When I first started writing Treasured Posessions (TP), it was a TTRPG, not a solo game at all. At some point, I spun off the original location generator and made Threap, a solo journalling game of wandering around a largely empty countryside. Over time, I've added a few bits to Threap to generate settlements and a tweaked version of the villager generator from TP to create roadfolk, the people you meet on your journey. They have professions and a reason for travelling, unlike villagers, and a role in your story.
I've been playing with re-combining TP and Threap to create a solo game and it's worked to some extend, but the mapping has been letting it down - Threap uses an abstract map, it doesn't tell you how the pieces relate to each other and that feels like something missing from a solo rpg.
I like a good hex map, but I'm less keen on one-hex-one-thing, so I've been playing with big hexes. Each can hold a number of locations, but has its own terrain, so clear, hills, woods, etc. to shape the locations within it. Each sheet of paper holds a 7-hex flower to fill in. You can extend off onto another map if you get to the edge - at some point it will be fun to cut them out and stick them together.
When you first enter a hex, you generate the terrain type and number of locations in each of the hexes around it, so you know what your general surrounding are like. You choose a location in the hex (at the moment they're just points) and generate that location - fruit trees, a rock pillar, a stone circle and so on. At the moment, these are largely narrative items, to help give shape to the location.
Each location also has an occurrence - a person, a settlement, an event or a plot point. These are the core of the solo game, how does the person feature in your story, what's at the settlement, what event occurs or what happens to advance the plot?
In bringing it together and trying to create something that feels formed, I've also plundered some of the Perchance generators I've build for TP - village names, inn names and quality and so on. It's an exercise in table-wrangling, and sometimes I wonder if you can have too many tables?
The game plays quite slowly, but I'm kind of happy with that, wandering the countryside isn't a speed pursuit, after all. It's quite rough at the moment, but playing and tweaking and adding and cutting are helping to find the spots that need more attention.
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