Content warning: discussion of ableism and racism
When strict social distancing measures came into place in London in March 2020, it felt like the world was finally catching up with me. My health had been deteriorating since November with near-constant chronic illness flares, and by February I was already spending most of my energy on work. Social plans were rescheduled and then cancelled, I wasn’t able to travel to school for lectures, and I couldn’t do basic daily tasks like cooking or showering, let alone write essays or spend time with personal projects and hobbies. I’m working class and disabled so I dedicated my limited capacity to work so that I could pay my rent, buy ready meals, and pay for medication. While I was supported at my jobs to work from home, and my friends continued to check in and help me with basic tasks, I felt isolated and lonely. It seemed like I was being left behind, missing out on events and dinners and trips to the cinema.
For a couple of months after social distancing came into place, I didn’t feel as alone. Suddenly everybody was working from home, unable to socialise, unable to carry out their daily routines like before. I was no longer the only person I could see who was struggling to achieve and thrive in the face of uncertainty and social isolation. For a few months I went to stay with my partner, who supported me in cooking meals and going grocery shopping. Between their company and regular video calls with my friends, I avoided the mental illness spirals I’m prone to when on my own for too long. My friends and I even discussed playing some tabletop games remotely, but we only managed one session of Dungeons & Dragons and a couple of worldbuilding sessions. Each of us went through periods of anxiety, despair, and distraction over those first few months of social distancing, at different times and to varying levels of intensity. We’re a group of disabled and neurodivergent people and we struggled to organise sessions despite our interest.
After Orion Black shared their experiences of anti-Blackness, dismissiveness, and marginalisation at Wizards of the Coast, which publishes Dungeons & Dragons, I started thinking about alternative games that I could play with my small Dungeons & Dragons squad. I began to flip through my little collection of digital game books, feeling excited about the possibilities for character and world creation. However, most of the games were designed for several players and a gamemaster (GM), a setup that was difficult for me and my friends to commit to. My partner, brand new to roleplaying games, was interested in playing a few sessions but wanted both of us to play characters, so I looked into GM simulators, which use randomising mechanics as a replacement for the GM. Uninspired by the simulators I found and having never GM-ed before, I decided to try to adapt these multiplayer games for solo play so that I could get used to their mechanics and be prepared for potential sessions with friends in future.
I felt rejuvenated by the possibility; not only could I finally spend more time with the tabletop games I was interested in, I could play them even if I was too tired to collaborate with friends, or when our capacities and schedules didn’t allow for us to arrange a session together. By taking on the roles of several characters at once, while simultaneously crafting their world and situations, I could be social when I was unable to socialise with other people. Even if I was flaring up and unable to get out of bed that day, I could do something fun and engaging. The concept made me feel more self-sufficient and less isolated, a way to reconnect with the world that I felt was leaving me behind.
While I was interested in several games, including Monster of the Week, Dragon Age, and Shadowrun, I decided to begin with Bluebeard’s Bride, an indie game by Strix Beltrán, Sarah Richardson and Marissa Kelly that my friend bought for my birthday several years ago. I loved the concept and the book’s gorgeous, haunting artwork. Players take on different personality traits of the Bride, guiding her in an exploration of her new husband’s house of horrors. The GM creates situations designed to push the characters—and their players—out of their comfort zones and into unease and discomfort. I had wanted to GM Bluebeard’s Bride since receiving it but I had been hesitant to set up a session with friends due to the game’s exploration of themes of trauma, patriarchal oppression, and fear. The game encourages the use of safety mechanisms, allowing players to veto topics that might be triggering or upsetting, but nonetheless I was uncertain about being able to ensure the safety of myself and my friends while maintaining an engaging gaming environment. It was a perfect game to adapt for solo play, allowing me to test out the game alone, push at my own limits, and establish how I might construct a group session in future.
