Solo RPG Blather and Rambling

Notes and stuff about solo, solo+LLM, and indie ttrpgs.Most not developed into full posts.

[solo-rpg-rambling]

The Agnes Rose Cooperative: Scenes 3-6

Trying to move this forward a bit.

Scene 3: After the Rescue

Tarot draws:

Elektra (nemesis turned ally?): Death, tower, temperance Donnie (kidnap victim): Kidnap victim Omegas (bad guys): Devil Outcome: Hanged Man Cut-up:

I try to write you a love song A cold world set aflame Last days of the sunset superstars Come close, whisper my true name Where do we go from here?

The Coop and Elektra rescue singer Donnie from the Omegas hideout on a frozen methane moon. In the fight, Elektra loses an arm. The Omegas escape.

In the hospital after the rescue, Elektra declines to have her arm replaced, announcing that she wants to leave her role and name behind. Elektra returns to religious community that raised her, warning that the Rose Cooperative has started to gain a reputation. Agnes says, "You are important to us, but that doesn't make us friends."

Scene 4: First Solo Album

Tarot draws: Hope: Devil Gnosis: Judgement Being: Lovers Outcome: The World

Years pass. The Rose Cooperative produces multiple albums for the band (now called Rusted Teeth) before branching out with an independent album. The effort is complicated by interference by their publisher and producer, but they find help through a relationship with the Violet Farbender Collective (accountant, lawyer, drummer).

Scene 5: An Interrupted Journey

Tarot draws:

Fool reversed Chariot reversed High priestess reversed Devil reversed

The Rose Cooperative is asked to escort an elder community to a new symbiosis candidate. The shuttle is marooned for several weeks awaiting rescue. In spite of the passage of years, the Coop still struggles with integration.

The Coop and Agnes learn a new way of coming to terms with symbiosis from their elder ancestors. The elder and younger survive the struggle by merging to become a new synthesis.

Scene 6: A New Threat

Tarot draws:

Conflict: (Imperial Remnants) The Devil Hope: World Passage: (rebellion remnants) Chariot, Empress Outcome: Lovers

More years pass, The Rose Cooperative serves as creative director of the St. Mildred Music Festival in addition to their own work. Their species thrive with thousands of symbiotic communities across the galaxy. The Rose Cooperative lives openly, although many others can't.

The Festival serves as a meeting ground for multiple rights activist groups, including the Synth Syndicates, and the cult of St. Mildred. The latter brings Maena (Elektra) now a music teacher with a teen son.

The peace is shattered by the Omegas, who have infiltrated and control multiple Imperial Remnant planets. They have also flourished using a different kind of secrecy, and use violence to make the point that the benevolent strain is not as safe as they assume.

[doctorluthien]

not to leveragepost in 2025 but I simply must talk about the scene where hardison plays sheherazade, because I learned an arrangement of that third movement recently and I am still so impressed

for context: I started playing violin when I was five years old. Am I great? Nah. Am I able to tell when an actor is phoning it in on violin playing? Absolutely.

aldis hodge actually played that piece. They definitely found a recording to play over him because that's what you do for TV but I rewatched that scene when I was learning that solo and got tips from his fingering. he has vibrato technique. he doesn't just pick a violin up once in a while, he's legitimately a skilled violinist who also does everything else he does

[solo-rpg-rambling]

Cut-Ups and Solo TTRPG Play

Solo Roleplaying combines elements of traditional tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, creative journaling, and the use of divination oracles as a means for brainstroming and reflection. The games use oracles such as random dice tables, tarot, or playing cards to create an element of challenge and surpise usually provided by gamemasters or (in the case of computer-rpgs) game-design teams.

Lately I've been experimenting with cut-up techniques as a way to drive scenes and plot developments. a more direct TTRPG implementation is included in the Tilt: An oracle for solo roleplaying.

Primarily I've been using song lyrics because poetry offers a high level of imagery per word. The process I use involves the following steps:

Collection

Curation

Random Draws

Editing

Collection: Pulling text from sources that match the overall theme of the current game. In the example below, I started with music that felt personally and/or politically apocalyptic (even if the song isn't necessarily science fiction themed). After a few trials, I added in some additional texts to fill in some missing pieces (in this case, "Building Steam with a Grain of Salt," "Not," and "Many Moons"). These get copied into a markdown file with source citations at the top and lyrics below.

