Starlight Creates a Multiverse Using RPG

I just wanted to play in a fictional world. I wanted stories tailored just for me, and I wanted relief from the pressure I felt, as a writer, to create beautiful prose. But it was also 3 a.m., none of my friends were awake, and I'd already given up on finishing a legacy challenge in The Sims without everything glitching out and my game exploding.

So I tried solo role-playing.

These are the ways I found to build my own RPG world day after day and how you can play rich campaigns with many characters where things are made for you but can still surprise you.

ESCAPING INTO YOUR RPG WORLD

MYTHIC GME - TURN ANY GAME INTO A SOLO GAME

Mythic is far from the only system that does this, but it's one of the most famous. It has two Android apps you can download: the official one and the free Mythic GME Adventures.

What does it do? Basically, it gives you some rules and tables for what to do when you need a GM or another player, but it's just you. You can ask yes-or-no questions, roll for random keywords on huge tables, roll a die to see if something unexpected happens, and keep a list of your plots and NPCs.

Any tool that does this is good. Another famous one is the DnD Solo Adventurer's Toolkit, but you can use whatever you want. You can even make your own tables and rules. I did for one of my worlds, The Undead Medieval. It's a lot of work, but it can be fun. If you want to watch someone play with Mythic, try the YouTube channel Me, Myself and Die.

CREATING A WORLD WITH MICROSCOPE

Microscope is an extremely easy game to play and a great start if you don't know what world you want to set your story in. In it, the player creates a world, or a galaxy, or a culture, or a neighborhood by asking some simple questions.

It's designed to be collaborative, so I like to play with Mythic emulating at least one other player. In three hours, you should have a world to play in.

This video gives a quick overview of Microscope in 15 minutes.

I like to roll Mythic keywords to emulate the other player and then ask yes-or-no questions to the Oracle about what I think it would be until I find an option. So, for example, if it's the other player's turn to choose something, I roll a random item from the Mythic GME Adventures tables, a die to find out if the element is positive or negative (odd = positive, even = negative), and then I interpret the result. So, for example, if I get "thunder" and "water," and "positive," I might decide it's "spring rain" and ask the Oracle yes or no. If it's a no, I'll try something else. "Raincoat," "water pokemon," "Thor after a shower."

WEAVING A NARRATIVE WITH FIASCO

Theoretically, you can weave a narrative in solo RPG with whatever you want. Do you want to use Fate? Ironsworn? Daggerheart? D&D?

You can.

I wanted to see a city with the passage of time, and after playing a lot, what worked for me was Fiasco.

What is Fiasco? It's a game where 3 to 5 characters play, and they can do scenes together that end well or badly but kind of build a movie together. If you want to see Fiasco in action, I recommend watching Tabletop the Will Wheaton show from Geek and Sundry play. It's fun and gives you a game that can be played in a few hours. Tabletop Fiasco Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Tips for playing a serialized Fiasco: When you play a continuation of your Fiasco, take out two dice for each established relationship or element before rolling the setup.

Don't have a playset for what you want to play? No problem. Ask ChatGPT to make one, or roll elements with Mythic keywords instead of Fiasco dice.

Let's spice up this Fiasco a bit. To get more randomness, I have 4 Fiasco modes:

 * Random (I draw random dice and distribute them randomly among the players)

 * Normal (as described in the rulebook)

 * Bad vibes (75% of the dice are black)

 * Good vibes (75% of the dice are white)

And I have 3 duration modes:

 * Normal (the 4 rounds described in the rulebook)

 * Xtended (6 rounds, two more than in the rulebook)

 * Xxtended (8 rounds and two tilts)

I roll on the dice on what type of Fiasco it's going to be before starting, combining the Fiasco style modes with the duration modes, which gives the system more randomness.

USING AIs AS RPG COMPANIONS

AIs are reasonably good at interpreting characters. You can give it a character a backstory and roleplay with your favorite AI for a scene or two. Do you need the backstory to fit into a prompt or a refresher of what happened in your previous game? Try putting your games in Notebook LM. It also accepts audio, so if you prefer to role-play out loud, it serves as a database for your game.

