#solorpg

The plague is here. You’re the only surgeon left in town. You can’t save everyone—but you might be able to save one person. 🩺💀

THE SURGEON is a solo journaling RPG of medical survival, resource management, and dark memories.

Grab a deck of cards and a d6. The operation begins now.

I run a Solo D&D Lite campaign.

Its called, The Story of Jade Marie Rose.

No groups, No DMs, No Scripts, No Filters, Just Me.

Posts will go up whenever I finish a session.

I’d recommend starting the story from Session 1.

Some notes,

Firstly, this is not meant to be a super polished story. (I'm not an author) I'll polish stuff enough to be readable, not book quality.

Secondly, Always give feedback, I want to improve this craft as much as possible, so let me know. Be constructive and not mean.

Namely I was torn between Apothecaria and For Small Creatures Such As We. Although I love me some herbalism/fantasy stuffs... I went with FSCSAW because it has fewer expansion packs and is less complicated.

Committed to the randomizer because the point is to have to make fewer decisions about stuff and to lean into the idea that the story is fun when shit goes wrong.

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).

If you are Triple-O backer, you can vote on the next ones to be added 😊

it's been a lot of fun!

I really want to stress that solo rpg is one of the cheapest hobbies there is. So many rpg systems and solo systems are free or PWYW. Once you wrap your head around it, you just need a way to write things down, and some dice--and plenty of systems use six sided dice, so dice from any board game will work. Even D20 games can be hacked--roll 3 six sided die. You won't get results of 19-20 or 1-2, but that just makes your results a little less swingy.

Most of all, it's about emergent storytelling.

I've settled into using fountain pen, pencil and physical dice for most things, and using my tablet for rules reference and random tables. Being as analogue as possible is helping me enjoy it, I think. It's become precious quiet just-for-me time No one will see the results, no one will judge how I do or how I journal, it's me and the dice and my imagination.

My two current campaigns are:

Classic Traveller (facsimiles of the 1981 editions of the basic books are free, but I bought a huge bundle of supplements): I think I have spent roughly 8 hours and my main character has done two (2) things so far, bought some spice and found a patron.

Constructing elaborate stories to support character generation results and rolling and developing a subsector has been wonderful reflective creative practice. I find myself thinking a lot about it when not playing. While Mongoose Traveller felt more of a complete rpg in the modern way, Classic Traveller feels like a box of tools to create my own stories with. It's going to be amazing for solo, I think. It's already been amazing if I never play it again.

On the fantasy style of things, I've been using Microlite20 (PWYW, I chucked a couple of dollars but the suggested price is free) which is a super simplified system for D&D 3.5 compatability (other versions exist if you want to play other editions or systems). I generated a random dungeon on Donjon (free, and it also has a free copy of the Purest Essence version of the rules). I'm using Plot Unfolding Machine and Scene Unfolding Machine (paid) as oracles, but a free Oracle like One Page Solo Machine would work just fine.