Trials For One

Solo Role-Playing

Parts Per Million

Credits
Written By: Peter Rudin-Burgess

Art By: Maciej Zagorski - The Forge Studios

Game Icons: This book uses game icons from game-

icons.net under the Creative Commons 3.0 BY license. The
icons used were created by Lorc and Delapouite.

Index Card RPG© RUNEHAMMER GAMES LLC

Trials for One©2020 Parts Per Million Limited.

Contents
Introduction ........................................................................... 4
How to Solo ....................................................................... 4
Solo Combat ...................................................................... 5
Getting Started ...................................................................... 6
Genre & Setting ................................................................. 6
Failing Forward .................................................................. 7
Location, Goal, Obstacle .................................................... 7
Goals .............................................................................. 9
No Adventure Survives Contact with Characters ........ 10
Question Time ..................................................................... 11
When to ask a Question .................................................. 11
Getting Answers .............................................................. 12
Yes-No.......................................................................... 12
Likelihood .................................................................... 14
‘Skill Tests’ and Questions ............................................... 15
Open Questions ........................................................... 15
20 Second Rule ............................................................ 18
Dodging The Bullets ............................................................. 19
Introduction
If you are reading this, I hope you already have your copy of
Index Card RPG [ICRPG]. You are going to need it.

This book was inspired by the Trials in the ICRPG core rules
(2nd edition page 48). The rules say you can play the trials
solo, but there are no rules for solo play.

This book fixes that. I hope you enjoy it.

How to Solo
The cornerstone of solo play is the question. It is the basic
building block.

Imagine your character in a situation, any situation, at some

point, you would ask your Game Master a question. Is the
Goblin near or far? Are the poppies poisonous?

This is where the solo rules will come in.

You roll a dice and get an answer. Questions where there are
two choices, are the easiest. Frame the question in a yes-no
format and roll. High is yes, low is no.

Because the answer is out of your control, the adventure can

go in any direction. There are going to be times when an
answer will flip how you imagined the scene.

In ICRPG, you start out with a really strong idea of the

situation your character is in, you get all the visual stimulus
you need. The questions you are going to ask are more about
visualizing the living world, how or where are people, or
threats moving or acting.

You roll the dice, get an answer, and imagine the action. At
its heart, that is all that solo play is. Rather than saying what
your character says, and telling the group what your
character does, you imagine it.

Solo Combat
I have inserted a suggested solo combat system, see Dodging
the Bullets below, into this booklet. In the ICRPG rulebook,
there are a set of trials [page 48], and at the end, we are given
a set of questions. The last ones says ‘Who rolls for the
monsters?’ My answer to that is ‘no one’. What you are going
to do is roll your dodging, parrying, or evading, and if you
don’t make the roll, the monster hits, squashes, eats, or
vaporizes you. The emphasis is always on you. You attack,
and you try and avoid being hit.
Getting Started
Everything in the game masters section of the ICRPG rules
holds true for solo play. The added difficulty is that you will
have foreknowledge of what is to come. Try to think of
playing and planning in ICRPG as a Hollywood blockbuster
movie, only with better special effects and CGI. When you
see the nine nodes and the cards, you have seen the trailer
for the movie, not the movie itself.

When I am playing, I like to deal a card for the location I am

in and the locations that I imagine as directly connected to it,
but no further. This keeps a little mystery.

Genre & Setting

Solo play works equally across any genre or setting, just like
ICRPG. I prefer hard sci-fi, and many of the examples in this
book will be sci-fi inspired, but that makes no difference to
how you play.
Failing Forward
Games were you cannot progress because you failed a roll,
you didn’t find the key, you didn’t convince the scout to show
you the way, you failed to locate the safe, can grind to a halt.
Failing forward is a technique where whatever you roll, you
get what you need. Where the failing comes into play is that
every failure comes with a consequence. If you need to open
a safe but fail the roll, then you took so long that security was
alerted. If your persuasion of the scout was so dire, that he
agrees to take you, but he tips off a gang of criminals set up
to ‘car-jack’ you.

Finding clues or getting into new locations advance the story,

and they bring new challenges. Being stuck with no way
forward is less fun.

If the roll was an attempt to shoot a charging alien

Rhinoceratops, the missed shot is consequence enough.

Suspension die/Timer Die

When you use fail forward if you cannot think of an

immediate consequence, tick your suspension die down by
one. If the suspension die is not in play, roll a d4 and start the
suspension die running.

Location, Goal, Obstacle

This method of building scenes works exceptionally well for
solo play. In this example, I am going to use Game Icons in
place of ICRPG cards. If you want Runehammer map
locations, buy a map set, and support the game.