After social distancing measures had eased a little, I left my partner’s place and moved into a new, more accessible home. My new home allows me to better take care of myself but I still have my bad days, and six months after strict social distancing measures were put in place, I spiralled in both my physical and mental health. I felt severely isolated and overwhelmed as a disabled and racialised person in an ableist and racist society. As abled, middle class people began to return to work and the pub, I once again felt like I was being forgotten. I swung between blaming myself for failing to keep up and anger at a world that refuses to meet the basic needs of people like me. In the midst of this, I turned to Bluebeard’s Bride, looking for comfort and catharsis in its horror, and for company in the creation of several characters—all in interaction with myself.
I set up a game on Roll20, a site that enables remote and digital tabletop play, using the site’s in-built character sheets. This format allowed me to experiment with the game without having to print pages of character or reference sheets and keep track of them all. To a background score of spooky ambient music that I found on YouTube, I began character creation, noting each character’s motive and personality through prompts included on the sheets. It felt like fiction writing or a character study, work that I used to escape into as a child but lost touch with as an adult with limited capacity. A creative fire rekindled inside me as I worked through each sheet. I felt like I was reconnecting with a deep part of my being. I was also creating different personas, each of whom would seek out conflict and co-operation with each other over the course of the game. I chose the archetypes of the Animus, the Witch, and the Virgin, characters that naturally contrast and conflict with each other, providing me with distinct character voices to work with. Unlike open-ended fiction writing, this type of storytelling gave each character a predetermined purpose, and it gave me as a GM the skeleton of a story that I could not break away from. When I’m writing fiction, I have full control over the narrative, the characters, the themes of the story; when I’m gaming, some of that control is taken away, as in real life social situations.
In fact, I found this difference to be a bit of a learning curve as I attempted to GM for the first time. After character creation, I verbally narrated the first room that the Bride entered. I chose to speak aloud, sitting alone in my bedroom at home, attempting to simulate the feeling of oral storytelling with friends. Roll20 allowed me to mark which character was currently in control of the Bride and which moves were available. I only made two moves during my short session and I chose to use a physical die in my rolls, something tactile to ground me in the context of play.
In comparison with the written character creation, I found it difficult to verbally narrate the story and quickly over-exerted myself. I had to end the session early, drained after attempting to simultaneously GM and play characters both verbally and mentally. I struggled to keep track of which voice I was using and what could come next in the situation I was crafting. In my head, I was setting the scene as the GM, and then switched to the active player—the Virgin—when it was time for the Bride to navigate the room. I narrated the Virgin’s decisions, what she chose to investigate in the room, and then switched back into the GM role to describe the outcomes of those decisions. Without writing the story down, I found it tricky to know when to switch voices or when to use one of the Virgin’s moves. In addition, players are able to try to take, and relinquish, control of the Bride at any time, particularly if there is a conflict between how different players wish the Bride to act. The Virgin character was in control of the Bride when I started the game, but her motivations and approaches to situations are in stark contrast to the Witch’s, one of my other characters. I felt overwhelmed by this feature, unsure of whether I should be attempting to seize control from myself as the Bride moved through the room.
I finished playing after thirty minutes, exhausted, and while I was disappointed that my disabilities had prevented a full solo gaming session, I felt invested in the characters I had created and I plan on continuing the game in written form, like a guided short story. I haven’t yet played a second session but I now hold a better understanding of both how the game works and how to navigate my next session in a way that better suits how my brain and body work. I know that I need to be able to easily track several character sheets, and to write instead of verbally narrating the story. I feel committed to exploring the game’s themes and by playing solo, I’m able to push my own boundaries in secret, navigating complicated issues like trauma, abuse, and oppression in a storytelling format, and entirely on my own terms. I don’t need to make use of the game’s safety mechanics, I can just feel out my own lines and triggers. And unlike standard fiction writing, the gameplay mechanics introduce in-built tensions and unpredictability, almost like writing prompts designed to push the story forward.
