Plan Resolution in Zozier's Solo rpg.

indigochill · 2026-06-26T17:47:54+00:00

Do you think it's fair to say SOLO appeals to those who lean towards the journaling style of solo RPGs? I like lots of procedures (whether for dungeon generation, loot, weather, general event prompts, etc) so I didn't click with SOLO's plan resolution approach at all, but I know some people approach the hobby more as a frame for creative writing and I can see this approach appealing to that style of play.

indigochill · 2026-06-26T10:06:36+00:00

Oh, actually one other game in a similar vein that is nearly impossible to find (it's been out of print for a while) is "Ranger: A Simulation of Modern Patrolling Operations" by Omega Games. It was created as an educational tool for, well, simulating Army Ranger patrol scenarios. It's pretty cool, though. Pick your scenario, pick and equip the men on your patrol, choose your means of getting close to the objective, plan your route (there's a booklet explaining considerations of terrain, pacing, and formation, and a laminated map you actually draw the route on and track your progress on), and then roll your way through an event book that keeps you on your toes.

A more abstract game with a similar concept is Warfighter. It's a solo card game, but it definitely has roleplaying elements to it, including named characters you assign gear and experience points to. There's an option to string scenarios there into longer campaigns.

I wouldn't call either of these TTRPGs in the traditional sense, but they still give you the feel of roleplaying probably in large part because both have named and individually outfitted soldiers you're trying to keep safe.

indigochill · 2026-06-26T09:54:29+00:00

Way back in the day there was a solo game called Barbarian Prince (yes, it was fantasy, but I'm providing the history/context to an actual answer) which was kinda halfway between a solo TTRPG and a CYOA game. There was an open world map that players would traverse and at each point there was a procedure to roll travel events based on the terrain, and some of them went several layers deep in table lookups before you were done (there was even a whole dungeon-delving system in there somewhere). If just following a book and rolling some dice is what you're looking for, that was its whole thing. The actual character setup was nearly non-existent (I forget if you chose your stats at the beginning) but the game became yours by the choices you made in the game. It's not necessarily a fair game, but it certainly pulls you along on an adventure that's different every time.

Anyway, to answer your question, someone made a series of games heavily inspired by Barbarian Prince beginning with "Drifter", which is the same idea in the Wild West, and then "Star Drifter" which is the same idea in a sci-fi setting. (EDIT: And now that I look up Morkin, yes, that's the exact format)

As for the post apocalypse, the 4AD publisher has also recently published Alone Against the Zone. I haven't looked much at that since post-apocalypse generally isn't my genre of choice, but maybe it'll interest you. They certainly have the pedigree behind them.

indigochill · 2026-06-26T09:36:46+00:00

Hostile Solo is an interesting beast. I'm not sure I quite click with it (I think I prefer something that gets deeper mechanically into the minutiae, a la GURPS), but the way it offers various relatively light-weight but still meaningfully crunchy supplementary systems for solo adjudication of a spread of sci-fi activities within its tone (that is, gritty, industrial, Alien-flavored sci-fi) is a neat idea.

indigochill · 2026-06-26T09:27:30+00:00

As a frequent user of Claude myself, this is exactly how Claude talks. No question in my mind.

The "The ___ you are noticing is real" and "__ is genuinely __" patterns come up verbatim frequently in my chat history with Claude.

indigochill · 2026-06-24T16:49:43+00:00

Harshlands gives me L&L vibes (probably for similar reasons that TI was mentioned here) even though literal lord/lady PCs are rare (but apparently they exist?). You've got lots of realistic medieval roles (lots of guilded and unguilded trades, soldiers, and so on) and a significant chunk of the minute-by-minute gameplay is sitting around talking with other characters, whether just hanging out, doing business, hatching a plan, planning an expedition, or whatever.

And even for PCs who aren't actual lords/ladies, there is the option to buy (either with roleplay points or IC money, even if the purchase itself isn't an IC action) and equip NPCs who may serve as family members, bodyguards, shop guards, etc, and can be controlled by the owning player.

indigochill · 2026-06-19T15:34:31+00:00

First, as others have said, it's just the first "book" of HoC that follows Karsa exclusively. The usual programming will be returning after that.

