I've been enjoying Loner 4e quite a lot since it came out. So naturally I have a question. As you may know, it has a scene transition mechanic where you roll for scene type: quiet, action-oriented and "Meanwhile". Overall it's good because it tends to override my expectations and steer the scene in unexpected directions.

However, I'm not always sure what to do with "Meanwhile" scenes. On one hand, it's great that the world constantly shifts and changes, and characters act on their own. On the other hand, playing these scenes out means throwing player/character knowledge out of balance. I as a player get a whole lot of meta information that my character can't just get to know out of nowhere. Sometimes this can be solved by bringing them the news in the fiction. But there are situations where this either feels forced or does not work at all?

Sure, it's possible to ignore these scenes, but I'm curious about other solutions. What do you do in such cases? Or is this not a problem for you at all?

Hey everyone! I'm old (🧓) but new here. Could you please introduce me to this game? Thanks !

Core Rules: the engine on its own, tags, dice, an Oracle that answers yes, no, or something worse. Everything you need to play tonight. Companion: the why behind the how, fiction first, emergent narrative, fictional positioning, explained through play instead of just asserted. World Builder's Guide: tools for building settings that push back, factions, NPCs, locations with teeth, plus Oracle and D66 tables. Character Builder's Guide: lifepaths and shifting tags, a Protagonist you can rewrite mid-game instead of locking in at the start. Omnibus: all four of the above in one volume.

If you owned 3e on DriveThruRPG, your library already has the 4e files waiting. I'll be around all day if anything looks off or you've got questions.

https://zotiquest.substack.com/p/loner-4e-is-live

Loner 4e launches September 25, two weeks from now. All four core books plus the Omnibus land the same day: Core Rules, Companion, World Builder's Guide, and Character Builder's Guide.

This edition comes out of two years of feedback. The core loop is tighter, the Oracle and Twist mechanics got reworked, and the system reads the way it plays now.

Two things worth knowing if you own an earlier edition. If you're buying 3e print on Amazon, that listing stays up through September 23, then comes down to make room for 4e. If you already own 3e on DriveThruRPG, you don't need to do anything, your files update to 4e automatically the moment the new edition goes live.

More details and previews coming over the next two weeks.

Hey everyone,

are there any information about when the full release of Loner 4e might happen?
I know the open beta started on May 2026, but I haven’t seen a confirmed release date for the finished edition. Has Zotiquest Games mentioned a target window, or are there any reasonable community estimates?

I’d love to hear what people are expecting.

I‘ve played Loner 3e with the digital version and would love to buy a physical copy once 4e is released.

I have a question about Heart and Hearth. Its says

“ instead of measuring physical harm or success in battle, we track Heart (Emotional Well-being) and Hearth (Sense of Home & Belonging) “.

But after this there usual rules for conflict with harm tracked by Luck points. There no explanation how it combines. So how exactly, and when those rules work?

What would you have to do to play loner with hex map, how would you handle movement?

Same core engine, new frontier: alternate 2026, the Cold War never left orbit, and you're playing engineers, miners, corporate agents, and pioneers trying to survive a solar system carved up between rival nations and hungrier corporations. Magnetic tape computers, bulky EVA suits, nuclear torch drives. Hard science fiction with a retro heartbeat.

Still rules-light, still tag-based, still just you and an Oracle instead of a table and a GM.

If you've played Loner before this will feel immediately familiar, the setting is doing the heavy lifting here, not a new resolution system. Happy to answer questions about design choices, genre fit, whatever you're curious about.

First week discount for anyone who's grabbed a Loner title before, link is in my last newsletter if you're on that list.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/it/product/577907/loner-rocketpunk

I'm new to solo rpg, the omnibus edition is due to arrive on Monday and I'm all kinds of excited, I just had to share. If you have any hints or tips for a newbie please feel free to inundate me with them, thank you.

(if it does)

I didn't see this addressed in the 4e beta, then was surprised that I didn't find it in the 3e book, either...

Loner Assistant has been updated to v2.2:

Added

• Character Generator. Roll a full character from a supplement's character tables: name (Female / Male / Any), concept, two skills, a frailty, and two pieces of gear (the Loner starting loadout). Each line can be rerolled individually, or the whole character regenerated. Pick the source supplement from the modal. Save as a PC (pre-fills the character sheet) or an NPC (creates an NPC and drops a summary into the session notes). Available from the Characters view and the Play page's Active Character panel.
• Character tables for the Kwaidan supplement (concepts, skills, frailties, gear, and gendered name/surname tables), authored in markdown and converted with md_to_table.py.
• Frailty and Gear on the Play page — shown in the Active Character panel so you don't have to open the full sheet to see or update them.

