Contemplating the Anthology Film Format for Solo RPGs [with Fiasco 1st Edition]

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Contemplating the Anthology Film Format for Solo RPGs [with Fiasco 1st Edition]

2025-09-19 Note: This was written around twenty days before it was posted. Setting up the internet around 10 days later and then getting sick caused it to be delayed by a good chunk of a month. I thought about going through and updating the text to reflect stuff that would have been true had it been posted when I finished, but ehhhh....

Getting Inspiration from Freaky Tales

Space Pilgrims, I am currently without internet on my main computer. I am not without internet. I can access it via my phone or via the cheaper travel laptop. I simply do not have internet access for the computer that is my main source of playing solo rpgs and just well, doing stuff in general. Turns out the wireless card is not working — it has possibly become disconnected in the move or just generally gave up — and the new geometry of the new house makes it questionable if I can get any sort of ethernet cord to it until I can mail order one or find a shop nearby that sells one. Instead of playing solo rpgs, I have been thinking about solo rpgs and sometimes it satisfies the same sort of energy.

Last night relative to writing this [August 30, 2025, I am currently unsure when I can get the ability to post it] I watched the recent anthology film Freaky Tales. I recommend. It has a bit of humor. A bit of romance. A bit of raunchy jokes. A fair amount of violence — my one complaint is how much violence against lovers, especially women, is a driving force — and a tinge of horror. It takes three events from around Oakland, CA in 1987 and highly fictionalizes them to add in a bit of magical realism and does a good job of adding in a fourth tale that interweaves. My primary take away, though, is that I really love anthology movies.

I extra-love anthology movies where the stories intertwine to some degree while bouncing off certain themes. Little hints of larger world building in the way things intersect just oh so slightly.

After watching the movie, I was wondering about how I might be able to pull off something similar in a solo rpg. And then I thought back to another thought I had very recently — no internet on my main PC gives me lots of thinking time — which was how could I use Jason Morningstar's Fiasco to scaffold a solo game. This started when I was unpacking and found my Fiasco anthologies

Using Fiasco to Generate Characters

There are two editions of Fiasco and both have the same end goal: to tell a collectively generated, gamemaster-less story about a group of people on the brink of a fiasco. The first edition used dice and d66 type look-up tables to generate characters — by way of their relationships and certain places, items, and desires — while the second uses cards to generate the same. A simplistic overview would be that 1) you generate a lot of potential options [including player agency in which order to read the options], 2) players take turns connecting these options together, 3) once you have generated two relationships per player [and some other details] you then work out some basic details of backstory for the characters. In the way of such things, these steps are generally blended pretty well. The playsets range from generic — "Tales from Suburbia" — to a bit more high concept — "White Hole," about a space station on the edge of a cosmic anomaly. Even when the setting seems commonplace, the elements lead to some hooks. The suburbs, but there are affairs and drugs and stolen money. The mall, but someone is stealing from the store. A wedding, but secrets are threatening to spill over. My favorite are those where there just enough weirdness to lean in but every playthrough can be fairly different.

From a character creation standpoint, the bigger-deal-than-acknowledged aspect of character creation is you do not generate characters, per se, you generate the spaces for characters to inhabit. You describe who you are playing by their relationship to other characters, by a need — not necessarily a need they have together but one that someone impacts the relationship — or a place or an object. By far the greatest Random Stuff Generator at any table playing Fiasco is how a given group, at a given time, chooses to express these spaces in terms of their characters.

Let's take a look at one of the four "core" playsets: "Main Street." You have six Relationship "categories" [the first d6 of the d66]: Family, Work, Friendship, Romance, Crime, and Community. Note that the usual playset does not go too deep into what any of these broad terms might mean — in this case, fairly self-explanatory — so some leeway is given to players when sorting them into their game. Each category has six items [the second d6]. Friendship has some fairly typical (e.g. "Old Buddies," "Friendly Rivals") and some less so that bleed into other categories (e.g. "Drug Friends," "Friends with Benefits"). In broad, the "Main Street" set keeps things pretty real world for the relationship. Some hints of dirty deeds but also just people who know each other.

Then, you get a d66 table each for Needs, Locations, and Objects. Again, some more typical and some more flavorful. A Need "To get out... of this town before they realize you took it." A Location "Out by the interstate... Durable Paper Goods, paper bag manufacturing plant." An Object which is "Information... Secret recipe."

Playsets that have flecks of spice in a seemingly bland soup tend to play the best in the long run, based on my many sessions. If the playset leans too hard to a single story, it takes away a bit of the spark. By giving players a canvas, some paint, and just a few thin prompts you get the best portraits.

You start combining these elements together. For instance, let's say I am playing with four people: Barry across from me, Celia to my left, and Edgar to my right. For Celia I end up with friends with benefit connected to the paper bag plant [make note that while you have some freedom, it freedom within a smaller pool of elements generated at the start]. With Edgar, our characters are old buddies with a need to get out before "they" find out "you" took it. Could be either of us or both of us or maybe someone is running from us, there are ways to interpret it and even outright re-write it as the group fiction needs. It's a genre prone to plot twists and changes of fortunes. As we talk, there are questions that come up — along with Barry character's relationships with Celia and Edgar's characters. Is Celia's character and mind coworkers at that plant, or is that just where our characters hook up? Are Edgar's and mine characters in trouble for theft or something a bit more abstract?

