes a day can be surprisingly productive,
  • that I am happiest in writing code when it's just for me or for a small group of people I know personally.

I hope I will remember these lessons longer into 2026 than I did in 2025.

May we all have happy new years.

❤ a ghost

December adventure day 27

The last few days have each featured a very productive half hour. I'm letting the ebook bot sit as-is for now. It's working just fine and while I was working on its reimplementation in Rust, I remembered another Rust rewrite I wanted to get back to.

I'm in a song-listening club with some friends. The little bit of code that runs it is a handful of Python scripts and systemd timers. For as small as it is, I overbaked it a bit. There's a RabbitMQ server. This doesn't need a RabbitMQ server. And I often wish there were one service instead of five.

So that's what I've been rewriting and setting up. Since Christmas Eve I've ported the code that generates the statistics page and the bit that posts a pair of songs on Saturdays for a "flashback" discussion. I had to think harder about async and moves and ownership and errors.

I had to find a job scheduling library that would let me nicely mix tasks that should run on an interval (every 5 minutes) and on a schedule (every Saturday at 9am). I found turnkeeper which serves that nicely. I nearly gave up on it when I was running into a "future cannot be sent between threads safely" error... But it turned out that organizing my code better resolved the issue.

A satisfying resolution, even if fundamentally I'm not exactly sure where a future was trying to go between threads.

December adventure day 21

Yesterday and today I started a Rust project where I'm re-implementing the ebook-splitting code and where I'll write the new algorithm I mentioned the other day.

Part of picking up Rust again is getting my bearings, especially around organizing code into modules. I think I finally have the rule I need to remember that always trips me up:

When you have binary and library code, they are different crates and the library crate controls all the Rust source except the one file that makes the binary, main.rs. That's why in main.rs you use PACKAGE_NAME::... and everywhere else you use crate::.... The binary has to import the library. The library gets to talk about itself as the crate.

December adventure day 19

Yesterday was basically a day off. I looked a little bit at the current state of Scheme implementations... I don't know what I'm waiting for, but I think I'm waiting a little longer.

Today I wrote notes toward a new ebook chunking algorithm for @tomes.

The idea being the splitting works from the whole instead of accumulating from the beginning. Trying to balance chunks better.

As an example, a series of chapters with the following character counts:

  1. 12,000
  2. 8,000
  3. 12,000

Currently, the accumulation strategy grows each chunk until hitting around 8,000 characters, and would result in chunks approximately like so:

  1. 8,000
  2. 8,000 (spanning the chapter 1-2 border)
  3. 8,000 (spanning the chapter 2-3 border)
  4. 8,000

Instead, look first for any chapters within the threshold, and make their chunks (nearly?) invincible. Then chunk the remainders "evenly":

  1. 6,000 (chapter 1, front half)
  2. 6,000 (chapter 1, back half)
  3. 8,000 (the entirety of chapter 2)
  4. 6,000 (chapter 2, front half)
  5. 6,000 (chapter 2, back half)

Additionally, apply some penalties to certain pieces of markup to try to avoid breaking up sections that would likely suffer.

For example, near the middle of a long chapter:

<p>
    .... long paragraph ...
</p>
<p>"Quick dialog," she said.</p>
<p>"Witty retort," he replied</p>
<p>"Devastating comeback."</p>
<p>
    .... long paragraph ...
</p>

It'd be nice to penalize breaking a chunk between short paragraphs, likely to be dialog that would be better to stay together. And have large penalties near the beginning and end of a chapter, to avoid cutting too close to natural seams.

Then find the lowest penalty cut points near the point where a naïve even split would go.

December adventure day 16

All my thoughts about cleaning up the code that powers @tomes@phantasmal.work got sidetracked by starting on Tumble Forth, which promises, "Starting from bare metal on the PC platform, we build a Forth from scratch..."

I came across it from a sequence of clicks that started from browsing the #DecemberAdventure hashtag and ended up derailing my morning.

Now here I am, looking at wikis and trying to write assembly.

  mov al, 0     ; clear lines
  mov cl, 0     ; starting at the left
  mov ch, 0     ; starting at the top
  mov dh, 7     ; until line 8 (which is enough)
  mov ah, 0x06  ; Scroll up window
  int 0x10      ; Interrupt

I wrote a few things in Uxn earlier this year, which primed me for getting captured by a tutorial for implementing Forth from scratch.

December adventure day 15

I think today will just be the quick morning update to handle ebooks with multiple title entries by simply picking the first one. In the case in front of me,

["Frankenstein", "Or, the Modern Prometheus", "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus"]

it will choose Frankenstein.

Meanwhile, O Pioneers! is proving to be a good read. It wasn't even on my list!

December adventure day 14

This morning I continued my adjustments to make Frankenstein work.

Each xhtml file in a Standard Ebook epub file basically looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops"
      lang="en-GB"
      epub:prefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/, se: https://standardebooks.org/vocab/1.0" xml:lang="en-GB">
	<head>
		<title>Chapter XXIII</title>
		<link href="../css/core.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
		<link href="../css/local.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
	</head>
	<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
		<section id="chapter-23" role="doc-chapter" epub:type="chapter">
			<h2>
				<span epub:type="label">Chapter</span>
				<span epub:type="ordinal z3998:roman">XXIII</span>
			</h2>
			<p>It was eight o’clock when we landed...</p>
            <p>...</p>
            <p>...</p>
            ...
		</section>
	</body>
</html>

One assumption of the script that splits up the xhtml files is that each immediate child of the <body>'s <section> will be "small". So all it does is take each child, see if adding it to the current chunk is still within the size threshold and either add it or make a new chunk.

However, Frankenstein proved that assumption false. There were two examples of children that were big: another <section> and <blockquote>. The <blockquote> examples are kind of fun, because Frankenstein is a story-within-a-story (-within-a-story...).

Today's solution was to "unwrap" <section>s. A <section> doesn't do anything in a fediverse post, so it seems safe to do that.

<blockquote>s impact rendering so I'm unwrapping it, but re-wrapping each child in its own <blockquote>. So this:

<blockquote>
  <p>Three be the things I shall have till I die:</p>
  <p>Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.</p>
</blockquote>

Becomes this:

<blockquote>
  <p>Three be the things I shall have till I die:</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
  <p>Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.</p>
</blockquote>

Semantically bad, structurally questionable, but renders fine.

Good enough for me.