Last month Geek Native wrote a short article discussing how to play a tabletop RPG by yourself. Today, Shaun Sides and Rob Twohy of 5E Solo Gamebooks have added a new way.
The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox is a Fantasy Grounds MOD that adds in random quests, random encounters, the ability to create dungeons randomly, wilderness exploration and town settlements and NPCs. The toolkit creates random NPCs including merchants with shops, and they say infinite monster encounters.
The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox uses 5e rules, and Sides and Twohy say with it you’ll be able to generate on-the-fly and detailed adventurers to play without a dungeon master.
The supplement costs more than many of the DMs Guild supplements that sometimes only stretch to a few pages, but this is a collection of tools for Fantasy Grounds divided into 18 chapters. It’ll set you back $24.99.
The authors say the toolkit is the result of many months of work. They’ve gone live with a collection of quotes from people who have tested it. Patrick Higinbotham of NonZero Sum Games is quoted saying;
What impressed me the most was seeing the question I had answered come to life. In solo play we can reach a level of detail that is very intuitive, rivalling even a group setting.
What’s inside The Solo Adventurer’s Tookbox
Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview of Chapters
Chapter 2: We examine the Question / Answer Mechanic that I have created for use with the resources in this book. This simple system allows you to gain answers to any question in the same way as a system like Mythic GM Emulator, but far more stripped down.
Chapter 3: Deals with travel, modes of travel, weather, camping, unmarked settlements and the like. A more detailed system for wilderness exploration is outlined in Chapter 9.
Chapter 4: Wilderness encounters. In this chapter, you will find a d100 table of random wilderness encounters, all with an open-ended nature so that they can be interpreted differently every time. You can use these, or you may choose to use the encounter generation tools in Chapter 14.
Chapter 5: The same as above, but for urban settings.
Chapter 6: The same as above, but for dungeon settings.
Chapter 7: Contains tools for generating quests for your solo PC or PCs.
Chapter 8: Contains tables for the random generation of dungeons and their contents.
Chapter 9: Contains tables for the random generation of wilderness terrain and its contents.
Chapter 10: Contains guidance on merchants and shopping while in settlements.
Chapter 11: Contains guidance on downtime activities for your solo PC.
Chapter 12: Contains some ideas about roleplay in the solo format.
Chapter 13: Tables for the random generation of any number of NPCs you might meet on your travels.
Chapter 14: A collection of tables designed to generate an infinite number of random encounters in any environment, and also answer detailed questions framed by the player.
Chapter 15: A slightly experimental chapter dealing with monster tactics.
Chapter 16: Contains tables to generate monster encounters, with difficulty adjusted for the solo PC. Tables are arranged by environment type and CR.
Chapter 17: Loot tables, Individual and Hoard, arranged by CR.
Chapter 18: An example of solo gameplay using this system.
