Devlog 1: The Origin Story

Seeking the Unbeaten Path

There’s much to be said for the beaten path - it gets you places, safely and quickly. But you gotta leave it to find the wilds, and maybe yourself.

Maybe it’s because I’m an introverted, only child that I value solitude so much - and I think solitude is at its richest while you’re moving through physical space. I’d say moving through psychic space is a close second best, but for one obvious advantage - you can go to places your feet (or a fast metal tube/box of some kind) can’t take you.

I was preparing for a super long train ride from Bath to Austria recently when I first started looking into solo TTRPGs. I wanted to find something with a sense of journey, of ‘cozy isolation’, that I could lose myself in while I hurtled towards the alps. I wasn’t sure where to start.

Then I came across The Outer Darkness which professed to be a Jungian coded delve into the darker reaches of our psyches in the form of a forest-crawler. Perfect - I’ve always been fascinated by psychology (my mum was a psychodynamic counselor and one of my English Lit theses was on the storytelling of Freud’s case studies) and so I took a chance on it. I found my seat on the train, loaded up the PDF and cracked open my notebook, excited to start learning the rules.

Only, the rules felt pretty resistant to being learned. Or at least, in hindsight, they required me to read through right to the end before I understood the mechanical context all the tables, systems and lore actually functioned in. I also realised (right near the bottom of the entire PDF) that I’d require a deck of playing cards and a number of print-outs, which I obviously hadn’t packed.

The Outer Darkness is an immersive, thought-provoking game that I’ve ended up enjoying a good deal, but I couldn’t help but get itchy fingers while playing it. So I decided I’d write my own solo TTRPG - one that could be played on a train/plane and synchronise with that sense of momentum and journey. One in the same thought-provoking vein as TOD. One that’s intuitive and fast to learn and that, if you want, can get you rolling before you even read the whole thing. And one that moves away from the extremely well trodden grim-dark path that we all know and love in order to find something wilder, something exotic.

So now I’m writing DECOHERENCE (working title), a procedural, xeno-biology x solarpunk solo TTRPG that requires only a PDF, your notebook and the dice of your choice that can add up to 12.

I hope you’ll follow along with me while I write it. I don’t know exactly where we’ll end up but I think it’ll be an interesting journey.

And who am I to take on such a task? Turn to page click here to find out.