Sometimes I feel a hint of digital overdose, and it's not hard to see why. Specifically, I wonder how much of it is Emacs-overdose. More than half of my work-life and half of my play-life happen in Emacs, which makes up a whole unit of... something.

It crossed my mind to pick up a board game or a trading card game as a way of digital detox. It even led me to consider learning trading card game design, but that's a bridge too far.

Then there's tabletop role-playing games. I've never played one in person, not even an online session. But in the past, I got curious enough to watch a few high-production-quality game sessions being played, just to see how it felt.

I'm sure everybody involved had fun. Being a dungeon master is itself a non-trivial art.

But somehow, I felt no desire to want a piece of the action. If you feel no envy, that's how you know there's no desire.

Then, last week, I watched an Emacs conference talk and learned about something called Ironsworn. I dug further and found out it's a genre I didn't know existed: solo RPG.

I dug further and found that there's a space opera-themed version called Starforged. Now, I'm obligated to give it a run.

Not having played such things before, I'm not sure how to get started.

I downloaded all of its playkit PDFs. They are well-produced, but nowhere does it tell me the first step of setting up a game. It's as if the game assumes I know the typical process of a D&D session, which I suspect is the case.

I resorted to YouTube to get an idea of what session-zero looks like, which is about world and character-building.

I understand that a solo RPG would have the player be both the main character and the game master simultaneously. But I barely know what that means until I manage to do enough to start an adventure.

I don't know if it's unique to Ironsworn, but they employ something called an oracle as a way to drive the plot forward. It's a semi-structured set of words that are vague, but when put together via dice rolls would make up something possibly meaningful to the story. Plainly speaking, a few dice rolls would get you a set of words, which you can then use to describe any entity in the world or inject your interpretation to have it mean anything at all. Think of it like I-Ching for sci-fi/fantasy; it's quite brilliant.

Essentially, what comes out of the oracle are prompts. And when you see prompts, you can't get away from LLMs, which is to say chatbots would make decent assistants to game masters if done right.

In conventional RPGs, dungeon masters are practically all-around actors enacting the goings-on. In solo RPG, I have to express everything in prose as a journal (as the game calls it) and do it in no less dramatic ways. I find this more appealing than watching even the best dungeon masters act.

Given that so much writing, dice-rolling, and rule-enforcing takes place, scribbling on paper would be cumbersome. It makes sense to use the best writing tool there is: Emacs Org mode.

In fact, the entire game can be programmed within one Org file. Org mode has the built-in data structure, and inline Emacs Lisp is there to execute the logic.

But before I even considered that, I found a web app that does exactly that: Stargazer. This makes the game so much more sensible. Its journal is not as good to write in, but it's serviceable. It's a small price to pay for not having to code it myself.

So much for trying to go back to analog mode. I still can't escape digitalization.

Continuing in part 2.