Index

Feature Article

• From Railroad to Sandbox: A framework for converting any linear adventure into emergent play by Roberto Bisceglie

Announcements

• A Bowl of Temporal Soup is Launching on Kickstarter September 1st! by Cole "Tacky" Nowacki

Game Reviews

• The Goblin: Stories to Run You Down by Jordan Woosley

• Let’s Look at Firelights by Juha Loukaja

• WOTC: Adult Readers Do Not Need Guardians by Joseph Camera

Mindset

• Why Removing Behavioral Obligations in 5E Made Refereeing Harder by Joseph Camera

Playthroughs

• "The phototographers last flash" by Mattias Schmidt

• Dandelion by Ness

Resources

• Tools of a Braunstein-Style Campaign by KA Winch

• How to Use Mythic Adventure Logs in a Sprawling Serial by Niamh Celeste

Strategies

• Gating the Help Action by Alexander Tzakis

TTRPG Design

• RPG Conversions: Bladeborn Goes Soulbound by Jay Kirkman

• Cards and Catacombs by Quest For Quests

• I made a game! by Paul

• How to Make Travel Feel Like Part of the Adventure by Tabletop Toolkit

• Designing Tongues of Verdant Fire by Natural 7

Subscribe now

Feature Article

From Railroad to Sandbox

A framework for converting any linear adventure into emergent play

by Roberto Bisceglie

I first worked this out on a battered old pulp science fiction trilogy, the kind of module where every scene assumes you talked to the right drunk in the right bar and walked down the only road the writer bothered to describe. I was porting it to a stripped down, procedure-heavy system in the Traveller family, and the mismatch was obvious within the first page: the system wanted a living sector full of factions doing things, and the module wanted three groups of players to walk the same hallway in the same order. That gap is what pushed me to work out a repeatable process instead of a one-off fix. What follows is that process, stripped of the specific setting, so it works on whatever railroad you happen to be sitting on.

Because this isn’t a problem specific to one module, one genre, or one decade of design. It shows up anywhere an adventure was written as a sequence of scenes rather than a situation.

The problem with railroads

Open almost any classic adventure module and you’ll find the same skeleton underneath the flavor text:

1. An NPC hands the players a quest.

2. The players travel to Location A.

3. A scripted encounter happens.

4. The players obtain Clue 1.

5. Repeat until the final confrontation.

Nothing here is inherently bad. The trouble starts with what this structure assumes: that players will make the choices the writer expected, that failure needs a safety net so the plot keeps moving, and that every scene has exactly one correct solution.

That produces five specific failures:

• Choices don’t matter. The story proceeds the same way no matter how the table approaches a scene.

• The world is static. NPCs wait patiently for the party to arrive. Nothing happens off screen.

• Success is mandatory. A failed roll gets quietly overwritten with a backup clue so the plot doesn’t stall.

• Every obstacle has one answer. The module assumes a specific approach and has no idea what to do with any other.

• NPCs are furniture. Villains exist to be defeated. Allies exist to deliver exposition.

The result is a table that feels like it’s reading a choose-your-own-adventure book where every path leads to the same page. The agency on offer is decoration, not substance.

What emergent fiction actually means

Emergent fiction is a story that comes out of the collision between player goals, NPC and faction goals, world systems, and the actual outcomes of dice rolls. Nobody writes the ending in advance. The GM builds a situation, populates it with people who want things, and lets the collision produce whatever it produces.

That means the GM’s job changes shape. Instead of asking “how do I get the players to do what the adventure needs,” the question becomes “what happens when these goals run into each other.” The rest of this piece is a step by step method for making that shift on an adventure you already own, without throwing away the material you like.

Step 1: strip the adventure to its ingredients

Read through the module and make five lists:

• Locations that exist regardless of what the players do

• NPCs who have their own agendas

• Factions or groups with goals that conflict with each other

• Objects that more than one party wants

• Secrets, meaning information that can be discovered rather than delivered

What you leave off these lists matters as much as what goes on them. Don’t write “the players meet the informant in the tavern” or “the players rescue the captive at the camp.” Those are plot beats, and plot beats are exactly what you’re discarding. You’re inventorying what exists, not what happens.

This step alone usually reveals how thin the actual content of a railroad is. Strip away the sequencing and you’re often left with three or four locations, a handful of NPCs, one or two objects worth fighting over, and a couple of secrets. That’s not a weakness. It’s a small, workable set of ingredients, and small ingredient sets are exactly what emergent play needs, because the complexity comes from how the pieces interact, not from how many pieces there are.

Step 2: turn NPCs into factions with wants

Every railroad has hidden factions disguised as individual characters. The quest giver, the villain, and the local authority are usually written as functions: the one who hires you, the one you defeat, the one who complicates a single scene. Pull them out of those roles and ask three questions of each:

• Want: what is this faction actually trying to achieve?

• Have: what resources, people, or leverage do they control?

• Will: what methods are they willing to use to get what they want?

Say the original module has a grieving relative hiring the party to find a missing family member, a criminal outfit sitting on the real prize, and a local government treating the whole affair as a legal nuisance. Once you ask want, have, and will of each, they stop being props:

The relative wants the missing person found and the truth vindicated, has money and institutional standing, and will hire outside help and take real risks to get answers. The criminal outfit wants the prize for profit, has soldiers and informants and captives, and will bribe, threaten, or kill to stay ahead. The government wants to keep the situation legal and under its control, has patrols and legal authority, and will inspect, confiscate, and arrest anyone who gets in the way.

None of these factions need the players to do anything. They’ll act on their own timeline whether the party shows up or not, which is exactly the property that makes a world feel alive instead of staged.

Step 3: write faction moves

A move is a simple conditional: when this happens, this faction does that. Moves are what let you run a reactive world without pre-scripting every possible branch.

The format is always the same: “When [trigger], [faction] does [action].” A criminal faction chasing a stolen prize might have moves like: when the party escapes with key information, dispatch pursuit within a day or two; when the party fails a stealth or social check near faction territory, start a parallel search using stolen intel; when the party locates the real prize, mobilize to beat them there. A government faction worried about legality might have: when the party uses attention-drawing methods, send an inspection team; when the party is seen leaving with contested property, issue a warrant.

Write four to six moves per faction before the session starts. During play, you’re not improvising motivation from nothing. You’re checking whether a trigger condition has been met and, if it has, letting the faction act. The prep happens once. The payoff happens every session after.

Step 4: build choice points with telegraphed risk

Every scripted scene in a railroad has a “correct” solution buried in it, usually a specific skill check the writer had in mind. Find that scene and multiply the ways into it.

Take a captive rescue: a guarded location, a prisoner, a supervisor in charge of security. The railroad version assumes infiltration, a fight, and an escape, with a backup NPC ready in case the party can’t manage it. The emergent version lays out several approaches and is honest about the risk of each one:

Sneaking in risks a full alarm if the roll fails, but succeeds quietly if it doesn’t. Talking your way in as inspectors or new hires risks a blown cover if someone checks your story. Bribing a guard risks the guard taking the money and reporting you anyway. Causing a distraction risks the distraction spiraling out of control. Negotiating directly with the faction holding the captive risks a demand for collateral instead of a clean release.

Notice what’s missing: a prescribed method. You’re presenting the situation and its stakes, and the table invents the approach. If everything fails, the consequence isn’t a dead end, it’s a complication: the captive stays held, gets interrogated for information, and the opposing faction pulls ahead in whatever race is running. Failure needs to be interesting, not a wall.

This same principle applies to information. If a door is sealed, tell the players it’s sealed and roughly why, then tell them what forcing it risks versus what picking it risks. Don’t make them guess which skill the scene was built around. There usually isn’t a hidden right answer, only choices with different exposure.

Step 5: make time matter

Railroads tend to run on infinite time. Players can shop for a week, backtrack to the wrong location, fail a rescue attempt twice, and nothing in the world changes to reflect it. Villains wait. Clues stay exactly where they were left.

Fix this with clocks, a segmented tracker (six boxes works well) attached to a faction’s goal. Every time the party stalls, delays, or fails in a way that gives an opposing faction room to act, fill in a segment. When the clock fills, that faction achieves its goal, whether or not the party is ready.

A rival faction’s clock toward recovering a prize might read: interrogate a captive, decode partial information, retrieve a missing piece, complete the puzzle, reach the site first. Every stalled session advances one segment. You don’t need to narrate the internal mechanics of why; a line like “word reaches you that their ships were spotted near the border” is enough to make the pressure visible.

Once players understand a clock is running, every decision picks up weight, including the decision to rest, shop, or backtrack. That’s the entire point: time stops being free.

Step 6: turn locations into reactive states

A static dungeon describes one configuration: guards here, prisoner there, treasure behind a trap. It never changes no matter what happens elsewhere in the world.

Give major locations two or three alternate states tied to which faction controls them and when the party arrives. A dig site or stronghold might be:

Undiscovered, if the party gets there first: no guards yet, active hazards, evidence of who else has been through. Occupied, if the antagonist faction has claimed it: guards, patrols, a captive, and a real risk of open conflict. Abandoned, if the antagonist already got what they needed and moved on: empty camp, discarded gear, a trail leading to wherever they went next. Seized, if a legal authority got there first: an official presence, paperwork, and a very different set of risks around access.

Track faction positions on a simple timeline or map. When the party decides where to go, check who controls it and what state it’s in before you describe anything. If the party stalls, update those states using the faction moves from Step 3. The location isn’t a set piece anymore, it’s a snapshot of an ongoing situation.

Step 7: layer multiple solutions to every problem

Railroads tend to assume a single mechanism for solving each obstacle: take this object to this expert, and the expert solves it for you off screen. That’s a single path with no real decision in it.

Take any object or problem that requires expertise and give it several routes, each with its own tradeoffs. An encrypted artifact might be decoded through an official institution (slow, safe, but visible to anyone watching), a black market specialist (fast, expensive, and unreliable), a direct attempt using whatever tools the party already has (immediate, but risky to the artifact itself), or simply sold or handed off to someone else entirely, which ends the party’s involvement in exchange for a payoff.

Each route trades speed against safety against cost against control. The party isn’t solving a puzzle to find the “real” method, they’re weighing what they value and living with what that choice costs them later.

Step 8: build consequences that persist

Railroads reset by default. Emergent fiction has to remember what happened. Track consequences at three distances:

Immediate, resolved within the same scene: a failed stealth check sounds an alarm, a botched negotiation ends a conversation badly. Medium term, carrying into the next session or two: killing a faction’s enforcer draws retaliation, destroying evidence triggers a legal response. Long term, shaping the rest of the campaign: siding with one faction over another locks out certain alliances later, letting a rival win a race means someone else now holds the leverage.

A useful habit is to trace one consequence chain across sessions rather than treating each session as a reset. A violent outcome in an early session becomes the reason bounty hunters show up two sessions later, which becomes the reason the party needs a deal with a legal authority by session five. None of that needs to be planned from the start. It just needs to be tracked and allowed to compound.

Step 9: design open climaxes instead of scripted endings

The classic railroad ending is a fixed sequence: reach the final location, fight the final boss, win, done. That’s one outcome dressed up as the only possible one.

Instead, engineer a convergence: arrange for the factions with a stake in the outcome to arrive at the same place at roughly the same time, each with their own resources and leverage, and let the party decide what to do about it. Fighting everyone is one option, and usually the worst one on paper. Allying with one faction against another is another. Brokering a three way split that gives each side something is a third. Sabotaging the whole situation and escaping with what can be carried is a fourth. Destroying the prize outright, so no faction gets it, is a fifth.

None of these is the “correct” ending. Each one closes the current situation while opening a different one: alliance with criminals starts a very different next campaign than alliance with the law, and a brokered deal starts a different one again. The story doesn’t end, it turns a corner.

Common pitfalls

“Players might miss the important clue.” Put the same piece of information behind three or four different paths (a conversation, a document, tracking evidence physically, interrogating someone connected to it) rather than hiding it in one spot. If a table somehow misses all of them, let them find it through brute persistence, at the cost of time, rather than stalling the game.

“The adventure needs them to go to this location.” Don’t send them there by decree. Make the location the only place that solves a problem they already have, and they’ll go on their own.

“But I prepped this encounter.” If the party finds a clever way around something you built, let it work. Move the encounter’s content elsewhere, or let it happen to different characters. Punishing cleverness teaches a table to stop being clever.

“The antagonist needs to survive for later.” Let them die if the party earns it, and build the next complication out of the vacuum that leaves behind: lieutenants fighting each other for control, a faction fracturing into pieces that are individually easier and collectively messier to deal with.

“I don’t know what happens if they do that.” Trust the faction moves you already wrote. If the party does something genuinely unplanned, ask what each active faction would want in response and let that answer the question for you. You don’t need the ending mapped out in advance. You need factions with goals and a habit of checking in on them.

