About

Hi, my name is Doug Bolden, it is nice to meet you.

As it says on the header and elsewhere: this is my place to post the output of my various solo roleplaying campaigns and games along with some advice, musings, and reviews. It started as a place to post The Bloody Hands campaign recaps and from there went on to grow a good bit.

If you are not sure what solo roleplaying is: it takes elements of traditional roleplaying games and is about finding a way to play it as a solo player (by being your own gamemaster but also using a variety of tools that help to generate and react to content).

On the left-hand menu, the SOLO CAMPAIGNS section shows my current and "completed" campaigns is the bulk of the blog. Technically, none of them are ever marked as complete because I might restart them or some side-stories in them at some point in time, but a few do essentially wind down to a good stopping point. 

The ORACLES, TOOLS, ETC collects my advice and musings and solo tool reviews along with actual "oracles" I use in my games. The final section, OTHER, is for things like this about page and for "Fourth Wall Breaks".

The Five-plus Main Types of Posts

There are a few different types of posts I use to share my solo roleplaying sessions. You can read a more in-depth description of the four main ones here: The Four Solo Play Techniques of This Blog. There are a couple of additional types. A quick summation of all types would be:

• RECAP: The default type. I play the solo roleplaying session in whatever method works best (journaling, pen-and-paper, through a virtual tabletop) and then write up a recap along with screenshots, photos, and notes of the session after so you both get the overall gist of the session plus see the nitty-gritty of the blog.
• MULTI-PHASE: Largely used for The Bleak + The Pearl campaign but might be used elsewhere. Divides play into distinct phases. Gamemaster Phases are where session building primarily occurs with oracle rolls aimed at designing rooms, scenes, and encounters. Player Phases are a lot like the REAL TIME sessions below but are responding to the Gamemaster Phases (and Lore Phases) in shorter bursts so it is easier to control/contain. Lore Phases are a mixture of the LITERARY PLAY and LORE sessions below and allow purer worldbuilding and campaign building to take place in the flow of the session.
• LITERARY PLAY: A { variation | cousin | modification } of REAL TIME sessions where the various rolls (both oracle and game mechanic ones) are reduced and lore is baked directly into the writing. Like a form of creative writing where each scene has a few plot-points and actions decided by dice instead of pure fiction. Unlike REAL TIME play, each "session" takes place over several bursts so time is spent developing threads/ideas.
• LORE and INTERMISSION: Different sides of the same coin. LORE sessions are all about building up the lore of various campaigns and are either pure worldbuilding or LITERARY PLAY. INTERMISSION sessions are for more purely game mechanic style sessions (though some lore and such works in). Stuff like building up the overall concept of a dungeon or hex-crawl or handling leveling up characters, retooling some mechanics, and so forth. 
• REAL TIME: a somewhat retired type that no doubt will show up again here or there. Session is played in "real time" as the blog post is written (so the post is posted as soon as the session is ended and when I end the session I hit post). Tends to be more "real time" in its reactions to oracle rolls with less long term worldbuilding. Mostly "retired" because it did not quite fit my playstyle and required me to have all my tools available while blogging. It also cut out a lot of playing I did if I was using any external tools (including stuff like miniatures). 

A Note about Content

I try and include a content warning for every in-game post since the start of The GLOW (previous ones may or may not depending of if I had time to edit them). This is the case even when the content really needs no warning. Solo play is a vast field and people have different lines/veils. I cannot say everything I will flag everything that might bother someone but I at least try to be honest.

I am a big fan of horror so there are often references to things a bit grody, gorey, painful, stress-inducing, and deeply weird. Violence, monsters, and body horror are pretty frequent.

Despite the horror, weird, and mystery themes that frequently provide a back-end of posts there a few topics I consider my lines/veils and rarely get any mention or direct acknowledgement unless I feel like there is not only a great reason for it but that the story necessitates it. Some of these topics include, but are not limited to: rape, sexual assualt, violence against pets/animals, cruelty towards young children, and other forms of sustained abuse. When these topics do surface, I acknowledge them in the commentaries of each post and keep their mention brief.

I am not great at sexy time scenes and it sometimes feels weird to have sexy time scenes in my solo-play (a personal preference). The rare instance in which it comes up I am apt to wink-wink-nod-nod it and move on rather than dwell.

I am not a big fan of games where one species or another character class/type is deemed "automatically evil." There are bound to be exceptions but usually if goblins, orcs, and witches show up they are not portrayed as sword fodder.

Character Death happens but I do not play the sort of game where character death should be assumed to be frequent or any kind of mechanical or story goal. Different campaigns will draw different lines. In some, any character "death" is more akin to a temporary and sometimes complicated set-back than an actual death. I make no apologies for this.

I am a pansexual, cis, white male. My game worlds—no matter the genre or general content/storyline—are considered openly queer-accepting as a default to the degree that queerness is nearly never treated as anything but an acceptable norm not worthy of any specific comment. This includes being open to gender-identity, asexuality, and polyamory.

It is hard to have some high action, fantasy elements without touching upon ableism (in a world where some people have magical abilities, it can be a quick leap to discussions why certain people are not able to have it...etc). Still, I strive to avoid any sort of quality judgements about people in these worlds that have different life stories.

I am disabled in real life due to an unfortunate hiking accident so sometimes playing characters that can just freely run around, run up stairs, walk for miles, etc is my own way to escape my own issues. I miss hiking and such so characters are prone to go places that require me to look at beautiful art of nature scenery to get into the mood. It is nice.

On the other end of my own personal experiences, depite being vegan and atheist I rarely invoke these things as a default state. I do not smoke or drink much but characters might. I used to smoke and drink quite a bit (and eat meat, and attend church) so I have some experience that shows up there but I mostly just default to a "fictionally sufficient" take on these activities.

Despite playing at some gritty, dark storylines—themes like racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are often treated as minor asides, absolutely missing, or teaching moments. Rarely will even my main villains invoke any kind of racism or sexism to justify their actions. I refuse to downplay their aspects or real life impacts but I am also generally in worlds where I get to create the entire reality so I choose to ignore them as any kind of de facto setting.

Authority is often to be questioned in my stories and several dwell in a paranoid reality. Those set in the Alabama Weird or other real-world-adjacency might reference real life names or places but it should be understood to not be the actual people and places you might know (alien invasions, strange entities, and hidden truths have altered much of my stories' realities).

Names of books, movies, songs, events, or other real world artifacts should likewise to be considered more second cousins than closer kin to the real world counterparts. Sometimes it can be because I get the facts wrong or misremember a lyric. Other times its because the Gnoles rewrote someone's biological code.