Designing a Cult Solo Game, Part 1: Planning the Beginning

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I like solo rpgs, as one can tell by reading this blog, and I think it’s about time I try to turn my hand to making one. 

The perfect excuse just came up.  Solovember 2026.  This is a game jam celebrating solo table top rpgs in the month of November. It is hosted by Sero, co-founder and creator of the Solo RPG List. 

I’ll be participating, and this blog post is the first in a series of my thoughts on creating a solo game about starting and managing a cult until a horrible Something is forcibly brought into the modern world. Fun, fun, fun!

The Thinker, Musee Rodin

Thoughts on Starting

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” – Frank Herbert, Dune 1965

I’ve never made a solo game before. I’ve played several. I have a handful of ideas and a general theme to go with. 

But that’s not all. Whenever starting a new project where I technically don’t know what I’m doing, I look towards models of other successful projects and the people who made them. 

So, let’s get into some game design inspirations.  

Anna Blackwell aka BlackwellWriter, of Blackwell Games, really needs no introduction in the solo rpg world as they are the author of many solo games including the very successful journaling game Apothecaria.

They wrote a really interesting blog post a couple months back titled “How I Make A Game”.  It is a very encouraging piece of work that lays out a good structure (in my view) on how to approach making a game, solo or not. Like a man floundering in an ocean, I’ll cling to this life raft. 

One of the points that I am taking away from this blog post is the line, “I recommend creating a skeleton of what you think you’ll need to do. Work out what your most important mechanics are and build those.” So, I’m going to do that.

The second blog post that really struck me and I’ve been rolling over in my mind for a bit is titled “TTRPGs Are Games, Not Improv Theater” by Dawnfist Games.

When it comes to solo games, I see them as a spectrum. This spectrum ranges on one extreme to solo games that are mostly writing prompts for journaling, to the other side of the spectrum where solo games are mechanistically defined procedures.  I want my cult management game to be mechanistically heavy with journaling options; but primarily a game where decisions are adjudicated by rolling on a table, or for some challenge, and then determining a result based on that roll. 

Dawnfist Games’ blog post is sort of a defense and explanation of how mechanisms in games can generate fun. I really like this blog post and I’ve come up with three main quotes from it that I will focus on while designing my game. 

The first quote is “Outcomes Must be Dictated by Mechanics.” Now that statement is a header from a section of the blog rather than a quote, but it’s succinct and encapsulates what I want to do.

Quote number two is, “I don’t play solo TTRPGs to relive my own already imagined ideas. I want to be surprised. I want to be forced to react to things I hadn’t planned for. Clear mechanical consequences are the only things that allow a solo player to experience truly unexpected situations. If we have to invent the friction ourselves, we can’t ever truly be surprised.”

I agree. I want to be surprised by outcomes and labor under unforeseen circumstances when playing my solo game. I want to, by necessity, adapt and shift gears when confronted with events that change the game environment.  There must be a central goal to work towards for the game, but I want the outcome to be in question. 

Quote the third is, “…tracking resources is even more vital in solo play than in group play, because depleting resources force tricky, uncomfortable choices, and that is the foundation of any good story generator.”

YES. I’ve played enough Darkest Dungeon and similar video games to know this to be true. I want the cult management game to start with a singular angst-ridden, perhaps partially unhinged; individual whispered to in the darkness by something from Beyond. I want the game to describe their story as they gather a following, accrue dark resources, and have them threatened by antagonistic powers of the Light; as the cult seeks to bring their patron into the world to overthrow the established order.  

Putting Pencil to Paper; Current Ideas and Initial Game Skeleton

So here are my rough ideas.  

I’ve already established I want a cult management game. 

The flow of the game should be making a single cultist, choosing a supernatural patron, accumulating resources including additional cultists, making decisions on where to allocate those resources, and at the finale seeing if your character/cult has enough resources to achieve endgame which is summoning your patron into the reality of a modern world. 

Gameplay Skeleton 1. Main Gameplay Loop left undefined

Concurrent to this there will be an antagonist system.  This will comprise of two systems, I think. The first is a Doom Tracker, not unlike the one in the Arkham Horror boardgame, where the player has a certain number of increments until their actions are overwhelmed and ended by an antagonistic force.

