Last week, I experimented with using Arkham Horror as a chaos engine to help outline a horror story, just to see what kind of crazy results we could come up with. Those of you who’ve read that post might remember that our (perhaps ill-advised) story of Anna and Inspector Yi had actually managed to flesh itself out pretty well just in the setup of the game. While this was super fun, I didn’t actually get to address the thesis of the experiment, which was about using the game itself to plot a story, rather than just using the chaos of game setup as a free brainstorming session. And so, this week, we’re diving back into Tabletop Simulator to see where this story is going to take us.Continue Reading

After a recent back and forth with Rebecca Tucker (@researchib) on Twitter, I’ve been looking into the idea of using solo RPG as a writing aid. As quickly became apparent, the rabbit hole goes super deep, with lots of really cool-looking systems and system-agnostic methods of running a game without a GM. I told myself I wasn’t going to spend too much time on this, since I’ve got tons of other stuff to work on at the moment, but the idea kept nagging at me so I decided to try a bit of an experiment to see what comes out of using solo gameplay for story-writing purposes.Continue Reading