Solo Tabletop

In my first post  for this game, I talked about my plans for the campaign and now it's time to actually implement these plans. I'm going to show you the random results I got and walk you through my thought process during character creation. The finished narrative I've come up with is summarized at the end of this post. I randomly generated a crew, as described in the core book, and then went through my collection to find something fitting for the theme. One mini (the Hulker) was already finished, but the rest I painted specifically for this campaign. Without further ado, let's meet the crew! (With their gear and in the order I rolled them up) The Captain Name : Latus Edaro Species : Human Background : Alien Culture Motivation : Order Class : Mercenary Weapons : Infantry Laser, Glare Sword Gear : Combat Armor Mini : Kill Team Rogue Trader Box Set A mercenary captain is pretty much all you need to get going with a sci fi story so this was a promising start and would make ...

During my childhood, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit made me fall in love with fantasy and reading in general, so I was really excited to finally have the 2nd edition of The One Ring RPG from Free League Publishing in my hands. I bought both the Core Book and the Starter Set, but for this post I'm only going to look at the latter. Starter sets have been a mixed bag for me in the past, but the Forbidden Lands box (also from Free League) had such fantastic production values that I trusted them to deliver another quality product. My blog is focused on solo gaming, so that is the lens through which I'm going to focus my first impressions. At the time of writing this post, I have not yet read anything from the core book, but the beautiful hardcover alone makes me really excited to give it a go. I just thought it would be interesting to approach the starter set without any preconceived notions of how things 'should' be. The bullet points and pictures should be enough to giv...

Into the Woods is a free journaling RPG written by Nathan Mehlhorn. It's about surviving a full year in an ever-changing forest, and that premise is pretty much all I knew before playing the game. As you can see from my notes, my sessions were very short, and I must admit that I felt very deflated at the time of playing (roughly 2,5 years ago). The story prompts, and random tables felt too simplistic, and it quickly devolved into a creative writing exercise, instead of the survival game I expected. My disappointment came from a lack of research and knowledge about journaling games in general. Don't let my experience with this game keep you from trying Into the Woods for yourself. If you like this style of game and the theme, then you might very well enjoy your time with it. It's free, so there's no barrier to entry. My Notes What follows are all my written notes for the very short game that I played. You can tell by the dates that I used my last session to quickly wrap...

The Rangers of Shadow Deep campaign has a few scenarios that call for gnoll enemies. Initially I was going to replace them with orcs as I didn't have any fitting minis. Then I saw the sprues of the  Frostgrave Gnolls  kit from Northstar Miniatures - which wasn't easy to find, as practically every store page (except the one I linked) only showed the front cover of the box. I really dislike how it isn't standard practice yet to show the box content (and if possible every sprue) on the store page. I want to know what I am buying, and the box art, while beautiful, doesn't help me at all. As the Frostgrave kits are very modular and mostly interchangeable, I used the opportunity as an excuse to buy a few of the other multipart kits as well. I now have a nice selection of different bits that I can use for future projects. I also decided to challenge myself a bit and practice my batch painting. Usually I only paint 5 miniatures at a time when I work on larger groups or regiment...

Another one of my older projects, and this one is especially important to share because there were a few points where it looked like a failure. In the end, it taught me a lot of valuable lessons and still left me with usable terrain pieces. Am I'm proud of them? No, not really. Can I use them for my games? Yes, of course.

This project was done over a year ago, but it's still fun to share, so here we go.

This is a project I did last year, and the rest of my Battle Company projects would sadly have to take a backseat to other things in my life. I hesitated in posting these minis on here because I'm not really proud of the result. The models are small, mono-pose, and riddled with manufacturing defects. I wasn't looking forward to painting them, and it shows in the rushed end result. It was one of those "Just get it done and table-ready" kind of projects. After giving it some thought, I  especially  want to post these kinds of projects in the future. Mistakes and unsatisfying results are part of the hobby, and I want to present my (relatively) unfiltered hobby experiences on this blog. Moria Starting Battle Company

This is a project I did last year, and the rest of my Battle Company projects would sadly have to take a backseat to other things in my life. The Lord of the Rings is by far the most influential franchise of my childhood. The books absolutely blew my mind as a child and made me realize how incredible reading can be. The movie trilogy is still my favorite to this day, and I regularly rewatch them each year. It's no wonder then that 'The Two Towers' box for the Lord of the Rings miniatures game was my entry into the tabletop hobby. I vividly remember standing in front of my (tiny) local Games Workshop and staring at the Uruk-Hai and Rohan miniatures in the window display. The box was insanely expensive for me at the time, but it was more than worth it, for it opened the door to this beautiful hobby. I wasn't yet aware that I was colorblind, so I didn't realize that it wasn't normal to not see the difference of the Scorched Brown Uruk-Hai skin on the Chaos Black pr...

