Fun for Friday: Solo TTRPGs as Writing Exercises
Image by Zoltan Matuska from Pixabay
One of the panels that I attended at Worldcon in Seattle back in August was about using solo TTRPGs as writing exercises. If you’re not familiar with the concept of solo TTRPGs, these are often short games that use a randomizing element like a deck of playing cards, a few dice, or a tarot deck to generate prompts for creating a character, journaling, worldbuilding, and more. There are even a handful of solo TTRPGs specifically designed around writing poetry.
While I was at Worldcon, I also picked up a small stack of solo TTRPGs, which included Lighthouse at the End of the World. I’ve played around with this one to get some ideas for what I thought might be a flash fiction piece written in a journal format, but it wound up turning into a wild research rabbit hole and may actually be the inspiration for a novel. (I talked about this research rabbit hole in my latest newsletter–if you missed it, drop me a line and I’ll forward it to you!)
While not all solo TTRPGs will generate material that you want to use for a story or poetry, some of them can be excellent exercises to get your brain working and making connections or for creating backstory for something you want to write. It can be a lot of fun to embrace the randomness, but you can also read through the lists of random options for one that seems most interesting to you! itch.io is FULL of solo TTRPGs, and a good number of them are free or “pay what you will.” So if you’re looking for a source of writing inspiration and exercises, dig around on that site and see what piques your interest!
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