The conversion checklist

1. Extract locations, NPCs, factions, objects, and secrets. Discard the plot.

2. Give each faction a want, a have, a will, and four to six moves.

3. Define the starting situation and at least one ticking clock.

4. Turn static locations into two or three reactive states.

5. Build choice points with telegraphed risk and at least three approaches each.

6. Track consequences at three distances: immediate, medium term, long term.

7. Design a convergence climax with several genuinely different outcomes.

8. Prepare tracking tools: clocks, a faction timeline, and quick NPC reference notes.

9. Playtest by asking “what if the players do this instead” until you run out of surprises.

The upfront work is heavier than reading a module cover to cover. The payoff is a table you no longer have to steer, because the world already knows how to react without you.

Roberto Bisceglie is a solo tabletop RPG designer, and runs Zotiquest Games and Loreseed Workshop. He writes Zotiquest, a newsletter about tabletop game design, solo play, and experimental worldbuilding tools, covering mechanics, narrative systems, and the process behind his ongoing projects.

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Announcements

• A Bowl of Temporal Soup is Launching on Kickstarter September 1st! by Cole “Tacky” Nowacki — A Bowl of Temporal Soup is launching soon on Kickstarter! This 190 page OSR-inspired solo RPG of time paradoxes and anachronism stew is almost ready to go live. Back any tier of the project and get a copy of A *Cup* of Temporal Soup right away!

Game Reviews

• The Goblin: Stories to Run You Down by Jordan Woosley — First in a series of four reviews of Mörk Brog Zines! Includes links to various supplements, and more!

• Let’s Look at Firelights by Juha Loukaja — A brief overview of the game Firelights by Fari RPGs. I explain how the system works and what I found to be working and what I found could use some tweaking.

• WOTC: Adult Readers Do Not Need Guardians by Joseph Camera — The use of sensitivity readers

Mindset

• Why Removing Behavioral Obligations in 5E Made Refereeing Harder by Joseph Camera — A look at how 3e helped refree's rule when characters were not following their identity behaviors.

Playthroughs

• “The phototographers last flash” by Mattias Schmidt —A starting solo playthrough of my latest homemade scenario for Call of Cthulhu ttrpg

• Dandelion by Ness — A new Ironsworn Sundered Isles series of an unhinged and tormented sleuth crossing the ocean. Very short, narrative focused chapters

Resources

• Tools of a Braunstein-Style Campaign by KA Winch — Ever dreamt of a true Living World? With every Lord & Lady a living Player, and every event driven by real Humans? Here are some of the tools I am documenting for this style of 'Braunstein' campaign.

• How to Use Mythic Adventure Logs in a Sprawling Serial by Niamh Celeste — Learn three strategies for use of the Mythic GME threads list, character list, and adventure logs in your gaming, along with a look at how to set them up in your favorite spreadsheet program.

Strategies

• Gating the Help Action by Alexander Tzakis — A walk through thoughts on how to keep PCs helping each other from washing out weight on your calls for checks. If there is no gating, the PCs can pick and choose a way to negate checks entirely.

TTRPG Design

• RPG Conversions: Bladeborn Goes Soulbound by Jay Kirkman — So much Warhammer lore exists in one silo or another. What if we could cross them over? Come meet two Chaos warbands from Warcry that have been converted to NPC's for the Soulbound RPG!

• Cards and Catacombs by Quest For Quests — A pamphlet-sized dungeon crawler using a deck of playing cards to generate rooms and dice to explore them! Quick to pick up and play, the deeper you delve the more difficult it becomes!

• I made a game! by Paul Walker — Here is a sneaky slice of my forthcoming solo survival/investigation game, created for the recent One Page Game Jam. Download it for PWYW from Itch and play it today. Oh, and let me know what you think about it!

• How to Make Travel Feel Like Part of the Adventure by Tabletop Toolkit — Long journeys in RPGs can easily become montages or strings of random encounters. This article offers practical ways to make travel part of the adventure, with meaningful choices, discoveries and consequences along the road.

• Designing Tongues of Verdant Fire by Natural 7 — This post covers the design process for the layout, structure, and dungeon population in my submission to the 2026 Appendix N Jam. How do you take an abstract title created by someone else and turn it into a playable adventure?

We hope you enjoyed The Role Player’s Digest. If you’d like your work to appear in the September 2026 edition of The Role Player’s Digest, please submit your articles, art, reviews, GM tips, or anything else having to do with role playing to us here by Friday September 25. In the meantime, May the Dice be With You!

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Index

Feature Article

• The Art of Pressure: An Early Access Review of Boundless by Kerova

Mindset

• A Desire to “Make Things” and Solo RPGs by Tacky Nowacki

Playthroughs

• Obojima D&D5e Cozy Solo Actual Play by Alone in the Realm

• Boundless Solo Actual Play by Jordan Woosley

• Omens Below & Mythras Imperative by Threads & Throws

Podcasts and Videos

• The Rolling Alone Podcast is SIX by Paul Walker

Resources

• Foeditates by GMaia

Storytelling through Gaming

• Skill Creativity by Natural 7

• Reading as Inspiration for Play by Niamh Celeste

TTRPG Design

• The Situation Roll: Designing Generative Rules into 24XX by Roberto Bisceglie

• The Best Villains Don’t Wait for the Players by Calum Stokes

• D&D With a Special Effects Approach: On Magic, Wonder, and What the Rules Should Leave Undefined by Christian Lindke

Feature Article

The Art of Pressure: An Early Access Review of Boundless by Fari RPGs

Review by Kerova

Initial Highlights

The menacing dark fantasy atmosphere evoked by the art of Galen Pejeau is fantastic. It perfectly aligns with the dark, moody, stylings of René-Pier Deshais-Gélinas, who leads the project with concept, rules and layout. He names the Year Zero Engine and Cairn (among others) as inspirations for the ruleset.

The lore is presented in short descriptions, spanning aeons of time, that sets the stage of the current perilous world your player character will exist in.

Pressure Built In

This is what I consider to be the bread and butter of the game: Mechanics used to create and release Pressure.

The game uses a 6 sided Dice Pool system where results of 5-6 are hits. This comes into play via Fortune Rolls and Attribute tests.

2+ Hits: Success with extra Hits amplifying the effect.
1 Hit: Success, but there is a twist or a setback.
0 Hits: Failure and there is a twist or a setback.

This concept is further developed with more nuance through Positioning, which I will get into later. PCs have four Attributes: Strength, Agility, Presence and Wisdom that range from 1 up to 6 max. Attribute checks are made by rolling their Dice Pool and resolving successes (Hits) as above.

Fortune Rolls are where a lot of the dice rolling takes place. This is used to progress through key elements of play such as Journeying, Delves, Mysteries, and even running a Stronghold. The Fortune Roll also doubles as an Oracle, a staple for Solo Play.

The Fortune Roll Dice Pool goes from Very Unlikely (0 Dice), up to Very Likely (4 Dice). Players choose how likely the Fortune Roll is by considering the narrative, planning, and PC skill. The results, determined as above, are set up to draw setbacks a lot.

This creates a key component of the game: Pressure via Setbacks. Its very nature pushes and changes the fiction, moving your story forward.

Setbacks can take many different forms. Some elements (Journeying for example) have tables that can be used to generate thematic Setbacks. Often players may choose how the Setback occurs, using the narrative as a guide, which is part of the fun.

Slots (carrying capacity) is another key factor that generates pressure. Limited to 10 Slots in total.

Slots perform double duty by holding both Items and Conditions (as in Cairn). The limited space quickly creates pressure. A PC can plan for a comfortable journey, in theory, with lots of handy equipment (Rations, Torches, Tent) and then soon find themselves needing to choose what to drop when Conditions like Chilled and Fatigue begin to set in.

Conditions being thematic to the fiction with options to clear it are interesting puzzles.

My PC had the Chilled condition and could get rid of it by sitting near a fire - but that in turn costs time and resources. It affects the narrative naturally and perfectly: Do I have them spend time around the campfire or should I press on? Resting at a fire may cost more time or draw attention and pressing on may push the PC too far, since the Condition cannot be dropped arbitrarily.

Pools are a great pressure inducing mechanic. Their very existence, and what they represent can create varying stresses.

They come in different forms such as Usage, Event and Strain Pools. These Pools have a starting number of dice and are rolled as an applicable setback or when the narrative calls for it. When rolled, Hits stay and misses are taken away (up to 2 at a time). Pools are used to track everything from rations, torchlight, impending encounters, weapon strain, spell uses and much more. The Pools come and go and ease bookkeeping in many cases. They keep up the pressure because you know something is about to happen, and you can plan accordingly, even if the full details are not known quite yet.

The Importance of a Pressure Valve

Having the means to relieve the pressure is equally important. Just as the PC needs a moment of respite, the narrative also needs time to breathe. This allows time for planning, resource gain and recovery.

Mechanically this happens in two major ways.

First, Pools have the dual job of both inducing Pressure and Releasing it. They can lessen pressure in small doses, being rolled when an applicable Setback is called for. When the Pool is still present, via Hits when rolled, they may allow a moment of rest, gear functioning just long enough or light to hang on that much longer.

The second is Positioning. It represents planning, character skill and knowledge.

Standard positioning uses the result of 5-6 for Hits.

Planning or skill may allow the PC to approach a situation from a Good Position. This allows Hits to occur on a result of 4-6.

Conversely, unfavourable circumstances, lack of planning, skill or knowledge can create Bad Positioning. Hits instead only occur on a result of 6, and therefore causes, yes, you guessed it - pressure.

Boundless has an inherent tilt towards pressure that is balanced very well from tipping over with the release mechanisms.

Other Highlights

Open License

To quote: “Boundless is released under an open license. You are free to use it to create your own game built on its rules or to develop compatible third-party material.”

I love this! Encouraged and fully supported by Fari RPGs. I am pretty sure all their games have an open license.

Solo Tools

The standard Oracle is here with 4000+ random table entries (that is a crazy number).

Community

Fari RPGs has an established friendly community. An active discord where great discussions take place and all questions can be answered.

Rhythm Break

I did find myself looking for a defined way of encountering Boons. The extra Hits could absolutely come into play here. The presence of Tables for Setbacks left me wanting similar for potential windfalls (NPCs, Points of Interest or Treasure).

I would be reaching to find other thoughts on what is missing or what I want more of. Boundless is in early access and therefore a living document subject to change.

At this moment my playthrough is a solid 5 sessions in.

I do want to share an Aha! moment, when I fully appreciated what Boundless was doing for players:

In my fourth and fifth sessions, Edrik (my PC) was tracking a party of 4. They had a prisoner that he wanted to rescue. After tracking them across the wilderness and killing one party member, Edrik was hurt, cold and exhausted (2 x Fatigue and 1 Chilled Conditions taking up valuable inventory space and less HP).

He had two choices:

1. Engage now at great risk.

2. Rest and recover.

Sussing out the advantages and possible repercussions of finishing off the last 3 now, while they were somewhat vulnerable (not knowing if the prisoner was in any condition to help) versus allowing the foes to get to the safety of their stronghold was incredibly fun and engaging. It was a wonderful.

I had Edrik concoct a plan, using the environment, gear and his skills to maximise the best outcome possible. Edrik took on the aspect of Rambo and what came next was thrilling to play out.

Sorry, you’ll need to wait until post 5 of my Boundless: Edrik actual play to find out how it all went!

Follow the progress of Boundless on

• Itch: https://farirpgs.itch.io/

• Discord: https://farirpgs.com/discord/

• Website: https://farirpgs.com/

Kerova is a TTRPG enthusiast, artist and game designer. Find him on Substack at https://substack.com/@kerova. He is the author/artist of Dark Covenant Invader, Combat Apothecary, Tome of the Pyromancer and Under the Fourth Kingdom all set in the world of Ghelador. Find them on:

• Itch.io: https://kerova-archive.itch.io/

• DriveThruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/32774/kerova-archive

Kerova is currently working on the sandbox campaign setting “Ghelador.”

Mindset

• A Desire to “Make Things” and Solo RPGs by Tacky Nowacki

Playthroughs

• Obojima D&D5e Cozy Solo Actual Play by Alone in the Realm — A cozy solo campaign in the setting of Obojima, where we follow the journeys of the Witch-in-training, Naveel.

• Boundless Solo Actual Play by Jordan Woosley — A solo playthrough of Boundless, the upcoming release from Fari RPS! Going Dorn and Thora as they try to help their town.

• Omens Below & Mythras Imperative by Threads & Throws — Test play of a dungeon crawl generator

Podcasts and Videos

• The Rolling Alone Podcast is SIX by Paul Walker — The Rolling Alone Podcast is a fortnightly, 40- 45-minute podcast for solo RPG players. A mix of guests, reviews, interviews and features to inspire and assist YOUR solo play. The latest instalment features Tana Pigeon (Mythic GME), Izzy (Soloist Venture) and Odinson (Odinson Games), among others. Listen here on Substack or subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, PodBean, etc.

Resources

• Foeditates by GMaia — Core procedure (split in 4 posts) to create fantastical creatures within VI·VIII·X RPG. The procedure is meant to generate new monsters, thus supporting the GM to avoid the ‘usual’ monsters of trad games.

