I wanted to showcase a couple of games I've been playing this week that are a little more niche and indie. The first may ring some bells for folks who are active in the solo/small party tabletop scene, and that is the stand-alone game Starforged by Shawn Tomkin.
Official project art/wallpaper from Joshua MeehanStarforged is the successor to Ironsworn, wherein you are a spaceborne hero that is sworn to undertake perilous quests. It's designed from a solo-player standpoint but has 1-on-1 and small-group play rules as well for up to 4 players.
It's got a bit of a Dune/Firefly/The Expanse vibe to it, where you're a futuristic human among the stars just trying to make it way out on the edge of humanity's settled space. A core mechanic to this is the Iron Vow - which is a vow you swear that you are driven to complete at any cost.
You have a ship that you can expand and change as part of the game - since you're out among the stars, so that only makes sense, right? Plus you get all the normal space-adventurer stuff you'd expect. Companions, allies, neat equipment... it's all there!
I'm very early in my own solo playthrough, but so far it's been really fun. There are a lot of character-building prompts at the start to help you get a feel for the character you're playing and with the help of The Oracle system, exploring the galaxy solo is fun and unexpected.
The Oracle is basically a series of prompts for when something happens - you roll on a pair of tables to get a paired set of words that together and you interpret that to help describe a new location or event that's happening.
The game is run with a d6 and a pair of d10s to facilitate play, and similar to Forged in the Dark the mechanics of 'doing something' aren't simple hit/misses, but instead are divided into Strong Hit/Weak Hit/Miss. This game also has various 'clock' mechanics, where something happens after a set of actions (I think, I am assuming how this works prior to actually experiencing it in play).
I'll probably talk more about this as I get deeper into the game this week. I've basically just created a character and set the universe up, so there's a lot to experience yet, but I'm really enjoying it so far.
The second game I've been playing this week is an OSR game called Knave, by Questing Beast Games.
Knave Cover
Knave is... well, it's not really a game per-say, it's a framework for classless OSR gaming that is compatible with most OSR products out there.
OSR (Old School Renaissance/Old School Revival) are products either directly from the AD&D era in and around 1970/80, or ones that seek to emulate the 'life is cheap and adventure is dangerous' feel of those early TTRPGs.
With Knave, you can basically pick up any of the very old TSR-published AD&D modules and run them with very little conversion needed... and since I have a few pdfs as well as inherited AD&D custom dungeon cards, I thought it might be super cool to play through them!
It's not really designed for solo play... but it's easy enough to use my existing framework for solo-guided play to achieve a fun bit of OSR gaming.
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