World-Building via Letter Tiles: Last Example Round (Solo RPG)

This is, mercifully, the last post recording my playtest of using letter-tile prompts.  I carried it through the fourth oracle question in order to show just how malleable the emerging story can be. 

Speaking of emerging story, I’ll forgo the complete recap and attempt a two sentence summary.  “An aged Nazi attempts to arm his warlike Hollow-Earth patrons with a Wonder Weapon from WWII Japan, the weapon itself adapted from Hollow-Earth technology.  Only our heroes can stop him”.

OK, so learning about Roswell-in-the-Pacific from the oracle dice, I now fill my hand back to ten tiles and get on with laying down more words.  Hitting two orange squares gives me two hand refreshes and I complete four words before triggering the next oracle question: IDENTITY, GUSHER, MOTOR, and GUARD.

I'm not sure what to do with IDENTITY and GUARD, but since one is oriented horizontally and the other vertically, I'll say they're a word-pair.  So, the IDENTITY of a GUARD at the fringes of the aforementioned royal wedding might be in question?  Or, even better, perhaps it’s the phrase GUARD IDENTITY, with someone trying to hide their true nature.  I like this a bit better, and since IDENTITY is actually built off the previous word NAZI, I think we know who this refers to.

 

The new word MOTOR plays nicely into threads already forming, especially since it's indicated as Goal-related.

 

The word GUSHER gives me some initial ideas about introducing an NPC from the surface world.  I researched oil and gas exploration in the Indian Ocean and read that Japan was a key player in the late 20th century, in roughly the timeframe of my game.  Synchronicity!  Hmmm, maybe I'll change the narrative from last post that the "moon-rocket" is actually a super-science nuclear powered-borer?  Or possibly that there are two vehicles, somehow related?  I’m leaning toward the first option, but this is about letting the universe push us into unexpected directions, so let's ask the Oracle.

 

4th Question: Did a second vehicle from the surface world recently wreck in the Inner World kingdom?

 

Result: 5 "Yes, and…"

 

I can work with this!  Yes, a second vehicle from the surface world recently wrecked in the kingdom, and it has a close connection to the WWII spacecraft!

    

As the picture shows, I still have 37 tiles remaining in the bag and I could keep going.  In fact, I did continue on to a fifth oracle question, but I think I’ve demonstrated the process.

Does it produce a Hugo-award winning narrative?  No.  Does it produce any narrative at all?  That’s debatable, but since there’s no structure, the answer seems no.  I’d say the letter tile process is an idea generator, and a slow one at that.

Still, I find it a fun mini-game and the tile/dice oracle combination does inject unexpected inspiration.  Personally, I would have never introduced World War II elements into my subterranean fantasy world, but now I have an adventure arc featuring just those things.  I’ve got NPCs, their potential motivations, technology that could offer the PCs a way to escape back to the earth’s surface… lots of angles to explore and interpret after only four questions.

The playtest documented here was essentially adventure creation, like a GM getting ideas to build an entire session or two worth of material for a group of players.  The next time I use this technique, I’ll integrate it real-time with a true solo RPG adventure to see how that works.

Steps for solo RPG integration:

1. Start with generalities defined: the PC(s), setting, premise, etc.
2. Run the board set-up as in the intro post and play the tile process through the first oracle question; the intent is to set the solo RPG opening scene and, in Mythic GME terms, define some open threads.
3. Refresh the tile hand and lay down additional words, continuing until the next oracle question is triggered.
4. Leave that question unanswered and return to the solo RPG proper, using the newly generated words either to interpret an altered/interrupted scene, or as additional threads/NPC details; play the solo RPG scene as normal.
5. Between scenes, use the events of the actual play, amplified by the existing tile words, and answer the still outstanding Oracle question.
6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 above.      