Storytelling through Gaming

• Skill Creativity by Natural 7 — This post discusses how player creativity can shine when the game they're playing offers abstract skills. Without explicitly defined skills, a dialogue between the GM and players can create a unique and fun dynamic.

• Reading as Inspiration for Play by Niamh Celeste — Inspiration for you campaigns can come from anywhere. Let’s take a look at a few examples taken from reading history.

TTRPG Design

• The Situation Roll: Designing Generative Rules into 24XX by Roberto Bisceglie — 24XX is built around a single design decision: roll only to avoid risk. That decision is clean and correct in the contexts it was designed for. The problem is structural. The system resolves pressure. It does not produce it. What would it look like to patch 24XX itself, without replacing it with something else?

• The Best Villains Don’t Wait for the Players by Calum Stokes — Memorable villains should not sit around waiting for the adventuring party to reach the final encounter. This practical guide explains how to give tabletop RPG villains their own goals, plans, and momentum, creating antagonists who actively shape the campaign and make the world feel alive.

• D&D With a Special Effects Approach: On Magic, Wonder, and What the Rules Should Leave Undefined by Christian Lindke — D&D has historically kept how magic works mysterious by having a catalog of spells so deep that no one could know what every spell does. It's an interesting approach, but Dungeon Masters would be better served by taking what Champions called an Effects Based approach to spells.

  

  We hope you enjoyed The Role Player’s Digest. If you’d like your work to appear in the August 2026 edition of The Role Player’s Digest, please submit your articles, art, reviews, GM tips, or anything else having to do with role playing to us here by Friday August 28. In the meantime, May the Dice be With You!

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Welcome to the 6th edition of Role Player’s Digest. We have a great feature article from Kate Korsaro for you, as well as some links to more role playing inspiration.

Index

Feature Article

• The Combat Paradox: Reconciling Wargaming Roots with OSR Philosophy by Kate Korsaro

Announcements

• Zine 3 (Free Add-on) for Under the Fourth Kingdom Released by Kerova

Playthroughs

• Salvage at Salvation Point Part 1: An Alien Evolved Edition Lone Survivor Actual Play by Adam Wright

• Machine Gods of the Noxian Expanse Actual Play by Alone in the Realm

• Delta green/Omen gme: ”911, this is an emergency” by Threads & Throws

• Robert, the Inner Warmth Paladin by Jordan Woosley

Podcasts and Videos

• Iron Vault Demystified by Oathbound Soliloquy

Resources

• Logging Your Ironsworn Campaign: A Lonelog Guide by Oathbound Soliloquy

• Ashgrave: Exploring a Procedurally Generated Dungeon with Undaunted by Sebastian Grabne

• The Secret Weapon for Serial Writers, Novelists, and Game Masters: NotebookLM by Niamh Celeste

TTRPG Design

• Backstory or Backbone? Give your character something to stand on by GMaia

• Why Great Games Die In The Backlog by Kaben

• Fiction Engines, Pressure Engines, and World Engines by Roberto Bisceglie

• How to Create a Character You’ll Still Love After 20 Sessions by Jasper C. Lock, Tabletop Toolkit

• Thinking Aloud About Game Design by Paul Walker

Feature Article

The Combat Paradox: Reconciling Wargaming Roots with OSR Philosophy

by Kate Korsaro

The Doctrine of Avoidance

Welcome to the great OSR identity crisis. If you’ve spent any time in the old-school community, you’ve likely heard the refrain: “Combat is a failure state.” It’s a foundational pillar of the philosophy, preached with the fervor of a desert monk. We tell our players that the real game isn’t about how many hit points they can chew through, but how much gold they can extract without ever drawing a blade. Yet, paradoxically, many of us spend our downtime crafting incredibly intricate, granular, and mathematically dense combat systems. We tell players to avoid the fight, but we build them a tactical sandbox so tempting they can’t help but jump in. To understand why this tension exists, we first have to look at the ideological bedrock of the movement: the belief that combat is where the player’s agency goes to die.

The Failstate Manifesto

In the traditional OSR mindset, combat is not the climax of a well-played session; it is the messy, loud, and often unnecessary consequence of a player’s mistake. If you have spent the last three hours meticulously navigating a trap-filled corridor, bribing low-level guards, and using shadows to mask your movement, the sudden transition into a high-stakes tactical skirmish feels less like a “win” and more like an “oops.” In this light, combat is the “failstate”—the point where the players’ ingenuity has run dry, their preparations have crumbled, and they have been forced to rely on the blunt instruments of iron and magic.

The manifesto of the avoidance-oriented player is centered on the idea that the “real” game happens in the margins. The real game is the negotiation with the merchant, the clever use of a heavy stone to trigger a pressure plate from a distance, or the decision to simply leave the treasure behind because the sentry count is too high. When a party engages in combat, they are essentially admitting that their options have narrowed. They have moved from a state of infinite possibility—where they could talk, bribe, sneak, or bypass—into a binary state of “hit or be hit.” For a certain breed of old-school enthusiast, the moment the Referee calls for initiative, a little part of the player’s agency has already been stripped away, replaced by the raw, unrefined necessity of survival.

Agency vs. The Dice

This brings us to the inherent friction between player intent and the cold, indifferent rolling of the dice. In a truly player-driven game, the players should be able to look at a situation and propose a solution that relies on their character’s utility and their own wit. However, OSR combat is famously lethal and famously swingy. A single well-placed critical hit from a goblin could theoretically end a veteran adventurer’s career, regardless of how “smart” the player’s tactical positioning was.

This creates a profound tension regarding agency. On one hand, players want their decisions to matter. They want to feel that their choice to use a smoke bomb or a heavy shield is a meaningful contribution to the outcome. On the other hand, the high-lethality nature of the system introduces a level of randomness that can feel like a direct assault on that agency. When the dice decide the outcome of a confrontation through a sudden, catastrophic roll, the player’s previous “planning” can feel like an illusion. This is where the doctrine of avoidance becomes a survival mechanism. If the dice are going to be this unpredictable and this deadly, the most rational, “pro-agency” move is to never roll them in the first time. By avoiding the combat, the players are attempting to reclaim control from the chaos of the dice, seeking to replace the randomness of the combat loop with the more deterministic outcomes of environmental and social manipulation.

The Cost of Engagement

Finally, we must consider that combat in an OSR setting is never a “free” encounter. It is an expensive transaction, and the currency is rarely just hit points. Every skirmish, no matter how much the players “win” it, incurs a systemic cost that ripples through the rest of the adventure. This is the attrition of the dungeon crawl. When a fight breaks out, it isn’t just the characters’ health that is at risk; it is their resources.

Think of the utility of a spellcaster or the utility of a well-equipped thief. A combat encounter consumes spell slots, burns through precious torchlight, depletes rations, and leaves the party’s most valuable tools—their specialized gear—potentially broken or lost. This creates a mounting pressure of resource depletion. A “victory” against a group of orcs might leave the party so depleted that they lack the light to see the next trap or the magical energy to bypass the next magical seal.

This systemic risk turns every combat into a strategic gamble. The players aren’t just weighing the risk of death; they are weighing the risk of “structural failure” for the remainder of the delve. This is why the doctrine of avoidance is so much more than just a way to avoid dying; it is a way to preserve the party’s ability to interact with the game’s other systems. To fight is to spend; to avoid is to save. In the economy of the dungeon, the most successful players are those who realize that the most devastating way to lose a fight is to win it, but leave themselves too exhausted to ever truly succeed at the adventure.

The Wargamer’s Inheritance

Even the most dedicated OSR purist, the kind of player who spends their weekends preaching the virtues of “avoidance over engagement” and “narrative over numbers,” likely harbors a small, shameful secret: they secretly love a good, crunchy combat encounter. There is a profound, almost contradictory tension between our ideological commitment to the idea that “combat is a failure state” and our genuine-to-god excitement when a well-placed modifier or a clever tactical maneuver results in a spectacular, dice-driven resolution. We claim to want to bypass the slog of the battlefield, yet we spend our prep time meticulously designing the very mechanical gears that make that battlefield spin.

The Genetic Code of Grids

To understand why we can’t seem to shake the tactical impulse, we have to look at the ancestry of our hobby. Long before the first dungeon crawl was ever mapped, there were wargames stiff, disciplined, and intensely preoccupied with the precise measurement of distance, the visibility of terrain, and the logistical nightmare of troop movement. When the foundations of the RPG were laid, they weren’t built on pure improvisational theater; they were built on the bones of these miniature-based combat simulations. We didn’t just inherit the dragons and the dungeons; we inherited the very concept of the “unit” and the “grid.”

Even when we attempt to strip away the tactical map in favor of “theater of the mind,” the ghost of the wargamer lingers in our every instruction. We talk about “lines of sight,” “zones of control,” and “range increments.” We use language that assumes a spatial reality governed by the physics of a tabletop miniature. This genetic code is incredibly resilient. Even in the most lightweight, narrative-focused OSR titles, there is a structural DNA that expects players to respect the geometry of the room. We are, at our core, descendants of the hobbyists who once sat over felt mats and hex maps, and that legacy provides a fundamental sense of “where” and “how” that is difficult to erase, no matter how much we emphasize player ingenuity over tactical positioning.

The Dopamine of the Crunch

There is a specific, visceral kind of satisfaction that comes from “the crunch”—that moment when a series of modifiers, environmental factors, and character abilities coalesce into a single, mathematically decisive roll. It is the “guilty pleasure” of the TTRPG experience. While we intellectually argue that combat should be a breakdown of player agency, we cannot deny the dopamine hit that occurs when a player says, “Because I’m using the heavy shield, and the light is dim, and I’m flanking, I have a +3 to my roll.”

This complexity isn’t just “math for the sake of math.” It provides a tangible, granular sense of impact. In a purely narrative system, success can often feel like a mere concession by the Referee. But in a system with mechanical depth, success feels earned through the mastery of the game’s internal logic. There is a thrill in the calculation, a feeling that the players are interacting with a complex, living machine. When the dice tumble and the math checks out, the players feel a sense of agency that is purely mechanical, yet deeply rewarding. It is the satisfaction of the engineer seeing the gears lock into place. We call it “the slog” when we’re being philosophical, but when we’re actually playing, that complexity provides a textured, tactile layer of engagement that makes the world feel “real” in a way that pure prose cannot always achieve.

Complexity as a Safety Net

Finally, we must acknowledge the practical, almost defensive, utility of robust rules. As a Referee, you often find yourself in the eye of a storm of player chaos. OSR players are notorious for attempting the impossible: they will try to bribe a gelatinous cube with a vintage bottle of wine, or attempt to use a localized thunderstorm to short-circuit a magical ward. These are brilliant, player-driven moments that define the genre, but they also present a massive problem for the person running the game. Without a framework of established rules, the Referee is left with nothing but arbitrary fiat, which can quickly lead to resentment or the feeling that the “rules” are just the Referee’s whims in disguise.

Complexity, in this context, serves as a vital safety net. Detailed combat rules and robust mechanical interactions provide a structural anchor for the game’s reality. When the players push the boundaries of what is possible, the rules provide a standardized language for resolution. A complex system allows the Referee to say, “That is a brilliant idea, and here is the mechanical cost/risk associated with it.” The rules act as the physics of the game world. They provide a predictable, if difficult, boundary that prevents the game from dissolving into unmanageable, ungrounded improvisation. In the heat of a chaotic session, the “crunch” isn’t a burden; it is the scaffolding that keeps the narrative from collapsing under the weight of its own creativity. It provides the Referee with the tools to adjudicate the absurd with a sense of fairness and consistency.

Harmonizing the Paradox: Synthesizing avoidance and engagement into cohesive game design

If the previous sections have left you feeling like a person trying to hold a handful of wet sand, please accept my apologies. We are attempting to reconcile two fundamental, and often conflicting, impulses in our hobby: the desire to play a high-stakes game of wits where the players outsmart the environment, and the deep-seated, nerdy urge to move tiny plastic miniatures across a grid with mathematical precision. It is a bit of a headache, isn’t it? We want the “Old School” ethos of player ingenuity, but we also want the “Wargame” satisfaction of a well-executed tactical maneuver. However, the solution isn’t to choose one and discard the other. The magic happens when we stop treating combat and exploration as separate modes of play and instead start treating combat as the inevitable, heavy cost of failing to manage the encounter.

Combat as Consequence

To resolve the paradox, the Referee must shift their perspective on what an “encounter” actually is. In many modern-leaning games, an encounter is a discrete event that begins with a roll for initiative and ends when the last monster is dead. In a harmonized OSR approach, the encounter begins the moment the players catch a whiff of something stinking in the dark or hear the heavy rhythmic clanking of plate armor around the corner. The “combat” is simply the mechanical way the game handles the players’ failure to negotiate, bypass, or outmaneuver that threat.

