I’m not completely certain, but I think this is in the realm of our activity. Whether it is or is not is a valid topic of discussion for this post.

Some way or another, a year or two ago I became aware of the existence of a book called Top 10 Games You Can Play In Your Head By Yourself. I noodled with it a bit when I got it, but only recently have sat down to really do the activity it presents.

It’s not framed as solo-roleplaying, but it’s not not, either. It doesn’t concern itself with categorization too much other than sticking with the metaphor of game, which is probably just smart marketing. In any case, I have experienced this as my most rewarding and easiest solo roleplaying to date, in terms of compelling fiction, immersion, surprise, and bounce.

What Is This?

As it says on the cover, you more or less sit down and inhabit/control a character in a scenario and play the scenario out to its conclusion.

To familiarize the player with this concept, the book starts out with a simple exercise wherein one imagines oneself entering some sanctuary. One walks around it, gets to know it and its contents, then leaves the sanctuary and has the “shadow self” enter and steal something–unknown to the concious mind. The real self then reenters and finds out what has been rearranged and/or taken.

This is, for me, where the play in this comes in. There is an agreed-upon fooling of the self here, a contract with the subconscious to treat it as “other” and accept whatever it offers up as antagonism or development. I experienced a real sense of surprise upon discovering that my shadow had taken a small toy cow from my sanctuary, which, only as I type now do I realize is very much like one I literally wore to pieces from carrying it around as a child.

Adventure

This was the name of the “actual” game I played, the first one in the book, modeled on Indiana Jones tropes. Unlike the shadow-self exercise, there is a good amount of set-up, some read, some decided upon, some decided upon and then further elaborated through small imagined scenes.

Cairo, 1940. You’re either an American or a Nazi. You’re going to Egypt to delve into a tomb under a pyramid. Why? Choose and elaborate. What kind of tomb? Choose and elaborate. Who is your rival? Choose and imagine meeting them. What is something devastating or horrifying or embarrassing from your past that you still hold with you? Choose and elaborte. Your guide takes you to a mapmaker; get to know your guide and meet the mapmaker and see how the map is inadequate.

Then…Go. Close your eyes and play until play is finished. I did this for something like 3-5 hours over the course of the same number of evenings.

Indiana Jones-type stuff does nothing for me in terms of inspiration for play, really, except that the questions about the character, her goals, and all the other stuff gave a lot of leeway for me to make the person and the scenario my own. My character was an American woman, born to Egyptian immigrant parents. She was a librarian who delved into intense research regarding the pyramids and esoteric knowledge thereof after her mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. She found a source connecting her family to some ancient royalty buried under a pyramid, and information about healing charms tied to the bodies of ancestors. She was a closeted lesbian who once made overtures to a friend as a teenager and was so scarred by the response that she has effectively (so far) repressed her sexuality. Her rival turned out to be Evelyn Canary, an English pirate who was after the supposed riches in my character’s family’s tomb. That was fine by my character, as she was there for other things.

Now that’s an Indiana Jones I’d watch a movie about. As I wrote that last sentence it ocurred to me that it could come across as braggy, as if I’d made a better story than Spielberg & Lucas. But that’s a really stupid thought, because I was doing this by myself, for myself–of course I should think the character and situation are the most maximally interesting possible given the constraints of the preparation; otherwise what the hell am I doing sitting around with my eyes closed imagining stuff?

What The Hell Indeed

About that “sitting around imagining”: I’ve done some solo roleplaying before, and I found having to* express the fiction enervating. That is, processing it through language. I’ve always dismissed journaling games out of hand, since I practice fiction writing every day and I don’t want to simply “write, but shittier”. In the game I linked to above I instead took the approach of speaking play aloud, which became more tiring and less rewarding over the length of my entire play.

What I am trying to get at is that this play of Adventure, once the all-important GO was hit, was essentially pre-verbal. And that really worked for me. I was not narrating things in my head at all. I was imagining things and letting images occur. Characters spoke, of course, but this was either an exception to the rule or a special case of it: more like words floating up and being caught, rather than composed.

Bounce?

Manifold multitudinous images offer themselves up, as if they are all results from possible rolls of the dice, and then you latch onto one.

It did not feel that different to me than looking at a random table, briefly seeing some of the possibilities flash before my eyes, then rolling one of them and incorporating it into the fiction by reincorporating previously-imagined things that are affected by it or affect it: how is the situation changed, or how can I move forward with this new object or new knowledge?

If roleplaying as a medium is listening, and reincorporating what has been listened to into a new thing to listen to, then this was very much a listening to the self on that pre-verbal level.

For example: my character was below a pyramid in a kind of null-space where some enormous automated forge was building something gigantic, brick by stamped brick. She ran across the parapet of this building-in-process, and came across an armored skeleton whose skull she crushed. Running down a stairway, she was blown off of it by a sudden wind into a gelid black river where she lost all of her belongings and got covered in muck. She climbed out and decided to go back up to that skeleton and grab the spear.

In this vignette, the bounciest part was getting blown off the stairway. The wind occurred to me, and the river with it, when she was basically at the bottom and safe, or *just* the moment before she was. I suppose it was literally at that moment, in terms of the mental process at work here and not the fiction, if we can separate the two in such play. In a way, in order to get blown off the bridge, she had to be back halfway up it, rewinding time. But in another sense, it simply occurred as imagined, so the two moments, the one of getting blown off the bridge and the other of successfully crossing it, were both provisional moments proffered up by my mind–until I grabbed one and reincorporated it by taking the imagined fiction further.

Later on, my character was trapped with her rival in a dungeon room, with no apparent escape (there was definitely some romantic subtext developing through their banter, but that’s beside the current point). Some sort of metal-spider-skeleton could be seen through a crack in the wall, and after talking to it, it said it could release them, but then they would have to die.

My character took the creature up on this deal, figuring there would be some way to escape. It entered the room and grew, and grew, and the rival ran around it to seemingly escape, and my character was faced with its many many sword-legs and its growing flower-mouth out of which it spoke subsonically, and then finally a blade touched her–and the creature disappeared, leaving behind the preserved brain my character had been looking for. This end to the quest quite surprised me. I was sure that I was in for many more “sessions” of play.

In any case, my character grabbed the brain and went through the opening the skeleton had created, going up through the sewers back to Cairo. She brought the brain home to the U.S. and made part of it into a powder, which she used to make tea for her mother. Somehow, she knew that this would indeed save her mother, but at the cost of transferring the tumor to her own brain, ultimately killing her in the process. Of course, she was the kind of person who would do this without a second thought.

It only ocurred to me as I was writing this down that the deal the spider-skeleton made with her was true to the letter.

*a perceived need, not an actual one, in retrospect.