A table that answers back.

So I played all the parts. I drew the map, named the towns and decided what cavernous tombs lay under them. I wrote histories nobody would ever ask about. To this day, I still doodle Maps to Nowhere when I'm on a conference call. Then young me created a character, walked them into a world I had built that same afternoon, and pretended to be surprised by it.

I got very good at pretending to be surprised. I never found a way to actually be surprised. That's the whole problem statement, and it took me a long time to be able to put it in one sentence.

Ask anyone why we play role-playing games and you get a similar list of the benefits: Teamwork. Compromise. Shared narrative. Collaborative storytelling. Snacks.

The list is long and true. I love playing these games around the table. I love the moment when someone at the far end of the couch says the thing that turns the whole evening sideways, and nobody planned it, least of all them. Every defense anyone has ever made of this hobby rings true with me.

That list describes the benefits that playing with a group provide. It has nothing at all to say about playing solo (except the snacks). For many people there is no group: the campaign collapsed, or the DM had a kid, or everyone moved away. I didn't learn until the pandemic that there was a name for this other mode of RPGs, a whole shelf of extraordinary games built for it. I have been reading them ever since, and I can tell you exactly where I keep getting stuck.

A bard walks into a seaside town.

That is where it stops. Before my character has said a word to anybody, the other half of my brain steps in. The DM half of my brain that enjoys this part of the process starts taking over. Who founded this place? What do they pull out of the cavernous deep? Who is angry about it, and since when?

Ten minutes later I have a town but no story, and the character who was supposed to be walking through the gate is standing in the road holding a notebook with a weird look on his face. I am not playing at that point. I am preparing. And preparing, alone, with nobody waiting on you, is where my solo campaign quietly dies — not in a bad session, in an unfinished folder.

What I want, at that moment, is for something outside of me to answer.

What is this town about?

Unpaid Debt + Fire Takes One Building And Spares Another

That pair came out of a table I wrote myself, and I still didn't choose it. A debt nobody settled and a fire that took one building and spared another: the town is about something, and the direction it leads in is not just me telling me what to do. I get to explore, not just generate.

This is not a problem solo games invented. It runs through the whole hobby, and it's the thing I have been circling since I was a teenager.

Storyteller told us it was a game about complex, character-driven stories. Vampires and their appetites. The slow ruin of people who used to be people. I believed it, and I still do — it is a large part of why I am here at all. But sit down at the table and the machinery you are handed is a pool of dice and a difficulty number. The ambition lived in the prose. The mechanics were somewhere else.

I don't say that to score a point off a game I love. I say it because a game that advertises one kind of play and hands you the tools for another has moved the work onto a person at the table, and that person is almost never the one who came to play.

Solo games inherit the same gap and double it. A great many of them hand you a premise, a list of prompts, and the trust to journal your way to a story. That is a real form of play and people make beautiful things with it. it's not the thing I was reaching for. I don't want prompts. I want a world with opinions.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Most of the machinery I have been describing has already been built. it's scattered, that is all.

Powered by the Apocalypse put the consequence inside the roll instead of after it. Blades in the Dark made position and effect something you settle out loud before the dice land. The Resistance system, out of Rowan, Rook and Decard, turned stress and fallout into an engine that spends your character to move the story. Past the named ones there are hundreds of small books — clocks, fronts, faction turns, oracle pairs, tables that ask you a question instead of decorating a page — invented independently by people who mostly don't know each other's work exists.

Every one of those procedures was designed for a table with a game master at it. Every one of them adds one more thing for that game master to do. Which is fine, right up until the game master is you, and the entire point was that you were trying not to be.

So: gather them. That is the work. Where a game's material is open — the way Ironsworn and Starforged are, under Creative Commons — bring it in whole and credit it plainly. Where it's not, learn from it and build the equivalent honestly. Either way, let the application carry the bookkeeping the game master used to carry, so the part of you that came here to play can stay a player all evening.

I want to be careful about what I am claiming, because solo roleplaying has a physical culture and I have no interest in flattening it. These games come out of zines. They have a look and a weight to them. People play them in paper notebooks with dice they have owned for twenty years, and they should carry on doing exactly that. No application is going to replace those objects, and this one is not trying to.

So Abstractica is a dial.

Turn it all the way down and it's a character sheet with three fields on it — or two sentences and a handful of tags, the way Legends in the Mist does it. Somewhere to keep track of what's happened, who you've met and what you owe them. Don't roll digital dice if you'd rather not: roll on your desk, with your dice that you had to color in with a crayon (shout out to D&D Magenta Box), and write the result in as prose.

Turn it up and it carries all the mechanical outcomes of the game — the moves, the oracles, the dice math, the narrative clocks that span whole campaigns. Turn it up further and it answers when you ask.

Then there is the setup, which is where I keep running aground. I have an Obsidian vault. I installed the plugins, loaded the data, wrote the templates. It works, it's free, and it has never once surprised me. A vault gives you back what you put into it. That is the bargain, and it's a fair one, and it's not the bargain I want.

I would rather you opened the application and played.

I'm not going to pretend I think this is a small thing.

This hobby has spent fifty years quietly inventing procedures for imagination. Ways to ask a question and get back an answer you didn't author. Ways to turn a bad roll into a story rather than a setback. Ways to make a world push against the person walking through it. That work is real, and it's scattered across hundreds of books, most of them small and many of them already out of print.

Gathering it — making it run, putting it somewhere one person alone at a desk on a Tuesday night can reach it without an evening of setup first — is worth doing whether or not anybody ever buys a licence. That is the honest version. I would like you to buy one, but I would be doing this either way.

Abstractica is the first step. One table, one player at it, everything laid out and nothing to clear away at the end of the night. After that: more systems, more procedures, more of the machinery, until the distance between wanting to play and playing is thin enough to not matter anymore.

There's no faceless company behind this. In the end Elsewares, LLC is me — one person, writing the code, writing the tables, writing this page. I am building the thing I needed at ten and still need now, and the reason to sell is that selling it lets me carry on building it.