Designing encounters as “consequences” means treating the environment as a loaded spring. If the players decide to charge into a room filled with kobolds, the combat shouldn’t just be a test of their combat stats; it should be a test of their failure to notice the tripwires they ignored during exploration. The combat becomes a “bill” that has finally come due. The Referee isn’t presenting a combat encounter; they are presenting a situation that is rapidly deteriorating because the players’ previous choices have left them with no other option. When players realize that the reason they are currently rolling for initiative is because they were too greedy to bribe the gatekeeper, the combat loses its status as a primary goal and gains its status as a systemic penalty.

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Maintaining the Tensions

If we want players to avoid the meatgrinder, we have to make the “non-combat” tools just as mechanically interesting as the “combat” tools. It is a mistake to think that providing a way to bypass a fight is enough; the Referee must also provide the mechanical weight that makes fighting a terrible idea. This is where the “crunch” of the wargaming heritage can actually serve the OSR philosophy.

We can use detailed rules not to make combat more frequent, but to make it more daunting. Instead of just having a “Stealth” check, use the complexity of the rules to create a “Tension System.” Perhaps the heavy clanking of the fighter’s armor creates a “noise threshold” that the Referee tracks. If the players move too quickly or too loudly, the threshold is breached, and the “consequence” (combat) is triggered. Use the tactical elements—visibility, terrain, light sources, and line-of-sight—to create a landscape where the players’ survival depends on their ability to manipulate the environment.

The goal is to use the “crunch” to reward cleverness. If a player uses a well-placed smoke bomb or a cleverly timed lever pull to bypass a room, the mechanics should recognize that as a significant tactical achievement. By providing robust rules for environmental interaction, the Referee ensures that the “Third Option”—the solution that isn’t fighting or running—is the most mechanically rewarding path. The complexity shouldn’t be a distraction; it should be the very toolkit the players use to avoid the dice-heavy nightmare of a prolonged melee.

Reclaiming the Pleasure

Now, let us address the elephant in the room: when the swords are drawn, we still want it to be fun. We shouldn’t be so afraid of combat that we turn the game into a dry, bloodless debate. When the players have finally been cornered, when their plans have crumbled, and when the only thing left to do is swing steel in a desperate bid for survival, the game should transition into that high-stakes, tactical climax we all secretly crave.

The “pleasure” in combat comes from the narrative and mechanical release of tension. If the players have spent the last hour navigating a high-tension environment, carefully managing their light and noise, the sudden eruption of combat feels earned. It is the explosive conclusion to a period of intense pressure. In this moment, the wargaming roots can shine. The tactical grid, the detailed weapon properties, and the gritty, lethal math serve to heighten the stakes. The “crunch” provides the visceral impact that makes the players feel the weight of every missed swing and the terror of every incoming blow.

By treating combat as a high-stakes narrative climax, we respect the OSR philosophy of avoiding combat as a primary loop, while still embracing the wargamer’s love for tactical depth. We aren’t playing a game of “how much damage can I do?”; we are playing a game of “how do I survive the catastrophe I have inadvertently triggered?” When the Referee achieves this balance, combat ceases to be a repetitive mechanical loop and becomes a legendary, terrifying, and ultimately satisfying part of the player’s struggle against the dungeon.

Kate has been rolling funny-shaped dice and doing THAC0 math since the halcyon days of AD&D 2e, but lately, she’s hopelessly addicted to the lethal, rulings-over-rules charm of the OSR. When she isn’t actively trying to keep her squishy, low-level adventurers out of spike pits, she’s an aspiring game designer—or possibly a writer? The final career decision is still pending, which makes perfect sense given her ultimate superpower: the ability to enthusiastically launch a hundred brilliant creative projects and finish absolutely none of them. If you need her, she’ll be warmly welcoming you to her table while happily brainstorming her fifteenth unfinished dungeon module!

Announcements

• Zine 3 (Free Add-on) for Under the Fourth Kingdom Released by Kerova — This 19 page Zine features 4 New PC Backgrounds, 2 New Depths and 3 New Scourges.

Playthroughs

• Salvage at Salvation Point Part 1: An Alien Evolved Edition Lone Survivor Actual Play by Adam Wright — This is part one of my ongoing Alien Evolved Edition Lone Survivor Actual play. Read along to follow the adventures of Tennessee Briggs and see how long he and his crew survive.

• Machine Gods of the Noxian Expanse Actual Play by Alone in the Realm — A remnant of humanity survived the cataclysm, and ancient AI systems are now revered as gods. Follow in the footsteps of a lowly librarian, Cor, as he searches the ruins of humanity for artifacts...and the truth.

• Delta green/Omen gme: ”911, this is an emergency” by Threads & Throws — First part of my Delta green/Omen gme playrhrough

• Robert, the Inner Warmth Paladin by Jordan Woosley — An actual solo play of Tome of the Pyromancer. An ongoing series as I play the Dark Souls inspired TRPG.

Podcasts and Videos

• Iron Vault Demystified by Oathbound Soliloquy — If you've ever wanted to turn Obsidian into a VTT to play Ironsworn but the learning curve feel intimidating, now's your chance. I've recorded 8 videos detailing how to install Obsidian & Iron Vault, and how to get started.

Resources

• Logging Your Ironsworn Campaign: A Lonelog Guide by Oathbound Soliloquy — How do you use Lonelog notation with something like Ironsworn? Read this article, it explains everything with detailed examples of moves, oracle rolls and progress tracks, as well as how to create and track NPC's.

• Ashgrave: Exploring a Procedurally Generated Dungeon with Undaunted by Sebastian Grabne — Using the dungeon generation mechanics from Undaunted, the dedicated solo rules for Adventurous, I created Ashgrave. This post describes the process, and contains a map of the dungeon, drawn using Dungeon Scrawl. It is meant as inspiration for solo players, to show what kind of dungeons you can explore with Undaunted.

• The Secret Weapon for Serial Writers, Novelists, and Game Masters: NotebookLM by Niamh Celeste — NotebookLM holds my World Bible. It knows everything about my world, my story, my characters, and my plot. Anything I forget, it remember. Some software claims to be your second brain. NotebookLM actually delivers on that promise.

TTRPG Design

• Backstory or Backbone? Give your character something to stand on by GMaia — A dissertation about the (fake) myth of characters without backstory in the OSR model.

• Why Great Games Die In The Backlog by Kaben — The tabletop market is overflowing with interesting games, and most of them will never make it to a table. Not because they are bad, but because getting bought and getting played are two very different things.

• Fiction Engines, Pressure Engines, and World Engines by Roberto Bisceglie — This article is not a ranking. It is not a polemic against any design tradition. It is an attempt to map the actual terrain of contemporary RPG paradigms using a single, concrete question: where does the game place its engine of play?

• How to Create a Character You’ll Still Love After 20 Sessions by Jasper C. Lock, Tabletop Toolkit — A short guide to creating TTRPG characters who stay fun beyond the first few sessions, with simple ideas for motives, relationships, and room to grow.

• Thinking Aloud About Game Design by Paul Walker — I'm designing a solo TTRPG. And I'm doing it right out in the open. Here is the contents page for my series "Thinking Aloud About Game Design" with links to everything I've been doing in it! Keep an eye out, there is a lot more to come...

We hope you enjoyed The Role Player’s Digest. If you’d like your work to appear in the July 2026 edition of The Role Player’s Digest, please submit your articles, art, reviews, GM tips, or anything else having to do with role playing to us here by Friday July 24. In the meantime, May the Dice be With You!

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Welcome to the second edition of Role Player’s Digest. We have a great feature article from Flo G for you, as well as some links to more role playing inspiration.

Index

Feature Article

• Dynamic NPC Creation by Flo G

Announcements

• Zine Two for Under the Fourth Kingdom by Kerova

• Art Wanted for the Digest! by Niamh Celeste

Game Reviews

• Game Review: Kal-Arath by Alexander Tzakis

Mindset

• Brain fatigue by Threads & Throws

Playthroughs

• Solo Dolmenwood A Knight's Tale by Alone in the Realm

• Eustachius - A Cup of Temporal Soup Solo RPG Actual Play (Session 0.5) by Cole "Tacky" Nowacki

Podcasts and Videos

• The Rolling Alone Podcast by Paul Walker

Resources

• The Rumor Mill: A Simple Way to Make Your World Feel Real by Niamh Celeste

• Rolling Reaction by GMaia'

• Exploring Mythic Bastionland as a solo game by The Random Refuge

Storytelling through Gaming

• 5 Ways I Slowed Down My Solo RPG Play (And Why It Changed Everything) by Jonathan Hogue

Strategies

• Want-Have-Sacrifice by Natural 7

TTRPG Design

• The Highs and Lows of Game Design by Eric Dill

• Open Strategy Games: The Faction Engine by Roberto Bisceglie

• Limits, not Levels are what make your character interesting by Robert Bridgens

• Telegraphing Danger by Kate Korsaro

Other

• The Satanic Panic: The Monsters We Made up and the Cost of a "Righteous" Fantasy by Adam Wright

Feature Article

Dynamic NPC Creation by Flo G

A scalable approach to building characters during play

You meet a random NPC.
At first, they’re just a background NPC, maybe a guard, a merchant, or a stranger on the road.

Then the heroes start interacting with them, and suddenly you need to know:

• What do they want?

• How do they react?

• Who are they, really?

This article gives you a practical approach, tips, structure, and spark tables to create NPCs with meaningful detail without slowing down the game.

Quick Start

1. Choose the NPC’s function (how important they are right now)
This determines how much detail you need:

• Background NPC or Unimportant NPC → Appearance

• Combat Encounter → Current Action, Motivation

• Rumor / Quest NPC → Name, Identity, Appearance

• Quick Social Encounter → Appearance, Identity, Initial Disposition

• Random Encounter → Appearance, Current Action, Motivation (optional: Disposition)

• Important NPC → Name, Identity, Appearance, Personality, Current Action, Motivation

• Deep Social Encounter → Name, Identity, Appearance, Personality, Current Action, Motivation, Recent Past

• Companion / Patron → Name, Identity, Appearance, Personality, Current Action, Motivation, Past

2. Use context first
Before you roll anything, look at what you already know:

• Where is the NPC?

• What’s happening right now?

• What makes sense here?

Fill in as much as you can from context alone.

3. Generate what’s missing
Roll twice per trait and interpret.

• Appearance → Character Description

• Current Action → Character Actions

• Identity → Character Identities

• Personality → Personality Traits

• Motivation / Past → Themes

• Recent Past → Character Actions

• Initial Disposition → Disposition Table

You find the spark tables at the end of the article.

4. Connect the pieces
Combine the traits into a coherent character.
Adjust anything that doesn’t fit the situation.
Start playing. If the NPC becomes more important, you can always add more detail later.

1. Choose the NPC’s Function

Not every NPC needs the same amount of detail.

Most exist only for a moment. A few become important. Trying to fully generate all of them wastes time and slows down play.

Instead, try to assign each NPC a function.

The function determines how much detail you need right now.

Start with the minimum and add more only if the NPC becomes important.

NPC Functions

Use the following as a guideline for NPC functions.

1. Background NPC
Use when: Scene dressing, no direct interaction
What you need: General appearance or vibe

These NPCs exist to establish atmosphere.
Example: People drinking in a tavern

2. Unimportant NPC
Use when: Brief, one-off interaction
What you need: Appearance

These NPCs are not important. No name or deeper detail needed
Example: A tired barmaid serving drinks

3. Combat Encounter
Use when: Hostile or tense situation
What you need: Current action, motivation

Enemies that are doing something and want something.
Example: Bandits guarding a hidden entrance

4. Rumor / Quest NPC
Use when: Mentioned but not yet encountered
What you need: Name, identity, appearance

NPCs you haven’t met yet. This establishes expectations before meeting them.
Example: The Mad Baron, a feared war veteran

5. Quick Social Encounter
Use when: Short interaction, low depth
What you need: Appearance, identity, initial disposition

NPCs you meet with enough detail to roleplay the moment.
Example: A strict guard who dreams of adventure

6. Random Encounter
Use when: Open-ended situation
What you need: Appearance, current action, motivation (optional: disposition)

NPCs, you don’t know yet how important they are.
Example: A lone traveler watching the heroes from a campfire

7. Important NPC
Use when: Relevant to the story
What you need: Name, identity, appearance, personality, current action, motivation

These characters drive the story forward.
Example: A wounded traveler seeking protection to reach the next city

8. Deep Social Encounter
Use when: Meaningful or emotional interaction
What you need: Name, identity, appearance, personality, current action, motivation, recent past

NPCs that you will have a deep social encounter with.
Recent events will explain their mood and behavior.
Example: A guard acting harshly after being reprimanded

9. Companion / Patron
Use when: Recurring, long-term NPC
What you need: Name, identity, appearance, personality, current action, motivation, past

Recurring NPCs that may even travel with the heroes.
Example: A patron haunted by the loss of their child

Upgrading NPCs

First, start with the minimum you think you need. If an NPC becomes more important during play, promote them to the next level and add more detail.

This keeps the game fast, flexible, and focused, while still allowing NPCs to grow into fully realized characters when it matters.

