I’m happy to say that Parts Per Million (Peter Ruding-Burgess) and Lester Smith Games (me) now have four bundles of titles on DriveThruRPG:
- Cut Up Solo “Hour of the Dragon”/Swords & Spellbookmarks
- Cut Up Solo Carnacki/Paranormal Wordbookmark
- Cut Up Solo Dracula/Dracula’s Get
- Cut Up Solo Lovecraft/Bookmark Cthulhu
In case you’re not familiar with the Cut Up Solo concept, Peter takes popular public-domain works, cuts the text into snippets of about five words each, and puts them into a spreadsheet that generates random clusters, five clusters each time, to serve as an oracle to drive GM-less role-play. Here’s an example from Cut Up Solo Pirates, which he built at my request, to incorporate the Scarlet Pimpernel and Count of Monte Cristo:
of the boats out of
little recovered from the fainting
wine. Each, with
of MM. Schmaltz and
good action they had done
sight of the proas,
recovering some degree of confused
Guernsey, and the other
of fourteen, he was
our thirst. Must I
our ship’s hand spikes, and
his brother, had engaged
the voice of reason.
it. This pinched us
time of a feast,
and distributed. A huge
a stiff norwester
well deserves a glass of
the cruel sufferings to which
the square shouldered
Burgess demonstrates how to delete bits and fill in others so as to generate sentences for solo play. I tend to use the lines more loosely to suggest a scene. In this case, off the top of my head, I’m imagining a drunken captain whose ship has been caught off guard in an Australian bay—because “proas”—and is now trying to escape raiders, in the teeth of a coming storm. Stick my Bookmark HP RPG character somewhere in the middle of all that, and I have an opening scene for an adventure!
Speaking of bundles, I’d be remiss to neglect mentioning four so far with Larcenous Designs (Nathan Rockwell):
- GameMaster’s Apprentice | Bookmark No HP RPG | Core Bundle
- GMA Sci-Fi Deck | Bookmark Cyberpunk
- GMA Horror Deck | Dracula’s Get
- GMA Weird Horror/Bookmark Cthulhu
With a GMA Fantasy/Swords & Spellbookmarks bundle in the works.
GMA, short for GameMaster’s Apprentice, is my favorite card-deck oracle, with a wealth of prompts to choose from on each card: from sensory prompts, to verb/adjective/noun generator, to NPC motivations, with runic symbols, item suggestions, and even a random dice wheel. And more.
One Bookmark HP fan even created a one-handed system for on-the-go play when traveling, HandiQuest. I use it often for an evening’s GM-less adventure, sometimes solo, sometimes with friends.
If any of this sounds like a sales pitch, its really just the enthusiasm of a retired game designer creating things he likes to play, and pairing them with products that he admires. Because with each of these bundles, I cold-called the other fellows, asking the favor. I’m happy to say that the resulting personal connection with other one-man publishers has been satisfying as well.
If you’ve never tried GM-less role-play, give it a go. Look up solo play demos on YouTube to get a sense of all the options out there, and then maybe come back and support me, instead. [wink]