# No Scenario Required tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/loner #references/twitter ![[No Scenario Required (cover).png]] *Rolling dice icon © Delapouite / game-icons.net (CC BY 3.0)* Another one from the Japanese side of X, this time about whether you need a written scenario to have a night at the table at all. Here's the thread it was answering.  > I love foreign-set and historical scenarios, and I get to run them a lot, so there's plenty of variety — but on the flip side, sometimes it's "let's run one of those loose, character-play one-on-one scenarios for a change…" — no, there isn't one…!? A table-PC in modern Japan…!? Not a single one…!?  It's precisely for this reason that the rise of solo games in Western game design has been so nice. You don't need another person around to play a solo game. You can play as long or as short as you want for a session. You can focus on whatever topics you like. It's really quite nice.  > No, I'm not looking for a game I can play solo. > I'm looking to play again with players I'm already close with, using characters we've created and played before, but I can't find next scenario set in a world that fits those characters. You meant "no one" in terms of no scenarios, not "no one" as in no people. Weirdly enough though, I'm going to suggest the same answer. Not because you don't have people and you need solo mechanics to resolve it, but because most solo games come with dynamic situation generation systems so that you don't *need* a scenario to play. As long as the characters have motivations to get out in the world and do things, which, especially if you've created and played them before, you have those, all you need is some tools for exploring the world and asking questions that are answered by the system. That's exactly what solo mechanics do, best of all. You can even run dynamically generated situations just as you would if you wanted to be a GM, but you can also play with the other person as a co-op player and let the system be the GM. I'm going to give you an example using a system that I have readily at hand: **[[Loner]]**. That doesn't mean that your characters need to be restatted out in **Loner** (though it's easy), or that you need to be using those mechanics. I'm just going to assume that you're playing something that's roughly modern Japan, with a little bit of Lovecraftian urban fantasy/horror. For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume that your character is a private investigator who has been associated with some Cthulhu mythos investigation in the past and knows what he's up against. He's an excellent investigator and is pretty good in a fist fight. He's got a brass monocle that he held on to from a previous investigation, which allows him to sometimes see the invisible and sometimes see things he'd rather not see. He's also got some brass knuckles, just in case things go really sideways. Your buddy is a miko, a shrine maiden. She's sensitive to supernatural effects and has incredibly fast reactions. Like your investigator, she's got a history with the mythos. Somehow she just seems to attract the unusual. But she inherited some temple incense that can be used to drive it away. > [!info] **The Investigator** — *a private investigator who already knows what's out there* > > **Skills:** > - **Investigation** — the kind of noticing that turns the wrong stone over. *(≈ CoC Investigation.)* > - **Streetwise** — knows the streets, and can hold up his end of a fist fight. *(≈ CoC Streetwise.)* > > **Frailty:** > - **Haunted** — once the brass monocle shows him the truth of things, he can't unsee them. > > **Motive:** He knows it's real and nobody will say so — so somebody has to look. > > **Goal:** Find out what his last case actually was, before it finds him. > > **Relationships:** > - **The Miko** — the two of them share a history with the mythos, and neither can work alone anymore. > - **An archaeologist** — a colleague who's dug in old Japanese sites and found things that shouldn't be there. > > **Gear:** > - **PI kit** (concept) — notebook, phone, camera, the city memorized. > - **Brass monocle** — sometimes shows him what's invisible; sometimes what he'd rather not see. > - **Brass knuckles** — for when it goes sideways. > > **Luck:** 6 > [!info] **The Miko** — *a shrine maiden the unusual keeps finding* > > **Skills:** > - **Occult Lore** — she feels the supernatural before she sees it. *(≈ CoC Occult.)* > - **Lightning reflexes** — uncannily fast when something's off. *(≈ CoC Listen / Spot Hidden / Dodge.)