2. Use Context First

Before you roll anything: use context.

You may already know more than you think, like the location, what is happening, the culture of the area, how the world works, etc.

This context should answer as many questions as possible.

Only roll when:

• Something is unclear

• You want variation

• You need inspiration

Derive what makes sense. Roll what’s missing.

Let Context Shape the Results

When you think your context isn’t enough or you need a bit more inspiration, use the spark tables below to fill in the gaps.

But remember that the spark tables don’t replace context; they build on it.

In case a result doesn’t fit, just adjust, reinterpret, or ignore it.

Keep the game moving.

3. Generate What’s Missing

Most trait generations follow the same pattern:

1. Roll twice

2. Combine the results

3. Interpret through context

Name

Use when: Important or recurring NPCs

To create a name, think of an associated word and split it into parts, then:

• Combine the parts

• Modify the sound

• Extract pieces to form a natural name

Don’t overthink it. Strange names are fine.
Example: “Cellar” -> “Cel” + “Lar” -> Larcel, Lars, Ella

Appearance

Use when: The NPC is visible or relevant

Roll twice on the Character Description table.

This gives a general impression; interpret loosely.
Example: “Intense” + “Foreign” → A stern figure in unfamiliar clothing

Current Action

Use when: The scene is in motion
Roll twice on the Character Actions table.
This tells you what the NPC is doing right now.

Example: “Grow” + “Communicate” → Writing a message

Identity

Use when: Social or important NPCs

Roll twice on the Identities table.

This defines their role or self-image.
Example: “Builder” + “Adventurer” → A traveling tinkerer

Personality

Use when: Behavior matters

Roll twice on the Personality Traits table.

This shapes tone and interaction.
Example: “Withdrawn” + “Bitter” → Avoids others and reacts negatively

Motivation

Use when needed: Meaningful interaction or conflict

Roll twice on the Themes table.

This defines their goal or driving force.
Example: “Love” + “Quest” → Searching for or acting on behalf of a loved one

Recent Past

Use when: Mood or situation needs context

Roll twice on the Character Actions table.

This explains the NPC’s current mood or situation.
Example: “Deal” + “Guards” → Recently got into trouble with authorities

Past

Use when: Recurring or important NPCs

Roll twice on the Themes table.

This reveals defining experiences.
You can also roll multiple times for different life events and expand using other tables or oracles.
Example: “Strength” + “Pursuit” → A past focused on becoming stronger, possibly military

Initial Disposition

Use when: First contact

Defines how the NPC reacts to the heroes.

You can derive it from context (recommended for important NPCs) or roll randomly on the following table:

• 1: Hostile

• 2–3: Unfriendly

• 4–7: Neutral

• 8–9: Friendly

• 10: Helpful

Optional: Stats and Power Level

If you need stats or want to know how strong an NPC is, you can use the following table for a quick estimation:

• 1: Weak

• 2–3: Weaker than expected

• 4–7: Expected

• 8–9: Stronger than expected

• 10: Strong

4. Connect the pieces

At this point, you have everything you need.

Now connect the pieces and link the traits together to form your NPC.

Fill gaps with creativity and context. If you need more inspiration, you can always roll more words on the spark table.

But don’t aim for perfection. Aim for playability.

Tables

NPC Functions

• Background NPC or Unimportant NPC → Appearance

• Combat Encounter → Current Action, Motivation

• Rumor / Quest NPC → Name, Identity, Appearance

• Quick Social Encounter → Appearance, Identity, Initial Disposition

• Random Encounter → Appearance, Current Action, Motivation (optional: Disposition)

• Important NPC → Name, Identity, Appearance, Personality, Current Action, Motivation

• Deep Social Encounter → Name, Identity, Appearance, Personality, Current Action, Motivation, Recent Past

• Companion / Patron → Name, Identity, Appearance, Personality, Current Action, Motivation, Past

NPC Traits Tables

• Appearance → Character Description

• Current Action → Character Actions

• Identity → Identities

• Personality → Personality Traits

• Motivation → Themes

• Recent Past → Character Actions

• Past → Themes

• Initial Disposition → Initial Disposition

• Stats → Power Level Table

Initial Disposition

• 1: Hostile

• 2–3: Unfriendly

• 4–7: Neutral

• 8–9: Friendly

• 10: Helpful

Power Level

• 1: Weak

• 2–3: Weaker than expected

• 4–7: Expected

• 8–9: Stronger than expected

• 10: Strong

Examples

Example 1: Background → Quick Interactions

In this example, the heroes enter a busy tavern and approach one of the locals, leading to a quick social interaction with a background character.

The heroes step into a crowded tavern in a rough lower-class district. We decide that the context, a rough lower-class area and crowded, already provides enough information to describe the scene, so there is no need to roll for additional details. Based on this, we interpret the environment as follows:

People sit shoulder to shoulder on long benches, laughing, shouting, and arguing over games of dice. The smell of sweat, stale alcohol, and smoke hangs heavy in the air. Dice clatter across wooden tables while bursts of laughter and angry yelling echo through the tavern. Most patrons are still dressed in their work clothes, likely having come straight from labor to drink and gamble away the day’s wages. Most are too absorbed in their own business to notice the heroes, though a few glance up from their mugs and eye the newcomers with suspicion.

The heroes are searching for information, so they approach one of the locals.

At this point, the scene shifts into a quick social encounter. We already know the general appearance of the person they approach: rough-looking, with worn clothes. That is enough detail for appearance, but who is this person, and how do they react to the heroes?

We roll on the Identities table and get Fool, Scout. We interpret this to mean the character is likely a hunter or tracker, but also someone regarded as a fool by the locals, perhaps because of his reckless behavior or drunken demeanor. Next, we roll on the Initial Disposition table and get Unfriendly. This fits naturally with the idea of a belligerent drunk who enjoys provoking strangers.

We can interpret the result like this:

As the heroes approach one of the gambling tables, a man slowly rises to meet them. He wears faded green hunting leathers, and a worn knife hangs from his belt. His posture sways slightly, unsteady from drink, and the sharp smell of cheap whiskey lingers on his breath. Narrowing his eyes at the heroes, he spits onto the floor and growls, “What do you want, adventurers?” The last word is practically spat from his mouth with contempt.

Example 2: Combat with Motivation

In the following example, we explore how to create a straightforward combat encounter.

The heroes travel along an old forest road when they notice a massive fallen tree blocking the path ahead. The moment they see it, suspicion rises among the group. They know bandits have been operating in these woods, and the obstacle looks far too deliberate to be natural. Hands move toward weapon hilts as the heroes cautiously prepare for the worst.

At this point, we already know that this will become a combat encounter. We do not want anything overly complex here, just a simple bandit ambush, so we keep the setup straightforward. The current action is already clear from both the context and our goal for the scene: bandits have blocked the road and are hiding nearby, waiting for travelers.

What we do not yet know is how these bandits approach the ambush or what truly motivates them. To answer that, we roll on the Motivations table and get Life and Separation.

We can interpret these results like this:

These bandits are not hardened murderers, but desperate survivors. Somewhere deeper in the forest, they have established a hidden camp, populated by people who fled from danger or disaster nearby. They need food, medicine, and supplies to survive the coming weeks, but they are unwilling to die for loot alone.

Because of this, the ambush may begin with demands rather than immediate violence. The bandits could attempt to force the heroes to pay a toll, create a distraction while trying to steal supplies, or quickly retreat if the fight turns against them.

This interpretation also creates potential story hooks for later:

• What forced these people to flee into the forest?

• Are they truly criminals, or simply refugees driven to desperation?

• Is there a greater threat nearby that the heroes have not yet discovered?

Example 3: Random Encounter → Important NPC

In this example, we develop a simple random encounter into an important NPC and the beginning of a small side quest.

While traveling through the woods, the heroes notice another traveler further down the path. At this point, the person could be anyone , friend, foe, or something in between. Instead of deciding immediately, we use the tables to discover who this character is and what role they may play in the story.

For a random encounter like this, we only need a few details to begin with:

• Appearance: what the character looks like.

• Current Action: what they are doing when the heroes encounter them.

• Motivation: what drives them.

There is no need to overdevelop the NPC at this stage, since we do not yet know whether the encounter will become important.

We first roll on the Character Descriptions table and get Cool and Tanned. From this, we can imagine someone with a calm demeanor and sun-darkened skin, suggesting they spend much of their time outdoors.

Next, we roll on the Character Actions table and get Protect and Deal. This implies the character is protecting someone or handling a difficult situation. To gain more context, we roll an additional word and get Hurt. Together, this strongly suggests the character is caring for or protecting someone who is injured.

Finally, we roll on the Themes table for motivation and get Hope and Friendship. These are very positive results and suggest a compassionate, good-hearted character.

We can interpret the encounter like this:
A weathered, sun-tanned man notices the heroes approaching along the forest path. Though clearly alert, he does not appear hostile. He raises one hand calmly, signaling for the heroes to come closer. Resting against the trunk of a nearby tree is another person, pale and visibly wounded. Torn cloth around the injury is stained dark with blood. The pair appears exhausted and in desperate need of help.

At this point, the heroes decide to approach and offer assistance. Since the encounter is beginning to develop into a small side quest, the NPC becomes more important, and we can now define them further.

Let’s choose a fitting name inspired by “tanned”, something simple like Dan. We also roll on the Character Identities table and get Noble and Champion. Combined with the earlier results of Tanned, Hope, and Friendship, this suggests the heroes may be dealing with a wandering druid.

We can now bring the NPC fully into the scene:
“Greetings, travelers! Fortune smiles upon us today.”
The wandering druid kneels beside the wounded man, carefully changing a blood-soaked bandage. Though hardened by years of travel and exposure to the elements, his voice remains calm and warm. The injured man is revealed to be a bandit, possibly even one the heroes encountered earlier. Dan knows exactly what kind of man he is helping, yet shows no hesitation.

Other Approaches & Inspiration

There are many great tools and ideas out there for creating NPCs, like:

• UNE (Universal NPC Emulator)

• One Page Character Crafter (Mythic Magazine #45)

Both take slightly different approaches, and both are worth exploring.
You can easily combine these approaches. Simply go with what feels right.

What About You?

I’d love to hear how you handle NPCs in your games.
Do you prefer structured tools, improvisation, or something in between?
And does this approach fit your style or not quite?
Let me know, I’m always curious how others run their games.

You can find Flo G on Substack at Worlds Within the Mind where he explores and develops rules, procedures, and techniques to enhance solo play.

Announcements

• Zine Two for Under the Fourth Kingdom by Kerova. Zine Two for Under the Fourth Kingdom by Kerova

• Art Wanted for the Digest! by Niamh Celeste. No article, just a plea. I would like to feature at least 10 to 12 pieces of art in the digest. I resorted to stuff from Unsplash for today’s digest, but I want to feature my fellow Stackers. Feel free to submit art as well as an article. Thanks!

Game Reviews

• Game Review: Kal-Arath by Alexander Tzakis. A review of the game Kal-Arath by Castle Grief. This creator gives a great example of just creating the thing and getting it into the world and it’s something aspiring creators need to see.

Mindset

• Brain fatigue by Threads & Throws. How to handle getting brain fatigued by playing solo ttrpgs

Playthroughs

• Solo Dolmenwood A Knight’s Tale by Alone in the Realm. Follow Alfred Burl in his journey to becoming a knight in this solo Dolmenwood adventure. I will be using Mythic GME as well as the core Dolmenwood rules.

• Eustachius - A Cup of Temporal Soup Solo RPG Actual Play (Session 0.5) by Cole “Tacky” Nowacki. Cole "Tacky" Nowacki introduces his newly released solo RPG, A Cup of Temporal Soup, through a new series of actual plays. In this "session 0.5," he breaks down exactly what A Cup of Temporal Soup is, how it came to be, and what the future has in store for Temporal Soup.

Podcasts and Videos

• The Rolling Alone Podcast by Paul Walker. The Rolling Alone Podcast is now up and running! This is the brand new fortnightly audio magazine show for solo TTRPG players with interviews, reviews, tips and ideas to inspire YOUR solo play. Listen here on Substack, or subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any podcast platform.

Resources

• The Rumor Mill: A Simple Way to Make Your World Feel Real by Niamh Celeste. No world can exist without gossip and rumors. Research shows that about 65% to 80% of our conversations involve people who are not present. If you include all the things we talk about on social media, gossip and rumors are the dominant form of communication in today’s world. If you want your game’s world to feel real, you need gossip and rumors. Free generator included.

• Rolling Reaction by GMaia. A procedure to define reactions between to parts made in the form of a game.

• Exploring Mythic Bastionland as a solo game by The Random Refuge. This format shows where Mythic Bastionland really shines: Rules are kept light, all the focus is on the setting (Rules-lite, Flavor Heavy as Chris McDowall calls it). The game is a super weird toolbox that, however, spawns amazing Arthurian-like legends. All in a single afternoon.