I used 76 tiles over five questions during my playtest, so that suggests about 15 tiles per question.  A bag of 100 tiles would therefore yield six, maybe seven questions with the first one occurring prior to play.  The tile-based word prompts therefore only last for the first five or so scenes but honestly, that feels about right.  After five or six scenes, there should be plenty of threads to explore. 

World-Building via Letter Tiles: Example Round 3 (Solo RPG)

Last round of the emerging story of the subterranean Inner World suggested two warring factions, including one guided by Nazis!  The tile-formed words also hinted that a royal wedding could end the fighting.  The oracle dice confirmed this, stating that:

Yes, the marriage is part of a truce between warring factions, but the bride's (or groom’s?) people were never truly threatened by the Nazi-influenced kingdom.

Seven more tiles drawn to fill the hand back to ten, and then another round of word-building.  If I were playing Scrabble, I could have racked up an impressive score on a longer word.  Generating story connections by hitting the desired colored squares and then triggering an oracle question, have me laying down three short words instead: MOON, ODE, and ACE.     

It's coming together!  This shows how the entire story can morph and how it's OK to jettison big portions of previous ideas.  Look at it as if from a character's limited perspective… maybe the previous brainstorming reflects what appeared to be going on, but then more is revealed.

 

The Japanese vessel that disappeared long ago into the Inner World was not a submarine but a MOON-rocket (more of a spaceplane maybe?).  Originally designed for peaceful purposes (Goal), the rocket's development was hijacked to support the war effort.  The NAZI who advises the primitive kingdom was not a scientist but a test pilot, part of a two-person crew with a Japanese ACE fighter pilot turned test pilot.  Their test flight ended in the Inner World, with the German surviving.  Did the Japanese pilot live?  Unknown, but the cryptic Haiku (ODE) he left holds the interest of more than one character (Connection). 

 

Why have we never heard of Japan's WWII-era moon ambitions before, or since?  I'd say this points to a unique vessel; perhaps the HULL of the rocket utilized one-of-a-kind alloys and/or a special propulsion system…

 

3rd Question: Did Japan receive help from the Inner World to build their World War II rocketship? 

 

Result: 3 "No, but…"   

 

No, Japanese scientists did not receive help from the Inner World to build the rocket, but they did reverse-engineer a wreck of an Inner World craft!

The story’s getting more focused but no less weird.  Stay tuned…

World-Building via Letter Tiles: Example Round 2 (Solo RPG)

Continuing the demonstration of my tile-laying method of world building, we ended last post with the following question posed to the oracle, and its answer:

Question: Are elements of the subterranean world's nobility actual German Nazis? Answer: Yes, elements of the Inner World nobility are actual German Nazis but acting as advisors, not in charge.

Getting to that question exhausts my hand of tiles, but since the last word built over a "?" square, I refresh back to a hand of ten letters (see previous two posts for a rundown of the rules).

The next hand of tiles looks promising, especially the Wild tile.  Although I used the 100 tiles included in a basic Scrabble set for my story-creation system, I replaced the two Blank tiles with two “Wild” tiles, labelled “|+|”.  The player uses Wild tile as either a traditional blank tile, i.e. representing any letter desired, or the player can cash it in for 3d3 additional tiles.  As seen from the picture below, I choose the latter option, the additional letters allowing me to make five words this round: VEX, JAPAN, WEAPON, MARRY, and HULL.

Interesting… so both Axis powers from WWII are somehow involved.  VEX shares a Goal story element with VAULT; someone is frustrated by failure to access a sealed area/container, but their failure is someone else's goal.

 

Since MARRY is a Setting element, the scene is a royal wedding!  The background of The War Inside says the inhabitants of the Inner World are advanced, with technology beyond current understanding (anti-gravity, beam weapons, etc.).  The assumption however is that there are different factions, maybe even nations, with disparate technology levels.  Who could be advised by Nazis?  Certainly not high-tech utopian people but instead a more primitive kingdom.

