My breakthroughs in solo RPGs and Starforged

With a huge thanks to, in no particular order: the communities at r/Solo_Roleplaying and r/Ironsworn; Matt Risby for his playthroughs an advice in The Bad Spot podcast on youtube; “Man Alone” for his video 7 Approaches to Journaling in Solo Roleplaying Games; Shawn Tomkin for creating and publishing the Ironsworn: Starforged RPG.

(the excerpt below is from a post I wrote on reddit)

FWIW, one of the many great pieces of advice I encountered was to take a step back and take some time to just think: “what is it that makes it challenging for me?” plus: “what do I want of solo RPGing?” Other than that, maybe three of the most important realizations for me were: for one, that I can always and anyways retcon and reroll whatever I want and however much I want; secondly, that if a piece of story starts shaping in my mind, I can just write it down as/make it be facts in my game and I don’t have to roll anything in it; thirdly, inspired by Conan stories and presumed workshop of their author, that I can write disconnected episodes in unclear chronological order, and that it’s fine to casually put any story at any stage in a drawer (also metaphorically) and/or butcher and rehash any pieces of it I fancy into another stories at any time now or in the future. Ah, and also the “7 Approaches to Journaling in Solo…” video by Man Alone on youtube.

And for Starforged in particular, also: a cheatsheet of Moves that I created; realizing that Starforged mechanics are about “simulating the flow of a story” rather than trying to “simulate the ‘Real World’ (or rather some fantasy one)”, the latter being doomed to failure (because even all our strongest supercomputers taken together struggle to simulate something so tiny as the interactions of a bunch of molecules in a single protein); and the “Episodic Adventures” formula in Forge Horizons.