Adventure Introduction

In September of 2026, the Arcane Library released the second and final book of their Western Reaches campaign setting to Kickstarter Backers. I was eagerly looking forward to seeing what Kelsey's concise, useable design was going to look like and I was not disappointed – as engaging as the zine format was for official Shadowdark supplemental material, I was frustrated with the GM experience of having various GM and Player-focused information spread across multiple booklets and collecting and expanding all of them into the Western Reaches books was a great relief.

My eagerness to run the setting overwhelmed my success at forming groups willing to play, and like many GMs, was often with only half-ingested understanding of the new lore and rulesets (I am, despite my best efforts, somewhat distractible).

As part of the Backer Rewards of the Kickstarter Campaign, Kelsey offered to make some youtube videos of SoloDark play, and did so. Clearly, the designer of this game I was so impressed with believed this was a viable and even enjoyable form of playing it, and this triggered some curiosity in me.

Solo Roleplaying has never significantly appealed to me, as my primary draw towards roleplaying has always been social and collaborative, but I had done a little solo roleplaying when 3rd Edition D&D came out, just to explore what a party of characters might look like as they progress through the levels. Nothing granular or round-by-round, just "what might these characters fight, let's roll some random monsters and imagine the fight and what skills or abilities might come into play. Okay, let's level up and do it again."

One thing that shifted my thinking a bit was that browsing for various Shadowdark discussions would sometimes land me in the r/Solo_Roleplaying subreddit, a community devoted to the growing practice (and market) of play-by-yourself TTRPGs. Looking through some of the discussions convinced me that this was not at all a community of friendless gamers, but a contemplative practice often done by journaling artists – engaging in narrative creation through random generation and then writing and drawing their adventures. Some incredibly beautiful journaling!

A solo-play "scroll" by u/CastleGrief

I've dabbled in journaling but my life just straight up isn't interesting enough to make it a daily practice.

But adventuring is pretty interesting. So while I don't quite have the chops to make gorgeous analog artwork for my first foray into Solodarking, I'm at least interested in sharing my adventures with anyone who wants to bother to read them. Which may be no-one, but if you're reading these words, thank you for the company, I appreciate your interest and if this is at all inspiring to you, I hope you find something joyful to explore.

 

One quick note before you begin – the first few entries may not be very compelling, as it took me a few sessions to find the "voice" of my journaling and start to get invested in the story of these characters. I've done some minor editing of my initial journals to try to bring them up to par, but please give the narrative a bit of grace and stick with it for at least a few entries.

Thanks!

• Next: Session 1 - Two Companions Meet in the Far North