I went down a solo and standard playing card RPG rabbit hole after playing “The Wolves of Langston<\/a>”, a 5e D&D solo adventure. I had a blast sitting at the table with some whiskey, a character sheet, and my tablet and after my first play-thru I wanted more. I started with the PDF but recommend a hard copy for that old school feel.<\/p>\n I was left wanting more, as well as curious about non-dice mechanics and pining for something with a mapping aspect since I’m a sucker for grid paper, a ruler and a new mechanical pencil.<\/p>\n Then I remembered a solo RPG Kickstarter I backed, Ironsworn<\/a>. The system is fun but since I’m not a fan of low fantasy (give me magic! give me elves!) I didn’t play it much BUT he did release a sci-fi version that’s very Firefly\/Star Wars aligned called Starforged<\/a> so I bought that and played a bit and it was a BLAST.<\/p>\n Next, as someone that goes through a deck of cards a week due to constant shuffling and fidgeting I wondered if anyone had incorporated a standard deck into an RPG. The answer is yes. I checked out non-solo RPGs that use playing cards and really liked the world building and weirdness of Unbound<\/a> and may steal some of the ideas for other games. It moves a lot of the world building out of GM prep and into the session zero as as group activity, with each person rolling a random world aspect that the group then weaves into a cohesive setting.<\/p>\n Another set of tables generates a shared core truth that binds the group together, followed by individual goals that others can suggest for your character. It’s just prescriptive enough to give the group a focus yet wildly open to how they achieve it.<\/p>\n That led me to Index Card RPG<\/a>, which uses the classic six dice and stats but uses index cards to map out the adventure, with each index card representing a single location, reward, or situation, with a single value to use for all checks. One card might be a goblin camp that you have to move through, with a target check of 12. Want to go full murder hobo, beat a 12. Your bard craving some strange, clear a 12 for that sweet cross-species debauchery.<\/p>\n The target value can be adjust down by -3 (EASY) or up +3 (HARD), depending. That frisky bard recognizes some chill goblins from the last Fire Goblin festival (like Burning Man but cleaner), drop the 12 to 9. The murder hobos forget they were cursed by a peddler they swindled, that the next time they raised their weapons against the innocent their weapons would turn into flower bouquets and their armor into pastry dough, bump that 12 to 15.<\/p>\n While adventures are prepped with key locations players can still go off script. If they decide the wizard wasn’t paying them nearly enough to deal with horny goblins they can do the usual role-playing and once they pick their next move the GM can whip up a new card with the next encounter.<\/p>\n Less pouring over characters sheets for that one magic skill or spell and more creativity in the approach. Probably less fun for min\/maxers that enjoy spec’ing out the ultimate killing machine. That’s what Baulder’s Gate is for.<\/p>\n And that brings us to what I really wanted to share, Dungeon Solitaire<\/a> (scroll down a bit on the page), a relaxing solo card-based fantasy adventure loosely based on the classic solitaire layout that uses a scoring system based on how much “treasure” you escape with to create tension. And you must escape, if you die or your torches go out, no points for you.<\/p>\n Just like solitaire it’s easy to mindlessly play once you know the mechanics.<\/p>\n There’s a slightly deeper system that uses tarot cards that I might try. Or I might spend the next three years perfecting my own highly stylized version, at least talking about it :)<\/p>\n May all your rolls be interesting…<\/p>","category":[{"@attributes":{"scheme":"https:\/\/whiskeyandcode.com\/categories\/whiskey\/","term":"Whiskey","label":"Whiskey"}},{"@attributes":{"scheme":"https:\/\/whiskeyandcode.com\/tags\/rpg\/","term":"Rpg","label":"Rpg"}},{"@attributes":{"scheme":"https:\/\/whiskeyandcode.com\/tags\/solo\/","term":"Solo","label":"Solo"}}]},{"title":"How to Love Markdown","link":{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/whiskeyandcode.com\/posts\/why-i-love-markdown\/"}},"id":"https:\/\/whiskeyandcode.com\/posts\/why-i-love-markdown\/","updated":"2026-10-18T02:41:51+00:00","published":"2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00","author":{"name":"Shawn Oster","uri":"https:\/\/whiskeyandcode\/","email":"shawn.oster@gmail.com"},"rights":"[CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/deed.en)","summary":"Markdown Overview Welcome to a quick tour of Markdown, where it came from, why I love it, how to use it.\nWhat is Markdown? The official Daring Fireball site offers a much better overview of what Markdown is. The short version is that Markdown is a markup domain-specific language (DSL) designed to be human-readable that can also be rendered into semantically correct XHTML.","content":" Welcome to a quick tour of Markdown, where it came from, why I love it, how to use it.<\/p>\n The official Daring Fireball site<\/a> offers a much better overview of what Markdown is. The short version is that Markdown is a markup domain-specific language (DSL) designed to be human-readable that can also be rendered into semantically correct XHTML.