Cross-Post: Collaborative Gamer's Solo Campaign

+Justin Aquino's talking about it, so I have an excuse to talk about it too.  I've been avidly following +Collaborative Gamer's solo campaign for awhile now, and I think it's great, but for different reasons than Justin (that's not to say that he's wrong, just that we see different facets).

I'm a big believer in Failing Faster.  The point behind Psi-Wars is to finish a campaign sooner rather than later, so I'm borrowing as much as I can from other works, including Star Wars itself and various GURPS books.  The point is that the perfect campaign that takes ten years to never get off the ground is always inferior to the shoddy campaign that actually gets run.

Yet people complain that GURPS takes too much work to get up and running, and they do have a point.  I've been working on Psi Wars off and on since January, and while I'm farther than what you see in my posts, I'm not much farther.  I have been slowed, to be sure, by getting married and by the fact that I actually have to make all of my notes presentable, but it's still taking some time.  How can we make it go faster?

Maid offers one way. Maid has something of a bad reputation, but I think those who criticize it miss the real beauty and elegance of the game and the way its random creation tables can rapidly inspire a quick and fun game..  Inspiration is a very important element in an RPG. The ideal RPG overflows with ideas, so as soon as you grab the book and read it, you think "Oh, I totally need to run this!" Maid uses easy-to-understand concepts paired with random generation tables, so you can literally sit down with some friends, roll on a few tables, and have everyone's characters, their master, and an interesting scenario, complete with twist, to work your way through.


Collaborative Gamer's solo campaign is a huge advertisement for the power of his random generation tables.  Collaborative Gamer has devised an entire system for randomly creating a scenario, complete with NPCs and interesting dungeons and even ways to answer questions ("the solo d6") if you're stuck.  What he's done is construct a system of inspiration, so that you can sit down and play GURPS now rather than later. And he's proving to you that it works.  If he can run an interesting solo campaign with absolutely no prep, then he can run a campaign for you with absolutely no prep.

So check it out, and when you're done, check out his many tables and systems.  He's just giving them away, and this is the sort of thing people would pay handsomely for.