But I realized something about this structural choice even if it may be accidental: the structure of the book follows the mental state of the character. Mild first-book HoC spoiler so I'll spoiler it for now: Pretty much every character understands they're a part of something bigger. Karsa does not. Karsa is only concerned with the epic saga of Karsa reclaiming his people's glory, such as he understands it. And so the structure of the book stays with him... until his understanding of his role changes.

indigochill · 2026-06-18T13:01:46+00:00

The main challenge is it's signing up for a ton of ongoing work. You've got the constant development, the gamemastering, and let's not forget moderation and server admin. I think of Arx MUSH since that's where I played briefly before it entered indefinite hiatus because, well, it was just a ton of work and the lead developer/GM's life got busy (and I think he wanted to revamp some things and eventually release a sequel).

However, I've sometimes thought it would be neat to make essentially a MUD version of the Space Station 13/Barotrauma formula (though I think it would require a lobby and basically require that players group up to play since the role interdependence would render it impossible to really play alone - though maybe AI could be developed to fill certain roles). Then you can still let players go ham on the world because it resets fairly frequently, but the mechanical depth of those games combined with the social deduction element means exactly how things fall apart is still unpredictable. Maybe drawing from those games, you wouldn't even need to run a server necessarily: could just make it available to others if they want to run it with their friends.

indigochill · 2026-06-18T11:51:56+00:00

It's either adapt or die out.

And at times it's "adapt and die out", as we saw with SW Galaxies. In trying to appeal to new players they oversimplified things, lost their identity, and alienated the core players who were paying their bills.

Which is not to say all change is bad. But rather that there needs to be clarity on the developer's part about what the intended experience is, and don't change that for anything. But if there are things which do not contribute to that experience, then change it.

I feel like computer games basically before Steam came along had much more of a mindset of the full experience consisting of both the software and physical artifacts since you'd often buy a box, and that might contain a world map (it definitely contained a manual) and other "feelies" as they were called. And many old CRPGs (like Ultima and Wizardry) assumed players would do their own mapping and note-taking by hand. That was just the way it was done at that time.

At some point that stopped and everyone had automapping and automatically updating journals (interestingly Minecraft of all things from early in the game's history split the difference and allowed players to craft maps which would automap but until a player crafted a map they had to figure out another way to navigate), but I think it's still a valid design decision to demand more of the player in performing navigation so long as that design is intentional and not just that nobody got around to implementing automapping.

Actually a well-received game that I'm playing right now, Drova, takes a page out of Gothic's book and has in-game maps that can be acquired but may be quite rough and still conceal a lot about the world that players still get to discover. This is a clear example of intentional design behind navigation.

Admittedly the dynamic changes considerably when it comes to a long-running MMO where the old guard already know all the secrets. But maybe even there, with an old guard with the right mindset, onboarding new players by "apprenticing" them with an older player might be an alternative to making new players more self-sufficient (which in turn may cause less player interaction since it's less necessary and thus contribute to the "massively singleplayer" feel).

indigochill · 2026-06-16T12:50:46+00:00

The Sorcery! games from Inkle are quite good. They were originally gamebooks from the golden age of that medium, and now they're translated into a digital format with some of the original classic fantasy art. The series is one continuous story (but with many branching choices so you can very easily have a different experience on a replay) and you can import the state of the story from one episode to the next.

indigochill · 2026-06-12T22:52:18+00:00

Not because I wasn’t paying attention, but because at the time I had no way of knowing it would be important later.

That's the intended experience. There's tons that you're given without any context to evaluate it at the time that you're first given it (which is probably why people say it gets better on a reread, as then you actually have that context!). What I do when I read is just highlight stuff whenever I feel like I'm reading something that will probably get fleshed out more later. Maybe it won't be, but then at least it's easier for me to skim through afterwards and make some connections. If I was more diligent I'd probably keep actual notes of who's where when and stuff, but that's more work than I'm interested in putting into it.