Storytelling through Gaming

• 5 Ways I Slowed Down My Solo RPG Play (And Why It Changed Everything) by Jonathan Hogue. Five small changes I’ve made to my solo RPG sessions that completely shifted how they feel, from quickly moving through rolls to slowing down and letting moments, meaning, and the overall story emerge more naturally.

Strategies

• Want-Have-Sacrifice by Natural 7. A framework for giving characters reasons to adventure that focuses on what they want to achieve, what they have at their disposal, and what they would sacrifice to get what they want.

TTRPG Design

• The Highs and Lows of Game Design by Eric Dill. Creating can be a double-edged sword, providing great highs and deep lows. Continuing to create requires remembering the joy that creation brings. While I approach this as a TTRPG creator, this reality is true for any creative endeavor.

• Open Strategy Games: The Faction Engine by Roberto Bisceglie. Open Strategy Games is a play format centered on factions rather than individual characters, with turn-based, private action submissions and referee adjudication driving the fiction forward. It also presents the “faction engine” as a distinct design model, tracing its lineage to Matrix Games and framing the public turn report as the mechanism that keeps the game moving

• Limits, not Levels are what make your character interesting by Robert Bridgens. A meaningful weakness gives a character something to struggle against. That struggle is where the most interesting stories tend to come from.

• Telegraphing Danger by Kate Korsaro. In Old School Renaissance (OSR) games, traps shouldn’t be arbitrary “gotchas” solved by a simple character skill check, as this breeds tedious paranoia and kills suspense. By treating traps as tangible mechanisms and rewarding curiosity, Referees encourage players to interrogate the environment using their own wits and mundane tools like 10-foot poles and sacks of flour.

Other

• The Satanic Panic: The Monsters We Made up and the Cost of a “Righteous” Fantasy by Adam Wright. Most people think the Satanic Panic was one simple era that focused on everything from music to TTRPGs. In fact, there were three distinct phases, each driven by a unique set of societal anxieties. This post breaks down those phases, exploring the complicated history of shame, tragedy, and the real-world impact it left on the tabletop hobby.

  

We hope you enjoyed The Role Player’s Digest. If you’d like your work to appear in the June 2026 edition of The Role Player’s Digest, please submit your articles, art, reviews, GM tips, or anything else having to do with role playing to us here by Friday June 26. In the meantime, May the Dice be With You!

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Welcome to the fourth edition of the Role Player’s Digest. We have a great feature article from Ben Adams (WriteFirster) for you, as well as some links to more role playing inspiration.

Index

Feature Article

“Play With Yourself” by Ben Adams

Announcements

“A Grinning Ghost’s Grim Tale” by GMaia

Game Reviews

• “Artefact Review” by Sarah Blount

Playthroughs

• “Lights…please?” by Threads & Throws

• “The Leather Diary - A Loner Playthrough” by Roberto Bisceglie

Resources

• “Wasting Money in the UVG” by Riley (Natural 7 on Substack)

• “Why all your NPC’s sound like you” by Robert Bridgens

Storytelling through Gaming

• Writing the Silver Spire Pt. 2 by Niamh Celeste

TTRPG Design

• “What I Learned From My First Freelance TTRPG Writing Assignment” by Adam Wright

Feature Article

Play With Yourself by Ben Adams

When I say I ‘play’, I want to be specific. I mean, creatively, using your imagination, engaging in the act of ‘play’ with one self.

“Imaginative Play” or “Make-Believe” is important for children in order to imagine, plan, practice, and play out social situations. It’s also FUN AS HELL! You ever see kids making up absolute bonkers situations? The sheer creativity is inspiring.

And we all did it. We all used our imagination. We all were creative. But then we grew up. We had to “live in the real world” and “stop daydreaming” or “get your head out of the clouds”, etc. We have to be “productive” and even our hobbies become structured and scheduled. Free time becomes gobbled up by the latest tv show or movie or video game or doom-scrolling or checking social media or any of a hundred other things that humans do to avoid boredom, many of which are passive and require little to no creativity or imagination.

This isn’t to say those things are bad! I do them, we all do. Sometimes I want to watch a funny video about dogs, or watch the latest Daredevil: Born Again episode, or Sinners (great movie) or play Cyberpunk 2077 (good game), etc. etc.

This isn’t a plea to stop doing those things, but it is a call to try to make some time to engage in creative play with one self, with one’s own thoughts. Stretch your creative brain-muscle. The point is to engage with one’s self and one’s imagination. Create art. Create stories. There’s so many ways to do so, but I’m going to focus on solo tabletop role-playing games.

There is tons of research on “pretend play” with children, but much less on “imaginative play” and adults. One such article is “Pretensive Shared Reality: From childhood pretense to Adult Imaginative Play” which has many interesting points and I’d encourage you to give it a read, even if just the abstract, introduction and conclusion. While its focus is on group tabletop rpg play, I believe many of its ideas can extend to solo play as well.

They state “...that adults engage in sophisticated forms of imaginative play, and that this phenomenon is common and widespread…while imaginative play in adults frequently requires rules, it operates by the same cognitive mechanisms of imagination that support childhood pretense.”

That makes sense to me. For our purposes today, we’re going to focus on why adults do (and I believe should) engage in this imaginative play. Here are some insights from the article.

“Generate personal…enjoyment or mirth.”

“Safe exploration of individual self-concepts (such as alternative expression of a players sexual or gender identity)”

“...expressions of alternative, unreal, or impossible agencies.”

“...engage in profound explorations of agency and concepts associated with expression of identity and morality (among many others).”

“...allows us to experience, master, and derive pleasure from forms of agency not available to us in the real world.”

“...produce novel cognitive content, and affective or agentic experiences which may be valuable to the players as individuals…”

“...opportunity for deeper involvement in the medium – via agency – is principally greater than in more passive artforms that do not require behavioral engagement.”

“...the expression of alternative agency…agency which is unavailable in other domains of real life, and agency which may be explored or exercised without regard to real-world social norms and structures.”

“...game events can generate authentic cognitive, emotional and agentic experiences…”

“...permeability between the player and play, which is responsible for affective dimensions of the experience.”

In summary, why do (and, I argue, should) adults engage in imaginative play?

It’s fun, you can explore being a different person in a different world, it provides you with agency you don’t have elsewhere, it produces new, thoughtful, affecting, valuable and authentic experiences.

So far, so good. I would agree with all those statements. Unfortunately, in the article, they state that “...unlike childhood pretense, however, such play is – critically, possibly even necessarily – socially shared.” Here’s where I must disagree. Nothing in the points above requires anyone other than yourself, a few rules and an imagination.

Children engage in ‘make-believe’ without anyone else, why can’t adults?

I know I’m speaking to those who already engage in ttrpg’s, so you are engaging in imaginative play. What I am suggesting is that, if you only engage in ttrpgs socially, in group play, is to give solo play a try.

I’m not suggesting that you should replace group play with solo play, or that one is inherently better than the other. They are obviously different, but, as seen above, both can provide some of the same benefits.

There’s something about playing with one’s self. It forces all the creative pressure on you. There’s nobody to turn to and the only tools you have are some tables and your own imagination. This also means the only limits are the ones you set. None of your ideas need to be discussed with other players or a GM. This can be intimidating and overwhelming but also freeing.

‘I’m not the creative type’ some might say, which makes me cringe. Not because I’m upset at one who says it, but at a society that has allowed a human being to grow up and identify with that statement. Every child performs some kind of ‘pretend play’ and humans have been telling stories since before we were drawing on cave walls. The idea that someone is or is not ‘creative’ cuts me to the core. Anyone can tell a story. Anyone can pretend. Anyone can make-believe. Anyone can be ‘creative’ and use their imagination. It’s part of what separates us from other animals.

To create, to use our imagination, is a skill that can be taught, practiced, learned and improved. I believe solo-play is a great way to do so and have fun. Before you say ‘not for me’, know that there are so many different ways to solo play. There’s crunchy and dense rulebooks, or loose, minimalist settings, or journaling with guided prompts, or one-page one-shots. There’s cozy and calm and peaceful games as well as intense, violent and climactic ones. There’s ones where you write pages and ones where you jot down a few words per action in bullet points. There’s games where you craft entire worlds and others where you play out one scene of one specific story. There’s tools to turn any game you like into solo, and games that come with their own solo procedures.

Many simple ones are free. Give it a try. Create a character, a world, a story. Experiment with agency. Engage with different experiences. See how it makes you feel and what thoughts come up, all on your own.

Don’t get bogged down with negative thoughts and questions. Why am I doing this? This has no purpose. Nobody is going to see this. I’m bad at this. What’s the point? Etc.

Play first, ask questions later.

And maybe you try it, and it’s not for you. Maybe you try a few different games and none of them really stick. They fall flat. That’s okay! That doesn’t mean you aren’t creative! That doesn’t mean you don’t have an imagination. Maybe drawing or painting, or graphic design, or making music is the thing for you. Try anything! Try everything!

Just do something. Create something. Tell a story in your head. Be alone with your thoughts.

Play with yourself.

You can find Ben Adams on Substack at Playing With Myself. He is currently doing a playthrough of Dark Heresy. Ben is the author of Niv Lova and Zona Nole.

Game Reviews

• “Artefact Review” by Sarah Blount. This is a review for the GM-less game Artefact by Mousehole Press. It is a fantastic journaling game about creating backstories for magical artifacts and weapons. It is completely system-agnostic and a lot of fun!

Playthroughs

• “Lights…please?” by Threads & Throws. A test of a solo-session for Call of Cthulhu ttrpg

• “The Leather Diary - A Loner Playthrough” by Roberto Bisceglie. A solo playthrough using the Loner Core Rules follows Chloe, a disillusioned high school senior in a bleak 1995 American town, who finds an anonymous diary filled with pain and sets out to uncover its owner. What begins as curiosity becomes a deeper search for authenticity, shaped by a slow, melancholic tone and unpredictable events driven by the game’s oracle system.

Resources

• “Wasting Money in the UVG” by Riley (Natural 7 on Substack). This post delves into ways you can spend the thousands upon thousands of gold coins rotting away in your coffers! Full of great "achievements" for your old school treasure hunting games.

• “Why all your NPC’s sound like you” by Robert Bridgens. Not many oracles give you prompts on how to roleplay your NPC's so that they feel distinct. This VAK approach will give them extra texture with only a one word prompt.

Storytelling through Gaming

• Writing the Silver Spire Pt. 2 by Niamh Celeste. A backstage look at running a long-term serial story with a multitude of characters. AKA How to be a Guildmaster without going Insane.

TTRPG Design

• “What I Learned From My First Freelance TTRPG Writing Assignment” by Adam Wright. I walk through my personal experience of my first TTRPG freelance assignment and all of the ups and downs that went with it. I tell my own story and have a few tips for aspiring TTRPG writers along the way.

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We hope you enjoyed The Role Player’s Digest. If you’d like your work to appear in the May 2026 edition, please submit your articles, art, reviews, GM tips, or anything else having to do with role playing to us here by Friday May 22. In the meantime, May the Dice be With You!

Welcome to the third edition of Role Player’s Digest. We have a great feature article from Alone in the Realm for you, as well as some links to more role playing inspiration.

Index

Feature Article

• What happens when you fail a dice roll? by Alone in the Realm

Announcements

• King of the Road by Julian Grant

• Decoherence (free prototype)- a solo, procedural xeno-biology RPG by Danny Wadeson.

• Rolling Alone: The Podcast by Paul Walker

Playthroughs

• Shadow Protocol: Rainwalker by Roberto Bisceglie (Zeruhur)

Resources

• A new Gamemaster Emulator in the making by The Random Refuge.

Storytelling through Gaming

• Flying Transportation in Mythology by Niamh Celeste

Strategies

• Family Ties by Riley Clark (Natural 7)

TTRPG Design

• Traveller5 is the Civilization Phaze III of RPGs by Joel Peterson (Compleat DM)

• Swarm Tactics by Kerova Archive

• XP for Gold by Kate Korsaro (Kate Plays)

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Feature Article

What happens when you fail a dice roll?

by Alone in the Realm

The thief approaches the door to the treasure vault. His lips curl up in a smile as he pulls his trusty lockpick kit from his pack. He has picked hundreds of locks in his day, and this simple door will not stop him from getting rich today.

Roll d20 +7 against DC 12 lock… 2+7=9 Fail.

Try as he might, the thief cannot open the lock, though he is a very skilled locksmith. He packs up his stuff and goes home empty handed.

The above example is extremely exaggerated. If you are playing solo, and you are doing this to yourself…well…I hope you are having fun, because I wouldn’t be.

If you do a search on “failing forward” in ttrpgs, you will find a plethora of advice and opinions on the internet. Some people hate the idea of a non-binary pass/fail result on the dice. This baffles me in a way, because, who wants the game to grind to a halt due to a failed roll? I think in solo especially, we have to provide ourselves as the player and the GM ample room to keep the story flowing, since the onus is completely on one person.

