My Favorite Solo Tabletop RPGs of 2024

Becoming the Villain by There’s A Way Studios
You can purchase this game here
Read my actual play here

I didn’t play many solo journaling games this year, opting for games with more dice rolling and moment-to-moment action. I enjoyed this journaling game, which helped me create a villain for my Supersworn (Starforged with supers assets) game. Becoming the Villain uses tarot cards to unfold your future fiend’s history. You’ll track your character’s changing ambitions, goals, and motivations affected by the events keyed from your card draws. Allies very likely will become enemies. Precious resources will be destroyed and fuel your villain’s rage. For GMs wanting to have a firmer handle on their campaign’s BBEG, this could be an enjoyable resource during planning.

Wanderhome by Jay Dragon
You can purchase this game here
Read my actual play here

Wanderhome isn’t a solo game, but it was reasonably easy to turn it into one. It’s a game about the journey home after a life-changing event, and instead of humans, you play animals. Built off the diceless No Dice, No Masters system developed by Avery Alder, players will pick one of fifteen playbooks. These range from the lonely Exile to the lively Ragamuffin, the wistful Poet, and more. I played as a Guardian, which is a bit similar to Lone Wolf and Cub. I turned the bullet lists associated with characters, locations, and seasons into rollable tables for solo play. When you do this, Wanderhome becomes a modular journaling game where the journey is more important than the destination.

Liminal Horror by Goblin Archives
You can purchase this game here
Read my actual play here

Liminal Horror is one of several rules lite Old School Renaissance games that has been on my radar for years. This year saw some significant revisions and additions. I was in the mood for something horror and decided to check it out. Character creation is a breeze and includes creating two NPCs that are connected to you. Ability checks are equally smooth, and the consequences for failure provide interesting plot fodder that kept me interested. Some fan-made solo rules work well, but the system is naturally adapted to solo play, given a basic oracle. I would like to dig into some premade adventures and settings and see how to make them solo-friendly.

CY_Borg by Christian Sahlén and Johan Nohr
You can purchase this game here
Read my actual play here

Last year, I discovered the joys of the rules-lite tabletop game Mork Borg, a gritty take on OSR fantasy. This year, I tried the cyberpunk equivalent that delivers an equally genre-rich and smooth play experience. CY_Borg takes place in a fictional near-future European city divided into messy districts that keep the wealthy mostly separate from the street trash. The game includes a robust Mission Generator consisting of several tables that provide everything from your contact for the mission, client, target, location, and reward if you are successful. Like Mork Borg, the specifics are vague, but the details provided are evocative and will aid your table’s worldbuilding. Like Mork, there’s a fan-made solo rules supplement called Cylitary Defilement.

Blades in the Dark by John Harper
You can purchase this game here
Read my actual play here

It’s not a solo game, and it was tricky adapting this. Blades is a game/system that has taken the tabletop world by storm, leading to many Forged in the Dark games. You play as a gang member in the grimy seaside city of Doskvol, going on heists and using the tools at your disposal to get away with the loot. It’s pretty impossible to play as a single character, and most of the solo tools I found said to switch between gang members. That worked for the most part, but if I were to pick this up again, I would probably use something like The Electric State solo rules, which have you spotlight a character each session in solo play. What I really loved here were the Downtime Moves. These are actions your members get up to between heists that play with how much attention authorities are paying to them and either make things better or worse with factions across the city. This is one of those games that lends itself to campaign play, and I can imagine some groups have great stories to tell about their gangs. Thinking about trying the science fiction-themed variant on this one, Scum, and Villainy, in the new year.

Mothership 1e by Tuesday Knight Games
You can purchase this game here
Read my actual play here

Another solo game that made for a fun solo experience. Mothership brings the mood and tone of Alien to the table. There are not many frills in the four books that make up the core set. The writing is straight and to the point. The lore will be up to what you create at the table. This fantastic system of rules makes for a highly fatalistic space horror experience. The more you fail, the higher your Stress gets. Combat takes a backseat to exploration with a dice-rolling system that leans into failure. The Warden’s Operation Manual is one of the best GM books I’ve read in a long time. It includes an easy-to-follow method of quickly building adventure frameworks complete with obstacles, stakes, and threats looming in the background. There’s also a plethora of adventures and supplements for Mothership that add everything from playing as bounty hunters to adding a found footage structure and more.

