Poole-based indie publisher Black Armada Games will launch a crowdfunding campaign for Black Armada’s Advent Adventures on 21st July. Lead designers Becky Annison and Joshua Fox, widely recognised in the indie tabletop community for narrative-focused story games such as Lovecraftesque and The Big H, are introducing a pair of prompt-driven calendars designed to guide a single player through a complete game story by Christmas Day.
The project, titled Advent of Adventure on Kickstarter, features two distinct holiday options: a path following an unlikely hero and a dark Christmas horror narrative. Players open a designated door each day from 1st December through 25th December to discover a mechanical or narrative prompt, establishing a daily habit of writing, drawing, or audio recording. To introduce the design philosophy behind this system before the campaign goes live, the studio has released a detailed breakdown of strategies to keep solo players engaged without losing momentum.
Core Strategies for Solo Journaling
Solo roleplaying games frequently suffer from high abandonment rates when mechanical procedures begin to resemble administrative tasks. To counter this, Black Armada Games shared an explicit checklist of tactical habits via their public community logs, focusing on protecting play from becoming domestic work:
- Protecting Playtime: A busy schedule can quickly cause solo sessions to slip, leading to passive habits like doomscrolling during stressful weeks. Setting a strict, scheduled time of day helps safeguard the hobby.
- Avoiding the Admin Trap: The quickest way to lose interest is when procedures feel like chores. Players should actively customise rules, introduce spontaneous non-player characters, or shorten written text to keep the momentum light.
- Fictional Hooks: The studio considers ending a writing session on a direct cliffhanger to be their most effective tip. Leaving either life-or-death stakes or an unresolved personal question hanging ensures immediate engagement for the next day.
- Prompt Modification: If a randomly drawn prompt does not fit the established fiction or writes the character into an awkward corner, players are granted explicit permission to change the prompt entirely rather than twist their story to fit.
- Character Investment: Successful solo play relies heavily on building a main character that the player genuinely cares about or loves to hate, avoiding neutral feelings that make narrative progression dull.
- Breaking Isolation: Players can bring elements of traditional group play into a solo layout by asking friends what a character should do next, using them as sounding boards for complex narrative tangles, or having them briefly voice an NPC.
- Pacing Constraints: Keeping a system time-limited or working toward a definitive calendar deadline makes satisfying story beats much easier to pace and conclude.
- Reframing Pauses: Taking an extended break from a game should not be classified as a failure to finish. Paused games remain active setups waiting for a natural return.
- Tactile Comfort: Selecting high-quality, practical tools—such as paper that prevents ink bleeding and comfortable pens—ensures a smooth flow during extended writing periods.
- Personal Grounding: Mapping real-life emotions or personal experiences onto a fictional character can provide a valuable outlet to process thoughts through an external perspective.
Exclusive: The Gateway to Game Design
While these initial steps focus on playing existing systems, Becky Annison has provided Geek Native with an exclusive eleventh tip. She challenges players to stop treating solo systems purely as consumers and instead use them as an experimental sandbox for building their own games.
Design it yourself: If you are curious about designing your own games then solo games are a great place to start. Solo games are a perfect medium for experimenting. You could hack existing systems like Wretched and Alone and they are much easier to playtest than a game with multiple players. In point 4 I said if you don’t like how a prompt has written you into a corner… change it the prompt. Now I’m encouraging you to go one further. Use the game itself as an inspiration to create your own prompts, your own rule add ons, reskin it for a new genre or complete something totally new and unique.
Launching a winter holiday project in the middle of July might seem to pose a clear psychological hurdle to consumer engagement, though it remains a logistical necessity to ensure physical manufacturing and global shipping timelines before late autumn. The truth is that many TTRPG fans are used to a bit of Crimbo early, as this mid-summer festive focus mirrors broader hobby trends, such as the major DriveThruRPG Christmas in July sale, which is currently discounting thousands of digital roleplaying games.
Quick Links
- Back this Campaign on Kickstarter
- Read the Full Post on Patreon
- Explore the DriveThruRPG Christmas in July Sale