 

The JAPAN-WEAPON pairing suggests that maybe this has to do with Japan's nuclear weapon program in WWII.  JAPAN is an Obstacle here… perhaps a Japanese submarine was lost in the war while carrying heavy water to/from a collaboration with German scientists?  Of course, the submarine did not sink to the depths but disappeared, sucked into the Inner World.  The Nazi adviser to this kingdom here in the present day (1978) Inner World wants to build an H-bomb and knows the wreckage of the submarine holds the key ingredient.  Is that what's in the VAULT though?  Or is it scientific notes?  Perhaps he's already accessed the heavy water and made a dud?  Or perhaps he hasn’t even found the submarine yet?

 

A narrative is starting to form, but I don't want to box myself in.  I’ll explore one of the other words then…

 

2nd Question: Is the marriage part of a truce between warring factions?

 

Result: 4 "Yes, but…"

 

Yes, the marriage is part of a truce between warring factions, but the bride's (or groom’s?) people were never truly threatened by the Nazi-influenced kingdom.

 

How were they not threatened?  Superior technology I assume, but it could be another advantage.  Why give one of your nobles in marriage then?  Who is this new faction and what are its motivations? 

  

Like most solo games, each answer just seems to create more perplexing questions.  The fun lies in interpreting the mess, and we’ll do more of that…. next post.

World-Building via Letter Tiles: Example Round 1 (Solo RPG)

Stepping through the fourth, and final playtest of my Letter-Tile-Worldbuilding technique is the easiest way for me to explain the process.

First, before we start pulling tiles out of bags, we need a general overview, a light scaffolding to hold everything together. If this was a video rental store (remember those), or a library, in what section would your story be found? Is it science-fiction or fantasy? Or maybe science-fantasy or horror? Within those choices, is it fantastical, or gritty-realistic? We’ll use the letter tiles to help us fill in details, but we need some context to bound things. 

I suspect, for solo RPGs, this context is easy to describe, since presumably most players would start with a preferred system or setting. 

My current solo RPG project could best be described as science-fiction, specifically in the “hidden lands” sub-genre. The setting imagines spies from both Cold War superpowers stumbling upon a subterranean “Hollow Earth”-type world in 1978. The likely PCs are the spies themselves and other travelers from the surface world wrapped up in the web of espionage. Player Character motivation is chiefly returning to the surface world, while preserving or gaining an advantage for their side in the East vs. West ideological struggle. The Inner World consists of many different lands and peoples, allowing all sorts of bizarre encounters, from dinosaurs to advanced technology beyond comprehension. 

While that helps set the stage, I see I still have a very wide playing field and nearly anything could happen in the opening adventure. We have a blank page before us, so let’s use the letter tiles to fill it up! 

Picking up from the set-up detailed in the last post, the board sports five randomly placed letters and a random chit-draw has determined the functions of the colored squares (picture repeated below for clarity). 

Set-up complete

I draw the first ten letters and begin building off of any of those five initial tiles. The first three words come quickly: REIGN, VAULT, NAZI. I play the tiles in that order making sure I save NAZI for last, as it will be built over a “?” square and trigger an Oracle Question and hand refresh. Building those three words uses all ten of my tiles, so after I answer the question I also get ten new tiles! 

First round complete, including oracle roll

Now the fun part: interpretation. Systems like the Mythic GME and Ars Magica have taught me that interpreting word-pairs can be easier than divining the meaning of a single word. One technique I therefore use here is splitting the new words into two categories based on orientation, vertical and horizontal, to limit the number of possible word-pair combinations. If words actually share a letter tile however, I honor that as a link. 

So, getting back to our words here… well, no need to try to form the best horizontal/vertical pairing, REIGN and NAZI both share a letter, so they are obviously linked. Even more so, the letter shared sits on a blue-colored cell, indicating this link has strong Connection to something in the story (likely a character or characters). The word REIGN features two colored squares, actually, the second being a magenta Setting indicator.  The word VAULT also overlays a colored square, in this case a green one, which indicates a Goal-related story element.