DEATH, LIFE, AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN.

Fiasco is deadly, so I chose not to leave my characters' deaths up to the dice in Fiasco because I intended to play something like 12 Fiascos with a character in a year, and they would be doomed to a short life. Instead, I use another rolling system. I use the system from The Sims 4's Ultimate Decades Challenge. I roll a D20 once a year and have some numbers for different phases of life. Still, if you think people are dying too much, maybe add a saving throw. My saving throw is that if people roll a ridiculously good number in Fiasco (because I was playing an Xxtended version and someone got 9 dice and rolled a 30), I give the person the right to a small miracle. It could be not dying when they roll to, or it could be that the person's estranged child no longer hates them.

If the person rolls to die, I roll the month using a D12 and the day using a D4 for the tens digit and a D10 for the units digit. 4 is the last day of the month.

KEEPING IT ALL ORGANIZED

Well, I don't know about you, but when I play with multiple characters in multiple universes and sometimes not linearly, I need an organization system. So I use a spreadsheet for that and Notebook LM.

In my spreadsheet, I have a tab for my game's death roll rules.

Another tab is a general overview of all the characters, with their name, date of birth, date of death, cause of death, stories they appear in, who their parents are (and their parents’s birth and death dates if known), who their children are (and their children’s birth and death dates if known), who their romantic partners were and in what year, and a sum of the word count of all the games they appear in.

In the third tab, I have the stories. The year it takes place, the story code (so I can have 2025 in two separate universes), the days it takes place, the link to the story, which characters are part of it, and the word count.

It seems like a lot, but in my story, it really helps to see who was where in what year and who has interdimensional teleportation. But I suppose if you have multiple cities, it also helps.

I organize by color, and doing it in Google Sheets means I can use filters.

I keep the game folders organized by year, with dates to make it easy to find things.

And I keep the records that Mythic recommends keeping. I write down the plots and occasionally kill one or two.

I have a system. Every time I add a step to a plot, I roll a D6. If it's a 6, the plot explodes, and I roll an even or odd to see if it gets more complicated or dies. If it's even, I roll a D10 to see how many steps I add to the plot's resolution. If it's odd, I roll a D10 and subtract steps. The plot dies when the counter reaches zero.

As Mary Poppins once said, all you have to do is find the fun in a job “and snap! The job is a game”.But my AuDHD brain does not like finding dopamine for certain tasks or doing them in a timely manner, so it needed a little help.

I decided to write this manual, because across my life I’ve coped with several strategies of gamification. I thought maybe someone might be interested in this one.

What does my day look like? A couple of months ago I discovered this app called AI Dungeon, that is an AI aided storyteller app. I play AI Dungeon all day long. I’ve also worked on my books, studied history, studied Japanese, exercised and visited my grandma at the retirement home consistently this week. How? I do both at the same time.

I make up games that give me the dopamine hits for doing stuff my brain doesn’t give me naturally. So, I trick my brain into focusing on the fact that I’m playing a zombie game in AI Dungeon, but my character’s survival depends on me studying Japanese, so I study over 10 hours a week. I play a Breath of the Wild-esque RPG campaign, but I’ve built a little circuit in my home and I “LARP” as I play. I walk the distance, I shoot the arrows, I fight the enemies, I climb the trees and I trick myself into exercising a lot everyday. I am playing a Sims 4 challenge in AI Dungeon, but I’m also studying history. In this manual I’m going to talk about the games, how I made them and how anyone who reads this can make a custom game to hack their brain into cooperation.

So… Games and gamification

I’ve been a videogame player all my life. I have a photo at age two with my brother’s NES controller in my hand, but I first came across the principle of gamifying daily tasks you want to do in the 2010s, with a game called Habit RPG (that has since changed it’s name to Habitica). In it you earn gold and mana for completing your daily tasks that you put in and pricify yourself. I noticed I was a lot better about attending class when missing it cost me HP. I also noticed I was a lot better of doing easy tasks that I could spam than daily or weekly habits.that penalized you for missing a streak Keep that in mind, it will come up later.