My node layout looks like this:

 1. The Stakes: This looks like an impending meteor
impact.
2. Get There: This looks like a raging inferno, maybe the
meteor has already hit, and the mission is to go into
the disaster zone?
3. Meet the Enemy: This is an apt icon! For now, I think
law and order have broken down in the disaster
zone, and the ‘enemy’ are being led by warlords.
4. Skill Check 1: Water do I need to restore water supply
or is the water a threat?
5. Skill Check 2: This makes me think of a fortress or
fortification. I think the skill checks require stealth.
6. The spilling jug has given me an idea. I think the
water has been cut off, the only water supply has
been dammed, and the challenge is to bring down
the dam and restore the water that way. The dam, of
course, will not be undefended
7. This looks like the hilt of a sword. I think we have
single combat against the Warlord’s champion.
8. The Warlord confronts my character in a final
showdown. The icon looks quite mysterious and
threatening.
9. The final journey hows the Drama icon. It doesn’t
look like the journey back will be uneventful!

You can tell that as I was laying down the nodes, they were
suggesting ideas, but nothing is set in stone. As I play out the
game, the fiction will define the facts. The questions and my
imagination will inform the fiction.
Goals
Once you have your location and an outline of an adventure,
goals can add a layer of complexity and detail over the top.
The Node Map should help you apply context to the goal you
are going to roll next. Grab your d20 and roll it twice. Look up
the result on the table below and put the results together.

1d20 First Roll Second Roll

1 Escape the thief
2 Kill the children
3 Avenge a monster
4 Pass a secret
5 Retrieve the haunting
6 End the portal
7 Close the border
8 Reach an anceint horor
9 Exorcise a great power
10 Rescue an important resource
11 Activate an ally
12 Seal the workers
13 Stop the infestation
14 Repair enemy forces
15 Win the confusion
16 Uncover your doppelganger
17 Solve the usurper
18 Remove the old one
19 Protect the cleric
20 Hide the leader
If you get a combination you don’t like, re-roll one or both parts.

I rolled a 6 and 10, which gives ‘End an important resource.’

This immediately suggests that the important resource is the

water supply. It suggests to me that most of the people are
being held to ransom to get access to the only clean water
source. Without water, they [the people] cannot fight the
fires that are turning the disaster zone into a living hell.

No Adventure Survives Contact with Characters

Although I have an idea of the locations and challenges, and
the goal, this does not mean that the adventure will play out
like a film script or book.

Everything up until this point is there to help you set the

scene and suggest how to interpret answers.

The set up you have just read will be used to explain how the
solo rules work and how you can roleplay on your own.
Question Time
Solo players generally deal with two types of questions. The
first is a simple yes-no style question. The second is a slightly
harder open question such as what is in the vault, or what
does the diary say?

When to ask a Question

When you are solo playing, there is no loss of fidelity
between what the game master imagined when they
planned the adventure and what you imagine when they
describe the scenes, NPCs or monsters and aliens. ICRPG is
so visual as a game that imagining your character from 5m or
20’ away, rather like a movie director’s view, helps a lot. In
this view, you can see the action and hear the dialogue.

This simple point of view takes away a lot of the questions

you may have asked your game master. If you want to know
if there is a pawl of smoke on the horizon, it is exactly as you
picture it.

It is only when you need a little bit of extra input to start your
improvisation that you need to ask a question, or you want
outside input, to stop your adventure from being a simple
procession of scenes.

The answers are going to be without context. It is up to you

to take what you know of your adventure and everything that
has gone before and decide what the answer means to you
in this situation.

Because you are only looking for inspiration, there is no need

to keep asking questions to drill down to absolute truth. Ask
a question, if the answer throws up more uncertainty, try and
limit yourself to a single follow up question. Beyond that,
more and more questions will just slow your game down.
Getting Answers
Getting your answer will involve rolling a d20 one or more
times. The simple yes-no question is a single d20 roll, the
more interpretive open questions are two or more d20 rolls.

Yes-No
Even with a simple yes-no question, we can add in a few
shades of grey. The yes-no roll is going to give you four
possible answers. Yes and no are obvious, but we also have
no, because… and yes, and…

The no, because… answer comes into play if your d20 roll is
1 or less. It means that the answer is a no, but it prompts you
to add in additional detail, possibly one that your character
could hope to change.

The yes, and… answer is the most extreme form of yes. It is

what you asked for and more. On your d20 roll, a result of 20
or more is a yes, and… answer.

Yes and no start as yes on an 11 or more and no on 2 to 10.

In my ICRPG game, my character is in a world inspired by
Escape from New York/Mad Max dystopian future. The
meteor has struck the earth, and the world is plunged into a
nuclear winter. A few pockets of humans survived by being
in high-security bunkers, deep underground. I was one of
those lucky few.