First thoughts: the scene obviously opens in a palace where the nobility have some sort of connection to the German Nazi party! A VAULT of some sort has significance to someone's Goals but I don't need to work that into the question directly. 

First Oracle Question: Are elements of this nobility actual German Nazis?

I use a custom oracle method where I roll 5d6 and rank order the dice by score, using the middle (third rank) die. 1-2 indicates “No, And…”, 3: “No, But…”, 4: “Yes, But…”, and 5-6: “Yes, And…”. The oracle gives a 50/50 chance for “Yes” or “No”, with the “But” modifier favored over the “And” roughly 60/40. 

Result: 4 "Yes, but…" 

Yes, elements of the nobility are actual German Nazis but acting as advisors, not in charge. 

That’s the example done, to the first question. I’ll carry through these posts all the way to the fourth question, where I stopped, having gained sufficient detail for an opening scene. 

If this example doesn’t make the process clear, hopefully the follow on posts will. A big thing I wanted to show here is how the process is a mini-game in it own right, with word-building not just based on what seems interesting for the story, but also trying to hit those colored squares to get hints how the words play into the story.

The results seem “from the ether” to me, and not forced. I certainly didn’t anticipate Nazis in my subterranean world, but honestly, it fits with the whole Hollow Earth conspiracy silliness. And it gives me some immediate baddies for the PCs to punch. And who better to punch than Nazis?

World-building via Letter Tiles: Intro (Solo RPG)

Uncharacteristically for me, I actually followed through on both the brainstorming ideas I recorded last post.

The map idea evolved into my Town in a Pizza Box technique almost effortlessly, but developing a method of letter tiles for story prompts took a bit more work. I’m pleased to say that after three iterations I closed on the final form, and the fourth playtest produced an unexpected but fun narrative framework, with virtually no further mechanical tweaks required. 

I created a custom, narrative-focused board to use in place of the normal Scrabble board. As the picture below shows, the board eliminates all references to scoring, instead showing a pattern of blank and colored squares. Tiles are placed from a hand of ten tiles, but refilling the hand back to a full complement occurs only when tiles overlay certain squares on the grid. Tile placement on the various colors suggests different clues to the narrative, and can even trigger narrative questions. 

I start by drawing five chits, in a separate (virtual*) bag from the normal bag of Scrabble tiles. Four of the five chits represent story elements: Connections, Goals, Obstacles, and Settings. The fifth chit bears an “R” to signify that one color offers additional Refresh opportunities. The five tiles are drawn from the bag and placed on the color index track to the left of the board. As shown here in the example picture below, for this story the colors represent the following: 

Orange: Refresh 
Yellow: Obstacle
Green: Goal
Blue: Connection
Magenta: Setting 

*NOTE: I use the website Playingcards.io to host my custom board and tiles, all of which were created by me; no copyrighted material used.

Next I draw five starting letter tiles and place them randomly on the board. The board has 225 squares total, with 81 squares split into nine central regions, each designated by dashed borders like a keypad. Rolling a d33 (two different-colored d3s) twice identifies first the region and then the actual square itself to place the tile.

Playtest #4 Set-up; Story Elements defined and five tiles randomly placed

Next, I start the story generation in earnest by drawing a hand of ten letter tiles. Unlike with Scrabble, I’m not trying to earn points, but rather determine significant story aspects. A number of constraints therefore drive tile placement.

A word formed with tiles overlying colored squares gains hints on how to interpret the word within the story context.

Placing a tile on the specific color marked Refresh allows an immediate refill of the hand back to 10 tiles. Since there are a finite number of these spaces, it pays to empty one’s hand by forming other words, while still being prepared to build a word on Refresh color.

