RPG Review: ALONe Solo Game Engine
ALONe (an acronym for A Lonesome October Night … um … e) is a solo RPG engine built directly on top of the Gamemaster’s Apprentice Deck, both by Nathan Rockwood of Larcenous Designs. The original beta version of ALONe came out around the same time as the original GMA deck in 2015. Nathan finally decided to call ALONe “complete” in 2023, just in time for the second edition of GMA to come out and partially invalidate (or at least complicate) it.
ALONe can either be played by itself or as a GM emulator mixin for another game system. When played by itself, all the themes, power levels, technology, magic, equipment, etc. come straight out of the player’s brain. Want to play a starving orphan child in steampunk Paris? Go for it. Want to be King Shit of the Universe, capable of destroying galaxies with your mighty butterfly kisses? Have fun, bud. The system expects you occasionally to be in some sort of peril, physical, emotional, or otherwise, to keep the story engaging. But hey, if you’re satisfied creating a narrative where you shout “And I win again!” a lot, nobody’s gonna yuck your yum.
ALONe-on-its-own is designed for one player only. You could use it for GM-less group games, but the lack of power scaling can easily bite a group in the butt unless everyone thoroughly agrees what level they’re on. Using ALONe to run a separate system works somewhat more fairly since it engages that system’s checks and balances. There’s also no built-in system to ensure everybody gets their time in the sun, so you’d have to import a spotlight mechanic from elsewhere.
Setting up
Describe me like one of your French girls
Preparing an ALONe campaign is a multi-stage process.
- Decide whether you want to do just ALONe, ALONe as a narrative engine combined with another system for its crunchy tactical morsels, or use another system for everything but the story. In the third case, the rules suggest skipping ALONe entirely and using one of the Gamemaster’s Apprentice Deck adventure guides instead.
Using another game requires the player to do some lateral thinking. ALONe’s narrative engine relies heavily on Descriptors, like SPELLCASTING STUDENT, MASTER SWORDSMAN, DASHING ROGUE, etc. Using a different system requires the player to translate their character’s stats and abilities into these Descriptors so ALONe can play with them. The rules suggest things like translating a level 1 thief into ROGUE’S GUILD INITIATE and a high Stealth skill into BLENDS INTO SHADOWS. The player can also bring in character elements that the other system doesn’t cover, like BASTARD SON OF THE EVIL DUKE or MASTER OF THE KAZOO. It’s all the same to ALONe.
If you’re not using another system, never mind. Move along to 2. - Figure out your theme and your character. It’s all basic “Where am I? Who am I? Why am I here?” type stuff. This section includes a Mad Lib-like character motivation generator to get you started. If you can’t think of anything or don’t care so much, the back of the book has an appendix full of random character background/motivation tables.
- Gather your resources. This includes in-game resources like gold, weapons, and rations, and also Revision Points, which are ALONe’s meta-narrative currency. The player can spend Revision Points during setup to get more Descriptors, or use them in-game to re-draw a card, temporarily gain or edit a Descriptor, or trigger a story-altering Vignette, about which more later.
- Choose three initial Descriptors for your character. This might be disappointing for players who got all excited in phase 1 and came up with a dozen ways to describe their special unicorn OC. If three’s not enough, the player can buy extra Descriptors with Revision Points.
There’s plenty of advice on creating Descriptors in this section. One thing that stood out to me was how they interact with the campaign’s concept. The example given is a vampire character in a campaign about hunting other vampires; in this case, “vampire” doesn’t really need to be a Descriptor, since that’s the campaign’s baseline. They still have the powers and everything, they just don’t stand out from the norm. If everyone they’re likely to meet is a normal human, however, VAMPIRE is definitely a valid Descriptor.
Once the course is set and the main character is built, we can finally learn how to
Play the Game
Open up your mind and let me step inside
Unlike those fools up Washington way, ALONe has some basic principles: ask leading questions for the cards to answer, seek inspiration from the cards rather than instruction, and don’t assume that what the cards tell you has the same ineffable weight as a GM. It’s a deck of prompts, not the Oracle at Delphi.
