Cut Up Solo

Owen Wister's The Virginian.

Cut Up Solo is different from the more common Oracle-driven solo play. You still get a basic yes-no question and answer tool, but where you may be more familiar with getting word prompts or story cube style game icons to serve as prompts for scenes, motivations, or even plot twists, cut ups do things differently.

Cut Ups take texts in the same genre as you are playing and cuts them up into short snippets. You then draw out snippets at random and try and string them together to put words into the virtual Game Master's mouth.

You can edit the snippets to make something that reads fluently, as a GM would describe things, or use them as a rather verbose inspiration prompt, but one that understands the world you are playing in.

This PDF contains 2000 random snippets organized into two d1000 tables. The attached spreadsheets, in Excel and Open Document Format, contain all the text of The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, chopped into short snippets of about 5 words. It also has spreadsheets set up to grab 20 snippets at once at random.

Solo is a perfect way to learn a new game, test your first adventures, and going beyond just making characters when you are first getting to know the rules.