The second system is some sort of exponentially escalating series of events that drain the cultists of resources and/or forces them into a choice of two permanent negative game state outcomes.  This second system will be tied to the increments in the Doom Tracker (first system).  

I like the idea of the player choosing between two permanent negative events.  Either choice establishes an increasing challenge; but by making it a player choice, the player does not feel completely screwed by the system because they had agency in the decision.  This model has been used in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen and Star Wars Zero Company video games, to great success. 

The setting will be the modern day, or at least as current as the 1990s USA. The supernatural patron will be a choice between a Demon, Vampire, Wraith, or Outsider (i.e. lots of tentacles and eyes for the latter).  For resource I think I’ll go with Faith (an attribute for your cultists characters), Cash (for the cult) and I was considering Blood, but I feel that’s too impersonal. I want the players of my cult game to feel when a decision is meaningful. So, I was thinking of instead of a variable “Blood” that just increments and decrements; I want characters that can be encountered in game that could be titled Thralls, Kin, and Victims. I need to develop this idea further; I’ll come back to it in a future blog post.  Also, the cult should have the variable Power which determines the chance of using magic/causing “miracles” and is also critical for determining whether the endgame can be achieved. 

I’m going with a modern setting with an occult supernatural underground, inspired by White Wolf’s World of Darkness setting. 

A successful game will require the cult to have from 4-5 cultists. Cultists are characters that can be managed. They will have randomized Skills and Traits.  Randomized Skills mean that certain cultists will be useful or capable of certain actions during the main gameplay loop.  Not all cultists will be capable of the same actions. This forces choices for the player. Just as an off the cuff example, a Proselytizing skill could allow a cultist to recruit other cultists.  I am making the maximum number of skills per cultist as four.  Perhaps there will be six to eight skills in total.

Traits are unique benefits or maluses to certain actions or Skills or attributes of the cult.  Traits are randomly generated upon cultist genesis and should very rarely change in the core gameplay loop.  For example, a Trait could be “Silver Tongue” that gives a +1 to making a Proselytizing skill roll.  Traits should only range from -3 to +3 for any value. Traits are intrinsic to a cultist. Traits should be restricted to a maximum of two upon cultist creation.  I’m going to have to come up with a large random table for Traits. 

There is a possibility I was toying with from watching the developer’s Youtube log for the video game CultGame, which is expected to be released in a demo in October on Steam.  In the video game CultGame, there is the option to hire a hireling (which is a non-cultist character) that can execute some actions, for gold.  I’m not sure if I’m going to include this because it might be too complicated in scope for a solo game for now. Also, I want the player of my cult game to feel like they are working with incomplete and broken tools (their cultists) because the people who willing body and soul turn to a supernatural patron for evil … will likely not be fully mentally stable happy campers. That is where a sliver of dark humor comes in. 

Cultists may have Attributes, I’m not sure yet. I might be able to cult that out and just go with Skills and Traits. 

Also, during the main gameplay loop, the core actions cultists will able to take will include: methods to increase their personal Faith, methods to increase the cult’s Power, ability to increase infrastructure to hire more cultists (up to 5), acquiring a Thrall/Kin/Victim for a future nefarious purpose, attempt to use magic/a miracle, and initiate the endgame sequence which is currently undefined. 

Inspirations, Current Appendix N

I want to keep my core group of inspirations small to avoid feature bloat. My cult management game needs to be simple in scope because I will not finish it otherwise.  Including the antagonist’s systems idea is already complicating things, but I think it is necessary to create a failure state and generate escalating tension/challenge as the game progresses. 

Currently I have 5 touchstones. Some I have mentioned in the previous text but I’ll reiterate them here. I’m going to focus on 9 inspirations for this game maximum. Nine is a good number. 

1. Soth: a game of cultists vs investigators by Steve Hickey. TTRPG.
2. CultGame by Bucephalus Studios. Video game. 
3. The Broken Cask by Shoreless Skies Publishing. Solo ttrpg.
4. White Wolf’s World of Darkness setting. TTRPG.
5. Liberal Crime Squad by Tarn Adams. Video game.