World-Building via Letter Tiles: Example Round 1 (Solo RPG)

Stepping through the fourth, and final playtest of my Letter-Tile-Worldbuilding technique is the easiest way for me to explain the process.

First, before we start pulling tiles out of bags, we need a general overview, a light scaffolding to hold everything together. If this was a video rental store (remember those), or a library, in what section would your story be found? Is it science-fiction or fantasy? Or maybe science-fantasy or horror? Within those choices, is it fantastical, or gritty-realistic? We’ll use the letter tiles to help us fill in details, but we need some context to bound things. 

I suspect, for solo RPGs, this context is easy to describe, since presumably most players would start with a preferred system or setting. 

My current solo RPG project could best be described as science-fiction, specifically in the “hidden lands” sub-genre. The setting imagines spies from both Cold War superpowers stumbling upon a subterranean “Hollow Earth”-type world in 1978. The likely PCs are the spies themselves and other travelers from the surface world wrapped up in the web of espionage. Player Character motivation is chiefly returning to the surface world, while preserving or gaining an advantage for their side in the East vs. West ideological struggle. The Inner World consists of many different lands and peoples, allowing all sorts of bizarre encounters, from dinosaurs to advanced technology beyond comprehension. 

While that helps set the stage, I see I still have a very wide playing field and nearly anything could happen in the opening adventure. We have a blank page before us, so let’s use the letter tiles to fill it up! 

Picking up from the set-up detailed in the last post, the board sports five randomly placed letters and a random chit-draw has determined the functions of the colored squares (picture repeated below for clarity). 

Set-up complete

I draw the first ten letters and begin building off of any of those five initial tiles. The first three words come quickly: REIGN, VAULT, NAZI. I play the tiles in that order making sure I save NAZI for last, as it will be built over a “?” square and trigger an Oracle Question and hand refresh. Building those three words uses all ten of my tiles, so after I answer the question I also get ten new tiles! 

First round complete, including oracle roll

Now the fun part: interpretation. Systems like the Mythic GME and Ars Magica have taught me that interpreting word-pairs can be easier than divining the meaning of a single word. One technique I therefore use here is splitting the new words into two categories based on orientation, vertical and horizontal, to limit the number of possible word-pair combinations. If words actually share a letter tile however, I honor that as a link. 

So, getting back to our words here… well, no need to try to form the best horizontal/vertical pairing, REIGN and NAZI both share a letter, so they are obviously linked. Even more so, the letter shared sits on a blue-colored cell, indicating this link has strong Connection to something in the story (likely a character or characters). The word REIGN features two colored squares, actually, the second being a magenta Setting indicator.  The word VAULT also overlays a colored square, in this case a green one, which indicates a Goal-related story element.

First thoughts: the scene obviously opens in a palace where the nobility have some sort of connection to the German Nazi party! A VAULT of some sort has significance to someone's Goals but I don't need to work that into the question directly. 

First Oracle Question: Are elements of this nobility actual German Nazis?

I use a custom oracle method where I roll 5d6 and rank order the dice by score, using the middle (third rank) die. 1-2 indicates “No, And…”, 3: “No, But…”, 4: “Yes, But…”, and 5-6: “Yes, And…”. The oracle gives a 50/50 chance for “Yes” or “No”, with the “But” modifier favored over the “And” roughly 60/40. 

Result: 4 "Yes, but…" 

Yes, elements of the nobility are actual German Nazis but acting as advisors, not in charge. 

That’s the example done, to the first question. I’ll carry through these posts all the way to the fourth question, where I stopped, having gained sufficient detail for an opening scene. 

If this example doesn’t make the process clear, hopefully the follow on posts will. A big thing I wanted to show here is how the process is a mini-game in it own right, with word-building not just based on what seems interesting for the story, but also trying to hit those colored squares to get hints how the words play into the story.

The results seem “from the ether” to me, and not forced. I certainly didn’t anticipate Nazis in my subterranean world, but honestly, it fits with the whole Hollow Earth conspiracy silliness. And it gives me some immediate baddies for the PCs to punch. And who better to punch than Nazis?