When I first discovered that playing table-top roleplaying games solo was a thing that was possible, I knew I was going to have to give it a try.
I mean, here is this thing I love doing, and I can do WITHOUT OTHER PEOPLE?!?!
Sign my little introverted heart up!
Not that I mind playing with others. I actually work well with others. All of my teachers said so (except for that one math teacher, but he was a creep anyway so we’ll ignore him). But when you live in a small country town, sometimes it’s hard to find other local TTRPG lovers who want to meet up and play.
I was also trying to find a way that I could learn to GM so that I could run one-on-one sessions with my husband, just so that we could indulge our love of the hobby more often, without having enough people for a full party.
Then I came across the amazing Me, Myself and Die channel on youtube and became instantly hooked.
I was especially fascinated with the Mythic Game Master Emulator (GME) system by Tana Pigeon of Word Mill Games that Trevor Duvall uses in his gameplay for the series, and the claims that it would work on any TTRPG system.
Since, at the time, the system that was most familiar to me was Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition, I thought I would try it out by rolling up a character and attempting to create an ‘open world’ campaign (i.e not follow a module or set plot, but to just wander and see where the dice took me) using the “Explorers Guide to Wildemount” book as my setting, and the Mythic GME as my ‘Dungeon Master’.
Solo RPG character creation
I didn’t have any character ideas in mind, so I figured I would use the tables in the DnD book “Xanathar’s Guide to Everything”, to create a backstory for a character. But first I had to choose my race and class.
For this – mainly to make me smile – I used the Who The F#&k Is My DnD Character generator online and after a few clicks, got a Half-Orc Sorcerer. I can’t remember what the other parts of the generator said – hilariously pithy, no doubt – but as I was going to use other tables to generate backstory, I dismissed it anyway to move on.
I rolled my stats and took out “Xanathar’s Guide to Everything”, specifically the ‘This is your life’ section and started rolling.
What came from that was a Half Orc Sorceress, born to a human father and a half-orc mother. When I rolled for more detail about her family however, I got ‘Orphanage’ – which led me to surmise that she was sent to an orphanage at some stage.
The mystery of her background started to deepen. I rolled more, and the tables said her parents were still alive. Why then did they send her to the orphanage? Did she know who her parents were? Did she still have some connection with them? Many questions were being asked of the dice and many answers were revealed.
More rolls and more tables: She suffered a tragedy as a result of her latent magical power appearing and this caused her to be exiled by her community; she lived as a hermit; her family lifestyle was poor; her childhood home was a rundown shack; she was considered strange and only had few friends; and so on….
When I needed inspiration to expand on some of these points, I used the action and subject tables from Mythic to generate some word prompts.
I decided to go for ‘Divine Soul’ as her sorcerous origin, mainly because as a solo character, that sweet, sweet ‘Cure Wounds’ at first level looked mighty fine.
I had a look through the list of gods in the Wildemount campaign setting and randomised the choice by rolling for the God with whom she had the connection. I decided to not include the Betrayer Gods as I knew I wanted my character to have a ‘good’ alignment.
| D12 | God |
| 1 | Avandra, the Changebringer |
| 2 | Bahamut, the Platinum Dragon |
| 3 | Corellon, the Arch Heart |
| 4 | Erathis, the Lawbearer |
| 5 | Ioun, the Knowing Mentor |
| 6 | Kord, the Stormlord |
| 7 | Melora, the Wildmother |
| 8 | Moradin, the Allhammer |
| 9 | Pelor, the Dawnfather |
| 10 | The Raven Queen, the Matron of Death |
| 11 | Sarenrae, or Raei, the Everlight |
| 12 | Sehanine, the Moonweaver |
Using this table I rolled a 2, so Bahamut became her divine connection.
As I fleshed out the character, I used some other tools to generate things like appearance (utilising especially the D-Percent 100 Physical traist – female table), and some of the tables in The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox to generate races for friends and family etc.
When developing her, and when deliberating over the results of tables, choosing her spells, items and other traits, I tried to think about what would make her more likely to survive in the world alone – the idea of course is for her to face the world solo, without the usual adventuring party to support her.
So, as with the example of choosing her sorcerous origin as Divine Soul simply for the cure wounds spell at 1st level, I kept her survivability top-of-mind.