# music for scifi game ## Sources - St. Vincent, "Los Ageless" - Beast in Black, "Moonlight Rendezvous" - Reliqa, "E.O.D." - Reliqa, "Cold World" - Frozen Crown, "I am the Tyrant" - Rolling Stones, "Paint it Black" - DJ Shadow, "Building Steam with a Grain of Salt" - Patti Smith (orig Springsteen), "Because the Night" - Leonard Cohen, "You Want it Darker" - Big Thief, "Not" - Janelle Monae, "Many Moons" ## Text In Los Ageless, the winter never comes the mothers milk their young But I can keep running ...

Curation: I edit down the original text to get rid of repeated lines. I also break up lines to get a single idea per line,

Random Draws: I use the simple unix command line tail -n +18 music_scifi.md | shuf | head -n 15. (Remove the first 18 lines (sources), shuffle all the lines, take the first 15 lines.)

Editing: Further edit the result to fit the situation and grammar. For example, a response to "What really motivates the antagonist?":

Is there a lullaby for suffering? ("You Want it Darker") Come on now, try to understand ("Because the Night") My doubts make me alone ("Because the Night") Not your stable words ("Not")

Through the process of sifting and editing, a previously flat antagonist now has depth, a motivation, and a possible weakness.

[hersterical]

And most important of all they both stay silly

[coelii]

When you are about to brush your teeth, look in your hands and make sure you are not holding a chainsaw. As you know, chainsaws can cut through most materials, including teeth. At that point, you could get a blood infection which would put you at risk of dying.

[the-faramir]

Important advice!

[fatalism-and-villainy]

One aspect of Bashir reading as autistic is the way he goes into shutdown mode when under extreme emotional stress.

The big one is the fight with his parents in Doctor Bashir, I Presume, where he stumbles into the hallway and doesn’t even make it any father than just outside the door before collapsing:

Inquisition also features a similar Wall Slide when he’s in a holding cell:

I also get shutdown vibes from the scene in Tears of the Prophets where he announces that he’s unable to save Jadzia - he’s just folded in on himself, and he mumbles his lines through gritted teeth as if he has to force the words out. And there’s his behaviour in The Sound of Her Voice - withdrawing from other people is pretty basic depression and burnout stuff, but there are moments that feel very autism-flavoured to me, particularly when Kasidy tries to make small talk with him and he gives a clipped, one word response.

[solo-rpg-rambling]

The Agnes Rose Cooperative: Scene Two

(Solo RPG Play Report)

In which, we revisit some awkward issues of sexuality as a game mechanic.

Previously: The Agnes Rose Cooperative is a community of 30,000 sentient microorganisms and one very traumatized, humanoid, ex-military audio engineer. They've just rescued Agnes's former commander and mentor, Elektra,"The Voice of the Emperor." And oh yes, everyone's a bard.

Conflict (Elektra): Drew Judgement. Which I interpreted as Elektra wanting to make amends (or more likely, have that rejected).

Gnosis (the Cooperative's new abilities): The Lovers The cooperative's new and old abilities will play a role in the scene.

Hope (the future): Justice Long-term, the Coop are not wanting an apology, they're wanting change of some sort.

Outcome: Death The scene marks a major change. The prior relationship is dead, a new relationship must be negotiated.

This was a point where the cards and games pushed back against my intentions.

The Cooperative was a way of exploring character ideas that had been in my head for a few decades. And the original sessions for this character and setting happened during COVID, and early social and medical transition. HRT was rewiring my brain/body relationship. And I was also working through issues with neurodivergence, although I wasn't diagnosed as autistic at that point.

In effect I was juggling two characters and one character, a dualism that's still giving me some headaches. Agnes as a humanoid had an intensely parasocial relationship with her former mentor, but doesn't want that now. The cooperative doesn't understand host pair-bonding except as something that creates happy brain chemicals.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians and other PBtA games implement romance as a game mechanic (with mutual agreement). I wasn't comfortable for that for my player. And another feature of my life leaking into the game was realizing that the concept of romance doesn't work for me. (See conversations by Sherronda Brown, Juno Roche, and about wtf/quoiromanticism for more about that topic.)

But the draws insist that the Coop and Elektra continue to have some sort of a relationship, so I have to finesse a bit to make that work.

What came out of this draw was a very short (five paragraph) confrontation between the two characters. The Coop leans into prior skills (Gnosis/Lovers) and slinks away to the spaceship's workroom to do maintenance on Elektra's Cello. Elektra asks for a conversation (Conflict/Judgement) but is immediately shut down twice. "We're not friends, but we need you for the mission." (Hope/Justice) Agnes speaks for her individual self that they may never be able to accept an apology, and redirects the conversation talk about maintaining the cello. (Outcome:Death)

The result is a nice little pre-battle scene of characters setting aside conflicts to prepare for a coming struggle.