<\/p>\n The core tenet ripped straight from Daring Fireball:<\/p>\n Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it\u2019s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Due to its concise yet natural syntax and easy readability as plain text, it has become the de facto standard in most community forums (Reddit, StackOverflow), blogging and documentation platforms (Hugo, Jekyll, readthedocs.io), and every online wiki.<\/p>\n All modern editors support it some form, from syntax highlighting, live previews, and linting<\/a>.<\/p>\n It is the first thing<\/strong> people see in any Github-hosted project, in the form of a It can be versioned, diff’d between versions, is easy to update from anywhere, using everything from I find great joy and beauty in tools paired down to their simplest form, at an abstraction level that’s not condescending, that’s internally consistent while remaining highly compossible.<\/p>\n Most online rich-text\/HTML editors inject massive amounts of garbage HTML, which I take personally. To the point where I’ll spend hours cleaning up rarely referenced online wiki pages that were composed with an HTML editor. Sharepoint and Google Wiki I’m looking at you.<\/p>\n One of my coding principles is never to break your user’s trust with UX inconsistencies. I picked this up from the Windows Phone Design Studio, which always stuck with me. Feature adoption drops significantly when a feature isn’t consistent.<\/p>\n When a user can’t predict when and where a feature will work, they’ll start doubting it (“What did I do wrong? It worked over there”<\/em>) and then avoiding it (“I don’t know how to use that feature, and that makes me feel dumb, so I’ll just avoid it”<\/em>).<\/p>\n A common issue is mixing headings with bold text and swapping them back and forth willy-nilly. In Markdown, a single pound\/hash symbol ( This is a rough analogy, but it’s helpful when structuring content to be reminded that a book should only have a single title or a web page should only have a single H1. All my semantic web developers probably have this drilled into their brains. Instead of viewing a # or H1 as a big, bolded font, it’s better to view it as the main topic, book, title, blog post title, etc., and according to semantic HTML, a page should only ever have a single H1.<\/p>\n Call-outs in this context are those eyeball-grabbing points of interest in the form of a bolded IMPORTANT, a block-quoted pro-tip, or a helpful hint. Used sparingly, they hold the line remarkably well. Add too many, though, and the message gets lost from the constant context switching. If everything is important, then suddenly nothing is important.<\/p>\n If more than “some percentage” of a document is call-outs, the issue is often one of mixing tones or intent, such as shifting between exposition, extemporization, and detailed steps. The shift back and forth becomes a siren song for call-outs.<\/p>\n Depending on the intent, it’s better to pick a single tone or group similar tones together.<\/p>\n For install steps, it’s important to keep everything concise and the chatter to a minimum. Reducing each step to basics gives the impression that everything in the list is critical without having to tag every other step with a call-out.<\/p>\n Representing code in Markdown has little overhead and helps so much when reading large articles that it’s one of the first things I teach people.<\/p>\n Use triple ticks (```) to demarcate multi-line code blocks.<\/p>\n Raw<\/strong><\/p>\n \n``` Rendered<\/strong><\/p>\n Tell Markdown what language to use for syntax highlighting by adding the language name after the triple ticks, so for JSON it would be Raw<\/strong><\/p>\n \n```json Rendered<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
Index Card RPG<\/h2>\n
Dungeon Solitaire<\/h2>\n
Markdown<\/h1>\n
Overview<\/h2>\n
What is Markdown?<\/h2>\n
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Why learning Markdown is important<\/h2>\n
README.md<\/code>. Almost all developer documentation that will ever be written will be done in Markdown, and if it’s not, it really, really should be. The entirety of Microsoft’s documentation system is a series of Markdown files hosted on Github.<\/p>\nvim<\/code> to nano<\/code> to Visual Studio Code to Sublime to Notepad. If JSON is the language of APIS, and YAML the language of configuration, then Markdown is the language of documentation for developers.<\/p>\nWhy I \ud83d\udc97 Markdown<\/h2>\n
Spend more time editing, less time formatting<\/h3>\n
A Tour via Tips<\/h2>\n
Format w\/ intent<\/h3>\n
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CosmosDbFailover<\/code> and make sure all code references are formatted the same otherwise, cognitive pattern matching goes out the window<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n
*<\/code> or -<\/code> but pick one, *<\/code> is more “standard”)<\/li>\n#Title<\/code> compared to the correct # Title<\/code><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nWork with the constraints<\/h3>\n
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Using headings like book titles and chapters<\/h3>\n
#<\/code>) is the same as an H1 in HTML or the same as a book title. A double pound\/hash (##<\/code>) maps to an H2, which roughly maps to chapter titles in a book.<\/p>\n\n
When stuck, take inspiration from others<\/h3>\n
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Avoid too many call-outs<\/h3>\n
Code<\/h3>\n
Code Blocks<\/h4>\n
{\n"userId": "1234-ABCD-9876-DCBA"\n}\n<\/code><\/pre>```json<\/code>.<\/p>\n