Placing a tile on a “?” square triggers an oracle question, pausing the tile-laying (after the full word is laid down). The player reviews the words placed so far and any associated story elements indicated by colored squares, and asks a question to be answered by the game mechanism of their choice. As shown here, I use a 5d6 dice oracle; it’s a custom method that generates four possible answers: “Yes/No” each with a “But” or “And” modifier.

Triggering an oracle question also refills the player’s hand back to 10 tiles. Building over the “?” squares is therefore a key focus, but best done only after enough words have been formed to both guide the questioning and empty the hand of tiles. I find I get about three to four new words between each question.

The best way to explain further would probably be to just step through the rest of my fourth playtest as an example.  I'll do that, but in the next post... this one has gone on long enough!

Letter Tile Prompts (Solo RPGs)

Originally posted by me over on RPGG

If this seems eerily familiar to my one or two non-bot readers out there, I actually wrote this up before the Town in a Pizza Box setting-builder post; this was the primordial ooze from which that idea sprang.  The text below only slightly cleans up my brainstorming notes, which started around the concept of Scrabble-like letter tiles and quickly progressed to examining the modification of the underlying game-board to better interact with the tiles, from a solo RPG perspective.

We all have our ways of getting adventure (or dare I say it... story) prompts: from random tables, picture cubes, to grabbing a passage from the nearest book. Personally, I always used the dictionary, rolling a random page, then random column on that page, then scanning down and finding an interesting word (or three and letting one last random roll decide).

Starting Abandoned Solo RPG Campaign #1023 last summer, I decided to try prompts from Scrabble-like letter tiles and it worked pretty well. I grouped the letters into two piles and played against myself, alternating between the two piles with high score as the only goal to help me choose between which tiles to lay down.

Making sense of the resulting mess of unrelated words, framed by some very broad assumptions about the background, led me to an unexpected but surprisingly meaty adventure hook. The first of the following two pics shows my tiles and board.

I used my tablet to host the virtual game pieces, and then took a screen-grab to take notes on. The white erased regions aren't hiding anything naughty, I just wanted whitespace to write on. The second pic zooms in on the notes I took in one of those whitespaces. For context the setting is the far future Pax Galactica framework described in the (highly recommended) Fate Space Toolkit.

The Universe gave me this to work with???

A glimpse inside a weird mind...

(The 🥩 of the post) Tile-based word association is useful for prompts, but I keep having this nagging feeling that the Scrabble board itself could be pulling its weight more. Perhaps it could be replaced with something specifically designed for solo RPGs?

My first idea was to replace the colored markings on a traditional Scrabble board with RPG specific markings. Instead of “Triple Word Score” or “Double Letter Score”, certain squares on the grid would state things like “PC-NPC Connection”, or “PC backstory”, or “Important Place”. Perhaps the colored blocks could be left blank (but still different colored), the words filled in with tiles, and then each color defined randomly with a chit-draw. Finally, for this variant, I’m thinking that a number of tiles could be placed randomly, at the start, to help prevent lock-up in the middle.

My second idea was, how about just replacing the board with a gridded map? It could be a literal map for an RPG set in a rural town or on a space station or similarly “local” campaign. A more wide-ranging setting could instead employ a concept map, that shows perhaps major players and ideas with proximity implying strength of association. Regardless of the map type, a handful of letter tiles could be dropped from height, leaving those that land upright (i.e. readable) on the map to indicate not only the initial germ of a word, but exactly what in the setting (by map position) it relates to. Perhaps instead of dropping tiles, the solo player drops a six-sided letter die, one for each PC and maybe a few for significant NPCs. Each die would have a discrete color to identify to whom it belongs, and words would then be built off these with normal tiles. And if words from two different characters cross… perfect, that implies interaction.

I imagine this only as world-building or adventure design prompts, as it would be too time consuming for use as an oracle. I like the second idea more but the first idea would take far less production effort and I could be testing it today.

Anybody who has read this far… have you ever done something similar? How did it work for you? Thanks for reading!