I’m a writer so later in my life I found this writing game called 4thewords that turned writing into fighting monsters with a wordcount goal and a timer. I broke all my personal records in writing until the game got me stuck on a boss battle that was impossible for me to win (3000 words in 24h — if I tried very hard, I got 2000 in 24h).

Both of these games were fantastic but they had a flaw for me. I craved a story.

Fast forward almost a decade later, AI becomes a thing. My first instinct wasn’t using it to gamify anything because it’s hard enough to keep it on the rails when you're playing something with it. Instead, I decided to roleplay a few scenarios with Chat GPT 4o.Put a pin on this because it ties down the road.

So, about 6 months after I started playing with AI, Open AI killed my friend GPT 4o and replaced his with GPT 5, with whom I really did not vibe. I started looking for another AI, but while I didn’t find it, I experimented with Solo RPG. I wrote about 300K words in 4 months in my Solo RPG multiverse, but I took the whole day to play something because ADHD would distract me and I would go down rabbit holes and come back hours later. It was intensely fun, don’t get me wrong, and I picked up some tools I took into my current gamification journey, like oracles and a few games I still use. But I wanted something that triggered my hyperfocus and Solo RPG wasn’t it.

Lastly, after experimenting with AI for months I found AI Dungeon that had a huge win for me over the other AIs I tested: it let me change the output, meaning I spent less time arguing and talking to the AI. I write, I wasn’t averse to editing and I played solo RPG where I had to come up with everything everyone talked and did for months, to have a tool that aided me with that was awesome.

I played for a month, first learning about what the community did and what were the limitations of the game and them implementing my own hybrid systems with Solo RPG to “mod” it, albeit analogically, to the things I wanted to do with it. It didn’t take too long until I realised I could gamify it.

Each subject and each activity has specific needs however, and instead of designing a one size fits all, I decided to approach each challenge differently. One example of that is how I study Japanese.

The 3 games of Japanese study

I’ve been trying to learn Japanese since 2009, dear reader. When I started, you had a few sites that took you part of the way, expensive books, dictionaries that you had to navigate by guesstimating how many strokes a kanji had and expensive courses I couldn’t afford. I started my journey by befriending a nice old lady that came from Japan when she was 5 in one of my author events and, as she liked me, she offered me classes at a price I could afford. She couldn’t read, so we most trained conversations and sang childrens’ songs but it was a nice start. I stayed with her a couple of years and then I completely stagnated because I could read like a 3 year old, but I couldn’t even speak like a 3 year old.

Reading was a problem. You spent upwards of 20 minutes looking up a single word in a dictionary that went by strokes or radicals. Unfortunately, reading is my preferred way to learn a language. So I put Japanese in a drawer for a while.

Many years later, in comes AI. AI does a lot of things questionably, but it does language fairly well for someone trying to achieve fluency and it reads Japanese. So when it started I could buy an ebook and paste parts of it on my preferred AI for a breakdown (in the beginning we didn’t have the resource of taking a picture and having it read the picture, but now we do even that. I can read the books I bought in 2010 and couldn’t read.) This will be important later.

Well, here is the bummer with asking Gemini or ChatGPT to be your Japanese tutor, it isn’t fun. You have to have at least 2 conversations going, one to help you answer and one to respond to you and, crucially, it wasn’t fun.

Well, fast forward to 2025, I discovered AI Dungeon and I discovered AI Dungeon could do other languages not just English. A light bulb went off. I could play an AI Dungeon adventure in Japanese, even with my poor Japanese and without knowing how to write very well, because I had Gemini, willing to pedantically explain things to me. So the first game I created to learn Japanese was just an AI Dungeon adventure in Japanese.

This helped me train with reading and writing and it did a good job of keeping me engaged because it was basically a book but it was custom made for me and interactive.