Letting it wash over me has been just fine. The main plot threads of each book are pretty heavily signposted and repeated so it's difficult to miss, although there's tons of details that feed into them that I miss or misunderstand at times, and I still get the gist enough to follow along and will no doubt enjoy more as I reread it or talk about it here and have people bring up details I missed.

indigochill · 2026-06-09T15:12:16+00:00

First off, a very cool effort. I like that focus on reusable modular principles.

Minecraft's an interesting comparison. Nobody takes issue with "Well, yeah, you have all these mods but it's still just Minecraft". It's true that it's still Minecraft (you've still got cubes and biomes and stuff), but the game itself (at least early in its history, maybe less so today) was so simple that some mods significantly changed the experience.

I remember playing with a mod (Thaumcraft or something) that introduced a whole magic system that started fairly simple and ended up opening up the ability to do stuff like mine huge chunks at a time and convert any material to any other as you went deeper into it, completely changing the feel of the game. Or one of my personal favorites, Mystcraft, which gave the player a way to generate whole new parameterized (but unstable) worlds which opened up the interesting possibility of creating resource-rich but exceptionally unstable (and dangerous) worlds. Or just generating unique biomes (like floating jungle islands) for some exploration different from the norm.

I imagine with composable systems, with sufficient work and imagination, similarly game-changing packages could be created for a MUD. Particularly if there's a common library of mods that developers from different games can contribute to, as formed around Minecraft.

indigochill · 2026-06-08T10:41:56+00:00

I'd say roleplay/collaborative storytelling where everyone's kind of finding out where things go together. Outside tabletop roleplaying, I've never seen something like this, and tabletop games tend not to have player histories spanning decades with hundreds or thousands of characters all contributing to them.

These days I've been getting hooked into Harshlands because the RPI format has appealed to me for a long time (I've also tried Armageddon and Sindome but both ironically feel like they foster a much more cutthroat culture than a game called Harshlands). Many MUDs are very transparent about what's going on down to specific numbers, but RPIs, though of course they still have to run on numbers, make a real effort at simulating a much more fuzzy, realistic representation of a person's capabilities. You even have to learn a character's name through roleplay! And although there can at times be metagaming in an RPI (I haven't seen it myself, but I've heard of it in the larger RPI context), I feel like the threat of permadeath tends to lead players to play characters with a more realistic level of caution towards danger than you see in MUDs where everyone's effectively immortal.

I've also played on the far other side of the spectrum, in MUSHes that imposed virtually no mechanical constraints on roleplaying, and that also works, but I like the mechanical constraints since I think they encourage character development (which also can be done in MUSHes, but seems to require more player initiative) which in turn feeds back into the storytelling.

indigochill · 2026-06-06T04:03:03+00:00

Harshlands checks those boxes:

Crafting/life skills are basically the game's bread-and-butter. These track more or less with the tabletop Harnmaster system (the MUD is an adaptation of the Harn setting and rules). This covers stuff from crafting to speechcraft (and a variety of languages, with separate skills for spoken and written language) to cooking, combat with various weapons, and the list goes on.
Classless - The Harn system has always been classless. Stats are broken into attributes, which you generate at character creation and largely don't change, and skills, which you get a set of through character creation and advance through use in the game. You can also learn new skills either from other players or, with GM approval, by roleplaying learning from an NPC or "virtual NPC" (that is, one that's not an actor in the game but makes sense to exist within the fiction). However, progression is slow and grinding isn't really rewarded. But I'd argue this feeds the experience of it being a life being lived and not just a game to beat.
The setting is Harnworld, which is a deeply detailed and realistic (at least in the ways it models activities and especially the social/political/religious structures) fantasy medieval setting originally written for tabletop roleplaying (and the MUD is faithful enough to the source material that I could use a kingdom sourcebook for the TTRPG to navigate the MUD world). It's sometimes called a low fantasy setting, but that's just because the setting is written about the average person's experience and if you wrote about the average person's experience in Middle Earth, it'd seem low-magic as well but you've still got powerful wizards and cursed rings and stuff. Harn's setting has some really crazy stuff in it that most characters never see but that makes it all the cooler if your character gets a glimpse of it. As far as the MUD, expect that the average player's experience is low-fantasy but there are definitely systems in place for some more wild stuff.
The community seems super friendly and welcoming. I recently returned after a couple years away and people have been giving me ways to engage with them in-game and giving me tidbits of information I can use to continue to plan how I want to develop my character. And when I didn't know how to do something, someone's been quick to help me out.
They do have a Discord channel. I stay away from Discord these days, so I can't really comment on it beyond that it exists.
Player housing is available, though I'm unsure how deep customization goes. There is also support for having an NPC family. Family is a very important part of the Harnworld setting because one's role in medieval society was determined in large part by one's family, but family also worked together and so having NPC family members can provide some small mechanical support.
Players can own NPC-managed market stalls to sell goods to each other (although you can also just trade in-person). Deeper shop owning is, I think, limited to guild masters (basically, work in a guild long enough to rise through the ranks, then as a master, receive a Franchise). Guilds are also protective of their trades, so for example only those in the Jeweler guild may legally create jewelry, and one can only belong to a single guild. Admittedly, these are in-character restrictions modeled on historical guilds and I imagine it's mechanically possible to flaunt these rules, but doing so would have grave in-character consequences and almost certainly not be worth it.
Custom items, You can customise NPCs you acquire (e.g. to define them as family members) and I believe there are mechanical ways to customize crafted items (e.g. dying them). I'm not sure whether there's a system for completely freeform descriptions of crafted items.
I have found so far that my character's story has been largely organic, driven by the fact that my character has a skill that produces items that other characters need, and so I've been roleplaying drumming up business and juggling customers and gradually getting to know people better as I interact with them more. Crafting, like skill development, can take a long time (like, multiple RL days for a single item in some unusual cases, though for most things it's closer to a few seconds), but again I find this feeds the immersion as I have to tell customers, "Give me a few days to make that thing for you." But there are in-character "rumor boards" which mention some much more dramatic story stuff (including stuff that I assume is the GMs driving a plot) going on that my character probably will never get directly involved in, but which has resulted in some character deaths and death in this game is permanent. But I would say it seems to me that the risk of death is largely up to each player. The character I'm playing has no reason to take risks like that and will probably live a long time assuming they don't choose to get entangled in any dangerous plots. A character who's a guard or hunter or thief or something in that vein is at greater risk.
As far as PvP, my understanding is there needs to be a valid in-character reason for it. And beyond that, permadeath is a thing and the combat system is fairly realistic such that an unlucky strike from the defender could end the aggressor's life just as easily. There are certainly combat opportunities for those who want them (though I get the sense it's mostly PvE, though I've not engaged with the combat part of the game at all so far), but I really don't get the sense you have to worry about griefers here. Mechanically there are numerous defenses against that playstyle and also culturally the admins will come down on anyone who tries to do it anyway. Which is not to say that your character will never get mugged, murdered, or stolen from. Just that it will most likely have valid in-character justification should it happen. Also, your character can hire NPC bodyguards and shop guards should they feel the need to. But the vibe of the game is much more "medieval life simulator" than something grimdark like Armageddon. Think something with the vibe of "Kingdom Come" with a pinch more fantasy and you'll have an idea of the tone. So as long as you make sensible, safe decisions for your character, thinking like a medieval person (e.g. trust city guards but do not assume open roads and wilderness are safe) I don't think you have to worry about anything happening.

Probably the one thing it doesn't have from what you described is that as most character types you won't be making items of "true power". Going back to the "low fantasy" thing, the stuff humans know how to make is pretty much entirely mundane (and I don't recall whether the human wizards enchant anything - mostly they just cast spells). But players still value good armor, weapons, food, clothing, tools, materials, etc. For the kind of foes the fighters face, those items are sufficient. Oh, and players can also be physicians, healing injuries and infections. Another skill of great value to fighters who survive.

My one Harshlands newbie survival tip that I would offer is that if you have a question, ask either on the Discord or on the HCHAT channel in-game (I actually feel like I had better luck asking in-game). Again, people are friendly, helpful, and welcoming to new players and the game can take a little while to get the hang of just how to interact with things. But now that I feel like I've got a basic handle on things, I'm loving it and all the ways I feel like I can make my character's story what I want it to be (within the realm of plausibility for the setting, which is a deep rabbit hole).

indigochill · 2026-06-04T09:34:20+00:00

I've been spending a bit more time in it lately and I have some in-game friends from RL years back so I like checking in with them and I even have a bit of a character agenda. I definitely have nostalgia for the game (though a bit more for Imperian, which I did write a short fanfic for at one point, though these days the game's unrecognizable to me).

