My Favorite Free Solo RPG!

In this video I talk a bit about my favorite free solo RPG experience, which just so happens to be very appropriate with Halloween coming up soon! This is a short one, so hopefully you get a chance to check it out and let me know in the comments if you have had a similar experience with this game!

[@picardjeanluc]

I love Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu stuff. The Solo Scenarios are okay, somewhere between playing a ttrpg and a choose your own adventure book. I've got to find a way that's to my liking to fully solo Call of Cthulhu. Mystery generation is always kind of a tough one to do right.

[@booksbricksandboards783]

Yeah, I was thinking of how to do it and my conclusion was you would run it from the Keeper perspective and the investigators would be the ones that you ran through the oracle. So a little backwards, but honestly most characters are little more than stereotypes of an archetypal figure anyway, so I might run through some of the starter set adventures that way.

[@picardjeanluc]

@@booksbricksandboards783 Hmm, I hadn't thought of running it that way. Could be interesting, I'll have to give it a go.

[@booksbricksandboards783]

Basically, how I was thinking it would work would be to utilize skill rolls to see how well the investigators chose their path, and filling the gaps with “I think they would do this”. Helps to have a good idea of their personalities and motivations ahead of time. A trick I have used for similar experiments is, character A is this world’s version of X. They will act as X would in all situations where it is not obvious. Nice short cut.

[@AceneDean]

Has there been any more movement on this? I'd love to play it solo.

[@chatgris6102]

Looks interesting)) i would love to see some gameplay as an example if its possible

[@booksbricksandboards783]

Gris, mechanically, it is just roll equal or under a skill value on a d100. If the task is hard, you may have to roll under half of the skill value, and extreme is under one fifth. The trick is, unlike most games where you can be kind of a Jack of all trades, here you have around 80 skills and you are going to be a 50% or better in about 6 of them. So you have to make choices that you hope lead to getting a possible roll, then that the dice don’t fail you. I avoided playthrough on this one because with a solo, that is part of the experience. There some really good Cthulhu tutorials for the full game (Seth Skorkowski has a great series), but for the solo you really just need about 10 minutes of reading to understand.

[@JpgSilent]

thanks man was thinking about getting into tabletop

[@booksbricksandboards783]

Welcome. Good way to start, and it translates to a full game effectively as well.

[@user-ju1du2sm6b]

Im searching for the deepest most atmospheric setup of all solos rpgs may be this be the one. Never played a single one i just wanna start with a very strong solid good one

[@booksbricksandboards783]

If I’m interpreting you correct, I have 2 suggestions for you… while the Alone Against… Cthulhu series is great, you might want to try The Legacy of Cthulhu. It has the same horror asthetic, but the game is a little less restrictive in choice and probably offers some more long term play variety. If you don’t want to go horror, you could also try Ironsworn (or if you like sci fi, Starforged). They both have a great system for story creation that forces a stronger narrative experience. All of that said, you can not go wrong enjoying an awesome free solo rpg like Alone Against the Flames. Happy hunting! 😀

[@RHampton]

Thanks. Will give it a download. I have played CoC twice. Good skill and career system and basic mechanics. Really could be used for almost any kind of genre.

[@booksbricksandboards783]

Funny that you mention that, CoC was created using the Basic Roleplaying system, which is a stripped down version of Runequest. Chaosium still sells the “Basic Roleplaying” core book on their website.