The Library of Wandering Journals

Wandering Alone, Writing the Unknown

Solo RPG

  • Solo RPG Challenge #2

    In the game Epitaph one of the prompts which can happen asks the players to tell a moment in the character’s life from the point of view of someone close to them. It can be an interesting and insight exercise to think about your character from another perspective. This week describe your character from the Read more

  • The Mothership is Calling

    Waco just makes it to the door. He turns just in time to see the Albino-synth Croc grasp Sarah into its jaws and swim away. All that is left in its wake is a cloud of Sarah’s blood, which is slowly dissipating in the coolant. John hits the button for the airlock and the coolant Read more

  • Solo RPG Challenge #1

    Starting this week, I’m going to post a weekly Solo RPG Challenge. These will range from character development, world building, conflict, mechanics, magic, emotion, symbolism, and other odd little bits and bops. This is very much inspired from the sites I talked about Feb 6th and should be thought about as fun little exercises to Read more

  • May, Month in Review

    This month’s moon challenge was to play games that use cards in their system. I hadn’t played a lot of games which used tarot cards, so I leaned hard into those systems. I was successful this month, having played four different games which use cards. It also taught me a lot about tarot cards and Read more

  • The Right Time and Place

    I’m a teacher. Currently I’m a middle school science teacher but for years (a decade plus) I was a middle school English Language Arts teacher. One thing I’ve noticed that students struggle with is structure. Many of us adults also struggle with structure. Some people are super structured and that is their entire thing. They Read more

  • The Solo RPG Pipeline

    How are you deciding what to play next? I find it hard to figure out what to play. Not because I can’t find anything, the contrary. I have hundreds of games and 25+ lists with anywhere from 10 to 50 games on them. The issue isn’t there isn’t enough. The issue is that there isn’t Read more

  • The Trees of Ghazaria

    Last week I talked about The White Lodge from a number of old campaigns that I either played in or GMed. This week, I’m going to continue to mine those old games and talk about how I changed dragons in one campaign into trees and the effect that had on the game. Essentially, I took Read more

  • The White Lodge

    In a campaign from a long time ago we had the Cross World Inn. The inn gave us a place to store characters when we weren’t playing with them. It allowed us to have characters trade equipment and information across games, but most importantly it gave us a convenient way to store characters when we Read more

  • April Month in Review

    Let’s just start with an ufff. This month has been a lot. I’ve still been playing a little bit every day and getting in 6+ over the weekend, but in terms of my Moon Challenge I was an epic failure. The plan was to play 4 games that I found in itch.io which were free. Read more

  • Frankencobbled: The Way of the Published Adventure, part 2

    Introduction Last week we started a multi-part series on how I run published adventures. We spent most of the time looking at default character behaviors and started to break down the different ways people run published adventures. This week we will zero in a little bit more on maps and locations, contents and objects, and Read more