On your left you'll see the Ironlands...
An intro to Solo RPG and Journaling, more to follow!
With the New Year been and gone, I’m finding myself staring at a big chasm of things I want to be getting on with. I have chapters to edit and this platform to grow, as well as decide what form I want it to develop into. With my finished drafts there is what I hope is good content there, but until I’ve self edited there is always the worry it won’t show the kind of polish readers expect from publishable fiction. And if I wait until everything is in a perfect place there’ll be nothing to post. So I have decided to supplement my other fiction I wanted to make something just for here. So I turned to Ironsworn…
In 2018, Shawn Tomkin released the core rules for his Ironsworn game, a tabletop RPG with the option for solo play. Unlike the majority of tabletop roleplaying games, Ironsworn could be played by a single person, using a combination of dice and tables in the book to randomly create responses to imagined actions and scenarios. There is a lot of freedom in how to interpret this and the manner of play, but I have used this system a few times now to engage in creative writing “play”, writing the fiction of what is happening and using the ruleset to generate what would happen, often overriding my preconceived idea of what the narrative should look like when the dice are or (more often) not in my favour. Interestingly my Low Fantasy novel began as an Ironsworn prompt. I was creating a character and before the first dice was rolled I had a clear and stark vision of what interesting stories I could write with this person. It felt so good that I didn’t use any of the Ironsworn mechanics, filed the idea away until November of 2023, then just started writing. In this case Ironsworn created an initial spark of an idea and then I did the rest.
There is a growing number of people who do this sort of recorded solo play, and some excellent people on Substack if you are interested in more. One great example is Star Tripper: Tales of Beta Proxima by Jenna Figgers. She uses the Starforged rules for science fiction like stories.
Another example of what this system can do is the published novella Ironsworn: The Unspoken Vow by Margot Hutton. A combination of the narrative Hutton has written but also includes the mechanics and dice rolls which prompted the story to take the turns that it did.
All the links above are great places to learn more, and I get nothing for linking them other than a warm feeling of sharing things I enjoy. So now onto my plan (Steeples fingers together ominously)…
I’ll be publishing every couple of weeks or so with mini chapters of the adventurers of my imaginary protagonists. I’ll include the dice rolls as applicable, with some comments about my reactions to the rolls and how I try to envision what happens next. As well as being a fun outlet for when I want to write but not necessatrily tackle a big project or editing (shivers) this might showcsae my writing in a format I’m a bit less hesitant to display. I hope people will enjoy and keep coming back for more adventures.
Check back soon for the background and first chapter of the journeys of the Ironsworn… In fact, here it is:
