Alone in the Dreamlands

On Thursday, I’ll be sharing another Dream-Quest character class — the shadow, my take on a thief-analog for the Dreamlands. However, today I want to digress a little into something inspired by my work on this project that has broader implications, both for the design of Dream-Quest and for roleplaying games in general.

The simple fact is that Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales are not about adventuring parties. With very few exceptions, they’re about lone protagonists — Randolph Carter chief among them — who wander strange realms, grapple with mysteries, and pursue deeply personal quests.

That’s a very different model than the one most RPGs, especially those in the old school tradition, assume. In those games, the party is the fundamental unit of play, a band of companions pooling their skills and resources against the dangers of the underworld or the wilderness. By contrast, Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories often resemble pilgrimages or vision-quests, where the hero’s companions are fleeting at best and his trials are ultimately his own.

This presents me with an interesting design challenge. On the one hand, I want Dream-Quest to be an old school fantasy RPG, complete with adventuring parties, shared expeditions, and all the joys of collective problem-solving at the table. That’s the heart of roleplaying for me and, I suspect, for many of you. On the other hand, if I want to stay true to the feel of Lovecraft’s stories, I can’t simply ignore the solitary journeys that define them.

That naturally raises the question: should Dream-Quest include support for solitaire play?

Solo roleplaying has been with the hobby almost from the very beginning. Tunnels & Trolls was a pioneer in this and TSR published several solo modules for Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. More recently, solo play has undergone what looks like a genuine renaissance. Journaling games, oracle tables, and other creative tools for playing alone have gained a devoted following.

If any setting seems tailor-made for solo exploration, it’s the Dreamlands. These are worlds shaped by imagination and dream-logic, realms where strange landscapes shift around the dreamer and where encounters often feel less like tactical challenges and more like personal revelations. Doesn’t that sound like fertile ground for solitaire play?

At the same time, my primary focus is still on Dream-Quest as a group game. I don’t want to wander so far into solo territory that I lose sight of the kinds of campaigns I most enjoy running, namely, shared adventures where unexpected choices, strange discoveries, and collective storytelling emerge at the table. The tension between these two models — Lovecraft’s lone dreamers and the RPG world’s adventuring parties — is too intriguing to ignore.

So, let me put the question to anyone reading this:

• Would you be interested in a Dreamlands RPG that included some explicit support for solitaire play alongside the more conventional party-based game?

• Or do you think it’s better to stick closely to group play and let solitary dreamers find their own tools and methods?

• Have you ever tried solo roleplaying yourself? If so, what worked and what didn’t?

No decisions have been made yet. I’m very much thinking out loud here. Even so, I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts, since it'll help guide me as I commit more effort to Dream-Quest in the weeks to come.