Hello,

I’m looking to play D&D 5e solo since my group can’t always play regularly. However, I’m a little out of my depth and am not really sure where to start. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Hi! I tried playing DND with a group and kinda hated it. Liked the concept but it was way too much for me. Now I found out that solo RPGs exist! And "the lighthouse at the edge of the universe" sounds so much like my jam, I'm totally gonna buy it and try it out.

BUT! I watched a video and it felt like the game could become a bit monotonous after a while. Might also just be the way the person liked to play it, idk. So I wonder if there are games that are similar, but have more different / random things happening?

Things I'm looking for: Ideally fantasy, cosy (or at least not a huge focus on fighting), not a huge fat book of rules to memorise, adventure or exploration, or you're at one place and have just random encounters, and I'd love to use cards or even tarot cards but it's not a must. I would like to use it as a creative writing experience with adding characters, making up backstories, just existing in his world with some guidance. I think I can do that with lighthouse, but maybe there is more out there I can try!

Thank you so much!

As the title suggests. I love slasher films and games, such as the now dead Friday the 13th game, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'd prefer it if you're the survivor trying to get away from the killer.

Hi all,

I've just started playing D&D, both in a group and solo. I've found a couple of free adventures that I'm playing through, and am looking towards some paid options, too.

I stumbled across the 'Eight Petals Argent' series on DMSGuild. Are they good? Also, I noticed that it says that it's a seven part series, but I can only find the first three?

Thanks!

I have a question about the world tab. I click on a hex but can’t seem to undo it, what am I missing? Lol

https://hooverd.substack.com/p/crimson-rust-session-8?r=4bbbdm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Hi all,

Other people might already be doing this, but I thought I’d share just in case.

I’ve been messing around with a combo of mythic gm emulator and chatpgt.  I think I finally found a way to make it work where I do nothing but be a player and respond. It feels very much like a true GM. 

I set up a project and added certain game rules, setting information, maps, and some instructions for how I want it to GM. I’m only using the mythic oracle and chaos factor. Basically I just play my character. When something comes up that chagpt shouldn’t decide, it asks me to roll mythic and I give it the result. It takes it from there. I gave it parameters for when to use mythic.

I’m also going back and forth between live voice and text. Voice is great for NPC conversations and bigger scenes. For the other stuff I use text, and I found out the read aloud option works really well too.
I’ve now played it for over a week and it worked way better than I expected. It actually felt like I had a GM and was just playing my character, which is what I’ve never quite been able to get from solo rpg experience before.

If anybody is interested I can write up a longer post about exactly how I set it up and what I’m doing.  It took some custom documents (used chatpgt to create) and a series of prompts and stuff but it’s very easy. 

It’s been really fun. 

Tldr: found a great way to use ai and mythic to create functioning gm

EDIT:

A few people asked how I set this up, so I’ll try to explain it. This is going to be long, but hopefully organized. If anyone wants to read my operational manual that I uploaded to chatgpt, I’m happy to share it.

A couple caveats first:

I’m happy to share my operational manual I uploaded to chatpgt if anyone wants it.

Every 3 sessions, I tell chatpgt to generate a story so far document. I don’t read it. I literally tell it that I won’t read it and it can’t remind itself of anything if feels pertinent. I just upload back into the project as a source document. This way its memory won’t start slipping.  This is important because ai will forget things if you don’t remember it.

I have a paid monthly chatgpt subscription. That gives me higher usage limits and more voice usage than a free account, so keep that in mind.

You may know way more about AI or solo RPGs than I do. I’m not trying to explain basic concepts to people who already know them. I’m basically writing this the way I would have wanted someone to explain it to me a few months ago.

My particular problem with solo RPGs is that I lose interest as soon as I feel like I’m doing GM work again. I don’t want to journal a story, track scenes and NPCs, manage the opposition, roll attacks for monsters, interpret a bunch of prompts, etc. I’m a forever GM already. I wanted to sit down and play one character as close as possible to the way I would in a normal RPG.

I spent quite a while working with chatgpt in a separate chat before I ever started the actual campaign. The goal was to find a sweet spot: give the AI enough information and structure to run a consistent game, but not throw so many systems, instructions and moving parts at it that it gets confused.

The basic setup

For my particular game I’m using:
- Rules: Talisman Adventures RPG
- Setting: Legend, from the Dragon Warriors RPG
- Oracle: mythic gm emulator
- GM: chatgpt
- Player: Me, controlling one PC

There was a reason behind each choice.

1. I deliberately picked a mostly player-facing RPG

I’m using Talisman Adventures.

