What is SolOSR?

If you're reading this you probably are familiar with what the OSR is. Old School Renaissance. Old School Revival. Whatever you wanna call it. It's an old school, rules-lite RPG experience and it's pretty awesome. I'm relatively new to the OSR having first discovered these games existed maybe a year or two ago? I have yet to play them. And I really want to play them. So I am going to play them. By myself. Solo.

So this blog is all about the Solo OSR experience. Or, SolORS. Get it? Yeah. It's lame. Enough of that though. On to the good stuff! How do you play an RPG solo? Lots of websites and YouTube videos attempt to go over it. Many are vague, long-winded, and make little sense to me. So I figured I'd upload my adventures to this blog for others to read. I find the best way to learn how to do something is by doing it. Or watching someone else do it and then doing it yourself. After following along with my games, you ought to have a better understanding of how it's done. Is my way the only way? Of course not. But it's a free way. And you can't complain about free, right?

Here are the tools I'm using in my first SolOSR campaign:

Rules System: Lamentations of the Flame Princess. This can be legally downloaded for free without art and it's by far my favorite OSR system I've read through. And I have pretty much every OSR you can legally obtain for free (although I will admit to not having read everyone of them from cover to cover). Please note that the paid version contains graphic artwork intended for mature readers. You can ignore the explicit content warning on the cover of the free version though as that's all been cut out from it. Grab it here.

Oracle: Madey Upy Namey Emulator (MUNE). This is a free alternative to the popular Mythic GM Emulator which seems to be by far the most popular option out there. Mythic is not a free system though and it also is not as straight forward as MUNE. You may find its complexity a bit intimidating if you've never used an oracle before. Go get MUNE right over.... Wait, what's an oracle you ask? It's essential to playing solo RPGs. You ask questions to the oracle. Yes or no questions. Then you roll a die (or dice) and you get an answer. Simple as that. Well not so simple really. You need to have an imagination and think things through logically to interpret what the answers might mean for your characters and your world. You'll see how it works right away in my next post on character generation. Stay tuned! In the meantime, you can find MUNE right over here.

Random Tables: Maze Rats. Ok, so technically my solo campaign isn't 100% free. But I already had this and it's a full-fledged game that's totally worth the $2.99! It's a great system and quite possibly the best system to introduce new players of any age to TTRPGs. Honestly I think it's worth it just for its random tables. Of course you can find various random tables online, but it's nice to get such variety in a concise little package as this game offers. If you want to buy it, get it here.

Random Generators: I just discovered Kassoon when looking for a generator to give fleshed out NPCs and Towns. It appears to be specifically designed to use with D&D 5e. I ignore the stats and only really pay attention to the write ups provided with the characters and town. As it is random, sometimes it may not fit my world 100%. That's ok. It lays out a nice framework that I can add to or delete from as needed.

Solo Gaming Overlay: I have actually not utilized this yet, but there's a system called Scarlet Heroes and a free preview version of it called Black Streams: Solo Heroes. These systems are designed to help a solo character stay alive in a game designed to be played by a whole party of characters. I might need to use it as I intend on only playing with one character. Or I might not use it. The deadliness of combat was one of the biggest draws of the OSR for me. I don't want to turn my PC into an epic hero capable of fighting entire armies. We'll see how it goes without this optional overlay. Check out Black Streams here.

Am I forgetting anything else? Maybe. Whatever. I will address other resources in my toolkit as they're used. This gives you a good enough start to understand how I handle gameplay as both a player and game master. Come see how fun this can be and go do it yourself. As shown above, it can be done for free so there's no reason not to try it!