* > > **Frailty:** > - **Marked** — she attracts the unusual; it turns up whether she invites it or not. > > **Motive:** The shrine is her line's charge — she carries what her grandmother carried. > > **Goal:** Find out why the old wards are failing now, after all these years. > > **Relationships:** > - **The Investigator** — partners, bound by what they've both already seen. > - **Her grandmother** — the previous miko, who left her the incense and the duty. > > **Gear:** > - **Miko vestments** (concept) — hakama and white hōshi, a working shrine girl's kit. > - **Inherited temple incense** — burns to drive the dark back. > - **Gohei** — the purification wand, for the moments the incense isn't enough. > > **Luck:** 6 These characters are actually created using the **Loner** mechanics, and I'm just sort of showing you how you could put them together off the top of your head based on character sheets you may already have. You don't have to use these mechanics, but it makes it convenient for the sake of our discussion here. Also because I like making characters. We're going to bust out the whole toolset by pulling up the **Loner** 4e Adventure Maker tools, basically a set of tables that let you figure out a number of things to kick you off. Roll one d66 per slot: > [!info] **Adventure Maker** > - **Settings** — 52 → **Abandoned Space Station** > - **Tones** — 26 → **Philosophical and introspective** > - **Things** — 6→C · 46 → **Cyberpunk rebellion**; 6→C · 62 → **Psionic abilities** > - **Actions** — 12 → **Battle** > - **Oppositions** — 53 → **Manipulative patron** Then the mythos, from the **[[Loner - Cthulhu!|Loner: Cthulhu!]]** tables: > [!info] **Loner: Cthulhu!** > - **Investigation Hook** — 64 → **Biology professor discovers a species with no evolutionary precedent** > - **Urban Anomaly** — 25 → **Hospital ER treats patients for impossible injuries** > - **Helpful Contact** — 26 → **Translator fluent in ancient and obscure languages** Which is where the fun starts. The Adventure Maker is genre-blind — it just handed me an abandoned space station, a cyberpunk rebellion, and psionics. Wrong skin, right bones. You steer the frame; the tables supply the raw material. Recontextualize into modern Japan and it all clicks: > The abandoned space station isn't in orbit — it's a shuttered coastal research station, mothballed for years, where a marine-biology professor keeps a specimen hauled up from the deep. One with no evolutionary precedent — nothing on the tree of life should have made it, and a script etched into its surface that nobody can read. > > Meanwhile the city's hospitals are treating impossible injuries — wounds from no weapon that exists, and the patients remember nothing of getting them. Something is reaching into minds. The psionics re-read as the thing whispering; the miko can feel it; the monocle shows the Investigator hints of the source. A tiny cult gathers in the city's hidden corners — the cyberpunk rebellion re-read as a quiet congregation — bankrolled by a manipulative patron who protects the research and keeps the deeper truth buried. (Could it be the professor herself? Perhaps.) > > The professor needs someone to read what's written on the impossible thing, so she reaches down her list of strange contacts — an Investigator who knows what's out there, and the miko who inherited the power to stop (or control) it. There's the opening. No scenario written — just two characters with reasons to get out in the world, and a stack of tables that handed you a whole night. I did go a little bit over the top with this. I didn't have to use the whole Adventure Maker set of tables. I could have specifically just kept it to the **Loner: Cthulhu!** tables, which would have kept it purely on theme, but sometimes having to internalize something that seems off-kilter does exactly what you need. Now, you may say that you don't know what comes next. You've got a place for the characters to start, but because there's no step-by-step scenario, you don't know what is true. That's okay. You play to find out. Figure out what your characters would do and then go do it. For instance, it seems fairly obvious that the first place you should go is to where the professor herself is at. Does she want to meet in that coastal research station? We can just ask the Oracle. > [!info] **Does the professor want to meet at the Coastal Research Station?** > - 🎲 Chance **5** · Risk **3** → **Yes** So she does want to meet there. The isolated, mothballed station it is. Asking the Oracle just requires figuring out what the likelihood of something is, and most of the time 50-50 will do. Then you roll some dice. Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no. Sometimes "yes and" so something else happens, sometimes "no and." The "but" answers are where the game gets interesting. "Yes, but" — you get it, and something new to deal with. "No, but" — you don't get it, but you get a thread worth following. > [!info] **Scene Transition (arrival)** > - 🎲 **4** / 6 → **Quiet Scene (recovery, planning).** > The station sits dark and still behind the chain-link, salt fog rolling off the water. No sirens, no ambush — a quiet beat to catch your breath and think. The professor meets you at the gate and ushers you in to talk through what she's found before you go any deeper. > > A quiet scene sets the pace: room to plan, to ask the hard questions, and for the monocle and the incense to tell you something before the night turns. **Loner** gives you a roll that lets you find out the mood of the next scene. Very helpful if you don't have an idea already. In this case, it's a quiet scene, which makes sense. You're going to talk to the professor, ask some questions. Maybe try to get a sense for whether she's being evasive. In fact, let's presume that is what you've just been playing out. You and your co-player have been sort of role-playing the conversation with the professor, taking turns having her give answers, but now you want to know if the professor is being honest with you, or if this is leading you into a trap. The Miko attempts to use her ability to sense the unseen to skim the surface of the professor's mind. First, let's see if she can do that. You could use whatever your normal skill checks are for the characters you already have, but I'm going to use the **Loner** one because that's what I have in front of me right now. > [!info] **Does the Miko manage to skim the surface of the professor's mind?