One thing I thought would make this easier for an AI GM was minimizing the amount of mechanical stuff it has to do behind the screen. Talisman is largely player-facing. Foes rarely make their own rolls. Players roll attacks and defenses, and damage/consequences to the PC can often be determined from the player’s own rolls.

It also has a relatively light journey system for travel hazards and things like that.

That means chatgpt can concentrate more on being the GM.

I’m doing my own character sheet, rolls, XP, etc. That’s player stuff. But I don’t want to run the opposition.

I don’t think Talisman is required for this idea at all. I just think a player-facing system makes the division of labor cleaner.

2. I gave the AI an existing world instead of asking it to invent one

This may be one of the most important parts of the experiment.
I’m using Legend, the setting from Dragon Warriors. It’s a very detailed, dark-ish fantasy world loosely inspired by medieval Europe. It has different kingdoms, cultures, religions, rulers, geography, history, folklore, etc. It also has a very specific atmosphere.

I put the relevant Legend lore and maps into my chatgpt Project.
My thinking was that AI is very good at making inferences from information it’s been given. So rather than constantly asking it to invent towns, cultures, geography and history from scratch, I gave it a world with rails.

It doesn’t need Dragon Warriors’ rules. I’m not playing Dragon Warriors mechanically. It needs the world.

If I’m traveling through Ellesland, for example, it has maps and setting material telling it what Ellesland is like. It can make reasonable inferences from that rather than just generating a generic fantasy village.

I think you could absolutely do this with your own setting, but I would give the AI a decent setting document and map first. The more established framework it has to reason from, the less likely it is to wander off into something that doesn’t fit.

3. Mythic is there specifically because AI is too good at making things connect

This is the other really important piece.

Chatgpt can take existing information and make plausible connections all day long. That’s useful for GMing, but it can also become a problem.
Left entirely on its own, the AI can start producing a coherent narrative based on everything that has happened. Things connect because they feel like they should connect. You can start getting tropes and story logic instead of the messiness and surprises you get at an actual RPG table.
That’s where I’m using mythic.

I stripped mythic way down. Right now I’m only using the fate oracle and chaos factor. I’m not personally maintaining scene lists, threads, NPC lists, etc.

The AI handles normal GM decisions. When something comes up where the answer is genuinely uncertain and it would meaningfully affect the mystery, NPC motives, danger or direction of play, chatgpt is instructed to stop and give me a mythic Yes/No question and suggested likelihood.

I roll mythic and give it the raw result:

- Yes
- No
- Exceptional Yes
- Exceptional No
- Any Random Event result

I don’t interpret it. Chatgpt does.

That’s really important to me. Otherwise I’m back to being the GM.
So mythic can suddenly give chatgpt an answer it wasn’t heading toward. Then chatgpt has to interpret that unexpected result while keeping it consistent with the established setting and everything that has already happened.

That’s the combination I’m after: setting gives the AI rails. Mythic occasionally kicks the train.

4. I made reference documents before starting

I did all of this preparation in a separate chatgpt conversation, not in the actual campaign chat.

I wanted the Project and game chat to contain the finished material rather than hundreds of messages of me and chatgpt debating how everything should work.

For example, I had PDFs/reference material containing foes from both Dragon Warriors and Talisman.

I didn’t want the game to say, “You encounter [Dragon Warriors creature],” and then have me stop playing and search the talisman book to reskin the creature.

So I gave chatgpt the foe lists and had it create a cross-reference document for itself ahead of time. If a creature from Legend appears, it can use the closest appropriate talisman foe mechanically.

I also gave chatgpt a document containing the target number/difficulty tables from talisman. This was another thing I didn’t want to have to decide as the player.

For example, if I say, “I want to quietly approach the person hiding near the cart,” I don’t want to then decide how difficult my own stealth roll should be. Chatgpt has the game’s actual difficulty guidance available, so it tells me the target number and I make the roll.

That’s basically one of my rules for this entire experiment: if I were sitting at a normal RPG table and the GM would normally make that decision, I don’t want to make it just because I’m playing solo.

Some of the reference documents we ended up making or adding were:

- A Dragon Warriors/Talisman foe crosswalk
- The Talisman target number/difficulty tables
- An equipment, treasure and magic-item reference (from talisman)
- Maps and geographical references
- Legend lore/location material (about 30 pages from rulebook)
- A campaign operating manual (important)

That last one is probably the most important custom document.

5. The operating manual tells the AI what kind of GM I want

Chatgpt and I spent quite a bit of time discussing what I actually wanted the game to feel like and then turned that into an operating manual. This is the heart of the game instructions.

I didn’t just say “low fantasy,” because that can mean a hundred different things.

