The Toolmaker’s Drawer
A long flat case arrived this week, the kind a craftsman keeps his finest implements in — and when the Keeper unlatched it, no game spilled out, but the means of a hundred games: decks, tables, oracles, foldout maps, the quiet machinery that turns an empty evening into an adventure. Daniel (@dungeondive) has spent years assembling this drawer, and these dispatches are his catalogue of it: the toolkit-builder’s confession that the tool, lovingly chosen, is half the pleasure.
What binds the collection is a single conviction — that the solo adventurer need not buy a new game so much as a new generator. A book of a thousand encounters, a deck that strings quests into a campaign, an interactive-fiction pilgrimage that doubles as a prompt-mine, a pair of map-and-monster toolboxes, and finally a fond tour of the humble playing card itself, four suits standing in for a whole world. The Keeper has long held that cataloguing is its own adventure; here, at last, is a man who agrees.
Below, the drawer laid open — the new acquisitions and the older instruments shelved together, in the order they entered the archive.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Untold Encounters of the Random Kind — a thousand encounters by district, region and dungeon; as essential as Table Fables, and half as famous.
- Realm Fables - Part 1 - Tools for Generating Your World — worldbuilding generators from the makers of the Campaign Creator deck.
- Campaign Creator deck (Shieldice Studio) — red quests, blue interludes, green themes: a campaign skeleton dealt from a deck.
- Doom Pilgrim — a dice-less, idle-game pilgrimage of curses and psychic drops; weird fiction you can hold.
- Sandbox Generator — a tool worth its weight in gold for conjuring a region from nothing.
- Cartograph — discover a land and draw its map as you go.
- The Veiled Dungeon & The Long Road — Loke’s map-and-monster toolboxes: premade adventure meets roll-up sandbox.
- My favorite Tool for Solo RPGs - A Deck of Cards — the whole drawer toured, four suits standing in for a world.
- A Guide to Solo RPG Oracles and Generators — the overview that maps the whole toolmaking craft.
- GameMaster’s Apprentice: An Oracle for Every Genre — one card, every answer: yes/no, sense, name and event in a single draw.
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– The Keeper
Observes that the surest sign of a true collector is a drawer of tools he means to use more often — and a video, every year, gently promising that he will.