There are some rulesets that have the notion of failing forward built into the game engine. Ironsworn/Stargorged and other PbtA style games come to mind here. When I first started solo play, this idea was completely foreign to me. A failed roll was a binary no, and you had to move on and fail the entire objective. When I started playing Ironsworn, though, it really opened my eyes to the possibilities that a failing forward mindset can present.

I will explore in this article a few ideas concerning dice rolls, and my thoughts surrounding them. It really helped me to sit down and think about it, and perhaps it will help you as well.

First, when do I roll for a result?

This can be a hotly debated topic in itself, especially for those that are unfamiliar with the “rulings over rules” type of gameplay that is prevalent with OSR (Old School Revival) and narrative gaming. These are my thoughts concerning rolling for success. If your character has the skill, time, and resources to do a thing, they should just do it without a roll. A roll should only occur when there are stakes attached to the outcome.

Take our thief example from above. If there was nothing pressing the thief, he probably should just succeed in picking the lock without a roll. However, if there are guards patrolling the halls just outside the room, then maybe he should have to make a roll, due to the time constraints.

If there is nothing pressing your character though, you might want to roll for a result just to add narrative chaos into the mix. I would occasionally do this in my Mothership games. My character might be working to fix a piece of machinery, but what happened if he “failed” a roll? It might give me an opportunity for a nice consequence to incite some action. This is the driver behind the notion of failing forward.

Should you always fail forward?

For games that do not include a distinctive “weak hit” mechanism like you see in PbtA games, I think the answer here should be a no. Not every failed roll is a “No, but” result. Sometimes you just miss when you are trying to hit. Sometimes you will make a guard angry when you are trying to convince them to let you pass. But in instances where the stakes are high, and a pivotal roll comes up with a Fail, perhaps there is an opportunity to fail forward instead of bringing the story to an end.

If it isn’t outlined in your game engine, then this can also be determined by gauging the “depth of failure” based on your roll vs the target number. Perhaps if you are within X amount, you would give yourself a fail forward result. That will drive the plot forward, but still give a cost or consequence for the negative result.

Let’s look again at our thief example:

He failed his roll with a 9 vs a 12. Perhaps that is in my self prescribed realm of a “weak hit”. So, he is picking the lock and just as it clicks open, two guards burst into the room. Looks like there will be combat, or perhaps a chase scene? Either way, it gives us a consequence for the failed roll, but we still are able to get in the room, perhaps after the guards are dealt with.

There are other things that might happen as well for this weak hit, perhaps his lockpick was broken as the door clicked open. Yes, he was able to open the door, but now he will need to replace his tool before more locks can be opened.

How do you determine the consequences of a fail forward?

This could be a stumbling block for some people, as you might not always have a clear idea of what a natural consequence might be. I think having a nice table of possible consequences is a good idea if the context of the situation does not give you enough. I particularly like the Ironsworn/Starforged Pay the Price tables to spark ideas of what a consequence might be.

They range from:

You are hurt
You are stressed

You waste resources
An ally is hurt

Progress is undone
Innocents are endangered

Etc

I played quite a bit with the One Page Solo Engine by Inflatable Studios. It has a nice 6 option failure move table as well:

Cause Harm
Put someone in a spot

Offer a choice

Advance a Threat

Reveal an unwelcome truth

Foreshadow trouble

In the Warden manual for Mothership pg 33, it offers these options for possible consequences of a failed roll:

Action succeeds but costs more time or resources
Action succeeds but causes harm

Action succeeds but leaves player at tactical disadvantage

Action fails and the situation gets worse

These are all great examples that you could modify to fit your campaign or play style. More than anything else, it is important that you are having fun and that you continue to have fun and not get stuck!

This is my subjective opinion on failing forward, and certainly is not the only way to approach it. I hope it has been helpful for you in some way! I would love to hear how you handle failed rolls. Do you offer yourself a fail forward option in games where it isn’t codified into the rules?

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Announcements

• King of the Road by Julian Grant. A Solo Journaling RPG About Riding the Rails During the Great Depression.

• Decoherence (free prototype)- a solo, procedural xeno-biology RPG by Danny Wadeson. DECOHERENCE is a solo, procedural, accessible TTRPG about xeno-biology and surviving on a strange, new alien planet. Oh — and you've been infested with an alien symbiote who wants to share your consciousness. The prototype contains the full core rules and the first of three zones - hoping to find playtesters for feedback to help make the final thing really special.

• Rolling Alone: The Podcast by Paul Walker. Welcome to Rolling Alone, the new fortnightly audio magazine dedicated to the craft of solo tabletop RPGs. We aren’t here to give you another four-hour actual play. We’re here to talk shop. Every two weeks, we’ll deliver a 45-minute in-depth look into the solo scene: covering the latest indie news, system spotlights, and 10-minute How-To segments aimed at helping you become a better, bolder player with the help of creators and players from the Solo TTRPG scene. Whether you’re a journaling veteran or a curious newcomer tired of scheduling horror stories, this is your home base for mechanics, mindset, and community.

Playthroughs

• Shadow Protocol: Rainwalker by Roberto Bisceglie (Zeruhur). With this session, I’m starting my actual play of Shadow Protocol — a Metal Gear Solid TTRPG adapted to the Breathless SRD.

Resources

• A new Gamemaster Emulator in the Making by The Random Refuge. A lot of updates on the creation of the new 'Omen' Gamemaster Emulator. Omen is a toolbox for solo roleplayers that uses a unified D10 mechanic with 4 states and tokens a player can spend to influence the flow of their story.

Strategies

• Family Ties by Riley Clark (Natural 7). A post about how you can use a faction, such as a renowned noble family, to tie your characters together across space and time. I've found that using a family name helps me stay immersed in the goals and setting of a campaign even when my characters keep dying all the time!

Storytelling through Gaming

• Flying Transportation in Mythology by Niamh Celeste. Tired of your adventurers having to slog for weeks through the wilderness to get to a dungeon? Why not fly them there? Don't you make that face at me! At least not until you've read the history of flying transportation in mythology.

TTRPG Design

• Traveller5 is the Civilization Phaze III of RPGs by Joel Peterson (Compleat DM). Traveller5 is a misunderstood, unwieldy, intimidating masterpiece of tabletop roleplaying, and one that embraces a dormant philosophy about prep; that it is also play. Compleat DM previews the revised edition and makes a case for it not only as a game, but as an exhaustively useful set of tools for deep worldbuilding.

• Swarm Tactics by Kerova Archive. Mechanics for fighting and creating Swarm Enemies.

• XP for Gold by Kate Korsaro (Kate Plays). Awarding XP for killing monsters turns tabletop RPGs into predictable combat simulators and encourages "murder hobo" behavior. By switching to the classic OSR rule of 1 Gold Piece = 1 XP, the game transforms into a high-stakes heist. Monsters become dangerous obstacles rather than XP piñatas, making combat a costly fail-state to be avoided. This single rule change completely rewires player behavior—incentivizing stealth, diplomacy, and clever problem-solving, while making mechanics like encumbrance and resource management vital as players desperately try to extract their heavy loot and survive.

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We hope you enjoyed The Role Player’s Digest. If you’d like your work to appear in the April 2026 edition, please submit your articles, art, reviews, GM tips, or anything else having to do with role playing to us here by Friday April 24. In the meantime, May the Dice be With You!

Welcome to the second edition of Role Player’s Digest. We have a great feature article from Paul Walker for you, some wonderful art from Toby Penney, as well as some links to more role playing inspiration.

Index

Feature Article

• Table for One? Why I’m not embarrassed to play solo by Paul Walker

Game Reviews

• A casual stroll through the Painted Wastelands by Kind of Old

• Review of Sketchy Birds by Brian Jones with illustrations by Toby Penney

Mindset

• The Performance Paradox by Kate Korsaro

Podcasts and Videos

• How to play SoloRPGs - 3 Ways anyone can play by Daniel

Playthroughs

• Shadowdim solo play by Bryan Miller

Resources

• Creating a Sci-Fi Star System with Mythic by Alone in the Realm

Storytelling through Gaming

• Behind the Scenes: Writing the Silver Spire Pt. 1 by Niamh Celeste

Strategies

• Kitbashing my Knight Game: Or a Short Guide to Playing Multiple Games at Once by Nick Martin

• The Best Status Condition by Riley Clark

• How I solo Dolmenwood: the Campaign Mode of Omen GME by The Random Refuge

Feature Article

Table for One? Why I’m not embarrassed to play solo

by Paul Walker

If you spend any time lurking in the digital shadows of Substack, Reddit, or Facebook, you’ve seen “That Post.”

It almost always starts the same way: “I got into solo roleplaying because, as the years have passed, my gaming group has gradually crumbled into dust.”

The eulogies for these groups are remarkably consistent. It’s never a dramatic falling out.

No, it’s the slow, agonising erosion of adulting. It’s scheduling conflicts that require a PhD in logistics to solve. It’s cosplaying as a Taxi Driver for teenage kids who have a more active social life than we ever had at their age. It’s work commitments, lawn maintenance, and the general exhaustion of existing in the 21st century.

Suddenly, the gaming group that—ten years ago—had more free time than they knew what to do with, becomes a mathematical impossibility.

Then you have the “System Refugees.” These are the poor souls who want to try a gritty cyberpunk heist or some whimsical journaling game about being a sentient mushroom, but their group is welded to D&D 5e with the strength of industrial-grade epoxy. They won’t budge.

If it doesn’t involve a D20 and a Fireball spell, they aren’t interested.

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I’ve seen every reason under the sun for why solo TTRPGs are considered “the lesser option”—the methadone to the group-play heroin.

Rarely, if ever, do I see someone standing up and shouting that solo play is their primary gaming mode of choice. It’s always framed as a fallback, a lonely plan B, or a way to kill time until the “real” gamers come back from their kids’ soccer practice.

A couple of months ago, a little notification popped up on my local Facebook community page. A guy was trying to establish a local RPG group. The best part? The venue was a community hall no more than a five-minute stroll from my front door. I could have walked there in my slippers if I’d been feeling particularly bold.

My initial reaction was one of intrigued curiosity. Sure enough, D&D 5e was mentioned as the main system, but the organiser appeared open to other options. He emphasised that it was “beginner-friendly” and assured that anyone interested would be shown the ropes, even if they didn’t know a d8 from a hole in the ground.

It sounded promising. It sounded wholesome. It sounded like a great way to re-enter society.

Until I actually thought about it for more than ten seconds.

First, I did what any self-respecting internet user does: I engaged in some light Facebook profiling. The guy setting up the group was, I guess, somewhere in his mid-twenties. The initial respondents looked to be in the same demographic ballpark.

I, on the other hand, am a gentleman of a certain vintage. I’m in my mid-sixties. To put it bluntly, these people looked younger than my own children.

I started mind-mapping the “walk-in.” Imagine it: half a dozen bright-eyed Millennials and Gen Z-ers sitting around a table, trading memes and laughing about things I’d probably need an Urban Dictionary entry to understand.

Then, the door creaks open, and in walks this “knackered old Boomer.”

The silence would be deafening. It would be the kind of conversational death that follows a fart in a library. I could almost see the thought bubbles above their heads: “Is he here for the bridge club? Did he get lost on the way to the pharmacy? Is he someone’s grandpa coming to pick them up?”

Or, even worse, they’d be perfectly polite and assume I was the janitor wandering in to check why the heating was making that clanking sound or looking for a misplaced set of master keys.

Then there’s the experience gap. Despite the “beginner-friendly” tag, these groups inevitably attract people with years of D&D experience. My experience with the world’s most popular role-playing game is exactly zero. That is a very low bar to clear.

The thought of being “carried” through a rudimentary starter dungeon by a group of well-meaning, yet undeniably condescending, twenty-somethings triggered my social anxieties in about five seconds flat. I could hear the helpful, slow-motion explanations: “Now, see this plastic shape? That’s the twenty-sided one. You roll that to see if you hit the goblin, Sir.”

I started visualising the entire evening: the “fish out of water” feeling, the forced small talk about “the youth of today,” and the crushing weight of trying to roleplay a brooding rogue while my knees are making more noise than the dice. I’d be desperately checking my watch, waiting for the sweet release of the session ending so I could throw on my coat and escape back into the cool, solitary night with a massive sigh of relief.

Paranoid? Overthinking it? Of course I am!

I’m reasonably certain it wouldn’t be that bad. They’d probably be lovely, welcoming people.

...Or would they? (Insert ominous Twilight Zone theme music here.)

After staring at the “Reply” button for a good twenty minutes, I decided to let the opportunity pass. And in that moment of clicking away, I had a minor epiphany.

The reason I didn’t go wasn’t that I’m shy (though I am), or because I’m old (though I am), or because I’m worried about being “the janitor.”

The truth is, I’m not a solo player because I can’t find a group. I’m not a solo player because I’m “testing” things out for a future party.

I am a solo player by choice.

There. I said it. Someone notify the authorities.

There is nothing inherently “wrong” or “sad” about being a solo-only TTRPG player. I’m not neck-deep in this hobby because I’m a social pariah who can’t find friends (though, let’s be honest, my social circle is basically the guy who delivers my Amazon packages and me).

