How I write solo rules, pt. 1

2023 was the first time I was commissioned to make solo rules for other peoples’ creations. Here is my attempt at walking through my process and logic when I approach these.

Case study: This Ship Is A Tomb

This Ship Is A Tomb is an adventure module made by Fey Light Studios for the Mothership RPG. It presents a near-mythical, transdimensional spaceship and a set of procedural generation rules for populating it full of strange and diabolical things.

Mothership is a system that does not have an official solitaire mode. Whilst my own Mothership module, Thousand Empty Light, billed itself as a fully transferable solo toolkit as well as an adventure, what was needed here was something bespoke for This Ship Is A Tomb. The result was a module called Tooms’ Manifesto.

Where do you start?

Naturally a lot of what’s required at the start of one of these projects is getting your head in the game. You’re given an unfinished manuscript and step one is finding out what the module is all about.

As much as possible I’m keen not to take a cookie cutter approach to making solo rules. My goal is for each ruleset to feel like it belongs uniquely to the game or module it’s a part of. So I like to ask the creator what the experience of playing the game is like or what they want it to be like. This Ship Is A Tomb was an interesting challenge because it is so procedurally driven. In other words, it is already fairly suited to solo play; the player would be going through the procedures in the same way a Warden (GM) would.

So in this case, the question I was most interested in was: “what kind of experience or mechanical drive do you want to introduce that isn’t already covered?”

For this module, the answer was: exploration and problem solving. Great, that gives us something substantial to chew on.

What do you need for solo?

Normally the bare minimum you need for facilitating solo play is a way to generate answers to questions that naturally arise from play. With a group these questions are posed by the players to the GM. When it’s a one player game, these questions are posed by the player to… themselves.

In theory the player could simply answer everything themselves as they see fit. What’s normally more satisfying is some sort of random generation that throws up unexpected answers. Bounded randomness normally helps the experience remain as a play experience as opposed to a writing exercise.

This typically manifests as an ‘oracle’ of some sort, in one of two flavours. The simplest is an oracle that can give you a yes/no answer (often with some ’yes, but’s or ’no, but’s thrown in there). The more involved flavour of oracle answers open questions. It’s the difference between asking “is there something in the room?” and “what is in the room?”.

For this project, I had the option to re-use the Combined Systems Semiotic Standard that I developed for Thousand Empty Light. This is a d50 table of prompts disguised as a health and safety poster of industrial signage. From a diegetic point of view it kind of makes sense in the context of This Ship Is A Tomb — you’d expect to see warning signs on a spaceship. Easy. Job done.

However, I’m stubborn sometimes. In this case making something bespoke interested me more than incorporating an existing bit of content, and I had had an idea for a while that I wanted to explore.

Taking inspiration from The Calendar of Necrubel from MÖRK BORG

MÖRK BORG has this cool, apocalyptyic d66 table disguised as a set of psalms. Each of the 6 psalms is numbered and each contains 6 verses, annotated like parts of the Bible. The result is something that’s way more flavourful to consult than a normal, vanilla table.

The Calendar of Nechrubel. Mörk Borg is © 2020 Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell

For a while it’s struck me that this would be the good basis for a solo oracle (the open question sort) and I explored that idea for This Ship Is A Tomb. To justify the format of the thing, I came up with the idea that the oracle was some sort of unhinged manifesto the player finds on a terminal screen. The result is a list with 10 headings and 5 sub-headings (a d50 table essentially) where each heading is a cryptic statement and the sub-headings are all commands that fall under the theme of the statement.

Example:

2 I contain all that has ever been;

1. Shatter time
2. Betray legacy
3. Destroy stasis
4. Embrace mutation
5. Facilitate decay

(A quick and likely obvious note here on numbers. When designing for a particular system, it’s a bit weird to use dice sizes that aren’t usually used in that system. For Mothership, a game that almost exclusively uses d10s, this means you’re somewhat limited in the sizes of random tables you can include. A d5 (1d10 halved and rounded up) is used often enough that it’s used here.)

Each sub-heading represents two different prompts (in addition to their respective heading). The player can use one or the other or both to inspire the details they need to flesh out.

Introducing Landyn Tooms

With the main oracle in place, I next focussed on how to best integrate it with the rest of the ruleset and with This Ship Is A Tomb itself. Keeping with the idea of a terminal screen, I decided it would be neat if the rest of the solo material was on the same screen, which got me thinking about what exactly it was / why it was there.