Some things you decide right away and some things you give a little bit of a definition but then work out later.

This means there is both an easy and a hard aspect using this in solo games. The easy is you can just roll. Four dice per character relationship [which works out to being four dice per character, but in principle it is different]. Four characters? Roll 16 dice. Then group them up as random or as purposefully as you want and make some decisions. Heck, you can even just roll a few dice to generate objects and locations and needs and slot them into your game. Any game, really, that might vibe with the playset.

Where it gets harder is the solo aspect misses elements the collective bargaining process. If I am on my own, maybe I take the prompts as given and say that my character hooks up with Celia's character at the factory and Edgar's character stole some money and is about to get discovered. Only, Celia interjects. She doesn't want her character to work at the plant (a prompt between her and Barry suggests her character came into money). And maybe she figures she doesn't want to be the kind of person who has FWB. In her eyes, her character considers it a real relationship. My character is the one afraid of commitment. Edgar says he has already played a game where he stole money so he wants it to be something more esoteric. He wants to be a vlogger who has been anonymously telling town secrets by way of thinly veiled fiction stories posted to Youtube. He "took" the stories via some shady means and some of the stories have started to be viral and folks around town are starting to figure out who it is. These multiple interpretations are what makes the storyline so unique per group. Celia, Edgar, and I might play a wholly different game with very similar prompts the next time. It's fun.

And sure, I appreciate the irony that all of those things were things that I thung for an example, but in my experience it is the kind of joyous vibe that kicks it all off. The story exists in the spaces between words shared between people at a table.

There are tons of tools — Mythic, Gamemaster Apprentice Deck, drawing Dixit cards — you can use to flavor the prompts to find something new, but it still requires a bit of slowing down to avoid rushing into first grasps. You have to push back against the oracles a bit. This might even be a good time to use a "player emulator" that helps to set moods and such.

There is the slight issue that you make characters in clumps, but that's not an issue for me. That's what I am trying to do at this stage. If you were making characters for a more traditional single character solo session, you might treat the relationships as background flavor. That should work ok.

Connections: Yes, No, How Big?

Anthology films come in several forms. At the lowest conceptual tier, you simply have rough groups of cinematic short stories probably linked by a theme or genre. Sometimes the theme is less an actual theme and more a "people who submitted films for a contest" or "directors who knew a producer." Lots of them at least stick to a broad genre.

The next-highest tier involves wrap around stories. Presumably most readers know the general gist of what I mean, but to explain: a wrap-around is a framing device where the pieces of the anythology are being told/shared/exist in the context of a wider story. Some wrap-arounds are only loosely connected to the stories themselves — such as the Amicus-type films where four stories by Robert Bloch might be staged as anecdotes shared by asylum patients but the stories may or may not have anything to do with "madness" — and others are blended into the story itself. Usually this leans into the next highest tier — where stories interact with each other — but not always.

Going directly into that, the highest conceptual tier of anthology tends to blend the themes, characters, and locations to some degree. At this point, the framing story is just part of the whole. A somewhat extreme version of this would be Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark where the short stories are part of a larger story and form a narrative whole. Some old serialized novels can have a similar vibe, as well as some episodic television. Where there are distinct gaps between episodes/chapters but overall a complete story is being told. There are actually a lot of films that are effectively anthology stories — showing disparate viewpoints around a same event — with things only entering the framing device towards the end. If then. We'll leave out the more "accidentally anthological" takes for now.

What I am looking for is a step before this highest concept: where the wrap-around/frame is less "the real story" and is more a technical narrative hook that allows the individual stories to play off each other while also giving them some freedom.

What I am picturing is creating four characters via Fiasco, generating a couple of extra locations and objects, and then using some mechanic to find spots where the stories touch. In later sessions, those touch points will likely be revisted with a new viewpoint or at least are assumed in the later fiction. You finally get to the final character where there have been multiple touch points and world building sessions and to a degree they will wrap up the whole. They will still be their own character, though.

How to decide where the stories criss-cross? I think it could be done with either cards — each other character represented by a face card/ace — with a specially created short deck or via decaying dice. You would only want 1-2 of these shared touch points per section though background shifts might be more noticeable. If one character burns down a gas station on a Saturday, the next character can't visit it on a Sunday.

Can "later" characters revisit earlier characters in scenes that weren't featured? I'm not sure.

Further Thoughts

I think I have an idea of what I'd like to try and I think I have some basic tools to do it. Will I do it? I think so. When? Not sure.

I sometimes struggle to juggle all the concepts of a single narrative without extensive notetaking. This means that I would want to make sure I'm in a good place to actually play off these notes. I am moderately ok with stories drifting a bit in theme and even in reality but overall I want it to feel connected and part of a whole just not revisting some of the same locations in otherwise separate stories.

On the other hand, I feel pretty confident in using the tools and tricks to weave these stories together.

All that being said, since I'm a sucker for horror-themed anthology collections I think it might be fun to try in October. Not with a specifically horror-themed playset, but one more normal with interjections of horror. Not sure what system just yet.

Time will tell if I actually pull it off.

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