I play solo because it is, for me, the superior way to experience a story.

Get over it, Reddit naysayers!

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When you strip away the social pressure and the “consensual storytelling” of a group, you find some incredible perks that the group-huggers will never understand:

I play whenever I want. I don’t need to consult a shared Google Calendar or wait for Dave to finish his shift at the hospital.

If I want to play at 11:00 PM on a Tuesday, the table is ready and waiting.

I can shoehorn a cheeky session in between a doctor’s appointment and a nap. I don’t need a four-hour “block” of time to make it worth it.

I can stop mid-combat to spend twenty minutes reading the deep lore of a fictional city or writing a flowery journal entry for my character. In a group, people would start throwing dice at my head. Solo?

I can spend fifteen minutes agonising over whether to turn left or right in a corridor. I can ponder the moral implications of a dialogue choice until the sun goes down, and nobody is there to tell me to “just roll the damn dice.”

I can break off to grab a sandwich, stare out the window at a passing bird, or check the score of the game without breaking anyone else’s “immersion.”

The more I think about it, the more I realise that solo play isn’t a compromise. It’s the gold standard. It’s total creative control without the baggage of human egos and scheduling nightmares.

So, am I a “saddo”? Maybe a little. But I’m a saddo with a dragon to kill, a world to save, and nobody to tell me I’m doing it wrong.

Are you with me—or do you still need to check with your group first?

Game Reviews

• A casual stroll through the Painted Wastelands by Kind of Old. An agile review of the Painted Wastelands, a horror/psychedelic hexcrawl for OSE based on the delirious and surreal comics of Tim Molloy. We go through both the great stuff and the not-so-great stuff, all from first-hand experience playing the module.

• Review of Sketchy Birds by Brian Jones with illustrations by Toby Penney by Niamh Celeste. If you need a quick palate cleanser for your day, you need Sketchy Birds, a game so fun it should be illegal.

Mindset

• The Performance Paradox by Kate Korsaro. Tabletop RPG culture has shifted from an external focus on exploration (“How cool is that?”) to an internal focus on performance and character curation (“Look how cool I am”). This shift often clashes with complex rule systems, leading us to hand-wave mechanics in favor of cinematic moments, which lowers the stakes of the game. Furthermore, the pressure to emulate the production value of professional “Actual Play” shows is causing unnecessary GM burnout. To sustain the hobby, we should consider returning to a “gaming” mindset: respecting the dice, exploring the world with curiosity rather than pre-written scripts, and playing to be surprised rather than to perform.

Podcasts and Videos

• How to play SoloRPGs - 3 Ways anyone can play by Daniel. I create an adventure hook and walk through 3 different ways to play a SoloRPG

Playthroughs

• Shadowdim solo play by Bryan Miller. A Beyond the Wall derivative mega dungeon campaign

Resources

• Creating a Sci-Fi Star System with Mythic by Alone in the Realm. Read a demonstration of the Star System Crafter in Mythic Magazine Volume 46. The perfect tool to create your adventures in space!

Storytelling through Gaming

• Behind the Scenes: Writing the Silver Spire Pt. 1 by Niamh Celeste. Putting together and organizing a homebrew campaign for writing a serial novel.

Strategies

• Kitbashing my Knight Game: Or a Short Guide to Playing Multiple Games at Once by Nick Martin. Here are some ideas for how to break out of the constraints of singular systems and start crossing over however your story might need. Included is my current stack of materials and games for the knight-centered game that I’m playing.

• The Best Status Condition by Riley Clark. This post is about what I think the overall best status condition across all games is (both video and tabletop). I use Mythic Bastionland as an example for why "Dead" is the best status condition.

• How I solo Dolmenwood: the Campaign Mode of Omen GME by The Random Refuge. One of the most asked questions about Omen GME is if it will be able to run prewritten material, such as campaign books like Dolmenwood. In this article I discuss the oracles specifically added to the new Campaign Mode.

We hope you enjoyed The Role Player’s Digest. If you’d like your work to appear in the March 2026 edition, please submit your articles, art, reviews, GM tips, or anything else having to do with role playing to us here by Friday March 27. In the meantime, May the Dice be With You!

Submission Deadline: Friday February 21, 2026

Submit via Google form here

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Welcome to the inaugural edition of Role Player’s Digest. We have a great feature article for you, as well as some links to more role playing inspiration.

Index

Feature Article

• UNE / BOLD Review by Raymond Paul Gomez

Podcasts and Videos

• Mothership Gradient Descent Solo Actual Play Podcast by Alone in the Realm

Playthoughs

• Mythic Magazine 58 Moonlight Radio by Alone in the Realm

Resources

• The Walls of Mortok by Level 3 Dork

• A Table for Discovering Suppressed History by Niamh Celeste

• A Yes/No Oracle with Twists by Flo G

Strategies

• Four Ways to Play a Published Adventure by Paul Walker

TTRPG Design

• Designing a TTRPG: The Why by Write Firster

Feature Article

UNE / BOLD Review by Raymond Paul Gomez

The Universal NPC Emulator (UNE) and the Book of Legends and Deeds (BOLD) by Zach Best of Conjecture Games are system-agnostic prompting tools for NPC texture and narrative propulsion in TTRPG play.

This review is straightforward: if your play frequently stalls on Who is this person, really? or What happens now?, these tools reduce the frequency and duration of narrative stalls without undermining the feeling of discovery.

What You Get

UNE uses lightweight tables to directly answer questions of “WHO” regardless of setting or system. This utility is very narrow in scope and produces a wide variety of results within that scope. UNE’s possible outputs:

• NPC Concept

• NPC’s Motive

• NPC’s feelings toward current topic

• NPC’s personal immediate focus

BOLD uses similarly system-agnostic tables to serve as a “WHAT HAPPENS/HAPPENED” oracle yielding context about an event in the past or present. Its nature is more open-ended than UNE as you can use it to generate setting history, personal backstory, current dilemmas, and character/world connections at a quick pace. Because it generates events and circumstances its outputs fit both forward play and retrospective context, giving it broader coverage than UNE. BOLD’s possible outputs:

• Problems and unexpected circumstances (past or present)

• Connections between PC/NPCs and world

The Problem They Solve

In solo play (and even in traditional group games), two points of friction come up consistently:

1. Flat NPCs. Often we have an archetype (“guard,” “merchant,” “wizard”) but not much more. The interaction becomes generic because we don’t know the NPC’s goals or purpose, so nothing is at stake for the NPC.

2. Narrative block. We frequently will reach a point in the narrative where the next story beat isn’t obvious. The story idles as you search for direction.

Left unchecked, scenes can become transactional: no leverage, no surprises. You then burn time and energy coming up with solutions during play. That’s where UNE/BOLD come in. They work both independently and together to offer lightweight processes that address these problems with minimal effort.

Interpretive Generators

New solo TTRPG players often lean toward oracles and tools that yield explicit results, like the traditional d100 ‘something happens’ style of table. The certainty is useful early, but those tables can go stale as you play more and begin to get repeat results or results that don’t fit with your game.

Rather than giving the user a prescriptive answer, UNE/BOLD deliver a series of adjectives, nouns, and verbs that serve as an interpretive prompt. They are Interpretive Generators because they rely on the user to consider the context of their game to fill in the deliberate blanks. They resolve being stuck with a nudge to the imagination rather than with the dictation of explicit outcomes. You can get the same result in two different games and interpret them wildly differently. Because each result is a product of the contextual information of the narrative scenario, true repetition is rare.

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How I Use Them - Tool Triggers

Both of these supplements are modular. You can pull out a single table, run the whole tool, or mix and match with other systems. Some use cases will call for a single table, others will call for an entire supplement, and others still may require outputs from both UNE/BOLD.

I turn to the UNE when…

• A new PC or NPC enters the scene [UNE All Tables]

• I need direction on how an established NPC reacts to circumstances [UNE NPC Bearing/Focus]

• Resolve a social conflict that has tension or stakes [UNE Bearing/Focus]

I turn to BOLD when…

• Rolling up a new PC or NPC, to define a ‘formative event’ from their life that put them on the path that brought them to this moment. [BOLD All Tables]

• A scene lacks direction [BOLD All Tables]

• A complication arises but the details are unclear [BOLD Waylay]

• I need connective logic that bridges two narrative points (ie- History/backstory) [BOLD All Tables]

• I want a quick read on how a PC/NPC connects with the world [BOLD Connections]

I use UNE/BOLD together when…

• When an interaction between PC/NPC or NPC/NPC needs leverage, subtext, or greater narrative depth [UNE Bearing/Focus + BOLD Connections]

Micro-demo

In this example I’ll set up some minimal context and a triggering condition, then use UNE to create an NPC with leverage and BOLD to create a complication with enough of a hook to propel the story forward.

Setup:

You are playing a solo political-intrigue campaign. Your PC is an unranked courier working for a city-state during a time of political tension. They are carrying a sealed letter containing a coded message that, if exposed, could trigger open war.

Trigger:

Your character encounters someone on the open road while traveling to deliver the message. Who is it?

UNE:

Rolling…. 28…61…54…65…07…09…38…89…32

NPC Modifier/Noun… Pessimistic Mediator

NPC Power Level… Comparable

NPC Motive Verb/Noun… Learn Opulence

NPC Mood… Guarded

NPC Bearing… (Hostile) Injury

NPC Focus… Superiors

Prompt Interpretation:

• Another courier (comparable standing) expecting the letter to be handed off.

• They understand their lowly role as the mediator of messages between nobles, but are overall pessimistic about their place in the world.

• Secretly, they love being a courier because it allows them to sometimes break the seal of messages to read it for themselves. They get a twisted enjoyment out of learning about the opulence of the elite class from their communiques.

• They are particularly hostile today because they’re suffering pain from an injury which impacts their ability to do their job.

• Their main concern is performing their duty well enough to not earn the ire of their superiors.

BOLD:

OK, so what happens next?

Rolling…. 07…10…26…17…19…01…16…

BOLD Waylay Noun/Modifier… (Party) Disappearance

BOLD Waylay Solution… The Authority

BOLD Connection… Endorse…Exposing…Enemies…

Prompt Interpretation:

• “The Party” = your faction => someone from your faction disappears => after the “pessimistic mediator” NPC leaves with the message he’s never seen again.

• The setting’s bureaucracy somehow needs to become involved. You have to bring the problem to ‘the authorities’ to solve it.

• The authorities won’t want to find the missing man. You know that a missing courier will be interpreted as if the message were compromised. If you bring this to the authorities you fear they’ll in turn go to the council to endorse exposing the war plot by taking decisive action against their enemies…

RESULTING NEXT SCENE:

You return to the waystation to report the disappearance. The clerk refuses to log it without a superior’s seal. You either forge it, escalate to the authorities, or ride after the courier’s last known route to attempt to resolve the issue yourself.

The Final Verdict

UNE/BOLD aren’t flashy. These PWYW-priced tools are narrow in scope compared to all-in-one systems, but they solve two recurring RPG problems: NPC flatness and forward momentum. If you run solo, or you GM with heavy improvisational elements, these tools are a practical upgrade for your toolkit.

Raymond Paul Gomez is a Solo TTRPG player/designer exploring the space between chaos and order through oracles, myth, and history-driven worldbuilding. He is the author/creator @ Zep Tepi Games.

Podcasts and Videos

• Mothership Gradient Descent Solo Actual Play Podcast by Alone in the Realm — A audiodrama/podcast of my solo roleplay of the sci-fi horror game Mothership. In this podcast, we will follow my cast of characters through the module Gradient Descent.

Playthroughs

• Mythic Magazine 58 Moonlight Radio by Alone in the Realm — I explore the minigame Moonlight Radio in Mythic Magazine Volume 58. In it, we run a night time radio station that fields weird phone calls.

Resources

• The Walls of Mortok Pt. 1 by Level 3 Dork — Warmachten & Brass Gods in the 67th Reign Of Bonamere Napolia

• Behind the Scenes - A Table for Discovering Suppressed History by Niamh Celeste — A d20 table for exploring and discovering your world’s history. Perhaps your PCs think they know their world’s history until they uncover something that contradicts the official story.

• A Yes/No Oracle with Twists by Flo G — This post presents a practical Yes/No oracle for solo RPGs, designed around clear outcomes and granular odds. Answers can include twists that push the story forward and random events that create opportunities for an emergent story.

Strategies

• Four Ways to Play a Published Adventure by Paul Walker — We've all got those adventure books gathering dust on the shelf. What can we do with them when we play solo? Here are four approaches to try.

TTRPG Design

• Designing a TTRPG: The Why by Write Firster — A design article focusing on the most important fundamental question you must answer when creating a TTRPG: Why?

We hope you enjoyed The Role Player’s Digest. If you’d like your work to appear in the February 2026 edition, please submit your articles, art, reviews, GM tips, or anything else having to do with role playing to us here. In the meantime, May the Dice be With You!

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Submission deadline: Friday January 23, 2026

In the meantime, be sure to subscribe!