I finished the final draft of Millia and the second and a half draft of The Supervillain Rehabilitation Project, which means it’s now in the hands of beta readers and I have nothing to do (although I suppose I could work on the structural problems around it, but I wouldn’t mind a break). So since I’m in liminal space right now, I decided to try a few more Solo RPGs. This time, I surveyed some game stores’ top ten lists and Reddit posts, instead of recommendations by one lonely guy.
VOID 1680
This one was kinda fun, but you really have to be into music to get the most out of it. Also, this is not so much a writing/journaling RPG as a “talking” one. You are a radio DJ with your own personal pirate AM station. Your mission is to play four blocks of music with directions on how these blocks should be “programmed” in terms of theme. The songs you choose are determined by drawn playing cards (e.g., a song that makes you think of summer, a song that makes you tear up, a song that was popular when your parents were young, etc.)
And while the music is playing, someone calls into the station. The dice to determine what the caller is calling about. Maybe it’s to make a request. Maybe it’s about family or money. Maybe the caller is depressed or angry. The conversation depends on the theme of the night. When you’ve finished four blocks of three songs, you sign off and the game is over.
I chose to be a human DJ playing “Radio for Robots”. The question for the night was “The robot revolution–should it happen? Who would win? Who would lose? What are your thoughts?” But I don’t like talking to myself, or at all. So instead of speaking into a recorder, I just wrote down what I imagined would happen.
But choosing music to match the station’s motif, the topic, and the caller was difficult. Part was my fault for picking a difficult theme. The other was too many criteria to satisfy, trying to find a song that matched it all. I don’t have special bonds with certain songs or one that makes me think of summer or makes me feel like a villain. I just like what I like and don’t have any specific genre or artist I’m into, at least not at this age. I only have about 2,500 MP3s, all garnered from different places. A cursory shuffle through my iPhone shows Sunglasses at Night, My Own Worst Enemy by Lit, Cut the Cord by Shinedown, Misled by Kool & the Gang, Feel Good Inc. from Gorillaz, and the theme from The Amityville Horror. Still, with 2500 songs, I should be able to find 12 that orbit around robots or rebellions. But that’s me.
Also, this felt less like a game and more like play-acting or pretending. There’s no game to win or lose and you’re not creating a story. Don’t get me wrong, I like playing a radio DJ. My sister and I would dop this as kids with a microphone hooked up to our stereo (at least for fifteen minutes before we got in a fight and she stormed off). Playacting can be fun. But that’s not what I was looking for. This is a speaking game, not a writing game.
But the fun part is that VOID 1680 actually exists. The guy who created the game has a YouTube channel where he posts the recordings that other players have sent him. I’ve been listening and it’s fun hearing music curated by human beings, not giant corporations. Plus, it stays nicely on theme with amateur operation. If nothing else, I recommend sampling some productions.
The Librarian’s Apprentice
This game is sort of a dungeon crawler, except that instead of being a warrior or mage, you are a librarian. And the library is an ever-shifting Wonderland/Cube so that you never know what’s behind the next door. Your job is to hunt down six books. The playing cards in a deck represent the rooms. If the card is a K, Q, or J, you’ve found the book. But to move to a room (or do any action), you must roll 2 dice and draw two cards. If your roll is higher than the rank of both cards, it’s a success. If it’s in-between, mixed success. If it’s below, a Complication occurs. Complications can lead to you taking fatigue, and if you take 4 fatigue, game over.
The basic ideas are sound, but the game doesn’t feel well-executed. For one thing, the rules aren’t clear. I had to watch a YouTube video to see how you play the game non-abstractedly. There’s plenty about the mechanics and actions and taking an action, but nowhere do they tell you how you actually start. Also I didn’t know how you make the map. It says to put the card “above or below” the current one, but does that mean they overlap? Are you just building one long column? No, you’re actually setting it next to the card so that the upper half is touching the other card’s lower half, or vice versa. So you end up with a herringbone pattern turned on its side.
But that brings me to another problem. What is the point of the map? At no point do you go backwards or backtrack. You never need to return to a room, at least not from what I saw. And the map gives no information besides an audit trail of what cards you’ve drawn.
The game has lots of unnecessary things like that, like dropped plot lines. Like, your character has background biographical information gained by multiple choice, but this never comes up in the gameplay. There’s a list of patrons and inhabitants and creatures to run into, but there’s no room that says “you run into a creature” or “roll an inhabitant that jumps out and scares you”. Nothing that says “if you roll this, you must ask X a question.”
I went through 11 rooms and only ever got 1 Complication, which is the crux of the problem-solving and raising the stakes. But I only ever got mixed success or success. Along the same lines, the random tables aren’t plentiful enough. I often rolled rooms that had repeated attributes. I kept getting meteorology or star charts. Your character has 3 stats, like in Quill, but I only ever used one. I never needed to do any of the other three basic actions the game has. Why? Because there’s nothing in the random tables that brings up those obstacles. Nothing that calls the gameplay mechanics in for the player to solve.
It’s like the game creator made mechanics, then forgot to make them necessary to any assets. It looked promising, but I was disappointed. Like the game creator forgot to put game in the game. By room 9, I started getting sick of the repeating gameplay, and my paragraphs got a lot shorter.
So that’s my two cents on two scents. If I do another one, next will probably be Outliers, and then either English Eerie or Whispers in the Walls.