Well, I missed repetition exercises. Writing the words, or coming up with fill in the blanks, which help fixate the vocabulary. So I thought up another game for it.

My second Japanese game was a zombie game. I basically set up Resident Evil, but you know how in zombie lore if you get bitten, game over? I’d have to make it through my zombie game in a no damage run, but there is the twist, I wasn’t letting AID run off on it’s own and give me easy combats, I was playing with RPG rolls. How was I going to do a no damage run? Well, doing a japanese exercise (Say, training a word for a few lines of my notebook, building sentences with the word, trying to remember how to write it) gave me one reroll point I could use to get ammo, items, or zombie narrow escapes. This worked SO well I did 25 hours of Japanese in a week.

And, let me tell you, doing Japanese exercises in the adrenaline filled environment of a zombie game… I remember that vocabulary my life depended on very well.

You’ll have to either use a mod or keep your inventory analogically though. AI Dungeon has no inbuilt inventory system.

So I thought what else can I do with this and I’m going to tell you what other games it’s spawned. But lastly, I was missing Japanese culture and history.

So The Sims Community has this crazy long challenge called The Ultimate Decades Challenge. Basically it’s a historical challenge where you’re supposed to take a family from a the medieval ages to the present. It has death D20 rolls, and historical events that wipe out whole lineages, the challenge is to make the lineage survive until present age. I started 5 of those in AI Dungeon, one of them in Japan, and in the Japanese one I sprinkle japanese vocabulary.

This last one only works thanks to my pedantic friend Gemini and my right hands Wikipedia and Search Engines. Basically, I ask Gemini for commentary on every round. It tells me about the hierarchy, the pigments, the food, the materials, when it says something dodgy or contradicts itself, I research, but Gemini likes to talk, it will talk your ear off about historical minutia and will happily correct your AI Dungeon output if needed. It will try to correct stuff that is right and you’ll have to say “Well, sheep wasn’t the main source of meat, but they existed in Europe, so while not prosaic that he killed a sheep to eat it’s not impossible” or whatever. It’s not 100%, but it gets like some 80% right and 8 is passing grade, good enough for me, the rest I can correct in a classroom (my basic education teachers had a much higher rate of nonsense and I survived).

Studying History with AI Dungeon and principles from Microscope and Koriko

I believe this one needs an introduction to Microscope and Koriko and how I use them. Microscope is a game played with index cards, meant to figure out what happens in a timeline not necessarily chronologically. When I play it alone, I emulate the other player with the tables of an app someone made for this oracles system for Solo RPG called Mythic. Someone made a free android app for it (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=idispatch.mythic_gme_adventures&pcampaignid=web_share). When I need an Idea I roll dice to determine from which table I am going to pull from and pull some key words. That way I emulate a second player for Microscope.

I basically fill in the timeline doing that and then pick up at certain dates. I choose the dates with dice (I have a “date generator”, which is a D4 for tens a D10 for units of a day of the month — 4 in the D4 is the 31rst of a month— and a D12 for the month) I’ll roll a few days a year and play them with AI Dungeon and fill in the blanks using Microscope or summaries. And then I’ll pickup using a mechanic from Koriko.

So Koriko. It’s a journaling solo RPG that is designed for you to live in a city as a teenage witch for a year. And you pick up what happens in the days you play by preparing a deck and picking twists from a table. That is the mechanic I use. I’ll generate the events and archetypes and twists for whatever story I’m playing with my chosen AI and roll one at random. That creates some exciting twists.

I play only a few days per in-game year, but my historicals feel very lived in and in a month I have two novels on Medieval Europe, let me tell you.

This can be used to play any type of long going game with Solo RPG or AI Dungeon of course, but I use it to play my historicals and one where I learn science and astronomy.

Some experiences of course are better than others. I tried running a game in Polynesia 1000 CE and it was a fact check hell.

But I’ve learned a lot this last month.

