🦑 10 New Solo Games - From Lovecraftian Horror to European Fairy Tales
SOLO BORG Kickstarter Launches March 25
Welcome to The Soloist, a newsletter for players, creators, and curious explorers of solo and cooperative tabletop RPGs and other games.
1. New Solo and GMless RPGs
🚢 The Darkened Son is a Lovecraftian gamebook adventure with 200 sections that follows a rising silent film star who inherits a crumbling estate in England. Between film jobs, you set sail from the US aboard the SS Leviathan, bound for Southampton and unaware of the horrors that await. The game has a simple custom ruleset and beautiful color illustrations.
📚 The Archivium is a dark academia/cozy horror journaling RPG where you play a first-year university student drawn into a secret society hidden deep within the oldest archives of a prestigious school. As the night custodian, your role is to safeguard (or hoard) knowledge while staying one step ahead of the lurking horrors that would gladly consume your soul like soup.
🧝♀️ Hunters of the Glade 2nd Edition is a solo journaling RPG that follows the life of an Elven hunter. Beginning with the Training Years, you learn the art of hunting under the guidance of the elders. Stepping into the Early Hunting Years, you explore the land and hone your skills. During the Experienced Years, you lead hunting expeditions, face dangerous creatures, encounter mysterious figures, and discover ancient ruins. Finally, in the Elder Years, your journey comes full circle as you pass down your hard-earned wisdom to the next generation.
💀 Blood Engine Essential is a lean and brutal OSR game designed for unforgiving adventures. It streamlines character creation, has deep customization through a flexible tag system, and a clock mechanic to track dangers, resources, and progression. With lethal, tactical combat where every hit lands, success depends on player ingenuity over dice rolls. The 79-page digital book includes all core rules, character creation tools, a progression system, an adventure, and a wealth of weapons, spells, and monsters.
🔥 The Heartlight Chronicles is a journaling game where you explore a peaceful, whimsical world through daily prompts that encourage self-reflection and storytelling. Each day, you’ll navigate small challenges, guided by curiosity, kindness, or creativity, as you interact with the village and uncover new discoveries.
2. Crowdfunding
Wrath of the Wyvern gives solo RPGs the deluxe treatment that’s usually reserved for big box boardgames—innovative mechanics, fresh lore, multiple books, minis, cards, digital support and great human-made art.
This open-world hexcrawl is set in the Umbral Highlands, a mythical land inspired by Scottish Celtic mythology, where monstrous wyverns dominate the skies and humanity teeters on the edge of extinction. You play as a lone hunter fighting to reclaim a dying world. It features:
Tactical solo RPG that blends exploration, survival, and strategic combat.
No dice—a six-card Fate Deck resolves saves, encounters, and more.
Hexcrawl with replayable branching storylines and shifting faction influence.
I’m very excited for Wrath of the Wyvern. It looks like a modernized Barbarian Prince on steroids!
Zhenya’s Wonder Tales is a set of six card games that weave dark, Slavic-inspired fairy tales in just 1-2 hours. Guided by your mysterious host, Zhenya, you’ll journey through an enchanted Eastern Europe that never was—falling in love with a bear, battling shape-shifting fae, or searching for your stolen skin high above Devil’s Bridge. Each game uses a deck of 22 beautifully illustrated cards to shape the tale. Packed in a compact magnetic box, the set includes 135 full-color cards, solo and group play instructions, and map.
A Land Once Magic is a pocket-sized, GMless worldbuilding. Using a deck of playing cards, players collaboratively create ✅post-fantasy worlds through prompts. A Land Once Magic will interest fans of The Quiet Year or those looking to create a completely unique setting for an RPG campaign.
✅ Lingo check: “Post-fantasy” generally refers to fantasy fiction that goes beyond classic tropes often by emphasizing realism, blurring the line between good and evil, and exploring the consequences of magic.
✊ Why We Fight is a 1-5 player solarpunk, GMless RPG about collective resistance and building a future where no one has to “earn” the right to live. You lead a crew from the Community Alliance, an eco-punk movement standing against the White Fist, a fascist militia enforcing the dystopian rule of billionaire overlords. As you travel through rewilding lands, you’ll protect people, defend nature, and fight for a better world.
3. Last Role 🎲
🖨️ Print and Play
Legend of Hexdom is a roguelike print-and-play adventure for 1-8 players with cooperative, competitive, and solo campaign modes. It successfully kickstarted in 2024 but is available now to everyone. I saw Agent Solo Runthrough’s play session video and it looks like just the thing to satisfy that hexcrawl itch in a compact and fast (under an hour a session) form.
🌏 Worldbuilding
Deadline, the news-chronicling, map-making solo game where you are a reporter covering a city of your own creation, is now available from Wanderer’s Tome. The rule book evokes an old newspaper complete with advertisements (most from Kickstarter backers. I love the one they created for The Soloist! Read my Solo Session actual report—creating the steampunk Venice-inspired city of Lunicia.
🪖 Solo War Games
Adam Knight has written a fantastic blog post for Noble Knight Games about solo historical war games. Adam’s post is packed with insights on how these games work, why they’re so engaging, and how to pick the right one for you.
4. Solo Borg Kickstarter Launching March 25
The cataclysm approaches! SOLO BORG, a standalone solo RPG for playing MÖRK BORG on your own, is coming to Kickstarter on March 25.
Created by me and CM Lowry of Beyond Cataclysm, SOLO BORG provides tools for grimdark solo play—where you’ll discover brutal challenges and doomed adventures with your lone wanderer.
What Will Be Inside?
How to Play Solo: Learn how to take notes, interpret an oracle, and shape an adventure without a GM
Examples of Play: Follow a doomed wanderer as they struggle to survive using the tools provided in the game.
Random Generation Tables: Dozens of tables built specifically for dark fantasy solo roleplaying
Worldbuilding Toolkit: A 3-phase (Plow, Seed and Rot) setting creator
The Ritual: A 5-step repeatable gameplay loop for 30 minute sessions
Quest System: Start with a simple goal or let fate decide your purpose
Six Character Classes: The Exile, The Hunter, The Thief, The Messenger, The Prophet, and The Hunted
Gorgeous Art & Layout: With a combination of in-house art and design and contributions from experienced BORG artists
And more!
Face the darkness alone. SOLO BORG is coming.
The Kickstarter goes live March 25! Follow now so you don’t miss out:
We'll be backing Solo Borg so hard it will break the space-time continuum. Great work, as always!
Ooh, I like the call-out to the cozy solo journalling (Heartlight Chronicles). I actually wonder if there's merit in playing that daily and publishing the results on Substack or in Notes? It'd be fun! Although I'm not sure of the legalities of doing that content-wise with the authors... Maybe I'll ping 'em.