This website grew out of my solo role-playing campaign set in the world of Qai'Rhoz. At the moment, this is where I publish Tear of the Empire—the story of Talik Klost, a village fool whose ill-fated trip into the mountains ended with the loss of his home and an encounter with people he would probably never have met under different circumstances.

When I first considered solo role-playing, I wanted to take a single character through many adventures and watch him grow gradually. Not to begin with an experienced hero who already knows how to defeat monsters and save the world, but to start almost from zero. With no remarkable skills, knowledge, or understanding of what is happening around him. With a character for whom even an ordinary city can be something astonishing.

I use GURPS 4e and Mythic GME for the game. GURPS handles the characters, their capabilities, and the consequences of their actions. Mythic replaces the game master: it answers questions, determines random events, and occasionally throws out combinations of words whose meaning still has to be found within the current situation.

This does not mean that the plot is created entirely by random tables. They do not tell me what exactly happened. They only provide a direction that has to be interpreted in light of established events, the characters’ personalities, and the rules of the world. Sometimes the result fits neatly into what I expected. Sometimes it forces me to completely reconsider what I thought was going to happen next.

That is why the campaign has no pre-written scenario. There is a world, there are characters and their goals, and there are events that happen independently of the protagonist. There are secrets Talik may never uncover. Most interestingly, some of them may never be revealed even to me as a player. Knowledge of what happened off-screen sometimes remains with me only in my role as the game master—a strange situation in a solo game, but without it, part of the world simply could not exist independently of the character.

At first, the campaign was a straightforward session log: dice rolls, check results, and brief descriptions of actions. Gradually, that stopped being enough. I became less interested in which particular check a character had passed and more interested in what he saw, what he understood, and why he acted the way he did.

Starting around Session Twelve, the records became more narrative, and eventually they turned almost entirely into literary accounts of events. The game mechanics have not gone anywhere. Rules and dice rolls still stand behind the characters’ decisions, injuries, random encounters, and failed plans. It is simply the characters’ own perception of those events that now makes it into the text first and foremost.

Because of this, the story progresses more slowly than it could. The characters spend time travelling, recovering, searching for information, and talking. They can make mistakes, draw the wrong conclusions, or fail to notice things that seem obvious to the reader. I do not try to remove these things retroactively simply because another version would bring the story to the next major event more quickly.

Tear of the Empire is not a novel written from a finished plan, but neither is it a literal play report anymore. It is a literary adaptation of a story born from game sessions. The dice determine what happened. The characters determine exactly how it happened. All that remains for me is to put everything together and describe it in a way that reveals, behind the game results, a living world and the people trying to find their own path through it.

I do not yet know where that path will lead either.