I found solo roleplaying after years of flirting on the edge of the concept.
My introduction to roleplaying was pretty standard for a kid in the 80s: Red Box Basic Dungeons & Dragons. For pretty much that entire decade, I only got to be a player in one, short session based on the included Mistamere module in the Dungeon Master’s book but I went through the solo introductory adventure many, many times. I quickly learned (I was maybe eight or nine at the time) that I could ignore the rules of using a specific character and make up other characters, including those at higher levels, and attempt it over and over to see how things worked out. I eventually convinced some friends on the bus to play with me and we had a handful of adventures with me as the Dungeon Master. It was fun and we probably did 90% of everything incorrectly.
In the 90s, I started finding other RPGs. What I did not find a lot of were players. There were some. A not-very-long Palladium Fantasy game happened that was a lot of fun. Longer Advanced Dungeons & Dragons outings. A few sessions in Werewolf: The Apocalypse. In fact, most of my playtime was just me, sitting by myself, and making characters and dungeons and scenarios. I sometimes ran through a few rounds of combat myself. I sometimes might run a trap or an event as one or more characters to make sure it made sense. I did not make the leap, then.
Two other influences had also begun to show up: Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and Heroquest. I remember practically begging my older brother to play the latter with me. I eventually gave up and learned I could mostly just do it all myself. I still did not make the leap.
I got a copy of Theatrix and was fascinated by its tables showing dramatic shifts and how to use them to determine if something succeeded. I wrote a weird, largely-conceptual RPG called Ghostlight that led to me meeting some fans and other game designers. A Doug-inspired character showed up in Graveyard Greg’s Gaming Guardians comic and that character, the Dreamwyrm, even had a Buttonmen button. I tried turning Ghostlight into a fuller RPG multiple times and one time got really close but lost all my files and could not quite find the spark, again.
In the 90s, while playing with the concept, I wrote a post on a very old blog, my first, before “blogging” was a thing. It was on “Doug’s RPG Page” [on Geocities (!), to date myself] where I talked about how you could theoretically play a game without a dungeon master by building up a series of encounters and rooms and themes and then randomly draw from a stack of index cards or roll upon a table to figure out which ones were happening when. A few people commented on that advice and there was discussion about how we could expand upon this.
I was right there. Then I backed away. Though 90% of my roleplaying experience was doing things on my own, I still primarily took it as intended: a social, creative experience.
Over the next twenty or so years, I ran some games of varying qualities, got good enough at Call of Cthulhu I started running [and sometimes still do] demos at conventions and tabletop meet-ups. There was a pretty influential game of Shadowrun where I probably learned the most about the full gamut of roleplaying. A GURPS Lite game where I realized that games did not need combat set pieces to move forward if skills are interesting. Eventually a Fate Core game that started out as Final Fantasy VI meets Skies of Arcadia for a one-shot and ended up lasting for a couple of years. It had a very “if it makes it to the table, it might be canon” vibe that encouraged everyone to build up lore and ideas.
Finally Making the Leap
Despite roughly forty-years of playing RPGs and RPG-adjacent board games—including some legit solo runs of Arkham Horror games—it was a single question that shifted the course of things. A long-time friend and frequent RPG-buddy asked me if I wanted to do some sort of 24XX game together using Mythic. I had been playing a lot of GM-less games like Fiasco | Microscope | Protocol so the concept not having a gamemaster did not worry me. That two-fer or three-fer GM-less 24XX never happened but something else did.
I realized that I heard about solo roleplaying several times but had no idea how in the heck something like Mythic would even work.
After maybe a year or two that phrase finally found its way towards me picking up Mythic 2nd Edition as it was starting to bubble into availability. I read it. Thought it sounded fun, but had no good idea how I would personally use it.
I started watching videos of folks playing and reviewing solo games to pass time. Kelsey Dionne promoted solo play around the launch of Shadowdark. I cite Harper’s Quest 2 as the proper start—when I took the leap—but thinking back it was actually Dungeon Hero, a super lightweight, minimalist solo experience, that started me on the true path. Trying to work out how to handle twists and stories in the game, character development—mechanical and narrative—and how to add details in a qualified way got me primed to learn more about solo play.
I played Harpers Quest 2. Then added in bits of Mythic, and eventually kicked off an Advanced Fighting Fantasy game that never moved fast but drifted at whatever speed I needed.
I was hooked.
That has grown into several campaigns, off-shoots, and experiments. Hence, this blog.
The Doug Alone Prologue
Over the course of 2023 and into 2024, that AFF campaign was a large portion of my solo playing identity. Though it had multiple main characters, and had the idea of multiple POVs baked in, the central party – a bookprinter/herbalist turned hero, a runaway elf princess turned bard, and a stableboy turned fighting monk – was my outlet for a lot of creative play.
Then two things happened. First, was a disaster. Despite being “ok” with character death [sort of], the elf died at a critical point where the plot shifted gears. This made me upset enough that it kind of kicked me out of the world and made me rethink how I would handle it going forward. There was also the idea that the main big bad had turned out to be something like a hoax and the real main big bad had been broken: but it was the fact that had to rethink how the story would flow without the one character. Nowadays, I would have a number of solutions to this problem. At the time, I was still trying to figure out what was fair and fun.
Secondly, I was loving solo roleplay but the AFF game was taking a lot of time and effort to set-up. At the time, I had miniatures, maps, character sheets, journals. In some ways, it was a less complicated game than what I would play now but I was still inexperienced about how to handle what was effectively the equivalent of a multi-player game by myself where I rarely could make the full sessions required to feel like I was handling it properly.
I was looking for a game where I could play almost entirely on my phone in short bursts but still feel satisfied. This became The Bloody Hands. It was fun. It was different. It was super quick. And, with it, there was a notion that I needed a place to actually keep track of the lore and the concepts since it was very likely I was going to start forgetting things.
Hence, The Doug Alone Prologue was created [note, obviously it wasn’t called “The Prologue” to start]. And with it, my solo playing grew fairly quickly. Gareth Hendrix and the Bunker Bigfoot was the doorway to me posting more actual plays rather than recaps. Eustace + Hitomi was me continuing to experiment with different settings and challenges, but also adding in more artwork and artifacts to enhance my gameworlds. By the time the The GLOW showed up [which is being migrated to this blog], I was playing with formatting and increasing readability, including going back to some old posts and adding it in.
In September 2025, I made the decision to migrate some of the content over here and form a new blog that allowed me more creative freedom and content ownership.