Starting mid-May 2024, we kicked off a monthly game discussion hashtag on the fediverse, #SoloRPGbookclub. These are the games the bookclub has picked so far.
The September/October game. Comments to follow after we play it.
The August/September game.
We had a hard time with this one, but for much less substantial reasons - we just found it very tiring. The rules are vague enough that, not having watched any other playthrough, the best we could come up with was to play both GM and player at the same time ... and it's a lot to do. Especially with the number of prompts and trying to build theme and story.
We may go look for other playthroughs now, see if there's some elements of the game we didn't understand or if we're just not very suited to it.
The July/August game.
The game we're playing for the bookclub is our second run through, and quite a bit different from when we first played in 2021. That game was a lot of fun - very chill, very low-key, kind of 19th-century-Kiki's-Delivery-Service setting - and played in voice over about two hours. This time, we're going for a near-future setting, not post-apocalyptic but kinda post-collapse, and we're playing in text. And it's a lot of text by our NaNoWriMo-failer standards - 3.6k words so far and we're three cards and less than a week into spring.
It's good, though. The game system really holds up under some very different settings, if you let it.
The June/July 2024 game.
It has an interesting premise, and the prompts go super hard in cool ways. Each room works as a story, and each room works as a story for our character - we brought a character to it from a horror game, and in filling the prompts we could use their powers, their history, their resentments and regrets, in really fun ways.
Unfortunately, at the level of the game, we found the story had no time to establish, no time to build, and also nowhere to go - we hit the same room prompts over and over, and those prompts are just too specific to support random repetition. We ended up quitting on day 2.
The May/June 2024 game. A classic journalling game. It tends dark - every actual-play journal we read from the bookclub dealt with death and deception - but there was room for a range of tones, and everyone who played it found it creatively inspiring.