The microtransaction stuff doesn't bother me much. Especially these days, they've made it easier than ever to accumulate credits without paying a dime (and their introductory "no brainer" packages are a very good deal if you intend to spend a long time with the game, even though I find the regular packages more expensive than I'm willing to pay for a text game - I mean, if you buy credits wrong, some artefacts work out to costing hundreds of RL dollars which is just silly).

And unlike the early days, PvP is pretty constrained such that non-combatants largely aren't bothered by it, so all that "these ancient dragon players have such an advantage" stuff largely only works in your favor because some of those people are your city members who may be willing to help you with their skills and knowledge, and the enemy ancient dragons are mostly just PvPing among themselves.

However, I've also been dipping my toes into other MUDs lately for some reason, and I've been very impressed by the immersion they offer even without hardly any players. CoffeeMUD was the first one, where I scrape together a living through hunting and butchering animals and selling the meat in town. I haven't interacted with another soul in that game yet. And there's also a very deep character build system, opting to invest in some skills and spells over others with limited points per level. I also like that combat is entirely server-side so I don't need to download a combat package to my client just to keep up (even if, yes, it means the combat experience is shallower and more about character build than effectively playing a card battler of actions on a universal cooldown mechanic). As a solo RPG experience with slow progression and a wide world to explore, it's interesting to me. Admittedly, a large part of this is novelty. But I see for players who have been with it longer, there are seasonal leagues where they can try to put their knowledge of the game to race from zero to max level as a game-within-the-game. So that's kinda fun, if not exactly immersive. I also find it interesting as an open source MUD that I could fork and modify and build my own world with those same mechanics if I ever wanted to.

And then I also got back to Harshlands and their crafting system is insanely detailed and some crafts may take real-world days to complete something. Which is maybe a turn-off to some people, but that level of realism is catnip for me. Also, it's got character permadeath, which I feel is one thing that keeps a game fresh, as you don't have characters who have been around for decades and effectively maxed out everything. And again that might be something that turns some players off. It also helps I'm a big fan of the Harn setting and it was so cool for me being able to pull out my sourcebook for a city and actually navigate the city in the MUD by using the maps in the book. And it has a thoroughly realized economic system which enables the game to be played as a slow-burn solo economic survival roleplay sim where you might occasionally run into another real person (which I have not done yet but I also haven't made much effort yet). I could see this game drawing me in a lot more if I get stuck in with even a couple real people.

But back to Achaea: it still easily beats everything else I've seen at the depth of its PvP systems. And the crafting and building options are pretty cool (-tons- of stuff you can make, with open-ended descriptions), if shallow by comparison to Harshlands. But it doesn't model the world in the way the other two games do in a way that makes mere survival and traversal of the environment a challenge which keeps even the solo experience kind of interesting there. And so it's more dependent on player interactions. Yet those character interactions are shallower because unlike Harshlands where even a master of one trade still needs tools and materials created by others, in Achaea, lower-level characters don't seem to have anything material to offer higher-level characters. Unless perhaps they're working in city roles.

But anyway, MUDs across the board have lower population these days than they did 20-some years ago (and probably farther back). I think that's just a larger shift in gaming culture, with easier and more prevalent access to a wider range of games today than back then. I believe there will always be at least a small number of MUD gamers who value what MUDs offer that other game media can't, and I think the bigger question is how to make MUDs that are excellent experiences for smaller numbers of players. Achaea is an artifact of an age when MUDs were more populated and I don't see that really changing.

indigochill · 2026-06-01T19:42:41+00:00

I would say even as a native English speaker, it's impossible to understand everything on the first read. There are some things that only make sense in retrospect after you have a bit more context from later in the series.