** > - 🎲 Chance 2, 4 → **4** · Risk **2** · *(advantage)* → **Yes** > The professor's surface mind is a taut, frightened thing — she genuinely wants this read, wants help with the specimen, and the fear is real. But just under that surface, at the edge of the skim, the Miko catches a guarded flicker: something specific, carefully walled, that the professor won't let anyone see. Not proof of malice — just a locked room behind an open door. Whether she's honest or leading you into a trap? That's a different question. The Miko gives the investigator a look as you play out a little more of the scene. It's time to switch over into good cop, bad cop, with the investigator taking his usual role of bad cop. He wants to know what she's not telling them, and he goes in hard on the questioning. He has both Investigation and Streetwise skills, but the fiction has established that the professor is terrified. Is there something more going on? Let's ask the Oracle before we get into the questioning proper. Is she terrified of the investigator or of something else? > [!info] **Is she terrified of the investigator, or of something else?** > - 🎲 Chance **2** · Risk **4** → **No** > Not him. Her terror is aimed at the thing behind all of it — the specimen, the deep, whatever's coming. The bad-cop routine isn't what's scaring her; she was already afraid before he leaned in. That reframes the interrogation: she's not lying about the danger, she's just holding something back out of fear of it, not of him. All right, now we know, and that helps us decide whether the investigator should have an advantage on his questioning, or whether her terror of Something Else is keeping her from answering. The disadvantages for him — her fear and the fact that it's from something scarier than he is — cancel out both of his advantages. It's going to be a straight check to see if he can get her to tell him more. > [!info] **Does the investigator get the professor to tell him more about what she's holding back?** > - 🎲 Chance **3** · Risk **3** → **Yes, but…** · *(doubles: +1 Twist Counter)* > She breaks and it comes out in a rush — the specimen came up in a deep dredge, and the impossible injuries in the hospitals are the thing's kin coming ashore. The whole discovery is being buried, and the name behind the burying is someone who pays her, someone she's terrified of naming. > > She tells them more than she meant to. But the instant she starts to go for the patron's name, the words die in her throat — she literally can't say it, and the look on her face says the thing is listening. A complication, and a twist building toward a head. Here we see the results of a really good core mechanic, which leads you in another direction. Sure, she told him more, but clearly there's some horrible stuff going on behind the scenes, not just the nightmare creature she has locked up, but someone behind her. Plus we have a twist, which means when the twist counter hits three, something crazy is going to happen, something entirely unexpected. There's tables for that. That's basically how you can run entire scenarios with no idea of how it's going to start or where it's going to go next. The characters ask questions and get into situations, and then you play to find out what happens. Fights work pretty much the same way. Let's say this is the end of the scene, and we're moving on to the next. Let's find out what kind of scene the next one is before we start narrating. > [!info] **Scene Transition** > - 🎲 **6** / 6 → **Meanwhile Scene — the world moves without the Protagonist.** Let's say we don't have a really good idea of a scene happening meanwhile elsewhere, which shows what's going on. We could roll on some inspirational tables and see what we turn up. > [!info] **Inspiration** > - **Adjectives** — 46 → **Angular** > - **Verbs** — 66 → **Ascends** > - **Nouns** — 52 → **Lock** > The patron's Meanwhile beat writes itself with that: an **angular** figure — sharp-edged, severe, built slightly wrong in a way you can't quite place — **ascending** the dark coast road toward the station, toward the **locked** thing the professor keeps below. They're coming to break the lock, or to take what's inside it. The protagonists still have a window, and it's closing. All you need is a few pieces of inspiration and away you go. Now you as players know what's going on, and the screws are turning. Time is of the essence, but the characters don't know that yet. What are you going to do? The rest of the scenario plays out until you turn up the secrets or get yourself horribly killed, or possibly both. You figure out if you have an advantage or disadvantage in a given scene. You ask the Oracle questions. The play goes on. You don't have to have a scenario pre-written for everything. In fact, you can have a lot of fun playing with other people using systems that are designed for solo and co-op play. Just let the game guide you and be willing to be creatively inspired along the way.