Note: a few weeks behind on play report, might dump several over the weekend.

[soulmuppet]

Mad As Hell is a TTRPG that intends to create a safe, lightly fictionalised environment for aspiring and current activists to become familiar with the methods used in community organisation and direct action. Providing a structure that mimics real-world approaches to tackling injustice through a radical lens.

Demons are creatures of misery and woe, brought into being by the callous, uncaring evils of capitalist society. Mad as Hell's monsters are rooted in real-world evils, and confronting them allows you to explore underlying systemic problems in a controlled environment.

To kill demons in Mad as Hell you must understand the quiet violence that created it, and use symbolic responses to it as Banes. But without fixing the problem that spawned it, the demon, or one similar to it, will return.

[augustheart]

what if you were a corporate lawyer and you HATED yourself so you became a CRIMINAL and NEVER TOLD YOUR DAUGHTER YOU WERE DOING CRIME and then you had to run a scam on a guy by PRETENDING to be BISEXUAL despite being ACTUALLY bisexual and then your daughter WALKED IN ON YOU ON A FAKE DATE WITH YOUR MARK and then said YEAH IT MAKES SENSE YOU'RE GAY because you're BAD AT INTIMACY.

[leveragecentral]

Leverage: Redemption (2021-present) The Swipe Right Job (S03E06)

[kindness-ricochets]

Thinking About Gender Performance via Eliot in Leverage...

I adore how this show comments on masculinity with Eliot, and the shootout in The Big Band Job represents that perfectly. Eliot doesn’t use guns. We know he can, that’s never been a question, he’s career military until whatever shattered his illusions with that career (I don’t know if we find out, I haven’t finished the series yet). I didn’t want to really comment until I finished the series, but it’s too much of a standout not to comment. In most shows, Eliot would be armed at all times. It would become a running gag how constantly and thoroughly he is armed. He would have to disarm and pull out an inexplicable number of weapons, like Aragorn in The Two Towers or Inej in Shadow and Bone. Alternately, he might become a true pacifist—think Shepherd Book in Firefly. That’s the usual portrayal of a gunman who’s turned his back on guns. Instead, Eliot doesn’t, can’t walk away from that life. So he stays in it without relying on the easy solution. He’s a stone-cold badass because of what he can do unarmed, or scavenge-armed with a shovel or chair or whatever’s on hand. So why do I keep coming back to the scene where Eliot picks up a gun? Where he behaves like the cowboy I’ve seen a thousand different times in a thousand different media? Because the second the camera panned to the gun, my stomach clenched, because this wasn’t about how cool an outlaw is. It was about all the trauma Eliot can barely keep to a simmer that he was about to face head-on because he is still, above all, beholden to and defined by duty. And the way that scene is framed is so, so, so cool. It evokes cowboys and action heroes and The Matrix. The violence is justified: these are bad guys and Eliot is saving Nate. We literally see a handgun jammed down the front of Eliot’s trousers—he has, in the cultural parlance, reclaimed his masculinity. And that’s the toxic masculinity. The soldier. The cowboy. The myth of those roles without the hard work and dirt and early mornings. The cowboy without hardscrabble, the soldier without blood. We know Eliot can step into either role. He is, capital-a capital-m, A Man. And that scene is so, so, so cool. I can’t stop thinking about it. If it were in most shows, it wouldn’t stay with me the same way. It would be heroic and triumphant. In Leverage, what defines that scene? “They don’t need to know what I did.” It's shame. It’s a reminder that no matter how cool and justified and cowboy, this wasn’t the time Eliot took out a bunker full of mooks. This was when Eliot was pushed into such a narrow corner he defied his principles. He broke the rule that keeps everything in check. I don’t leave this episode feeling like Eliot’s a badass. Eliot’s always been a badass. I leave the episode remembering how deeply shattered this character is. In conclusion, no other show does it like Leverage, this is good stuff right here and I’m so glad I found it!

[solo-rpg-rambling]

The Agnes Rose Cooperative: Scene One

Draws:

Conflict/Elektra: The Fool

Scrying/The Ship: Temperance

Passage/The Band: Moon

Conclusion: Death Reversed

Mostly replaying the last session with a different perspective, and focusing on the big emotional beats rather than the turn-by-turn action. Writing this as if The Cooperative is being interviewed by a biographer, focusing on brief moments and scenes.