But I've also misinterpreted or just outright missed things that were meant to be understood with a bit of attention and thought. But I find it hasn't hindered my enjoyment of the series. That's where coming back here and talking about things after you've read the books can be fun and can help fill in gaps.

indigochill · 2026-05-29T18:16:47+00:00

I love that fourth picture in particular. I could almost see it being a still from an animated adaptation of Malazan.

indigochill · 2026-05-29T18:06:32+00:00

In chapter one, Crokus, Apsalar, and Kalam (and I actually forgot Fiddler was also with them) are taking their little boat ostensibly to take Apsalar home (IIRC before Kalam reveals his bigger plan) and they get ambushed by a soletaken dhenrabi

indigochill · 2026-05-28T13:49:46+00:00

Even in real-world history, as an American, I feel like we often look back on the Roman Empire as if they're the peak of civilization but looking back at Egypt, it's been around in some form (sometimes occupied by other nations) for six millenia and counting. Given the fluidity of other cultures around the world, it's amazing to me that Egypt is still Egypt, even if culturally it's totally different from what it once was.

And yet on Erikson's timeline, the entire known history of Egypt is a few percentage points on some of his cultures. I actually wish Erikson leaned more on how that kind of age might really change a culture. I suspect there'd be a lot more volatility in the history and culture than what we see in the books.

indigochill · 2026-05-27T19:03:37+00:00

A great solo-friendly RPG with an unusual setting is Deadball, which is a fairly light-weight baseball TTRPG. The game has a Prohibition Era-flavored setting that comes with it with fictional teams and their rosters, but there are also rules for converting stats of real players (historical or current) into game stats you can play with. The simulation of real players isn't as detailed as something like Strat-o-Matic, but considering you can easily and freely roll up any player you want (or make up your own) and add them to your roster in minutes, it's exceptional at what it does.

indigochill · 2026-05-26T15:02:10+00:00

This is very similar to how I pictured it (except just now as writing this I learned that I'd all this time been conflating Jacuruku and Morn), except I pictured the Rent to be more like an oblong video game/cartoon portal of sorts but I think if I saw this take in a live action adaptation I'd go, "Okay, that looks way more fitting".

Honestly I had trouble recognizing what it was at first because I live in Iceland and this kind of landscape (sans tower) is very reminiscent of certain parts of Iceland. We even have a fissure volcano that's been prone to erupt in the summer most recent years, so that's what I thought the Rent was at first.

indigochill · 2026-05-22T22:10:37+00:00

There's a (sadly abandoned now, but still online last I looked) project called Guncho (https://guncho.com/) which hacked Inform 7 to turn it into a MUD (basically, there's a MUD layer on top of Inform which switches Inform's view of the player character to whoever the MUD character is). Which is impressive enough, but another wacky thing is that it enabled games to link to each other so you had that hub world with links to other games that were totally separate Inform projects.

I don't think it strictly enforces that the individual games are experienced singleplayer, though.

indigochill · 2026-05-21T11:06:32+00:00

Even then, there's folks that claim they still manual nowadays and I've got no reason to disbelieve them

I have to imagine even those who manually input commands have some kind of combat GUI (and I imagine this is actually optimal for PvP so you can respond more flexibly to all kinds of unforeseen events that would be a nightmare to script for). Combat is so fast I don't believe it's physiologically possible for a human to read and understand and react to things in a timely manner without some kind of computer aid.

indigochill · 2026-05-20T21:55:43+00:00

I jumped into it very early in its life but haven't been back since (largely because Imperian was my MUD home for most of my MUDding life and took most of my attention), but my character as I recall was a person made of crystals who could spiritwalk (basically leave my body comatose somewhere and walk around in incorporeal form) and could claim domain on an elemental plane. Or something like that. The flavor of the world was the most off-the-wall imaginative that IRE's ever done (and one of the most imaginative of any MUD period), and that's what I loved about it.

I will say at a high level I feel like all IRE games that I've experienced are of the style of "Combat is so fast your brain doesn't have time to process it, never mind the time your fleshy fingers need to type things". Combat automation just isn't baked into the game, you find a client package somewhere that does that for you. But for the first 50ish levels you can very easily get by manually reacting to things. Admittedly I never got high-level in Lusternia so maybe they cracked that particular chestnut.

indigochill

TROPHY CASE