This is another project I did roughly two years ago. I was playing through the core book campaign of Rangers of Shadow Deep  and needed a flesh golem for one of the scenarios. I had a few options in my pile of shame, but I chose this one since it was already primed and ready to go. It's also quite big and fits the theme really well. The fly-arm is probably one of the giant flies that the warband will encounter in a later scenario and I like to imagine that the gnoll shaman just stitched random parts together to see if it would work. I also got a better photo setup by buying a really cheap lightbox. The difference is enormous. Look at this lovingly disgusting model. It's one of the Gellerpox Infected from the  Kill Team Rogue Trader  box set from Games Workshop, and I absolutely love it. It has great details like the maggots and flies in the wounds, and the exaggerated features were a joy to paint. I've always been quite intimidated by large areas of skin. Stark highl...

This is a project I did over two years ago, but I recently stumbled upon the images and thought it would be a good project to share as it is easy to replicate. At the time, I was playing through the early Rangers of the Shadow Deep  core book campaign and I wanted a medium terrain piece with height difference and a bit of line of sight blocking. This all happened before I decided to create this blog, so I sadly took no pictures from the scenarios itself and only mediocre ones of the hill building process. Looking through my available materials, I decided upon a simple hill with a cliff. Cork bark for the cliff, expanded polystyrene (eps) as the basic structure, and thick cardstock as the base. I cut the eps in the rough shape of a hill and hotglued everything on to the base. I then covered everything but the cork bark with filler and tried to hide the rough angles and transitions. In hindsight, I should have cut the structure a bit less blocky, as the filler didn't have the mass I ...

Preface Over my years in this hobby, I have spent countless hours creating homebrew settings for various games and different groups of people. Never have I sat down and actually dedicated myself to creating a cohesive setting that was only focused on my personal interests. There were always considerations to be had about the quirks of the other players because that's what traditional multiplayer RPGs are designed for. It's a cooperative adventure and everyone should be equally involved. Don't get me wrong, I love these multiplayer sessions and will continue to run them because I really like to see the players and their characters interact with the world I present them (be it homebrew or official). Obviously, many GMs spend a lot of additional time on worldbuilding, but the reality is that most of it will never come up during the game or the players just simply won't care about it. Solo play allows me the freedom to ignore all those considerations and only focus on the t...

This is going to be the beginning of the very first campaign after action report (AAR) on this blog.

Color Variant 1 Practically every solo session I play, I utilize at least one oracle for inspiration or to fill any story gaps that need answers. Oftentimes, they are the driving narrative factor and influence much more than the game system itself. I have a binder with printed oracles from a variety of different sources that get regular use. All of them have aspects I like, but none of them are exactly  what I want. Having to shuffle through all these oracles can get quite cumbersome, and I wanted a better solution. In the end, I wrote my own oracle that gave me all the information I wanted on a single A4 sheet. I would love to hear your stories and feedback if you use it in your own gaming sessions. Update December 2023 As part of the GEMulator V1.1 update, I've also updated my main oracle sheet. ( more details ) Don't worry, the old version is still available at the download links below. Downloads Color Variant 1 Color Variant 2 Printer-friendly Variant 1 Printer-Friendly V...

Over the years, I have accumulated quite a large collection of RPG books, PDFs, zines, and other random supplements. While I have read or flipped through most of them, barely any of them used to get any playtime at my table. It's just not feasible to interrupt my session just to look for that one table/encounter/location that I read about weeks or months ago and therefore aren't quite sure where to look for exactly. I  want  to use all these resources, but in the end It's just easier to fall back on the same few books. In order to change that, I relied on my favorite aspect of tabletop games: random tables. The very heart of solo RPGs is randomization. Not knowing what's next keeps the games fresh and interesting for me. Interpreting these random results and placing them in the context of the world is the real fun for me. So why not do the same with my books? Concept Create random tables for each category you have books or resources for. When the relevant category comes...

What is this blog about? The short version: solo focused tabletop gaming For those of you only interested in actual solo content, feel free to ignore this post and instead explore the rest of this blog. Look through the different categories in the header, and I'm sure that you'll find something for your preferred genre of game. If you are, however, interested in the details and the thoughts that went into the creation of this hobby blog, then read on. I hope you learn something interesting or even get inspired to start your own blog. Project Showcases Miniature painting, terrain building, kitbashing, retrospectives Actual Plays Solo roleplaying games of all sorts - varied genres and playstyles After Action Reports (AARs) Retelling and war stories of solo miniature wargames and boardgames First Impressions Overviews and impressions of solo relevant tabletop products Reviews These will be on the rarer side as I only like to review products that I have thoroughly tested by using t...