For example, being able to disguise herself would be good perhaps for quick getaways and social situations. Being large and intimidating could help her out of some sticky situations. Knowing about healing herbs could help her in the wilderness. And so forth …
And that is how “Silgeh the Deep”, my character for solo RPG play came to be.
Backstory
A Half-Orc woman of 16 years, stepping out into the world of adventuring for the first time.
Even at 16, Silgeh is a huge towering figure of a woman, with very long flowing black hair, so long in fact, that she has to pull it aside when she sits, or risk sitting on it.
The small tusks protruding up over her lip from her bottom jaw do not detract from her overall appearance, and there are those that would consider her unconventionally attractive. Her green to grey skin tone and unique metallic brass coloured eyes, that appear to have vertically slitted black pupils in the center, are striking, but not unpleasant to look upon.
Despite her appearance, Silgeh is very self-conscious about the towering size of her body, and the uniqueness of her eyes, and often wears long, hooded cloaks to hide her frame and features.
She was born somewhere near Othe on the Menagerie Coast of Wildemount. When she was just a small child, her arcane abilities manifested when, whilst playing with her cousin one day, she became angry and lashed out at him. Her innate abilities flared and tragically she killed the boy.
The people of her small community became frightened and, after much discussion, it was agreed that she should be sent away, for the safety of the group. Her parents took her to an orphanage in the city of Othe run by a kindly, motherly woman. With her, they left a crystalline orb, asking that it be given to Silgeh when she left the woman’s care.
Silgeh did not stay long in the orphanage. One day an elderly dragonborn couple – refugees from the fall of Draconia – came to the orphanage. They were growing frail, and were struggling to maintain their livelihood as poor herb gatherers on the swampy land of the Othemoor, and had decided that adopting a child would not only mean someone to help at home, but someone to care for and love as they grew old.
They saw something in Silgeh – something familiar, something special – and adopted her and took her, and her orb, back to their quiet corner of the swamp, where she grew up helping her adoptive parents gather herbs herbs and travelling with them into Othe to sell their goods to the renowned apothecaries and alchemists of the city.
Silgeh made a few friends amongst some of the other families living in little pockets of the Othemoor, but mostly she lived a very quiet life with her dragonborn parents. During the day they collected herbs, and at night they read and her father, especially, helped her learn to control her burgeoning innate powers. He brought her books about the arcane home from his trips to Othe to sell herbs, and helped attach the orb she was given by her birth parents to an old, gnarled staff. This became her spell focus as she practiced her skills.
Around the age of 10, Silgehs voice slowly shifted from childlike tones, to an almost unnaturally deep resonance – not masculine, but deep and tonal and breathy. This timbre is something that she learned could be both a help and hindrance to her. When needs arose, her voice could be used to intimidate the weak at heart, or it could soothe her loved ones when they were agitated.
She was often teased by other youngsters on the Othemoor about her voice when she spoke, leading her to remain quiet for the most part, except in the company of friends and family. This gave her an air of aloofness, which some took for her being a deep-thinker, and lead to her nickname, ‘Silgeh the Deep’.
Time passed, and Silgeh forgot the faces of her true parents, and the memories of where she lived before she was sent to the orphanage faded. One memory remained from before she was sent away though: the face of her cousin as he perished before her haunted her dreams, and she never forgot his name: Ushnak.
Very early on in her life, she vowed to somehow make amends for Ushnaks loss and to try to honour him by leading a good life.
As she strove for this goodness, Silgeh began to feel, more and more, the presence of the great draconic God, Bahamut, in her life. As if he was always watching over her. She learned some healing magic by concentrating on this connection to the platinum dragon and her mother helped her foster this healing skill by teaching her the properties of the herbs they collected.
When she came of age, the pull of this mystery of her connection to Bahamut became ever stronger and she knew she must set out to discover why she was touched by this bond.
Shortly after her 16th birthday, she gathered a small explorers pack and said farewell to her parents and the Othemoor and travelled out into the world.
With very little money to her name, she decided to head first towards the nearest city, Othe, and see where fortune would take her in her quest to discover more about her mysterious divine connection and to make amends for and honour Ushnak.
A Half-Orc woman of 16 years, stepping out into the world of adventuring for the first time.
