Solitary Pursuits

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the coincidental appearance of the article The Lone Adventures of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! on GameSetWatch recently. An excerpt:

But even those kids, who plodded through the game until their 9 PM curfew, had a leg up on the lowest caste of D & D players - the people who played by themselves. And I was one of them. How do you play Dungeons & Dragons by yourself? Well, you roll a character, give it a name, and you follow the module room by room, fighting, looting, fighting, looting, slapping on new gear, and fighting again. You don’t need a DM; you just need a long, slow night that needs killing.

And I was one of them as well! The entire article is so relevant to me it is almost surreal. Just days before I was describing to my wife how for me the typically communal D&D was an entirely solo venture. I related to her how I'm sure there must be a lot of other dorks out there who did the same, but not really caring for the social aspects, must have existed in their own isolated bastions of geekery. The article goes on to discuss the various game books designed for solo play, in particular Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series. Of course, that series is one of my favorites.

The really coincidental part is that the weekend before this article appeared, I committed myself to replaying the old Fighting Fantasy classic of yore, Deathtrap Dungeon. And here today, on this very blog, are the fruits of my labor: