Solo Play in Downcrawl
Explore weird underworlds on your own.
Hi, Downcrawl fans! Some notes today about playing the game solo, plus I’ll be streaming this version of the game this coming Thursday—skip to the bottom of the post for details on that!
Solo roleplaying has a curious history. It’s been around for years in forms like the Mythic Game Master Emulator (and as far back as the Tunnels & Trolls gamebooks from Flying Buffalo in the 1970s!) It started to gain more attention and critical acclaim in the last decade with games like Ironsworn, then exploded in popularity when the pandemic hit: there are now hundreds of solo TTRPGs out there.
If you’ve never tried one, a solo TTRPG might seem at first blush a strange kind of activity. But done right, these games can be their own unique kind of experience quite different from roleplaying with a group: personal, immersive, powerful, and dialed in to precisely to your own tastes and preferences.
Downcrawl 2E supports Solo play (along with traditional gamemastered and collaborative GMless play), letting you take a solo character on a thrilling adventure to new underworld places and meeting many strange new folk along the way. While the bulk of the game rules are the same between all three play styles, Solo mode has a few unique features and tools to help solitary explorations of the Deep, Deep Down really shine.
The Oracles
A solo roleplaying game typically needs at least one Oracle: some table or mechanic that can answer the questions you'd normally ask a gamemaster. Often these are split into two kinds of questions: those with yes or no answers (Does the house have any second-story windows? Does the jeweler accept my offer?) and more complex questions (Who's sitting at the bar, and what do they want to talk about?). The Yes/No Oracle in Downcrawl offers a result with an optional twist (like Yes, but it's more complex than expected) and allows you to tweak probability when the answer seems likelier to be yes or no.
For more complex questions, you can consult any table in the book for an imagination-boosting prompt, or ask a set of specific Inspiration tables (with categories like Action, Item, Resource, and Idea).
If, for instance, you want to know more about that stranger at the bar, you might Ask Reputation and get clumsy. Then to see what this person who spilled their beer all over you wants to talk about, you could Ask Idea and get skeletons. Already I feel a Yes/No question coming on about how easily you can escape this conversation...
Note: you can also Ask tables with the optional Downcrawl Deck, which makes it especially easy in Solo Mode to keep the action moving without having to stop and consult the book as often.
The Story Deck
You’ll also make your own deck of index cards in Solo Play, the Story Deck. These cards will track people, groups, plot threads, or themes that you want to make a recurring part of your story. Story cards currently active in your plot will be spread out before you; the others will be collected into a face-down deck. A move called Ask the Story Deck gives you a mechanism to draw from this deck and reintroduce some past element into your story, a great way to keep it returning to the characters, themes, and threads you’re most interested in following.
Downcrawl also has a few additional moves tuned for Solo players which emerged from extensive playtesting. There are custom moves to help you wind down or start back up a session, for instance, helping you remember what happened last time and ease back into the story you were telling. The Focus move helps reconnect you to the story and your character if you're starting to feel scattered or disconnected.
Trading Questions
I'd like to highlight one of my favorite Solo moves, though, which is called Trading Questions. Here's the move text in full (from the current draft of the book):
When you’re not sure what to talk about with an NPC,
Ask them a question, whatever you or your character are most curious to know about them. Ideally it’s a big one, skipping conversational filler and niceties that might lead up to it: how did you get that scar? what are you running from? what happened to the rest of your kind?
If they seem unlikely to tell you, maybe a skill check is required to convince them; or perhaps they just lie.
If you think they would tell you, explore the answer in your head: maybe you already know it, instinctively sense what it is, or maybe you want to Ask Inspiration for help. Decide how the NPC answers and how your character reacts.
Now, let them ask a question in return. Imagine what they might most want to know about your character. Think about the answer: invent it if you don’t know it, and decide whether your character would reveal it (and how) once you do. You might need to deepen backstory or peel back another layer of your character’s personality to find a truly honest answer.
Repeat if necessary.
Trading Questions might seem deceptively simple. Yet in play, it's been one of the most popular aspects of Solo Downcrawl. While it's easy to invent a character with a cool surface look (a paladin with red armor, a witch selling magic potions, a lonely bard singing in a crowded tavern), Trading Questions gives you permission to dig deeper. Where did you get that red armor? Were you always selling potions, even when you were young? Which of your songs is your favorite? Inventing the answers inevitably adds all kinds of interesting layers of depth to a character. Sometimes a random shopkeeper or chance encounter on the street turns into a great friend or major recurring character!
And then, when the NPC reciprocates, the tables are turned. You need to delve deeper into your own character's backstory to come up with an answer—or, if you already know it, explore how open they are about their true self and their past. Different NPCs will naturally have different kinds of questions, and often the answers you'll invent are surprising, deepening your backstory in unpredictable ways.
Some of my favorite NPCs and relationships in my solo Downcrawl games have sprung from Trading Questions. It’s a lovely part of the Solo game.
A Solo Play Stream!
If you're curious about how Solo play works in action (or just Downcrawl generally), I'll be streaming a brand new Solo campaign this Thursday, October 3rd, at 5pm Pacific (probably for around two hours). I'll be starting totally from scratch, inventing a new world and character live on stream (with the help of the book's new Session Zero chapter). Nothing will be planned in advance and I’ll try my best to answer questions about game rules and interact with the audience, to the extent my limited single-tasking brain can handle it.
Also, I will reveal the final Downcrawl 2E cover art live on stream! Here’s the remit I gave the artist, to whet your appetite: a pair of weird explorers overlooking a magma waterfall, with a stalactite city dangling above.
This will be a great way to get a sneak peak at how Downcrawl 2E works (in all modes!) and come with me on a new and epic adventure. I'd love to see you on stream! Here’s the link again.
(If you can't watch the stream live, I'll be saving the full video for later viewing. And if there's interest, I hope to keep playing this campaign Thursdays at the same time over the next few months!)
We're less than two weeks away from the Downcrawl crowdfunding launch on Monday October 14th! There will be a lot of amazing extras that I'm thrilled to tell you about soon. Make sure you sign up to be notified on launch if you haven’t already.
