Hello again, I made a thing! I have been interested in the Mothership scifi rpg for a while, and I chanced upon a solo scenario for it by Alfred Valley called Thousand Empty Light. This was a revelation to me in a couple of ways – first, although I played roleplaying games for a good couple of decades of my life, I was completely unaware of the concept of playing them solo (beyond a ‘choose your own adventure’ book anyway). Second because it is just so well put together. It’s presented as a company document instructing a “Lamplighter” (that’s you) who has to enter an underwater facility beneath an alien ocean and turn the power back on there – and since this is designed with Mothership in mind of course there’s something horrible down there. On top of that though there are codes to crack, secrets to find, and all sorts of hidden goodies to track down. You can check it out (and buy a copy) from Alfred Valley’s itch.io page and I heartily recommend that you do (I would also recommend the accompanying soundtrack “Sleeping in a Drowning Stone”, which is also available from there and served as excellent background music while I was writing).

The general idea with solo RPGs is that you’re given a framework of a setting to work in, and you explore it by asking questions that have a yes/no answer (e.g. “can I see any tools here” or “does the creature look hostile” etc). Then you roll dice and consult an “Oracle” which is a table that has “no”, “no but…”, “yes but” and “yes…” answers along with some prompts to help you describe the scene – e.g. if you asked “can I see any tools here” and rolled a “yes but” then you may see some but they’re in a locked cabinet that you’d need to break into. And then you fill out what happens to move the story forward and move on to the next situation, and repeat as required. In this specific scenario you’d use the Mothership rpg system to resolve things like skill checks, saves, and combat as well.

Now, I’ll be the first to say I probably didn’t do everything “right” here but then maybe there isn’t really a “right” way beyond just having fun with it, and I certainly did enjoy the experience. First I tried gathering some binary keys from Alfred’s site and the internet in order to tackle some of the binary codebreaking, and one of the prompts there gave me an idea. Then I started playing through and writing it up the thoughts of the lamplighter as a “journal” from the perspective of the character (I ended up writing over 11,000 words, which is the most I’ve written for anything in a very long time so I think I can safely say that I did get into it!). I started off just using the Oracle and taking whatever it said literally so things begin a little strangely, but as I went along I started using it less for the descriptive prompts and more for the yes/no answers, and then by the last couple of sections I had formed a good idea about where everything was going so I pretty much freeformed the rest of it (about halfway through I managed to decode/find all the secrets in the book too so that caused the story to evolve a little differently that I initially intended too). I’m pretty sure one could just use the Oracle as prompts for creative writing in general too. I should also add that this isn’t the only way to play solo RPGs – Mothership is actually intended to be a multiplayer RPG but there are plenty of dedicated solo RPGs out there now (I’ve bought a few of them but haven’t had a chance to look at them yet, but hopefully I’ll write something about those here later).

I think I’ve come up with something good here anyway – so without further ado, here is my playthrough of Thousand Empty Light! Let me know what you think! 🙂

UPB 154 was a grey, bleak, forbidding world coming in on the shuttle, and it’s a gray, bleak, forbidding world now I’m on the “ground” too. I say that in quotes because there is no actual ground here, just a creaking metal platform hammered by the winds and rain and spray of this godforsaken planet. Barring a few barren rocks poking above the surface, the entire planet is covered by a corrosively salty ocean and an unbroken layer of thick grey clouds above that. The wind gusts and howls, the waves crash on the caisson, and the rains lash me mercilessly as I stand on the platform watching the shuttle depart. I hate this place already.

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