The Electric State by Free League
You can purchase this game here
Read my actual play here

This was an unexpected treat. I hadn’t been paying attention to this Kickstarter, but I saw the game drop on DriveThruRPG. Based on the book of the same name by Simon Stålenhag, The Electric State takes place in an alternate reality in the 1990s where a civil war has left the United States fractured. Pacifica, formerly California, is the default setting, but you can set your game anywhere. Humanity is addicted to neurotransmitters, a type of VR helmet and system. Some use them to remotely operate cartoonish robot drones. There are also rumors that some drones have achieved sentience and are horrors out in the wastes waiting for humans to pass by. 

The book includes a whole chapter on solo play using a standard deck of playing cards to determine events, details of NPCs, and even a Tilt (if something is good or bad for the Travelers). Part of the solo suggestions is creating multiple characters but spotlighting one each session. There’s a chance you might draw a card that triggers another Traveler in subplots, which makes the game feel akin to an episode of Lost. I can definitely see myself revisiting this one.

Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu Guide to Character Creation and Guide to Carcosa 
You can purchase Character Creation game here
You can purchase Guide to Carcosa here
Read my actual play here

Character creation was never as fun as with Heinrich’s Call of Cthulhu guide. As part of playing the author’s solo Guide to Carcosa adventure, I rolled up a couple of characters using the first book. The amount of detail this goes into is staggering; creating a character feels like playing a game. Then I got to take them to the hellish Carcosa and its surreal, tortuous encounters. I can’t say I love the Call of Cthulhu system; it is crunchy, and I don’t care for that game style. However, I can’t deny this was a lot of fun to play. I can see myself having fun with the Character Creation book and never needing to put them in a scenario.

Sundered Isles by Sean Tomkin
You can purchase this game here
Read my actual play here

If you follow my blog, you know I love Sean Tomkin’s Ironsworn/Starforged system. I didn’t know there’d be a Kickstarter for his expansion to Starforged until a few days before it launched. It became the first KS I gave to since 2019. Tomkin builds on an already fantastic framework to add command and ship mechanics into his game and presents many more tables to roll on to create evocative details as you make your world. This is pirate/sailing-themed, but it is really about exploration & giving options for more specific ship combat. Tomkin has mentioned plans for an Ironsworn 2nd Edition someday, but in the meantime, I will play anything he makes at this point. No other system has provided me with so many hours of solo tabletop fun.

Random Realities/Against the Wind by Cezar Capacle
You can purchase Random Realities here
You can purchase Against the Wind here
Read my actual play of Random Realities here
Read my actual play of Against the Wind here

This year, I discovered the genius of Cezar Capacle. First, I used Random Realities to build a campaign over the summer. This is a universal oracle with over 60+ possible results per page. You might scan the box marked “World” with three elements: Name, Aspects, and Inhabitants. These results are relatively abstract, and anything close to concrete is still open enough for the player to interpret it however they wish. Now, an oracle is only as good as the player using it, so Cezar has done his job here. You do need to have an imaginative mind. I came up with several campaign hooks in multiple genres just from a handful of rolls in this book. 

Capacle’s mastery of tables came to the forefront in Against the Wind, one of the best fantasy solo ttrpgs I’ve ever played. This system is the opposite of OSR, entirely narrative-driven with procedures to create whole continents and locales through rolling dice. Your character sheet will provide you with aspects that can be added to roles if appropriate and logical. Creating enemies and locations are fairly similar, comprised of aspects and very few numbers. Dealing with conflict and challenges is not entirely the realm of combat; it can be dealt with by using your brain and thinking about how your character’s aspects could help them out. By the end of my time with Against the Wind, I had built up a fairly fascinating corner of my world. Perhaps I will explore it more one day in the future.