Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
So like, for someone who likes to write fiction I don't actually write a lot of it. One of many little problems I can work on in the complicated and, in places, slightly fraying tapestry that is my life. I have done quite a bit recently though, and hopfully found a neat little outlet to practice my skills. Starting back in July of last year I encountered a Facebook ad for a rules-lite world building focused TTRPG called HOME Mech X Kaiju. The idea is that you create a nation, build out its infrastructure and culture, and those decisions inform the stats of the mech you use to fight the Kaiju that another player creates. It's pretty simple and relies very heavily on the players' imagination and much less on actual game mechanics. I noted, that it had a solo mode where you fight a Kaiju of your own creation. I spent a few hours playing and wrote out a sort of quick and dirty narrative of each phase of the game as I completed them. I later found that I had essentially played it like a Solo Journaling RPG: A whole genre of solo tabletop games that are structured around using TTRPG mechanics to influence a series of writing prompts that come together to (hopefully) tell a satisfying, coherent story. Apparently there's a fairly thriving community of independant solo developers making these sorts of games on the indie game publishing website Itch.io. There are a couple of very popular systems that get reused and adapted to different themes and scenarios, and, thanks to a bundle that raised money for trans support organizations in Idaho, I've got quite a few to explore and try out. Admittedly, it wasn't one in the bundle that really caught my eye and made me want to give them a try.
If you've been following my socials very closely, or have been talking to me in person you may be aware that in the past like 3-4 years I've been getting into Mecha anime. It's been a long time coming considering Neon Genesis Evangelion was my introduction to Mecha, and indeed, anime as a whole, back in like 2012-2013. I've been building Gunpla, and letting a good friend of mine show me stuff from his own anime collection. So what really got me interested in journaling RPGs was CHVLR (pronounced like Chevalier). A game based in the Wretched and Alone system that promised to guide me through a dark and dramatic story inspired by mecha anime like Evangelion and Gundam. It took me a good deal longer than it really needed to for me to complete my 12 round game (I started back in March), but it was very enjoyable and got me to write about 7,000 words in a genre I had never thought to touch, with characters I wouldn't have created on my own. Obviously, this isn't really my story. The major plot beats were taken from a series of lists in the rulebook, but the characters, and most of the setting and world building, outside of some minor details defined by the rulebook are mine. The way it worked was every round I would roll a D6 (six sided die) and that would determine how many cards from a standard 52 card deck I would pull that round. Each card corresponded to an event listed in the rulebook, and those events would comprise the round. I'd take a moment to reflect on how my character would react to those events, and write a log from their perspective detailing those events. Of course what is a game without the threat of death. Games in the Wretched and Alone system also require a Jenga tower (or offbrand equivalent), and when a prompt has a liklihood of death it asks you to pull from the tower. The idea being, every potentially deadly encounter gets more dangerous the further you go along. Some specific cards had other long term effects on the game and could lead to ending the game, but that is more or less the long and the short of it.
These journaling RPGs are really cool for developing fiction writing skills as not only does it take some of the creative load off you, there is next to no pressure for it to be actually be good. These journals are not inteded to be and really legally shouldn't be monitized. However, they can and should be shared! The 12 journal entries I wrote for my CHVLR game don't serve to spoil the game for other people, and cannot replace the experiance of actually playing it. They are an entertaining, if not particularly cohesive or tightly plotted, bit of fiction that serves as advertising for the game. Of course what kind of writer would I be if I didn't have a deeply held need to share the writing of mine that I think is really cool so here it is! Keep in mind this is not intended to be a particularly well thought out thematically coherent narrative, and it is very dark. It deals with child soldiers, medical experimentation, death, depression, and suicide. If I were to develop a mecha genre story from scratch it would feel very little like this. I tend not to go for such dark stories these days. Certainly not so unrelenting. There is no real levity to be found in CHVLR's prompts. I intend on doing more. I might have to come up with a seperate section for them so they don't overrun my actual short fiction I developed myself from scratch.
Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com