Would You Search Through The Lonely Earth For Me? – Yes.

One of the main problems with tabletop roleplaying games, is that you need a group of friends to play them with. Not only that, but you need all your schedules to line up – which is a herculean task of its own. The more players you have, the more complicated organising a session becomes. Sometimes, you just want to flex your creative muscles without having to go through the hassle of setting up a session with your friends. Single player TTRPGs are where we can get that tabletop fix, which has become more powerful now that we’re all playing remotely.

Would You Search Through The Lonely Earth For Me is a single player, single page TTRPG, that can be played in one sitting or over a long period of time. For example, I completed my first playthrough over the bank holiday weekend in between the various chores that I needed to get done. Finally, a way to make laundry and video rendering interesting! Created by Michael Whelan, video team member at Dicebreaker and Zoe Delahunty-Light, video team member at Eurogamer, all you need to play WYSTTLEFM (not the smoothest of acronyms, I must admit) is something to write on, the rules and a ten sided dice. Easy to set up, easy to play, easy to enjoy.

Playing the game, requires four rolls of the d10. These rolls correspond to four key details that form the framework of each stage of your story:

1. Where – This column tells you where your journey is taking you e.g. whether you end up on a battlefield or in a museum. Whether you are on the way there or have already reached your destination, is entirely up to you.
2. Who – Who carried you to this place? Who found you and decided to bring you along for the ride? Did they treat you like a treasure or were you stuffed to the bottom of a bag, to be forgotten?
3. How Long – For what length of time will you remain in this place? Are you merely stopping by briefly, are you left behind to rust in the darkness until you are unearthed again?
4. Tone – This defines what you are feeling in this place. Are you hopeful? Are you proud of how far you’ve come?

Let me explain the concept of this TTRPG. You take the role of a precious treasure, that is passed from person to person, location to location, over the course of millennia. The treasure in question is up to you, the only real restrictions being that you cannot affect the world around you – only observe and experience. Regardless of how those who come across you act; you are powerless to do anything about it. It makes for a rather unique experience, as instead of having to think in character about what you *can* do in a situation, you are forced into the role of an observer. Each journal entry tells a tale of its own, as short, or as lengthy as you choose it to be.

This game is something that I recommend you play through on your own, as it is unique for everyone. However, to give you an idea of where your journey can go – I’ll walk you through my very first session. I decided that my treasure would be a golden amulet, like those you see in fantasy stories around the necks of the “totally not related to all-powerful beings” protagonists.

I began in a place of history, brought there by the prophet, abandoned there for an unknowable amount of time, with a crestfallen tone. As vague as the prompts are deliberately phrased, I had a clear vision in my mind of where my story would begin. My amulet lay in the depths of a cavern, near an underground river that flowed to the sea. I’d be thrown out of a bag, onto the dusty stone floor, an offering to a god that never answered prayers.

From there, a scholar uncovered my amulet under the rocks and debris that had built up over the years. Overjoyed at the care and effort that this professor put into rejuvenating the golden surface, my amulet settled into its new home in a museum with great content. Millenia passed and the amulet witnessed the development of the world around it, eventually lying in the possession of a young blacksmith called Corinth, who was forced to work for the war lords that controlled his home.

Travelling from the iron forges to the cusp of a war, my amulet witnessed the downfall of empires and the massacres of the battlefield, terrified that it’d be lost to the bloodshed that surrounded it. The chaos of the battlefield was a stark contrast to the collector’s basement that it spent the next few years in, forever cursed to watch every other precious object be prized and adored by him, but not the amulet. Eventually, the amulet was left as an offering to a local miracle worker, by a craftsman who desperately needed a miracle to save her son.

My story came to an end when the wanderer that carried me on her chest, was crushed in a cave in. The rubble tumbled from above and buried us both in an endless pile of boulders and rocks that weighed down on us. Helpless and alone in the darkness, my amulet’s main wish in the end was that the wanderer would be found one day, to give her family closure. It hoped that if found, it would be buried with her, finally at peace and no longer alone.

Despite my journal entries only covering seven pages of A5 paper, I felt that my tale had come to a satisfactory end. I had weaved a tale of a world that grew and changed, with its triumphs and failures. I got to flex that creative muscle that I haven’t gotten to use in a long time. I used to do a lot of creative writing when I was younger, including the summer where I actually took part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), which involved writing a 50,000 word novel in the span of a month. An intense but enjoyable experience.

A lot of my life has been spent weaving stories in my mind, some of which were put down on paper or turned into the worlds that my players now explore in our campaigns. The chance to create my own worlds again, to step back and make something entirely new, has been a real treat. There’s something remarkable about making a game that can create so much from so little and has such massive replayability value, so I tip my hat to Wheels and Zoe, this is a game that I think a lot of people will come back to.

Buy the game here! https://wheelsrpgs.itch.io/throughthelonelyearth

Anyways, I hope everyone is having a good day and I recommend you keep an eye on MindGames’s Twitter this week, especially on the 3^rd as I have a pretty cool announcement to make! Keep an eye out for that and be sure to let me know what you want me to talk about next.

Ciao,

CaitlinRC.

Tags: creativity, d10, game, journal, role playing games, rolling dice, singleplayer, table top, ttrpgs, writing