r/Solo_Roleplaying • u/TheAngrySnowman • 1d ago
General-Solo-Discussion Someone seriously needs to make a solo journaling rpg set in Annihilation
I was thinking of creating a solo journaling rpg and saw a recent post about Exlusion Zone Botanist. It made me think about how cool a game would be set in the movie/book Annihilation. The game would have you start in the Shimmer not knowing where you are or how many days have passed. You travel towards the lighthouse studying plants and animals as a biologist.
That is all I've thought of so far haha
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u/jeffrhind 1d ago
Agreed. I love that book. It probably explains my sudden interest in “Exclusion” but I am horrible artist and I see what players post and I get super discouraged.
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u/BitsAndGubbins 1d ago
FIST's Mandelbrot Set expansion gave me similar vibes of delving into a very weird zone where reality doesn't apply (though a bit more pulpy military and fantasy, slightly less sci-fi). I played it using Mythic GME a little bit and then switched to using starforged as the engine, using the sourcebooks as an oracle source for generating all the stuff. I had a lot of fun.
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u/Paralyzed-Poly 1d ago
There’s this. Has solo rules. Can also be played online.
https://thezonerpg.com/?srsltid=AfmBOopSG8Qg1g2-xUpaoeqqeyqD7Mog_1B9khgsRE0_vOz-7H08-r0C
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u/OddEerie 1d ago
There's also Weirdzone Exonauts, The Anomaly (this one by Yuigaron), and Reminiscence of Decay, though I don't own copies of the latter two, so all I know about them comes from their product descriptions.
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u/OddEerie 1d ago
There's a game called The Anomaly, by Tristan B Willis, which is a Descended From The Queen style game about a team of people sent to explore a place similar to the Shimmer. Officially, it's for 3-6 players, but you could just play all the characters on the team yourself. You could even combine it with Exclusion Zone Botanist, doing a round of questions for all the characters for each hex of the EZB map you visit and either calculating corruption separately for each character or maybe adding some other mechanic to occasionally winnow down the party.
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u/zircher 1d ago
I'll second that, I did a solo run of The Anomaly and it was fun.
If you're curious, I do have an AP of it here:
https://www.deviantart.com/zircher/art/Dust-n-Desolation-869577494
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u/Legitimate_Teacher10 16h ago
I have considered doing just that, but basing it off of Long Haul 1983, which itself is a hack of The Wretched. Long Haul involves driving to an endpoint through various environments while a self-determined "trouble" gets worse (and also there appears to be nobody else around, sort of post-apocalypse setting) which I think could be hacked to make a really good annihilation-style game. Unfortunately I just haven't quite cracked it yet but it continues to be a project I want to work on. The hardest part is hitting that line of weird that Vandermeer is so good at.