Over the next few weeks, I'm going to start publishing my journals from playing a solo RPG.
For those of you who don't know, a solo RPG is a ruleset that allows a person to create their own guided story. There's two broad spectrums of solo RPG: sandbox and scripted.
Scripted games are superior and more convenient when compared to choose-your-own-adventure books. They feature a predefined narrative with fixed outcomes determined by player decisions and dice rolls. These games are well-organized with a clear beginning, middle, and end. The exceptional ones will include a compelling element that motivates the character to embark on another adventure. The text takes the place of the gamemaster.
Sandbox provides a ruleset to allow play to go in any direction a player wants. The player rolls on charts to provide prompts and inspiration for how a story might develop and what a player character finds, but it's up to the player to make things up as they go along. The charts provide the outline for the story, but the player is both player and gamemaster.
Ion Heart, created and published by Parable Games and currently running a backerkit campaign, is a cozy Lo-Fi Solo Mech RPG. The player takes up the mantle of a mech pilot decades after a galactic war unified all within it. Peace and exploration reign and the core concept is to take your mech and explore.
The game bridges the gap between purely sandbox (it is about exploration after all) and scripted. The main mechanic for driving a story forward is what is known as a story circuit, which is a set of events that all surround a single story. It's like an adventure that the player can take on with a beginning, middle, and end. And once it is wrapped up, they then roll randomly to see what comes up next in their exploration.
With every game, you play two different characters that may sometimes be at opposition to each other, the Pilot, someone of flesh and blood, and the mech, a massive machine powered by a near-infinite power source and run by a sophisticated AI run by the Ion Core. The pilot and mech, while separate, can become incredibly close and even act as one in tense moments of drama.
With that being said, I'd like to introduce Brandivere Couvers, Second Pole Lieutenant of the Mechanized Calvary in the Astral Union Navy.
Her companion and mech through her exploration of the outer edge of the Astral Union is Polter, an unmodified war mech.
In my next post for the series, I'll introduce the first planet they'll be dropping onto. Polter might also have an image (I'm still searching my stock for one that will appropriately represent him) for him. And at the bottom of every post will be their character sheet.
If this sounds interesting to you, I invite you back to follow their story or if you want to explore the Astral Union on your own, jump over to the backer kit page for Ion Heart and grab the demo.
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