Introduction to the TTRPG Explorations blog

For the last four years or so, I got sucked into tabletop board games to quite a serious degree. Once I found the types of games I liked, I felt determined to own more and more. I bought more games than I needed, and read about even more that I thought I needed. I spent more time on BoardGameGeek.com (BGG) than just about any other website. Heck, I even wrote some Python scripts to built a web site to track good deals on board games, resulting in https://bestboardgamedeals.com/.

But earlier this year, that board game fever started to wear off. The whole hype cycle around the bigger, more complicated, and more expensive games started to lose its luster. I started selling off games from my collection, and backed off on following the constant churn of news about all the games soon to hit the shelves (or Kickstarter). I’ll still play a game when it’s suggested, but I just don’t have the enthusiasm for it I once had.

But somewhere in the midst of all of the board game purchases, I picked up a solo dungeon-delving (and drawing) game called Four Against Darkness (4AD). It’s listed on BGG, but I don’t think it really qualifies as a board game. It’s more of a solo role-playing game than a board game. But it sounded like a lot of fun.

As a teen in the 80s, I played Dungeons & Dragons with friends and I loved it. I bought all of the big books as well as plenty of the adventure modules. But once I got into high school, I stopped playing. Partially it was due to a loss of interest, but I also moved to a new state and school, and I never found a group to play with. Four Against Darkness sort of scratched that same itch I had as a teen. I played a few games with just the base book, and then I started picking up some of the many supplemental books and adventures for the game.

That’s where this interest in TTRPGs started. More recently, I started looking for more games that filled that same sort of niche. I looked again at Dungeons & Dragons–and picked up the base books–but I think it was the solo aspect of 4AD that appealed to me more than anything. That lead me to looking for other solo role-playing games out there. And I found a bunch, including a genre I had never heard of before: solo journaling role-playing games.

That’s sort of where I am at this point. The world of tabletop role-playing games, specifically the solo and solo journaling ones, has really captured my attention. So much so, that not only have I started to seek them out to play, I’ve also begun working on writing my own. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself on that point.

The primary goal of this blog will be to write about my explorations in the tabletop role-playing game space, both for playing and creating. I’ll be posting some news, playthroughs, and reviews of these kinds of games here. I’ll also be recording my attempts to create and release my own. Let’s see how it goes.