Solo RPG Day 2025

Today is the first Solo RPG Day!

I've had a great time with solo play this year, so I wanted to make a small contribution to the day. My main solo game is the Mythic Bastionland one that I'm sharing on my podcast (episode 6 is nearly ready!), but recently I've been trying to make time for a private solo game. I love Starforged and a sci-fi game is a nice contrast to other stuff I'm playing, so that's what I settled on.

What I want to share is the approach I've taken to journaling this one.

A photo of 2 d10s and a d6 on my notebook, with some nearly illegible handwriting.

Journaling can be a stumbling block for playing solo. There are a lot of different approaches, none universally right or wrong, but I'll share something that has been working for me.

I'm thinking of my own memory as being the main artifact of play, rather than the words written down in the journal. A fragment like "Bustling; silent alcove" is enough to remind me of a location in a busy spaceport, and the private conversation that happened under the protection of a sound-dampening force field. I'm not trying to create a document that I could show to someone else to convey the events or feeling of the game, I'm just trying to capture enough so that the next time I play I will remember enough to jump back in. Maybe in a year I'll look at this and find it incomprehensible. But during that year I'll probably have played more than if I was writing more verbosely.

The lines in the journal begin with symbols which, for me, help with a bit of structure, to constrain my writing:

- A dash indicates an action taken by my character.

. A dot indicates some detail about the world.

+ A plus is something new injected by the game system (the resolution of an action, decrease of resources, etc.)

O A circle with a little line under it (like a head on a neck) is for introducing a new NPC.

That's all I have so far. Maybe I'll add more symbols as I need them.

Here's an example from the start of my second session:

+ Vignette: unrelated situations connected. Election & Unisphere. Governor brought them in. Info control & hack opponents.

O Gov. Spatz. regal attire. Pet panther. Discussing w/ aide.

. [μ=5] Seon, stakeout. Sees Unisphere coming and going.

- Identify Unisphere activity, by watching.

+ [μ=7] (Advance, Pride). Jade escaped with an item. Unisphere want to use it.

. Seon picks up, directional mic, a Unisphere agent mention Jade. They head on & Seon follows.

I don't expect that to make sense to anyone other than me, but for me it triggers a fairly clear memory of a scene from my game. The journal feels like a tool, and not an intrusive one, rather than being the focus of play.

As I said, there's no right or wrong way to do this. There are people out there writing novels fueled by Starforged play and that is very cool.

Anyway, happy solo RPG day!