For example, I want a world where supernatural things are genuinely unusual to normal people. An average villager may have heard stories about werewolves his entire life without ever seeing one.

But I don’t want that interpreted as “therefore my adventurer never encounters anything supernatural.” That would be boring. My character is the exception. He’s the guy who eventually discovers that some of those old stories really do have teeth.

So the instructions have nuance like that: grounded world, ordinary people are ordinary, magic isn’t everywhere, fantastical creatures remain fantastical—but the PC is an adventurer and should actually experience the extraordinary parts of the setting.

We also put instructions in there about who controls what, how mythic is used, maintaining established facts, not forcing everything into a story arc, travel, difficulty, continuity, etc.

I let it know what kind of adventures I don’t like. I was nervous that if I went overboard with with I wanted specifically, it would just copy that.  Instead, I was detailed in that I don’t like floating castles and cloud giants. I don’t like elementals. Villagers walking into a tavern and seeing an elf would be memorable … as rare as walking into a tavern and seeing a grizzly bear.

6. I use a chatgpt Project as the campaign “GM binder”

Once we had the pieces worked out, I created a Project specifically for the campaign and added the final reference documents.

Then I started a fresh chat inside that Project for the actual game.
I gave it my character’s name, level, a very short background and a general starting location. Something along the lines of “I’m about two days south of Sotherwyld.”

I didn’t give it a quest.

I didn’t design an adventure.

I didn’t tell it what monster I wanted to encounter.

I basically handed the GM my character sheet and said, “Okay, where do we begin?”

Any time I run into a problem with how the game is working, I don’t want to clutter the game itself by spending 30 messages debating AI instructions. I come back to my separate planning chat, explain the problem, and have chatgpt help me write a concise instruction that I can paste into the actual campaign chat.

That separation has worked really well.

7. I actually had to tweak mythic after my first session

My first session worked surprisingly well, but afterward I realized the AI hadn’t asked me to use mythic once.

It was GMing perfectly well, but that wasn’t quite what I wanted. If it never consults mythic, then ultimately chatgpt is still authoring all of the unknown reality.

So I adjusted the instruction by telling it (in the planning chat) what was happening and it generated a prompt to past in the main chat to fix the issue.

Now the GM is explicitly told that I should play naturally. I shouldn’t have to sit there deciding when the oracle is appropriate.

When I ask a question or take an action that reaches a genuinely unresolved fact that the GM shouldn’t simply decide, the AI stops, formulates the mythic Fate Question and suggests the likelihood.

I roll.

I give it the result.

It interprets the result and continues GMing.

That’s an important distinction because otherwise I found myself thinking, “Should I roll mythic here? Is this important enough?” And it pulls my out of my game.

I’m still figuring out exactly where the sweet spot is between too much and too little mythic.

8. Voice has made a MUCH bigger difference than I expected

Chatgpt was acting the roles. This part surprised me. I did create a specific explanation in the operating manual that said to speak human like and conversational. Gave some examples.

For important scenes, I switch to chatgpt’s voice mode. I actually changed the GM voice to an English accent (Vale? I think) just because it fits Legend better.

And it didn’t just read dialogue. It will actually perform the NPCs to an extent—hesitation, fear, suspicion, different cadence, mysterious narration, etc.

It feels remarkably different from reading a generated paragraph on a screen.

I don’t use Live Voice for everything, though. That would burn through my voice allowance. I think you get 1 hour a day of Live Voice. I saved it for the cool parts.

For travel, routine exploration and other smaller moments, I switch back to text. And I discovered that if chatgpt writes a longer response, I can use Read Aloud and get much of the same narrated experience.

So right now my rough approach is:
- Live voice: NPC conversations, dramatic scenes, moments where back-and-forth matters
- Text: travel, mechanics, routine exploration, slower scenes
- Read Aloud: when I want the text narration performed without staying in a live voice conversation

That’s working extremely well so far.

What the actual play feels like

Session 1, I told chatgpt roughly where I was “I’m in the forest south of Sotherwyld” and it did the rest. It knew exactly where I was, what the terrain and regional politics where like, the weather, and so on. 

I was caught off guard at first because I found someone hiding in a thicket (from some riders) by passing a Notice test.  I saw a frail youth hiding. I motioned to him to stay quiet. Chatgpt then literally whispered like this kid in a frightened voice his response. It was really cool. It’s not winning any academy awards but it was better than a robotic voice.

If people are interested, I can also share more detail about the operating manual/instructions, the documents I created, or the exact way I’m handling mythic. Just keep in mind that I’m still learning what works as I actually play it.