I have a tendency to see something that excites or interests me and immediately saying “I WANT TO MAKE THAT.” (There you go. The simplest explanation for why I’m always getting myself pulled in twenty different directions.)

This happened about a week ago when I discovered that ‘solo journaling RPGs’ are a thing.

Part game, part writing exercise, this new(?) type of book gives you prompts that drive you down a narrative path. You essentially write your own story as you go, sometimes using dice or cards to introduce an element of randomness (and replay value).

Because I’ve had tons of ideas for both books and games, I had to find out more. But if you know me, you know I also tend to do bare minimal research before trying to do something on my own. I’m the ultimate example of a guy who doesn’t read the manual before trying to put together furniture.

So, I basically read someone’s playthrough of one of these journals and did my best to extrapolate how they work from that report. Then, I proceeded to think about how I would go about achieving the same goal. I knew the objective — a writing-based RPG — I could probably figure out how to make one.

The Idea

After a week of just thinking about it from time to time, I was struck with both a premise and a process. I immediately spend the next day writing the first 17 pages of my debut solo RPG journaling book: The Fringe.

If you haven’t figured it out, my idea was to base the story on the world of my Patreon-only novella, Tales from the Fringe. It’s a sci-fi thriller/horror in the vein of Roadside Picnic, Annihilation, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., so the idea immediately felt perfect. I’d already come up with several other Liminal sites with different properties, and the ‘broken physics’ aspect of the world meant that someone playing around inside of it could do…damn near anything.

The Development Process

I’m doing this by the seat of my pants and looking to my Patrons to get in on the creation. My hope is that we can work together on this project nearly from day one. For those of you who are looking for writing inspiration, this will probably be a great side project for you to join me on. Essentially, you can “playtest” this journal by having a go a character creation and seeing if my props and randomization mechanic work for you.

For now, I’m making my draft available on Patreon. It’s basically Open Source. What I’ve just uploaded is the basic mechanics, how to get started, and the first couple of prompt “sessions”. I made it really simple (since it’s my first try at one) and playing only requires a single six-sided die. And to be fair, you don’t even need that if you just want to choose your prompts without any randomness involved.

What you can do:

• Just try it and enjoy it. That’d be great!
• Try it and tell me what isn’t working.
• Bring previous experience with solo journaling RPGs into the conversation and tell me what I’m doing totally wrong.

As I continue working on this book, I’ll be adding more prompts to drive the story experience along and regularly updating it on Patreon. This is a living book, but the genre makes me think there’s no better type of book to experience that way…since you’re essentially writing your own version with me.

If you’re interested, take a look at my Patreon. I’m opening this up to all paid tiers, so you can get in on this for as little as $3. You can also join my Patron-only Discord and communicate with me directly about the book (or whatever you want to talk about, really).

As always, your support is always appreciated, even if that just means reading blog posts like this one. Slainte!