Sides and Twohy provide a toolkit for playing solo in times when finding a group is hard or impossible – they provide questing, dungeon creation, wilderness exploration, and town settlement as complete systems to play by yourself.
This set of tables can also serve as an invaluable aid for regular DMs who must generate encounters on the fly; there’s even an entire chapter dedicated to monster tactics!
Quests
Solo adventuring may often go overlooked in an age dominated by ensemble casts and group dynamics, yet its undeniable pleasure makes up for it. Every twist and turn, every NPC and threat explicitly tailored to your character, creates an intimacy that cannot be replicated within a group setting; you can spend hours deciphering an otherwise minor NPC’s backstory or skipping over subplots altogether without worrying about anyone else’s opinions weighing down your experience.
5E Solo Gamebooks honor the spirit of solo heroism with The Dead Don’t Sleep: Toolbox Solo Adventure for 1 or 2 PCs. This adventure provides an ideal opportunity to try out a new character or test an ad hoc scenario without waiting for your gaming group.
5e Solo Gamebooks offer many new adventures for solo gameplaying, all designed for sole use. They’re an excellent alternative to published modules and can easily be adapted for use in other settings. These resources for players also feature a 6d12 system to quickly generate quests, NPCs, and encounters, in addition to an impressive collection of d100 tables covering wilderness, urban, and dungeon encounters. Suppose you want more resources for solo play. In that case, 5e Solo Gamebooks provides another companion book: The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox Part Two: The Toolbox Expanded, which expands on its predecessor with additional tables, generators, random non-combat encounter tables, and systems explicitly designed to make playing solo easier.
Dungeons
Solo adventures offer the freedom and clarity of an experience where no voice gets lost in the din. Every encounter feels more intense, danger more menacing, and victories feel all the sweeter when there’s only you and God against the world!
Establishing such an adventure is no small undertaking. While there may be multiple approaches to structuring it, finding the ideal balance can be tricky – you want enough variety for players to feel as though their decisions have an effect.
The Toolbox offers numerous methods for creating quests, encounters, and dungeons for solo players. DMs may also use it as an invaluable resource in order to generate adventures on-demand for their players that might otherwise take too much preparation time to prepare themselves.
This toolbox offers many great activities to fill downtime activities for PCs while making their adventures feel like progress. There are random wilderness exploration tables, settlement discovery, and NPC discovery tables, and an infinite monster encounter generator designed with solo play in mind, as well as random wilderness exploration tables and a system to generate endless monster encounters, all explicitly designed to support solitary gaming experiences. With some creative thought and imagination, these tools can be used to craft rich and exciting solo adventures! Furthermore, there is even a hex crawl system that allows the player to play board game style while they play solo game solo!
Wilderness
No matter if your regular group can’t play or you can’t make time to organize one, there are still ways for you to enjoy Dungeons & Dragons! With 5E Solo Gamebooks’ new Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox, you have everything needed to run an enjoyable session without needing a Dungeon Master (DM).
This book covers all elements of game design for solo play – quests and dungeons to encounter generation, wilderness exploration, and settlement discovery. There is also a chapter covering downtime activities and advice for solo roleplaying. In addition, its toolbox offers numerous random tables that generate adventure details – everything from wilderness terrain content generation to random NPC creation. There’s even an infinite monster encounter system tailored explicitly for solo-player roleplay.
Random tables are typically intended to be used with the GM oracle, which provides players with clues regarding their adventure, surroundings, and what might come next. Unlike diceless systems, which use rolls of the die to decide what happens next, this oracle allows players to answer non-binary questions (What does that look like?), which provides for storytelling by players themselves.
Settlements
At first glance, championing solo adventuring may seem counter-intuitive in an age dominated by ensemble casts and group dynamics, yet these heroes do have a place in tabletop games as well. Sometimes, getting together with others just isn’t possible; in these instances, tools like DM Yourself or Elminster’s Guide to Solo Adventuring offer ways of playing Dungeons & Dragons alone – however, now Shaun Sides and Rob Twohy of 5E Solo Gamebooks offer The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox exclusively from DMs Guild (affiliate link).
The book presents a comprehensive system for creating detailed and immersive solo 5e Dungeons & Dragons adventures tailored specifically toward solo players. Topics covered in the book include quest generation, random encounters, dungeon and wilderness exploration, settlement creation, discovering merchants and shops during downtime activities, random NPC generation, as well as systems for creating unlimited monster encounters, all tailored specifically toward solo play.
This book boasts many helpful features that any DM will find invaluable, such as its method for creating urban settlements either broadly or on an individual street basis and its improved oracle system that allows you to increase stakes for adventures. Furthermore, this book also offers tables for creating clues, environmental features, NPCs, and events; each can be assigned probabilities by rolling six D12s – the result being used to access additional tables.
Merchants
At times, it can be challenging or impossible to form a group for D&D gaming. When that’s the case, players can use this book’s tools to quickly create fun and challenging D&D sessions on the fly without needing a Dungeon Master. As a companion volume to Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox, it provides extra tools like rolling adventures on the fly with random NPC encounters, creating towns, wilderness crawls, and settlements, as well as tables and generators.
Gamer-without-GM can rejoice!
Downtime
Solo adventures can sometimes make it challenging to gather all your friends for game night. Tools like the GM emulator and random tables can come in handy here, though these types of games tend to feel disjointed and less immersive than structured and narrative-driven ones.
This book bridges the gap between full campaigns and one-shot adventures by providing a framework that will allow you to run consistent, narrative experiences even when playing alone with PCs. With tables, generators, random non-combat encounter systems, and various resources at your disposal, creating unforgettable experiences is now simpler than ever for solo PCs!
This book in the Toolbox Solo Adventures line follows on from its predecessor, The Drop of Venom, designed for 1 or 2 PCs without needing a DM, with only paper required to map your quest or your imagination as the only form of mapping needed if theatre of the mind is your thing. Building upon its predecessor, it now includes many additional resources, systems, and tables which will enable solo adventurers to have an engaging solitary experience!