This bit, I think, is mostly here to help players who aren’t used to solo games get into a more active mindset. The cards may push your story like the wind, but it’s up to you to steer the ship. They report, you decide.
The rules then describe a Stability/Tension system to help determine when random events occur. The player sets a Tension score from 1 to 10, with higher numbers indicating more hectic situations. Whenever they draw a GMA card for anything, they also look at the Difficulty Generator score on that card. If that number is equal to or less than the current Tension score, a random event occurs. Draw two or three cards and look at the Random Event Generator part to get a noun, a verb, and potentially an adjective. Then inject whatever you just drew into the story.
The Tension level can be set once for the whole game, decided per scene, or have a rising level that increases per draw until it triggers, then resets.
The actual decision-making process is quite straightforward. Essentially, you couch what you want to know as a Yes/No question, decide your odds (bad, even, or good), draw a card for the answer, check the Tension level for a random event, and apply the results to the story. If you’ve ever used an oracle-based system before, this should be very familiar territory.
Descriptors come into play when determining odds. Having a Descriptor which is advantageous to the current action (NIMBLE FINGERS while picking a lock, maybe) bumps the odds in your favor. A situationally negative Descriptor (HUGE DUMPY while squeezing through a small passage, perhaps) knocks them down. If various conflicting Descriptors apply, the player can either choose which one seems most important at the moment, or count up and down as they cancel each other out.
A more complex point-based system exists for players that want more crunch, especially for mechanical questions like “did I hit the goblin” or, more importantly, “did the goblin hit me.” The player starts at zero, adds one point per each relevant positive Descriptor, subtracts one point per negative Descriptor, and adds or subtracts up to two points for situational bonuses/penalties. They then do that same calculation for their opponent. If both totals are equal or one point off, it’s Even Odds. Above that is Good Odds, and below that is Bad Odds. Flip the card and take your lumps.
If this is the system you’re going with, the rules suggest adding a number to your Descriptors so you’re not, for example, trying to figure out how NOVICE SWORDSMAN, EXCELLENT SWORDSMAN, and LEGENDARY SWORDSMAN stack up against each other. Instead, just do SWORDSMAN (1), (2), or (3) and use that in your calculations.
If you’re using a different system alongside ALONe, never mind all that mechanical stuff and use whatever they got.
The Consequences of Your Actions
Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal
While co-playing a different system, you most likely have HP/MP/Sanity/whatever to keep up with your current condition. By itself, ALONe doesn’t track any of that. Instead, failures impose either temporary conditions or negative Descriptors.
On a failure, the player draws a card and looks at the Difficulty Generator. A low number indicates something brief and easily fixable, like dropping your weapon. A median number might impose a temporary Descriptor, like BLINDED BY VENOM, which requires special effort to mitigate during the scene but goes away once the combat is done. High numbers impose more grave, long-lasting Descriptors, like LOST A HAND or LEARNED DARTH VADER IS MY FATHER.
Sometimes you may have trouble deciding what kind of consequence to take. There’s a handy random chart of effect types to help you figure that out, from confusion to incarceration to loss of motivation to good ol’ broken bones.
Here we run into a minor snag: this random table, and many others later in the document, rely on the Tag Symbols from the GMA 1e decks. Thing is, GMA 2e does away with Tag Symbols in favor of a different random generator. Admittedly there are ten of these symbols and you could just use the d10 from the Dice Wheel for the same purpose, though not all tables have numerical indices. So you have to count rows. Like a commoner.
An optional rule is the grandiosely named Doom of Damocles. This adds between three and five checkboxes to the adventure sheet. For every negative Descriptor the character acquires in-game, even a temporary one, check a box. If a Descriptor is cleared or mitigated, erase a box. When all the boxes are filled, your adventure reaches its bad end. Getting hit in the head with a sword is optional.
The rules continue with tips on how to adjudicate combat, from brawls to mass battles, and a fairly long section on how to run social encounters without feeling schizophrenic by using random motivation tables for your NPCs. At times the social section gets a little overly specific, expecting the player to create unique reaction tables for particular genres or even for important NPCs. That all feels like work to me, frankly, but I know some of you sickos out there would get a kick out of it.