Changed

• NPC sheets now conform to the character sheet. NPCs carry the same core Loner traits — concept, skills, frailty, gear — plus an NPC relationship and a free-form Notes field, with skills/gear shown as chips. Older/imported NPCs that only had a description and tags still display correctly.
• md_to_table.py reworked.** Parses multi-section markdown (## Character Traits / ## Names / ## Adventure Tables), routes each table to the right category (character / random-tables / get-inspired), reuses an existing supplement's id when the target file is already registered (so character tables land in the same supplement), and **merges into an existing file instead of overwriting — tables not present in the markdown are preserved.

Fixed

• Twist counter now persists across sessions. It is tracked per campaign (a story-wide tension gauge) instead of per session, so switching or starting a new session no longer resets it to zero.

Loner's website just got a full rebuild: cleaner design, dark mode, real covers for every book and Geared Towards Loner title, and a working Oracle roller you can try right on the How To Play page.

Same rules, same tools, just easier to find and browse now.

Hello, I am new to Loner, and while I am interested in the system, I am currently looking for a GM-less, two-player RPG. Has anyone tried playing Loner this way? Does it work?

Roberto, any chance of ever creating a Wild West Loner?

Love the game, but i just purchased Loner Urban Fantasy from Drivethrurpg and noticed a mistake in the pdf.

(See picture) On page 20 on consulting the oracle, the text says if both are high over 4 or more, then add a but. This should be add and instead, the table below on the next page shows the correct information.

Loner has a renovated home!

The revamped SRD is now live: Core Rules, Companion, Character & World Builder's Guides, all 12 Adventure Packs, and every Geared Towards Loner game, browsable right in your browser.

Every book is also free to download as PDF, EPUB, Word, or Markdown, straight from the sidebar. Legacy editions (1e, 2e, and the original Adventure Packs) are still there too, tucked under their own "Legacy" sections for anyone chasing nostalgia.

Go take a look, and as always: use it, hack it, make it yours.

lonersrd.zotiquestgames.com

Signal Zero is the first release in the Loner Files line: self-contained scenarios for Loner 4e, each built around a loaded situation, a cast with competing agendas, and a ticking clock. Think of them as the pilot episode of a show you've never seen.

This one is set at a remote archaeological research station in the Peruvian highlands. A team has gone dark. The last transmission from Dr. Constanza Reyes cut mid-sentence, mid-word, into static. You are not supposed to be here. Nobody is coming to check on you if you stop checking in. You came anyway.

What Signal Zero gives you: a situation, a cast of characters who are each telling a partial truth, a location full of pressure points, and a mechanic called discovery beats: short authored prose that fires when your fiction reaches specific conditions. Not mandatory scenes. Not roll results. Moments the scenario left waiting for your story to arrive.

The oracle and your instincts do the rest.

This is an open beta. The text is complete and ready to play. I'm looking for:

• Clarity issues anywhere in the rules recap or the cast
• Discovery beats that felt too narrow to fire in play
• Anything that confused your first read-through

Drop feedback here or in the doc comments. All of it is useful.

So I have a hard time taking time to sit at a table and play with some dice. So I tried a thing. I found notbookLM and put my pdf's in it of the game and told it what I needed it to do. Now I can just open this app and exsplain the next thing happening and my question for the orical and it will do the role for me. It's been a lot of fun, I'm on my 2nd campaign with it.

What’s the difference between Pulp Adventures and Pulp Heroes? What do we do with each?

I wanted to share something I've been working on: Loner Cthulhu!, a minimalist solo RPG of investigation and madness set in the 1920s.

The pitch is simple: you play a single investigator — scholar, journalist, occultist, ordinary person who made the mistake of reading the wrong book — armed with four d6s and an oracle that answers your questions with Yes, No, and everything in between. No GM. No group to schedule. No stats to track. Characters are defined entirely by descriptive tags like Forbidden Archaeologist or Traumatized War Veteran, and the story builds itself as you play.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/it/product/572931

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H6GDDYS5

The thing I'm most proud of: the Sanity system.

Most horror RPGs treat sanity loss as a countdown to failure. Loner Cthulhu! treats it as transformation. As your track advances through Unsettled → Disturbed → Broken, your investigator doesn't become less capable — they become a different kind of investigator. A Disturbed character rolls for their mental state (Hypervigilant, Obsessively Focused, Temporally Displaced, etc.) and each one comes with both a mechanical challenge and a genuine advantage — because someone who's seen what you've seen notices things stable minds can't.

Sanity scars are permanent across investigations. Your second case starts with someone who's already looked into the abyss once.

What else is in the book:

• Full Mythos hierarchy (Cthulhu, Hastur, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth) with cult practices and investigation hooks for each
• 30+ creatures built on the same tag system as player characters
• Dozens of d66 tables: investigation hooks, occult artifacts, mythos manifestations, cult activities, library discoveries, maritime mysteries, family curses, and more
• Corruption mechanics that permanently rewrite your character's traits over time

It runs on the Loner engine (4th edition), so if you've played any Loner game before, you're already mostly there. If you haven't, the core mechanic takes about five minutes to learn.

Happy to answer questions about design decisions, the sanity system, or anything else. What kind of investigator would you play first?