About
Hello, Space Pilgrims, my name is Doug Bolden, it is nice to meet you.
Possibly the best introduction to myself is just any of the many posts that I have posted, but I also know that sometimes folks like to know what they are getting into (and whom).
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.
I play all sorts of solo roleplaying games. My favorite "solo rpgs" are mostly just traditional roleplaying games—some with solo-modes or solo-options baked in—backed by years of personal experience, a gamemaster emulator, random tables, NPC emulators, and a few other tools.
I work a full time job and so do not always have a lot of time to play (in fact, short burst solo-play is a staple of my lunchbreaks). On the other hand, I usually have fun playing two to four campaigns at the same time so I can go back and forth on ideas, characters, themes, and such. This means that some campaigns get a bit compressed in time so I can see a more of the worlds and plots I am creating. Time skips, generation skips, lore posts, and quick-play sessions sometimes happen.
My introduction to roleplaying was pretty standard for a kid in the 80s: Red Box Basic Dungeons & Dragons. For pretty much that entire decade, I only got to be a player in one, short session based on the included Mistamere module in the Dungeon Master's book but I went through the solo introductory adventure many, many times. I quickly learned (I was maybe eight or nine at the time) that I could ignore the rules of using a specific character and make up other characters, including those at higher levels, and attempt it over and over to see how things worked out. I eventually convinced some friends on the bus to play with me and we had a handful of adventures with me as the Dungeon Master. It was fun and we probably did 90% of everything incorrectly.
In the 90s, I started finding other RPGs. What I did not find a lot of were players. There were some. A not-very-long Palladium Fantasy game happened that was a lot of fun. Longer Advanced Dungeons & Dragons outings. A few sessions in Werewolf: The Apocalypse. In fact, most of my playtime was just me, sitting by myself, and making characters and dungeons and scenarios. I sometimes ran through a few rounds of combat myself. I sometimes might run a trap or an event as one or more characters to make sure it made sense. I suprisingly did not make the leap, then.
Two other influences had also begun to show up: Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and Heroquest. I remember practically begging my older brother to play the latter with me. I eventually gave up and learned I could mostly just do it all myself. I still did not make the leap.
I got a copy of Theatrix and was fascinated by its tables showing dramatic shifts and how to use them to determine if something succeeded. I wrote a weird, largely-conceptual RPG called Ghostlight that led to me meeting some fans and other game designers. A Doug-inspired character showed up in Graveyard Greg's Gaming Guardians comic and that character, the Dreamwyrm, even had a Buttonmen button. I tried turning Ghostlight into a fuller RPG multiple times and one time got really close but lost all my files and could not quite find the spark, again.
Over the next twenty or so years, I ran some games of varying qualities, got good enough at Call of Cthulhu I started running [and still do] demos at conventions and tabletop meet-ups. There was a pretty influential game of Shadowrun where I probably learned the most about the full gamut of roleplaying. A GURPS Lite game where I realized that games did not need combat set pieces to move forward if skills are interesting. Eventually a Fate Core game that started out as Final Fantasy VI meets Skies of Arcadia for a one-shot and ended up lasting for a couple of years. It had a very "if it makes it to the table, it might be canon" vibe that encouraged everyone to build up lore and ideas.
I even wrote a post on a very old version of what later turned into Dickens of a Blog [originally, "Doug's RPG Page" on Geocities (!) to date myself] where I talked about how you could theoretically play a game without a dungeon master by building up a series of encounters and rooms and themes and then randomly draw from a stack of index cards or roll upon a table to figure out which ones were happening when. A few people commented on that advice and there was discussion about how we could expand upon this. It was around 1997 or 1998. I still did not make the leap. I was right there.
Despite roughly forty-years of playing RPGs and RPG-adjacent boardgames—including some legit solo runs of Arkham Horror games—it was a single phrase that shifted the course of things. A long-time friend and frequent RPG-buddy asked me if I wanted to do some sort of 24XX game together using Mythic. I had been playing a lot of GM-less games like Fiasco | Microscope | Protocol so the concept not having a gamemaster did not worry me. That two-fer or three-fer GM-less 24XX never happened but something else did.
I realized that I heard about solo roleplaying several times but had no idea how in the heck something like Mythic would even work.
After maybe a year or two that phrase finally found its way towards me picking up Mythic 2nd Edition as it was starting to bubble into availability. I read it. Thought it sounded fun, but had no good idea how I would personally use it.
I started watching videos of folks playing and reviewing solo games to pass time. Kelsey Dionne promoted solo play around the launch of Shadowdark. I cite Harper's Quest 2 as the proper start—when I took the leap—but thinking back it was actually Dungeon Hero, a super lightweight, minimalist solo experience, that started me on the true path. Trying to work out how to handle twists and stories in the game, character development—mechanical and narrative—and how to add details in a qualified way got me primed to learn more about solo play. I played Harpers Quest 2. Then added in bits of Mythic, and eventually kicked off an Advanced Fighting Fantasy game that never moved fast but drifted at whatever speed I needed.
I was hooked.
That has grown into several campaigns, off-shoots, and experiments. Hence, this blog.
The Exceptionally Brief Tour
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, there is a section for my campaigns (current ones and finished ones) and one-shots. There are also various tools, reviews, oracles, and other things useful to me so maybe they are useful to you. Then there is a section where I talk about some stuff about the kind of content I do and do not post (which is very long and wordy but also the ethical bible of this blog), my blog-status updates (aka "Fourth Wall Breaks"), and a write up of my long-running fictional universe - The Alabama Weird - just as a basic primer of some of the place names I drop in quite a few posts.
By the time you read this, I will probably have moved everything around and forgotten to update this post.
Apologies.
My Style of Posting (was: The Five-plus Main Types of Posts)
Most of the old content here got outdated really quickly. I have spent a month or so developing a format for this blog with a few options. For all details, see Anatomy of a Post.
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