In the core rules, the players start in a section called the Adaptive Docking Port. I liked the idea of creating a little space in this location, akin to one you might find in some video games where you navigate your character to different places to go to different modes / screens (looking at you Katamari Damacy). Here your character is going to the place that initiates the solo experience, and I figured it would be cool if this was a little escape pod bay (minus the pod itself). The implication by little here is that there’s only room for one character. Solo…get it?

From there it’s time to go to town on the theme that unifies the rules. I’d just watched an episode of X Files where the antagonist was called Tooms. Completely oblivious to the wordplay, I chose to create the idea of an NPC with that name. Only an embarrassing amount of time afterwards did I realise Tooms sounds like Tombs… like the adventure we’re working with here. Rest assured my subconscious was holding the reins.

So we have a character called Landyn Tooms and the terminal display lists their bizarre manifesto (our open-ended oracle). We’ve definitely got the makings of a solo ruleset already. But we should return to our objectives: exploration and problem-solving. How do we tie that in?

Let’s go scavenger hunting

If we consider possible catalysts for a sense of exploration and problem-solving, there’s one obvious one: items. Cool loot is a justification to delve deeper into the dark. It can involve problem-solving to attain. It can involve problem-solving to use. Let’s have a sort of bounty table of items that could be found on board this ship.

Here comes that magic glue that ties it all together. What’s the thematic justification for this? This is a question I ask a lot during game design. What neat ways can we combine things or fold the things we’ve got so they are as diegetic as possible in relation to the game universe?

In one of those shower moments of inspiration I decided Landyn Tooms is (/was?) an insurance company worker who came to seize the items. Now it makes sense why there’s a list of items on the terminal. What would an insurance company be interested in? The value of the items to be seized. This unlocked another thought - what if you gave the solo player an explicit extra incentive by seeing what value of loot they could seize and make off with? Suddenly you’ve got a sort of high score side quest. That’s a fun arcade-style twist you don’t often see in Mothership.

Finish with finesse

So to recap, mechanically we have:

• An open-ended oracle
• An item list
• A solo player objective

Thematically we have:

• An NPC and their weird manifesto
• A bounty list
• A quest

This is the point at which I do a lot of looking at what I’ve created and put in those small touches that will have a disproportionate effect on the overall impression.

Practically speaking we also need one of those simple yes-no oracles I mentioned. I wanted to stick with the idea that all of this solo stuff was on a single terminal screen. So I devised this as the computer asking for input from the user (Tooms). Remember that we need to work in lists of 5 or 10 because of Mothership’s dice. This is only a simple table so 5 should suffice, but that only covers us for “Yes”, “Yes, but”, “No” and “No, but”; we still have a 5th line to fill.

For this I was inspired by Graven Utterance’s Recluse solo engine and the way it introduces impossible presuppositions. Essentially, you ask a question of the game and it returns the result: error. This means something about the question was wrong. For This Ship is a Tomb I called this “[void]”:

“[void] indicates an answer that cannot be answered, at least not with a yes or no. Some fundamental assumption of the question is false. The baffling, chaotic nature of the Advent Dawn distorts reality and, sometimes, logic. For example, if you asked “Can I find anything in the debris?” and got a [void] result, one interpretation could be: “What I thought was debris is in fact something else completely”. Another could be: “It’s not possible to find anything right now, something is distorting my perception.”*

In a purely Mothership touch, rolling a [void] result forces you to make a panic check, because you need to make up for the fact there isn’t a GM asking the solo player to do this naturally through the course of play.

Bonus goodies

I like to fill the game design space I have with as many goodies as I can. Just cool stuff to read or play with.

The final things I added to Tooms’ Manifesto were:

• A table of threats
• A secret unlockable item

Why? Just because. The group players can’t have all the shiny toys.

Thematically the table of threats is a note on the terminal about piracy. It adds 5 different hostile NPCs that are effectively trying to do the same thing you’re doing — snaffling up all the loot — and ties them into an existing mechanic in This Ship is a Tomb.

The secret unlockable item is some pure Alfred Valley bullshit. This was fresh off the back of working on Thousand Empty Light where I had inquisitive players decoding messages to take them to password-protected itch.io sites where they could unlock bonus content. When I got the go ahead from Fey Light Studio I added a prompt at the end of the terminal asking you to input a password, with the hint, “What am I?” This is a reference to the manifesto/open-ended oracle. Yeah, it’s a riddle as well as a d50 table. And remember that problem-solving goal? Here’s a real-life problem to be solved.

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And that’s the making of Tooms’ Manifesto for This Ship is a Tomb. Next time, I’ll write a bit about the solo rules I made for Constant Downpour by Spicy Tuna RPG.

*this idea makes a reappearance in my one-page solo game that you play in your head, Diedream

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