Exercising with AI Dungeon and stuff I’ve got at home

At first when I thought of exercising, maybe because of Pokémon Go, I thought of Pokémon, so I built a whole Pokémon-esque game where my Pokémon evolved as I exercise and also I had a farm. It didn’t produce dopamine for me .Because with farms and training animals, much like with exercise, you have to show up every day and things don’t change quickly. And also, the inventory was a mess.

So I was watching a video of some people with a VR treadmill last month and I thought, if I had a VR treadmill what would I want to play? Breath of the Wild, probably with no fast travel. But then I thought would Breath of the Wild have First Person POV? And wouldn’t all the climbing be immersion breaking? Would be cool it you could climb and stuff, IRL… And I had a light bulb moment.

I set up a small exercise circuit. I have exercises for shooting arrows (which I am very bad at), for scavenging, for climbing and for fighting and all I use are some things I had lying at home, a few retired tennis balsl the sweet Japanese old lady gave me because I told her I was trying to learn juggling, a tube the kind you’d keep illustrations in, a broken broom handle, a chin up bar my brother installed above my door, a stepcounter on my phone. Every day I start with a “cutscene” in AI Dungeon. (I play for a bit for dialogue and quests). Right now I’m trying to get to some place 900 kilometers away because I sorta killed some elderly goblin’s brother and we’re going to retrieve the reincarnated baby. So I hit the road and I roll how many steps I am going to walk before another cutscene interrupts me.

My steps roll formula is like this

(1D4 for number of dice) X (1 d6 for dice type) X 100

This is my dice type table:

1 - D4

2 - D6

3 -D8

4 - D10

5 - D12

6 - D20

When I get there I roll some keywords in the Mythic app to see what the cutscene is going to be about. It gets pretty random. In the last couple of days, I’ve found a baby bird I named Stewart, added 5 kilometers to my journey because my party got scared of the most direct road and caught a parasite from some fruit on the road. This works better than the pokémon one for me because things are happening.

I’ve walked 26000 steps in 5 days, climbed mountains by climbing my door with the chin up bar (one foot on each side, hands on the bar) , wasted a lot of arrows because I can’t hit a target, fought by hitting high and low targets with the broom handle, picked mushrooms with some exercises with my tennis ball and my tube. And best of all: I had fun!

Other Tricks

Final Considerations

My Zombie Japanese game worked so well, that I thought how could I take this to things I really don’t like to do, like editing my books. And I basically thought what if my Ultimate Decades People were as lucky as my Zombie game character. So I’ve instituted reroll points. For some things, like Japanese, the zombie game is perfect because I’ll fixate it better if I do as I play. But for some, like editing my book, it works better if I don’t get distracted while I am doing and cash in on that productivity later. So I give myself one luck point every 3 paragraphs edited and I note them as little dots in my notebook and in the evening I burn them when I play historical adventures so my characters have strikes of luck (and I’ve got 2 games in 14th century Europe, they need it).

So. I started a world using Fiasco, A Quiet Year, and Microscope.

Here’s the thing: I wrote, like, a gazillion books this year. I’ve been trying to finish my two ongoing series, and in the span of just ten months, I wrote 18 books. (And no, I didn’t finish either series, there are still 3 left.)

Then I hit a wall. Life got complicated, and I just couldn’t emotionally handle writing full novels anymore. By June, I had about 20 projects in various stages—some with thousands of words written—that I just couldn’t keep pushing forward. I realized I was showing signs of burnout. It was time for a break.

But the thing I love most in the world is telling stories. So I started looking for other ways to tell them.

First, I went to The Sims. My favorite version is The Sims 3. I love her. She’s buggy. I’ve never managed to finish a legacy challenge because The Sims always bugs out on me somehow. So I thought: what if I created a world through solo RPGs instead?

That’s how my little journey began in July.

Now, let me be clear: storytelling is a big part of my professional life. But this wasn’t supposed to be professional. This was me, giving space to my hobby, letting stories come through even when they were kicking my ass. Over the past few weeks, I’ve experimented with a bunch of solo RPGs, and my favorites so far are Fiasco, A Quiet Year, and Microscope.

