Solo Journaling RPGs: When the Writing Is the Game
A solo journaling RPG is a game you play by writing. Instead of rolling to hit and tracking hit points, you draw a card or roll a die, read a prompt, and answer it in a journal: what your character saw, what they did, what it cost them. By the end of a session you have a few pages that read like a diary, a log or a set of letters, and you didn’t know what would be in them when you started. This guide covers what journaling games are, the ones worth knowing, and how to keep a journal that is worth rereading. For solo play in general, see the overview of solo tabletop RPGs.
How a journaling game works
Most of them run on the same loop:
- A randomiser — a deck of playing cards, a die, a tumbling-block tower — picks a prompt.
- The prompt is a question or a situation: “You find a structure no one has built. What is it for?” or “Someone you trusted takes something from you.”
- You answer it in writing, as your character.
- The game’s few rules track something that runs down or builds up — resources, memories, the tower’s stability — and decide when the story ends.
The prompts do the job an oracle does in other solo games: they push in something you didn’t plan. The difference is that the answer is a piece of writing, not a yes or no. (For the dice-and-oracle side of solo play, see solo RPG oracles.)
The ones worth knowing
Thousand Year Old Vampire — Tim Hutchings’s game, self-published in 2019, is the one most people have heard of. You play a vampire across centuries, and the prompts move you semi-randomly through its book. You keep a limited number of memories, and as new ones arrive, old ones have to go. Over a long game you watch your vampire forget the people it loved and the person it was. It is a paid game, and widely considered a classic of the form.
Alone Among the Stars — Takuma Okada’s tiny, free game of a lone explorer visiting strange planets. A die and a deck of cards give you what you find, and you write down what you see and how it makes you feel. No combat, no failure, one evening. The gentlest way into the form.
The Wretched and the Wretched & Alone games — Chris Bissette’s The Wretched puts you aboard a wrecked ship with something hunting you. Cards give the prompts, and a tumbling-block tower stands for the danger: each pull might be the one that brings it down. The free Wretched & Alone SRD lets anyone build a game on the same frame, and many designers have, usually about survival against hopeless odds.
Quill — Scott Malthouse’s letter-writing game, free with a pay-what-you-want option. Your character writes real letters to get something from the recipient, and the dice judge how well you said it. The journal is a correspondence.
Journaling in a dice-heavy game
You don’t need a journaling game to keep a journal. Most solo players of crunchier games — Ironsworn, a gamebook, a Postcard Adventure, Foked — keep some record, and the record is where the dice rolls become a story. A useful pattern is to write in-world: not “rolled 4, lost 1 Grit” but what your character would put in a notebook that night. All of our fiction is written that way: Pip Rippon’s field notes open every Postcard Adventure, and Pip’s diary is a long run of exactly that kind of entry, written from inside Hellsborough.
Keeping a good journal
- Pick a form and stick to it. A diary, a ship’s log, field notes, letters, a police report. The form gives the writing a voice and stops you drifting into a plot summary.
- Write short. Three good sentences per prompt beat a page of filler. You can always come back.
- Write in the moment, not with hindsight. Your character doesn’t know how this ends. Neither do you; let that show.
- Keep the details. A name, a smell, a number on a door. They are what you’ll remember, and what later prompts can hook into.
- Let it go badly. Most of these games are built to end in loss. A journal of a slow defeat is often the best thing you’ll write.
- Use whatever you like. A notebook, a document, an index card per scene, sketches. There is no wrong format.
Is it really a game?
People ask, and the honest answer is that it’s on the border between a game and a writing exercise, which is exactly why it’s interesting. What makes it a game is that something outside you decides what you have to write about next, and some rule decides when it’s over. You are responding, not composing. If you’ve ever stalled on a blank page, a deck of prompts is a very effective cure.
For more free games to try, journaling and otherwise, see the best free solo RPGs; for a first session of any kind, how to play a solo RPG.
Books