The ship gets a distress signal that Agnes finds a familiar. They rescue Elektra from a wrecked shuttle, treat her injuries, and learn she's fleeing from what's left of the old imperial military. Elektra was looking for Agnes, her old comrade, only to find that Agnes isn't just Agnes.

Agnes isn't all that interested in a reconciliation. The growth of a new cooperative isn't going well with their mutual trauma, and Agnes probably wouldn't have rescued her former mentor if she hadn't been outvoted, both by the band and the collective.

Unfortunately Elektra has been followed. The Omegas&emdash;the rival team to The Voice of the Emperor&emdash;are eager to wrap up the rivalry. They also have a substantial payday offered in the deal. Elektra didn't reveal this at first.

The surprise attack did substantial damage to the ship, and was only resolved when current lead singer, Donnie, gave himself up in Elektra's place. A rescue has set up the need for another rescue.

[prokopetz]

As far as I can tell there's never been a wacky caper movie about committing hole in one insurance fraud, and that honestly surprises me a little.

[prokopetz]

@plotbunnyfarm replied:

hole in one insurance fraud? Is this insurance fraud targeting "hole in one insurance" whetever that is, or a specific type of fraud lingo?

Institutions which offer large prizes which can be won with very low probability typically don't keep the money to pay out the prize on hand, instead purchasing an insurance policy to cover the value of the prize. Policies of this type are known as "prize indemnity insurance". The most popular type of prize indemnity insurance is hole in one insurance, targeted at golf courses which offer cash prizes for hitting a hole in one during tournament play. It's a sufficiently common type of prize indemnity insurance that there are entire insurance companies which exist purely to provide hole in one insurance policies.

[thundergrace]

Just a couple of dudes reminding you that Aldis Hodge is, in fact, the sexiest man alive. In addition to being a horologist, he's also a painter and a violinist. He also went to school for architecture.

[mckitterick]

an interview with the man about all this:

Actor Aldis Hodge Spills Horological Tea on His Hotly Anticipated New Watch Brand

When he’s not on set, the talented, multi-hyphenate artist is working on his burgeoning watchmaking career. 

[solo-rpg-rambling]

I heard about this when watching Cross and went down a rabbit hole of DIY watches because I like DIY pretty things. And timepieces. May not be for me.

[capricornsims]

Keep reading

[prokopetz]

Sometimes my cat will run in circles around my office chair while insistently doing her "follow me" cry, but gets upset if I actually get up, because what I'm supposed to do is "follow" her by spinning my chair. This will go on for five, six, even ten complete rotations. There's no destination – she stops when she decides I've spun enough.

[solo-rpg-rambling]

The Agnes Rose Cooperative: Game Prep

Threads is a journaling game about continuing ttrpg stories. Prep for it involves revisiting prior work and identifying keystones, key characters, ideas, and themes to guide the future narrative.

My responses to these ranged from a few sentences to a few handwritten pages.

Keystone of Conflict

"...an individual or collective with which you came into conflict..."

This was the easiest. As a teen, Agnes idolized Captain Elektra, the emperor's champion. She joined the Army army, became an engineer, and eventually was selected to serve on Elektra's crew. The Voice of the Emperor not only served as propaganda representatives, but as not-so-secret enforcers and agents. Her career ended when she was left behind during a biological attack using a zombie parasite. Somehow she survived, was experimentally "cured," and dying under intensive observation.

The Cooperative "brain bugs" are the same species as their "zombie" cousins. They recently converted to their own version of "environmentalism," working to improve the lives of their hosts while trying to keep their existence secret.

Keystone of Contrast

"...characters at their apex and nadir..."

The symbiosis between Agnes and the Cooperative saved both of them. But both carry a fair bit of guilt for what happened during the zombie attack.

Keystone of Gnosis

"...mastery of a skill..."

Agnes had a natural talent for engineering. She could understand how to meld sound, magic, and electricity into musical instruments that could be wielded by performers. The Coop brings their own flavor of sensitivity that allows for them to grow into a dual role as engineer and musician.

Keystone of Passage

"Did you attempt to seize destiny..."

The Agnes Cooperative escaped from the hospital, with the same rebels who had taken down the empire months before. They chose to rebel and use their knowledge to help other people get free from the empire.

Keystone of Hope

To set aside the traumas of the past and build a new life. To nurture other cooperatives.