The game is about being sent to hotspots and trying to bring

resources back online, and building a new civilization upon
the foundations left by the old.

My character, code name Shawn Bravo, is on the ground near

the crater site. Before him is a parched valley, and ahead is a
great canyon. The sky is brooding with thunderhead clouds
that flash with internal lightning, and the world reverberates
with constant thunder. All the pre-disaster maps have this
area as fertile farmland and a river that provided irrigation
and supplied a city downstream.

This is the setting. I know that the river is dammed, but I want
to know if Shawn can see any signs of the dam or even of
human activity.

Can I see the dam? I roll a d20.

I will come back to answer this in a moment.

Likelihood
Not everything is as likely as tossing a coin. Sure, some things
are just 50/50, head or tales, yes or no. If you think that
something is much more likely to be yes, you get a +3 on your
question roll. This is the same as making an Easy attempt.

If something is less likely, you apply a -3 to your question.

This is the same as a Hard attempt.

Likely Question = roll + 3

50/50 Question = roll

Unlikely Question = roll -3

At the start of your game, the yes-no Target is 11. 11 or more

is a yes, and 20 or more is a yes, and…

Every time you roll a natural, unmodified 1, you reduce the

yes-no target number. On a natural 20, you increase the yes-
no target number.

Examples in play

Asking if I can see the dam, I decided that this is unlikely (-3).
Rolling the d20, I got 17 (-3) gave a 14, which is yes. In the
distance, I can see the dam blocking the river.
‘Skill Tests’ and Questions
Some things are skill tests, and other things are questions.
You should not try and circumvent a hard skill test by turning
it into a question. If I was looking for signs of vehicle tracks,
that should be a Wiz check.

But how do you know if there are any tracks or not?

What you do is combine the check and the question. If you

made the check, a Wiz Check in this case, then you ask the
question as to whether there are any tracks or not. If you
failed the check, you don’t have to ask the question, as you
will never know. All you know is that you couldn’t find any
tracks.

If you made the Wiz check, but the dice say there are no
tracks to be found, then all your character knows is that they
didn’t find any tracks. If you make the check and the dice say
the tracks are there, then you have found the tracks and can
move forward.

If you choose to fail forward, you can turn the failed Wiz
Check into a success, but at the cost of a consequence that
will come back to bite you.

Open Questions
Open questions are slightly less obvious. It is easy to decide
if something is big as a dam can be seen or not, but a yes or
no is not going to help you decide what is in a vault, or a diary
or what the Warlord really wants.

For these questions, we need a different approach. On the

table below are different categories. What you are going to
do is roll three or four d20s. If there is an intelligent being
involved, the roll is four dice; if not, then just the three. Pick
one entry from each column. Put the first three together to
 form a strange little sentence. If there is a fourth roll, that
sets the tone or emotion of the answer.

Roll Part I Part II Part III Emotion

1 Addressing avoiding a core belief admiration
2 Assuring concluding a decision adoration
3 Commending confronting a desire amusement
4 Deceiving connecting a dislike anxiety
5 Demanding detailing a fear awe
6 Digressing discussing a like awkwardness
7 Endorsing divulging a love envy
8 Examining enjoying a possession excitement
9 Guiding excluding a skill sympathy
10 Imparting exposing allies disgust
11 Inspiring improving an ability triumph
12 Interjecting lying an annoyance craving
13 Negotiating negating an attribute sadness
14 Pondering obsessing enemies confusion
15 Proclaiming preparing friends or family romance
16 Protesting repairing home or hearth calmness
17 Reminiscing training you joy
18 Resolving understanding personal qualities horror
19 Scrutinizing weakening wealth fear
20 Speculating working your nature boredom

For example, Shawn has got himself up on the canyon wall,

he is looking down on a camp of the Warlord’s followers, and
I want to know that they are doing. I rolled 8, 15, 10, 20. That
combination gives me ‘Examining preparing allies’ plus
boredom.
‘Examining preparing allies’ suggests that there are two
forces here, the Warlords regular followers and some other
more elite followers. The Warlords followers are looking on
as these elite guards are getting their gear in order, but with
a sense of boredom, as if they have seen this many times
before. I decided that the elite types are armed. But the
regular followers are just normal people who have fallen
under the Warlords control.

You have the option of using some, all, or just parts of the
little sentence. If you use part, it can change the meaning
completely. ‘Examining Allies’ and ‘Preparing Allies’ could be
two totally different things.

The important thing is, how do you interpret the answer. At

the top of this section, I listed two example open questions.

What is in the vault?

What does the Warlord really want?

What is in the vault?

‘Examining preparing allies’ in this case suggests a bundle of

military intelligence reports, complete with a manilla
envelope, TOP SECRET stamp, and secured with a strap just
like in the movies.

