I discovered something yesterday. First, some backstory.

Lately, I’ve gotten tired of playing video games and started playing more physical games, board games and such. My problem is I have no friends to play with, so I’ve been focusing on solo games. In my search for such games, I ran across many. I won’t go into what they all are, but will focus on one particular kind, the solo RPG (Role Playing Game). Think of a solo RPG as playing D&D™ by yourself. You play as a lone traveller wandering through dungeons, or what-not, exploring, fighting evil, discovering treasure, and growing your character. There are ton of free/ultra-cheap solo RPGs on the web. The good news is that if you don’t like dungeons and fantasy, you can get them for space travel, post-apocalyptic scenarios, horror, vampires, beer making, and whatever else you can imagine.

In most of these, you create a character and are dropped into a pre-built environment or world. You proceed by rolling dice and consulting pages, or books-worth of lookup tables that determine what happens next. These tend to be fun if you want to go through the mechanics without worrying much about what’s going on. Think, playing a video game RPG and skipping the cut-scenes and story/lore. They are also good if you don’t want to write your own story, but want to live someone else’s; think reading a book, but more interactive.

Here’s what I discovered. There is a whole subgenre of solo-RPGs known as Journaling RPGs. (This isn’t to be confused with JRPGs which are Japanese RPG video games—fun, but not the topic of this post.) I’ll call Journaling RPGs jRPGs to distinguish them from JRPGs.

jRPGs strip almost everything, and are very minimal solo RPGs in that the rules often fit on a single sheet of paper, and the look-up tables are minimal or even non-existent. So what kind of game is this, if it has no story or almost no rules? It’s a writer’s game, as the journaling aspect hints.

In solo jRPGs, you not only create the character, you create the story as you play, following the minimal constraints. You create the world, the encounters, what you discover, how you react, etc. You role play everything. In D&D™, and its ilk, there is someone known as a Game Master (GM) who develops the game scenario and orchestrates the events that the players react to. In solo jRPGs, you are the GM and the player.

So why is journaling in the name? You write! You journal your adventures in a notebook. This not only builds a story, but keeps track of your abilities, your growth, etc. This can be as simple as bullet points, and as complex as full-blown chapter-length journal entries.

Simply put, a solo jRPG is a series of linked writing prompts with the addition of certain constraints.

Here’s a simple example:

• The event: You find a treasure. (It’s up to you to determine what the treasure is, where it is, how it’s guarded, etc.)
• Your character decides what to do with the treasure. At this point, the rules may tell you to either roll a die or look up a result based on a die roll in a table. This is the “fate” aspect of your adventure, what some games call the “Oracle” or game-AI (although no programming is involved.).
• Next event: You come to a river. (Again, it’s up to you to progress the story. You may have the treasure, or not. Or, you may have been severely injured in retrieving the treasure.)
• …and so on.

So, how do you win? It depends on the game. There may be a way of scoring, or the win scenario may be up to you to determine before you start.

That’s jRPGs in a nutshell. Again, you can get them in pretty much any genre, and level of complexity. What do you need to play? A pen/pencil, a couple of dice, a notebook, and the rules.

Here is a minimal one you can start with; this one requires a deck of playing cards.

Alone Among the Stars Alone Among the Stars by Takuma Okada

Here is a complex one that has more of the world pre-defined and lookup tables.

Colostle A Solo RPG Adventure

So, if you are a writer who enjoys using prompts, or a game player who would like something different, search the web for Journaling RPGs.

Now I want to create one.

Write on!