Now that we’ve absorbed all that, here, on page 43, it’s time to discover
How Everything Actually Works
Our story is only just beginning
So you thought reading all those rules meant you knew how to play? Ha! Think again! This section goes in-depth into concepts which so far we’ve only touched on: Revisions, Descriptors, Beats, Vignettes, and Downtime. Used together, these will hopefully help a player organize their random story into something coherent.
We’ve already talked about Revisions and Descriptors. The rules go a little deeper here, like how to gain more Revision Points and add/change Descriptors as the story goes on, but nothing earth-shattering.
Beats are units of story that start with a stake of some sort (e.g., you want or need something) and end when that stake is resolved (e.g., you get or permanently lose that something). There’s yet another random chart here to help spur the player’s imagination if it fails them. Beats are different from scenes, in that multiple scenes can occur within a Beat and/or a stake can be resolved in the middle of a scene and then either changed or doubled down on.
Vignettes are chunks of narration that exist outside the rules and can change the story any way the player wants. This may sound enormously powerful, but that’s only because it is. If the player wants to take a simple snail herder and make her the God of Hamburgers, a Vignette can do it in a snap. Vignettes also cover flashbacks that explain how that latest setback was all Part of the Plan, which is why you happen to have the magic dingus that saves the day! What prevents Vignettes from turning the game into a Mary Sue fanfic is that they have a Revision Point cost, so you don’t have an unlimited number of them. If the Vignette would change the character’s Descriptors, you have to pay for those too.
Downtime is where all the boring day-to-day stuff happens. If you want to quantify it, the player gets one Downtime Point and can buy up to two more with Revision Points. The more Downtime Points you spend, the more involved your off-hour actions become, from finding a safe place to hide (1 point) to founding a small-time crime cartel (3 points).
On the Campaign Trail
Vote early, vote often
The concluding chapter goes into how to incite a campaign with random actions, plus how to generate your own random tables for your campaign. Bookkeeping gamers may enjoy this, but it’s not my bag. Building a table in the middle of running the game feels like filling out paperwork in the back of a speeding semi full of volatile Quadrazine.
The rest of this chapter reiterates the Adventure Guide that comes with the GMA Deck nearly word-for-word. Select a Core, ask a Big Question, choose a Doom (not of Damocles), all that. I mean, it works, so there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.
The document ends with multiple appendices containing randomizers and examples of play. They’re fine.
Final Thoughts
Beyond the blue horizon
I just wrote a lot. But that’s because ALONe is kind of a lot. The document is 84 pages long with the only picture being on its cover. As rules go, it’s a bit intimidating. It feels especially wordy when you compare it to the Gamemaster’s Apprentice Deck that fuels it.
I’ll get my greatest complaint out of the way now: the document is poorly organized and badly edited. You must, must, read through the whole thing, cover to cover, to get the entire picture. Things are introduced without reference on page 11 that aren’t explained until page 46. There are several instances of “see page XX” instead of actual page numbers. The table of contents (and thank heaven we even have one) doesn’t show page numbers, only links. There are no PDF bookmarks. One form, apparently designed to be printed on one sheet, spills over to the top of the next page. For something eight years in the making, this is very … enthusiastically presented, one might say. Most of those problems could be fixed in an afternoon by a decent editor.
That’s a shame, because what the document says isn’t so bad. Once you’ve put some brainpower and patience into untangling the rules, they fit together pretty well. The Tension system is essentially Mythic GME’s Chaos Factor without weirding up the odds. Personally, I also like how Vignettes let you course-correct the story (or fling it beyond Mars, if that’s your bent).
Even there, though, it’s not all roses. ALONe wants you to engage with bespoke random tables a lot. But every time they tried to guide me to another table I kept glancing at the GMA deck, chock full of random prompts, just sitting idle. Use that, I thought. You made it too, Nathan. Have some confidence in your own brainchild.
Anyway. ALONe has some good ideas poorly presented, a solid foundation that gets lost in its own weeds sometimes, and can be rewarding if you put in the effort to learn but requires more effort to learn than it should. Once you wrap your head around it, it’s a decent solo system.
One and a half thumbs up for the system, but losing most of a thumb for the presentation.