What does the Warlord really want?

Now we are dealing with a person, the boredom element can

come to the fore. I suspect that the Warlord has achieved
everything that they wanted. There are no more challenges
for them. They have conquered everything that has stood in
their way. What they want is a challenge or an intellectual
equal to be that challenge.
Once you have that kind of insight into what is driving an
NPC, it means you can play them with a different level of
understanding.

20 Second Rule
If you roll an answer and the meaning does not come to you
inside 20 seconds, just forget it and either make something
up that seems logical, or look at the lists and pick what you
wished you had rolled.

There is absolutely no point in agonizing over an answer that

just does not fit with your vision of the game.

A constant refrain in solo play is ‘this is your game, and it

exists purely for your entertainment’. This means two things.
If the game is not fun, change the game. And, if the dice say
one thing, but a different answer would be more in your
choice of playstyle, your choice wins out.
Dodging The Bullets
One part of solo play I have always disliked was the idea of
rolling for the opponents to hit you, and then rolling the
damage. Where everything else can be first person or third
person centered on your character, rolling of the enemy
broke that momentum.

Solo combat is based upon the idea of a hit by the enemy was
a failure to dodge or evade by you.

If you think in that way, you can roll to attack, if that is your
plan, and then roll to escape being hit by the bad guy.

Regular combat has the enemy rolling over your Armor value
as their target. Which means, logically, that if you roll under
your armor with the foes bonus added to your roll, you have
successfully dodged or evaded.

Roll high to hit, roll low to dodge. There is a kind of logic to

that. The main difference is that of how you imagine your
character acting and reacting. You are no longer passively
standing there waiting for the Warlord’s champion to hack
you down; now you are dodging, ducking, and rolling out of
the way of the charging menace.
Journals and Record-Keeping
I recommend keeping a journal or record of your adventures.
The first reason is that having something to look back over
will help you get back into character at the beginning of each
solo session.

I record the location; just a few words normally is enough to

help me imagine what my character could see. Then I fill in a
brief summary of the action, what happened in this scene. I
also include any questions I asked, what I rolled, and how I
interpreted the answer. The questions and answers are an
important part of the game fiction. If you have established a
fact about your world, that should remain true from sessions
to session.

I frequently do not create NPCs until after the session. I don’t

want to interrupt the flow of play to write up an NPC. What I
do is write down anything I learned about the NPC in the
journal. Then when I do sit down to make some characters, I
can make sure that what I know remains true.

Tip: Make a variety of characters to use as stock NPCs in your

solo games.

How much you write is your choice. I know soloists who will
roll a few questions and answers and then write up an entire
scene longhand, like a chapter in a novel. My journals are so
brief they are almost encrypted. They would make no sense
to anyone but me. You will have to make your own decision
about how much structure you like.

Clever Stuff with Your Journal

I include these tips in just about every solo book I write
because I think they are important. Solo play gives you some
options that would be more difficult with a regular group.
One of these options is the ‘What if…?’

Your adventure may have taken a winding path and reached

a conclusion. Looking back over your journal, you can see
where everything hinged on one fateful dice roll.

In the What if… you imagine that the dice roll had come up
with a different option, turning your yes into a no, a yes, and
into a no, because, and so on. Now you play on from that
point, taking a different alternative route through your
adventure.

This is a challenge for any roleplayer. You will have

foreknowledge of future events, and you shouldn’t change
established facts. You are just seeing them from a different
perspective.

An even more interesting take on this is to highlight

particularly interesting NPCs in the story and highlight them
in your journal. After your adventure is over, pick an NPC, and
build an interesting back story. Then you play that NPC as a
player character, plot armored up until the point where your
stories intersected. From that point on, you play the
character in free play, just to find out what happened to
them after their brush with your character.

This version allows you to reuse locations and NPCs that you
enjoyed but different stories and characters.
Solo Characters
When you are solo playing, you will be outnumbered most of
the time. If you are going to survive adventures and battles
that were scaled for whole parties of adventurers. Even the
monsters in the core rules are a tough battle for a single
character.

You will need to make some form of balancing adjustment. I

suggest that you add in an additional heart and give yourself
one Milestone Reward before you start.

During play, there is another technique you can apply when

it fits the fiction. If you are defeated, consider if the
victorious force would take you captive, rather than killing
you. Being captured gives you a chance to reset your
adventure and restart with planning your escape. It moves
your story on, while at the same time giving you a new
problem to solve.

Just how much you need to boost your character will depend
on your playstyle. A game that is combat heavy with very few
opportunities to spend days recovering will require a
stronger character than one based upon investigations and
roleplaying. You will soon learn how to balance your games.

Above all, build a character that allows you to have fun with
ICRPG.