I put this in the front page of this thing but it was more of a post
Reading, playing, tabletop roleplaying games, probably some other things
I feel kind of stuck, not running any games with others in a long time.
I have managed to play some fun solo games lately - LMNL is fun if you can game and walk around (or sit around). It's very open, very free-associative, so the landscape you move through can get incorporated in the game. I loosely ran a few dungeon crawls in Dungeon Girls using LMNL, but didn't write anything down :( At least I don't think I did.
Respawn with an arm replaced by a makeshift hunk of metal, a drill-bit fused into the stump, when you hit or parry the vibrations bounce into your bones, a deep wet or a high-pitched ring of metal-on-metal.
Dungeon Girls and Songbirds are both wonderful combinations of fantastical and current-times, bodies broken and hurled into Death and back out again. The Creator ripped apart, Her parts in the heavens (Dungeon Girls). Or Death killing Love and requiring the PCs to be Her psychopomps, bringing rest to restless spirits. Soda-potions and cybernetics and magic songs which cost coin or risk spirits' wrath.
Songbirds 3e has a whole solo-play setup, and I've slowly started on it. 'Macro Play'. You create a hexcrawl and a settlement, a group of 4 songbirds, and off they go into danger, war names carved onto plinths where they rose, resurrected, from the long grey caves of lonely afterlives.
Snow also put out Soul Cemetery, which is a very different sort of solo game. It's styled like a Gamecube game manual crossed with a strategy guide, narrating a story of a videogame protagonist and your relationship with her, how she inspired you to become who you are, and how your childhood memories of her (and her world) don't always match up with the playthrough you make in the present, the present of reading through Soul Cemetery.
As the story goes along the narrative asks questions of you-the-reader / you-the-one-playing-in-the-present. Two ways of saying the same thing, really, because when you read Soul Cemetery you're playing it. When you're not reading Soul Cemetery, but remembering it, you're still playing it. When you go back and read it again, your own memory will distort the earlier playthrough, and you'll read about how your childhood memories of the game diverge from reality. Did it really happen that way? Did a nightmare creep into your memories, camouflaged?
Solo games! They're great. Shoutout to DIEDREAM and Hardcase. I need to get around to those.