Since that first session, I have been familiarising myself with other game books, with Michael Sands and Steve Hickey’s Monster of the Week intriguing me the most. Monster of the Week emulates supernatural television shows like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with players taking on the role of a team of covert monster hunters. So far, I have been making my way through the game book, fleshing out a world in my head and prepping my materials for character creation. I want to tie my time with Monster of the Week into an idea for a novel that I’ve stopped and started for several years, building on an urban fantasy setting where an underground organisation keeps “mundanes” (non-supernatural people) safe from otherworldly beings.
The character creation process for this game is more complicated than in Bluebeard’s Bride so instead of using Roll20, I’m using Scrivener, a word processor that allows easy organisation of files and scenes, to keep track of PDF character sheets and, eventually, game sessions. Larger games like this feel like undertaking big fiction projects, and Scrivener enables me to break up gaming sessions into short chunks, to track my characters without getting confused, and to switch quickly from character and reference sheets to the word processor when recording my sessions. I intend to again use physical dice in my sessions, a way to anchor me to the experience of gaming. I’m excited by the prospect of being guided through the story by rules, mechanics, and multiple characters with predefined archetypes and abilities. I am aware of my limitations when approaching these more complex games; they demand more capacity and time, and I am having to explore their lore piecemeal. It feels like a supportive way to return to fiction writing.
I’ve also been growing my collection of tabletop roleplaying games designed for a single player, and I’ve been carving out time to plan and record my adventures in games like Takuma Okada’s Alone Among The Stars, a space exploration game, and Fairyland Confidential, a fantasy noir by Teapot Dome Games. These games feel different to multiplayer RPGs, encouraging you as a solo player to introspect, journal, and spend time with yourself, in yourself. It’s a way of gaming that I encourage anyone to try, but I spend so much of my time paying attention to myself and my body—where the pain sits, how much energy I have left today, my scattered thoughts, my loneliness. Solo RPGs provide an escape, a way to reimagine yourself, as a lone survivor in space or a magical detective, and they provide that same sense of self-sufficiency. But adapting multiplayer games is a way to be social with yourself, a way to embody several characters at once, to guide yourself through a scenario while simultaneously feeling out the edges of the world you’ve constructed. Solo RPGs can be grounding but playing multiplayer games on my own is helping me to feel less lonely, especially at a time when social distancing measures are in flux.
As the people around me return to work and school, to socialising and holidays, I continue to spend most of my week on my own, with the vast majority of social contact made over video and phone calls. By creating characters to spend time with, to play with when I have the capacity and physical ability, I am able to engage with a world while respecting my own limitations. I feel more in control of both my ongoing isolation and my disabilities. For a short time, I’m no longer in a capitalist, racist, ableist society that demands me to perform to impossible standards for the sake of other people’s wealth. For a short time, I am in a utopia of my own construction, where my needs are respected and met, where I can thrive and adventure, and where I’m no longer alone.
While it is more work to play these tabletop roleplaying games on my own, in comparison to games that are designed for solo play or vanilla fiction writing, my experiences have been empowering, helping me to feel more self-sufficient and less lonely when isolated because of both the pandemic and my disabilities. Playing games in this way is enabling me to reconnect with my imagination and feel like I can belong somewhere, constructing and navigating multiple diverse characters, even if in real life I am on my own and unable to socialise like the people around me. I can engage with roleplaying games in accordance to my needs as a disabled person, whether that means playing super-short sessions or adapting the game to be played solo. My isolation didn’t begin with the pandemic this year, and it won’t end when the abled world can “return to normal”, so I’ll bring my adapted games forward with me to keep me company for as long as I need.
Zainabb Hull (twitter) is a trans queer disabled Pakistani femme of colour from London who writes about pop culture, disability, and diaspora feelings. They are (slowly) finishing their Master’s dissertation, which focuses on British media representation of Pakistani culture(s) and identity/ies. They are also an artist and activist.
Image based on Poly Dice by sbszine, under a CC BY-NC-SA license and released under the same license.