About six months ago, I discovered, quite by accident, a motherlode of games that I never knew existed: Solo and GMLess roleplaying games. This isn't to say I'd never heard of the concept. After all, I spent the first four years of my gaming life playing D&D by myself since I lived in the middle of Fuck-Off Nowhere without a single other nerd within shouting distance. If I was going to play RPGs (and by God, I was going to play them), it was going to be either by myself or with my younger brother, and my brother was a goddamn cheater.
Over the last few years, I haven't kept pace with the explosion in creativity in game mechanics and, more importantly, the conceptual shifts that underpin the current bumper crop of solo, duo and gm-less games out there.
Another piece of serendipity hit that while I was diving through all the subreddits, YouTube channels and such that I could find, I discovered that a big resource of the community, the Tiny Table Index by Luke Miller, had recently been taken down for cost and time reasons. Being a developer, I jumped on the opportunity afforded by the database being made open-source and launched tinytable.io. This gave me an added impetus to search out the very resources I was interested in.
I've since become enamored of this community of game creators: Folks who build all sorts of bold, mechanically interesting games - ones that defy genre, or even categorization at times - and I'm interested in taking my game-design expertise, marrying it with my development background, and trying to build as many tools as I can to assist players of these games to create deep, meaningful stories.
Unfound Worlds will be my attempt to openly document this process, and boost other in the community. Once this site gains some traction and actual projects, I'll figure out the whole subscription thing. Until then, subscribe for free and get everything posted here to your inbox as well.