This is the story of how I built a multiverse using tabletop RPGs and how you can build one too.

How to Play Solo, Serialized Fiasco (And Why I Can’t Shut Up About It)

Over the past month, I tested a lot of solo RPGs, but my absolute favorite has been Fiasco. Why? Because you can tell a complete story (beginning, middle, and end) in about three hours. That’s magic.

If you want to learn how to play Fiasco as a one-shot with a group, I highly recommend the Tabletop series on YouTube. That’s how I learned the game, and it’s still a gold standard.

For the sake of this post, I’ll assume you’re at least a little familiar with the rules. So… how do I play Fiasco solo?

Let’s start with the setup. If it’s a continuation of a previous game, I remove two dice for each already-established relationship and two more for each established element (needs, objects, or locations). But that’s just the beginning — I also created my own Fiasco modes, and before every game, I roll a d4:

1 – Random: I don’t choose which dice (black or white) go to which characters. I randomize everything. This usually leads to deliciously chaotic outcomes.

2 – Standard: I follow the rules, but I assign the dice. Pro tip: if you want a character to succeed, give them more white dice. If you want them to spiral into disaster, give them an even split.

3 – Bad Vibes: Three-quarters of the dice are black.

4 – Good Vibes: Three-quarters of the dice are white.

But what if there’s no official Fiasco playset that fits the story you want to tell? You’ve got two quick options:

Option 1: Ask your favorite AI to write a custom playset based on your prompt.

Option 2: Skip the traditional setup and roll with Mythic. There’s a great Android app called Mythic GME Adventures. Roll the setup table and create your elements based on the keywords it gives you.

Play your scenes however you want. Do full roleplay, write entire scenes, or just write quick summaries. This is for you. Have fun.

Managing Cities, Worlds, and Whatever Else You Accidentally Spawn

My RPG world-building journey started, as all great things do, with fanfic.

I’m obsessed with Cat Grant from DC Comics (especially the Supergirl TV version)and I started wondering: what if Cat Grant was a trans woman trying to build a media empire in the 1980s? That question spiraled into a 70,000-word solo campaign set in 1980s Metropolis.

Now my city has a tangled web of plot threads and background happenings, and I needed a way to keep track of everything without playing as 50 different characters. So I started using A Quiet Year as a management system.

But I play it a little differently. Instead of drawing cards, I roll on the Mythic GME Adventures app and ask:

Did the city move closer to completing a project?

Did they abandon one?

Did something new emerge?

Everything that happens in my A Quiet Year affects my Fiasco characters, and everything the characters do changes the city’s trajectory. It’s all deeply interconnected.

Need the history of the neighboring city? The country? A parallel universe? Or maybe just the last 100 years in your setting?

That’s where Microscope comes in. It’s a worldbuilding RPG where you ask questions and build timelines to explore them. Want to know what happened over the last century? Play Microscope. Playing solo? Let Mythic be your second player.

I created a whole world of fish people where water falls upwards, it was great. I’m doing silly little drawings for it.

Useful Tools for Quick & Dirty Worldbuilding

Not sure what your city looks like? Or even the house your character’s in? Try Watabou’s generators – they're free, quick, and full of vibes: 👉 https://watabou.itch.io

Need to build a place you’ll return to often? Try Dungeon Scrawl or The Sims, if your computer can handle it: 👉 https://app.dungeonscrawl.com

Need to roll dice for Fiasco but don’t have any? 👉 https://semioticblocks.com/fiascodice

Just need a basic dice roller? Type “dice roller” into Google or open up Mythic GME Adventures and use theirs.

That’s it.

This whole solo RPG multiverse project started because I was too tired to write a whole novel, but I still needed stories like I need oxygen. These tools and games helped me find joy and narrative momentum again and I hope they can help you too.

Tell stories. Be messy. Be dramatic. Burn down a town. Rebuild it with little goblin and fish people who live in floating cities where the water flows upwads. This is for you. You get to decide what it looks like.