My Solo TTRPG Toolkit

A gander at my books and supplies for solo dungeoneering

Dec 11, 2024

Around December, I get very nostalgic for the year I started taking Dungeons & Dragons seriously. My dad introduced me and my brothers to it when I was in early middle school, and we finished “Keep on the Shadowfell” before I started the seventh grade. I remember getting sick around the start of December that year and going wild browsing through the fourth edition character builder in addition to looking up various pieces of lore. It was definitely a sickday that influenced how I’d spend my time off from then on.

Since it’s getting colder outside and that “D&D bug” has crept into my bones again, making it the perfect time to sit around the table and start stories about characters in far-off lands, I thought I would take a casual approach to this week’s post. Today, I’m sharing my toolkit I use for the times I can spare to play some solo tabletop sessions. I’m fairly new to the mode of solo play, but I already think it is the perfect way to spend a few precious hours when, for whatever reason, you aren’t able to play tabletop games in a full group.

Equipment (Physical Tools)

Keeping everything as analog as possible, I always run with the classic “pen and paper” combo for my solo ttrpg endeavors. I find it helps minimize distraction and provides more immersion to have all my materials laid out in front of me. It feels rather like traditional research and consulting old texts with all the books, papers, and pencils, quite similar to the scene from Fellowship of the Ring when Gandalf is in the archives of Minas Tirith.

My dice are a collection of different sets from over the years. I don’t consider myself as a “dice goblin” at all and find it pretty unnecessary to own more than two sets (although I’ve pictured my four main sets here). Most of these dice were gifted, with the dark blue ones being from the 4th Edition Essentials Dungeon Master’s Kit, which also came with the small Dungeons & Dragons pouch. The steampunk dice were a gift on one of my birthdays and those, paired with the blue dice, became my primary sets. The orange dice were given to me by a friend in college (also on my birthday) who was actually the first person to introduce me to Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu. We were getting ready for a one-shot and he came in shouting, “Happy birthday!” as he threw the dice at me. The large, metallic d20 is a sort of novelty item that I picked up from a game store in Washington D.C., Labyrinth Games and Puzzles in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, when I was interning for a summer in the city. The clerk called it a “dire d20” which I thought was really fun and imagined myself using it for very dramatic rolls. Anyone who has used metal dice, however, likely know how annoying and troublesome they actually are when rolling them on unfelted surfaces. The green dice were also from a college friend who played in my two-year-long campaign based on Celtic mythology. She figured the green color was in theme since I had drawn so much lore from Ireland. What I also find kind of ironic is the bag in which these dice came had a blue dragon head stitched into it. I also have a few Zocchi dice for the few occasions I’ve played Dungeon Crawl Classics.

My journal was also a gift from a friend, this time from grad school. She had never played tabletop games before and had a blast getting to try out Dungeon Crawl Classics, Call of Cthulhu, and Crimson Dragon Slayer. For each of those games, I had a lot of notes and papers scattered on the gaming table that I had to flip through quite a bit for finding information. She hoped the journal would help me keep things in order for my future games. What I really enjoy about it (that is incredibly helpful for Dungeoneering) is that the pages contain grid-like dots rather than lines, which is perfect for dungeon mapmaking. I haven’t used a lot of space in it yet, but that will certainly change as I get more into solo campaigning. As an added bonus, it has a built-in bookmark, which is always handy!

Lore (The System)

The primary system that I’ve been using for solo gaming is Black Sword Hack: Ultimate Chaos Edition written by the Merry Mushmen. I backed this game on Kickstarter in 2023 sort of as a kneejerk to the OGL Fiasco that happened with Wizards of the Coast and I vehemently wanted to support as many creators that were not Hasbro’s minions as possible. I was quite happy with the end result and started dreaming of running campaigns in it although I didn’t have any immediate opportunities for doing so. After a few months of owning it, I actually got around to discovering the solo play section in the appendices. Black Sword Hack by default has everything you need to generate a campaign, from seeding the world with potential threats from the forces of Chaos and/or Law to deciding which factions align with either side of the cosmic scale to designing the unique runic weapons that exist in the world (there may only ever be two at a time!).

Several of the random tables for include rather esoteric prompts for generating encounters on top of standard rumors or plot hooks. As a Game Master in general, I've found these vague descriptors to be more challenging to interpret yet rewarding (see my comment on Gandalf above), making the hobby feel less technical or crunchy and more like an expression of folk culture, not dissimilar at all from “consulting the bones.” It also helps to not be so specific as to tailor whatever the dice come up with for specific characters and situations in campaigns.

Character creation in Black Sword Hack (in the same vein as other Old School Renaissance games) is incredibly simple yet packed with enough options and lore (left up to interpretation) to create a whole hosts of heroes, no two ever alike, to traverse a doomed world. Instead of the usual Race and Class system you find in D&D and similar rulesets, Black Sword Hack uses a background system with three Origins (Barbarian, Civilized, and Decadent) and a list of traits that provide characters with unique options for roleplay and combat, defining what they can do from casting spells to fighting with unmatched skill or consorting with demons and spirits. The first character I made for myself for my solo campaign was Fercuth, a Decadent spellsword who was born in the city of a dying race and joined up with a mercenary company, the Ash Crows, at the start of his adventure. What's great is that this system can also be used to generate companion characters to use alongside the main PC, helping flesh out the party in case I were to get stuck on an encounter.

