I'm fairly new to solo RPG's and I feel like I'm understanding how the gameplay works based on the instructions and I'm really intrigued. I'm uncertain on how to weave a story from it though. I would love to see a brief playthrough of this to really grasp it.
Yeah, absolutely! Sorry it took so long to answer but here it goes:
The main thing to keep in mind when playing these sorts of solo RPGs is that they work kinda like fuel to your creative engine: by placing the bookmarker on a page, you're getting crumbs, clues, directions - but the act of play consists in giving them meaning, filling the blanks and trying to make everything make sense and form a coherent story.
Using the example in the game's front page (the famous scottish play by Shakespeare, Macbeth), you'll see the chosen words were WITCH, QUARREL & REBEL, naming this chapter "The Cursed Uprising". We can choose to apply these words and story as a corruption of the original Macbeth story, or as a metaphysical virus, corrupting the lives of the readers instead. We're going with the second option: this particular copy of the book is carrying a spell (from the word WITCH), and everyone who reads it becomes frenzied (REBEL), being forced to fight everyone around them (QUARREL). What the corruption intends to gain from this chaos will be left for a future chapter - right now, our goal is to either stop the curse, or subdue the infected so that they cannot cause too much harm and rewrite reality.
Right now, we're playing as Rufus, a Lorekeeper who's really good at acting first and talking (and thinking) second - so we gave him +2 in Action, +1 in Modification and 0 in Identification. Rufus was sent to investigate this particular mission because the corruption quickly caused a tremendous ruckus, and stopping the chaos takes precedence. Understanding what's going on will be a bonus goal.
We just rolled our first 2d6, getting a 2 and a 5.
The 5 is already a success, so we can assign it wherever we want - but the 2 will be a failure no matter what we do (even if we assigned our +2 to it), so we choose to count our losses first and pick which word we're failing to solve. As such, we're sending the 2 to WITCH (a noun, so our +0). Rufus arrives at the root of corruption, people fighting all around him, buildings being torched to the ground - and he immediately realizes he doesn't have the arcane knowledge required to stop the ritual; so he decides to focus on what he's actually good at - butting heads and taking names.
We roll our 3rd dice, getting a 3.
Not the best result, but it works for us. The 5 succeeds on its own, and by assigning the 3 to an ACTION to make use of our +2 bonus (in this case, we're sending it to QUARREL), we're getting two Successes. We weren't able to use our +1 from our MODIFICATION stat, but that's alright, Rufus will still be able to stop the rebels and their rebellion - weaving reality-bending, corruption-binding spells, every single bewitched person is pinned to nearby walls. It's a tough job, but Rufus is very experienced in these sorts of situations, which is precisely why he was the agent sent. The muscular man moves extremely fast and his spells hit like trucks and sound like thunder, prioritizing taking out the most aggresive key targets (we assigned the natural 5 to REBEL first), and using his remaining energy to prevent destruction (with our 3+2 on QUARREL).
Rufus was able to stop the rebellion from doing too much harm, the Corruption contained before it could spread too far. Still, the ritual itself was not stopped, and more people can be turned to do the witches' bidding. Not only that, but we have no idea what's the endgame here... But Rufus still has two chapters to stop this occurence for good, and the odds seem to be in his favor - all he needs to do is keep choosing good words to confront and rolling well enough so that the current 1 Corruption never reaches 5... Surely fate will stay by his side...