The Friday Ledger
It has long been the Keeper’s observation that the most devoted scholars keep a standing appointment with themselves. So it is with Daniel (@dungeondive), whose Solo RPG Friday despatches arrive on the appointed day like a tide one can set a clock by — and whose 2023 wave has now been transcribed in full and shelved beside its 2022 forerunners.
What the Keeper finds pleasing about this stretch of the ledger is its restlessness. A single year’s Fridays refuse to settle on one thing: a grim, magicless campaign of branded survivors sits a few shelves from a cozy pub-crawl of inns and ales; a deck of weathered encounter cards leans against a box of story-generating decks; and threaded between the reviews are the quieter entries — the tip-sheets, the recommendations, the lone essay that stops to ask what any of this is. Read in order, it is less a stack of reviews than a portrait of how one player thinks about playing alone.
The Keeper has gathered the season into a single thread below — the older guidance and the newer Fridays interleaved by date, so the reader may walk the year as it was actually lived.
Exhibit Catalogue
- A Beginner’s Guide to Solo Role Playing — the on-ramp: what solo play is and how to begin without a group.
- 5 (+1) Tips for Starting a Solo RPG — six hard-won pointers for getting unstuck at the lonely table.
- Three Recommendations for Solo RPG Systems / Combos — pairings that play well together, plus a bonus combo.
- A Detailed look at Sacrifice, from Blackoath Entertainment — a magicless, Berserk-soaked D20 where you start branded and already hard to kill.
- 5 Things about Twelve Years — a tiny zine crawl with a twelve-year clock ticking toward a Lich King.
- Wandering Souls — a journaling preview with a rogue-legacy twist: retirees seed the world.
- What the heck is an RPG, anyway? — Calvinball to Blood Bowl, and seven personal markers of the form.
- Outdoor Encounter cards, from Phil Reed — a rules-agnostic deck dealt into a whole island campaign on camera.
- Broken Cask Society — fantasy Anthony Bourdain, hunting a mythical mobile micro-pub called the Water Wagon.
- Top 10 Solo RPG Things — a year’s-end reckoning of the games, tools and systems that earned their keep.
- The Oracle Story Generator — draw actor, action, subject, intent, development; watch a campaign assemble itself.
468 transcripts • 547 posts archived
– The Keeper
Notes that the man spent a whole year asking what a role-playing game is, and answered it the only honest way — by quietly playing one every Friday until the question dissolved.