Dungeoneering (The World Design)

One of the things I wondered when I started solo ttrpg play was how I was going to generate the world and events around my character. Thankfully, there are quite a few system neutral supplements tailored to helping Dungeon Masters creating basic plots or fleshing out their world and encounters. The two major ones I have used so far are The Dungeon Alphabet from Goodman Games and The Blue Dungeon Generator and Geomorphs by The Basic Expert.

The Dungeon Alphabet is a book I've had for almost as long as I've been playing tabletop games. I got it as a gift for Christmas the same year I finished “Keep on the Shadowfell” with my dad and brother, and right away loved the old-fashioned art style and the huge lists of random tables for generating all manner of things that could occupy a dungeon. One of my favorite activities through the years of owning it was to go through the full list of tables with an accompanying notebook or word document and roll on each one to generate different elements of a single dungeon. The tables range from A-Z with tables for generating commonplace things in a dungeon like A for Altars, B for Books, C for Caves and so on, or much more obscure or downright bizarre things like Y for Yellow or Z for Zowie (one of the options for the latter table includes the party stumbling across the rusted ruins of a classic Chevrolet).

While The Dungeon Alphabet is helpful for adding character to a dungeon, Blue Dungeon Generator is exactly what any GM would need to procedurally generate dungeon tiles using only some dice. Coming in at a lean 22 pages, this supplement has randomized tiles for standard dungeons and caves, with options for rooms, hallways, entrances, and massive 20x20 arenas. It also has some tables and options to help completely randomize each room after the first and a table for populating tiles with monsters, treasure, and traps. Some of the tiles also contain specific features to help signal the possible function of each room, which pairs beautifully with some of the tables in The Dungeon Alphabet. For example, one time I rolled up a tile that had an altar in it, so in order to determine what that altar was and if it had any properties, I turned to A for Altar in Dungeon Alphabet and rolled up what material it was made out of and what properties it had.

While these are great for dungeons and caves, there are still some supplements I ought to look for in order to flesh out other parts of my solo play. Wilderness exploration and specific monster encounters are things I would do well to add to my toolkit as I often struggle handpicking challenges for myself in my solo campaign.

Atmosphere

When it comes to actually sitting down and playing, since I’m by myself I can tailor the atmosphere of my gaming space to my liking. Usually this involves me simply sitting alone at a desk or small table with only what I need in front of me. If I'm feeling particularly moody or if we're nearing a holiday, I may light a candle or two in order to give myself “lore-friendly” illumination upon my journal and character sheet.

Something I always want to have on during my solo sessions (although I've been incorporating it into my group games as well) is dungeon synth. This genre of music is most easily described as the type of music you might hear in an old dungeon-crawling fantasy video game (many artists explicitly attempt to recreate that aesthetic in their sound and album cover art). As the name suggests, this genre primarily uses synthesizers to get the unique, droning sound that characterizes its songs, which are meant to evoke forgotten places and times only accessible via the imagination. Tolkien, D&D, Moorcock and other fantasy works are primary influences of the genre for obvious reasons with many artists referencing elements from these writers or works in their names, song titles, or art. At this point, the variety of dungeon synth has widened to include rather niche subgenres such as winter synth, dino synth, space synth, forest synth, and loads others that are used to create hyperspecific ambience for their listeners. The main place I check out for finding dungeon synth albums to put on is the You Tube channel Dungeon Synth Archives, which hosts and promotes various artists in the genre. I guarantee there is a little something for everyone on here for whatever kind of game you’re running that provides unobtrusive soundtracks to produce that old school atmosphere some veteran game masters strive for. I will say that this type of music is best paired with an old, slightly chilly basement at a small table surrounded by friends and family playing games.

Although I don’t solo game as often as I would like, the moments I do get to spend letting the dice fall and tell the story for me are something I look forward to once I get in the moment. The act of revealing and drawing the next dungeon room and seeing it blossom out on the page is incredibly soothing as it was undoubtedly my favorite part of creating my own adventures for D&D when I was a kid. It’s a relaxing way to have some fun by myself without stressing over what other people might think or leaving certain things up to a computer like in a video game; I get to watch a story about people and places that I came up with unfold by complete chance rather than try to forge it like my usual stories. I think solo gaming is something every tabletop gamer should try at least once, especially if they’re in a position where they can’t play as many group games. Sure, there’s something that’s missing when you play alone but it just takes getting used to the silence and determining what fate has in store for your character as you slowly sketch out the next room in the dungeon…

Thanks for reading this week’s post! Have you ever tried solo gaming in TTRPGs? What are the systems and tools you use for your campaigns? Share them in the comments!