Review By Karl Brown

Elminster’s Guide to Solo Adventuring (EGSA) is available through The DM’s Guild community content site owned by Wizard’s of the Coast. The author is not given in the PDF but looking on the DM’s Guild website I can see the author is Oliver Gibson. I think the publication date is May 2018 because this is when it was added to the DM’s Guild. The last update to the file was August 3 2018.

Elminster’s Guide to Solo Adventuring promises to allow you to play any adventure designed for regular play with a GM and several players by yourself. I have read this little booklet and used the instructions within to play through the first adventure site in the WOTC campaign book Storm King’s Thunder. I have enjoyed the experience very much and intend to complete Storm King’s Thunder as a solo campaign, so no spoiler’s please!

Before we get to the review proper consider the uses of ESGA and you’ll see its value. I have several D&D adventures and PDFs of even more. With ESGA I’m going to get more use out of adventures I buy. Furthermore playing solo through an adventure first seems like it would be a good way to prepare to run the adventure as a DM. A solo session can fill a rainy afternoon giving you another D&D fix or your only one if you don’t have a regular group. It allows DMs to play for a change. Finally, it provides another tool for playtesting home brews. It’s not a great tool for discovering if your new race of class is overpowered but it will spot glitches, mistakes, and unseen holes in your rules before you take them to your players.

The booklet is only $1.39AUD. For your money you get 10-page colour PDF with bookmarks. There is no print version. The illustrations seem to be taken from the packs of recycled WOTC art made available to those who publish on the DM’s Guild. The pieces chosen appropriately reflect the subject matter and are somewhat coherent in style. However some are awkwardly cropped and or have some of the text over them. The pages are on the standard D&D 5e parchment look background. If you did want to print, it would use a fair bit of ink but at only 10 pages maybe that’s ok. The PDF does not display properly on some PDF readers but reads fine on Acrobat Reader. What your really paying for though is the ideas within. For this reason it is hard for me to go into too much detail without giving away the essential content of EGSA for free. I’ll therefore focus on what it does and how well it does it rather than how it works.

Sales and fan ratings support my positive impression of ESGA. The GM’s Guild site rates EGSA an Electrum Best Seller. This high rate of sales could have been aided by the lack of solo adventures for D&D 5e until this year as noted by Bimler in the interview in this issue. At the time of writing this five buyers rated EGSA an average of four stars though some probably rated the booklet lower because of the display issue on some PDF readers.

The booklet opens with an excerpt from a Forgotten Realms novel. Mr Gibson makes good use of the property the DM’s Guild licensing agreement gives him to set the tone of the book and promote the book through the name recognition of Elminster. Really though this is not a Forgotten Realms book, it will work with any D&D 5e adventure on any world. Mr Gibson’s writing is informal yet to the point. The introduction sets expectations; this is not a perfect replacement for gathering friends around a table nor is it an A.I. that acts as a DM for you. It then outlines that EGSA tackles the standard framework for D&D 5e: the DM and player roles and the ‘three pillars’ of adventure: Exploration, social interaction and combat. After the introduction the booklet then outlines some tricks to help manage information flow as you fill both the player and DM roles. As well as the tricks Mr Gibson gives you I found writing an account of my adventure in first person present tense keeping pace with the action as I played a great help. Next pick your adventure, any published adventure you have not read; this booklet is in no way a stand-alone product. ESGA then has sections for each of the three pillars. The social and exploration pillars are handled in much the same way and I found the methods intuitive and easy to implement. Combat is easily adapted using the usual D&D 5e rules. Finally, the booklet gives you three different methods to ensure a single PC can survive encounters intended for a party of 4-6 PCs.

The following is a deliberately cryptic comment that hopefully will make sense once you have the booklet. I have noticed though is that while 3 is fast and easy to implement it effectively turns a -1 for an ability score modifier to a -6. After a couple of sessions I split the 2’s in two to replace 3 and that worked well. Unless your math obsessed though this probably will not matter to most players.

After more than 25 hours of play I found that solo gaming using a published adventure and ESGA works smoothly. Here’s a tip, if you pick one of the big hardback adventures from WOTC like Storm King’s Thunder or Out of the Abyss then the first chapter generally gives an overview of the adventure tells you who the real villains are and what they are up to. This takes away the fun of figuring it out for yourself so you might want to skip reading this chapter and start at the first adventure site.

At 10 pages and with its very informal tone ESGA is the kind of thing we are used to seeing for free in a fanzine like this or on someone’s website. However, the little systems in the booklet work well and enable you to play a published adventure by yourself as promised. The play experience is smooth and entertaining as you explore and develop the story much as you would playing with a group. With ESGA I will be playing a lot more D&D and getting more value out of the rest of my D&D collection. I certainly don’t begrudge Mr Gibson his $1.69, at that price ESGA is great value.

Review first appeared in RPG Review Fanzine.

This is excellent.

I've read and played with many solo adventuring systems. Lots of them are bloated full of tables that seem more concerned with quantity that quality and just generally create nonsense in a hope that you'll find a little bit of pattern in the chaos. This is not that. This is a simple, distilled, straightforward system for freeform solo play that gets to the point and does it well. If you're interested in dablling with freeform solo play in D&D I recommend trying this one out.

This is a must have for anyone wanting to "solo" published adventures! 5 stars!

This is a very straightforward and easy to understand document that really outlines a handy approach to running adventures on your own. Thank you!

While I just purchased it and have not had a chance to run it, I do like the overall setup. To me the pillar of exploration is the easiest to deal with through randomizing, with social intereaction being the hardest. I can get apst the majority of that.

My issue regarding solo gaming without a DM is encounters. The thoughts presented in this guide do a pretty good job with how to modify a character to allow them to use a published adventure as a solo. While there can be quirks in the process, it does give a great starting postion to see what works and what doesn't. The guide does a good job at giving options for rebalancing a character versus adjusting encounter difficulty.

I plan on using the guide for a short solo adventure using one of the Adventurer's league adventures this weekend and look forward to seeing how it works out. Overall it means a player must play smart. Hack and slash can get you killed, even with a rebalanced character, so player must learn when to fight and when to compromise or interact; no one is left to bail you out iof you fall. Solo adventuring can be deadly, but this guide does seem to give some great options for playing I hadn't considered. After I play through it I will adjust my review to suit as well as number of stars as wrranted. Good job thus far.

(edit after play)

Well I used this guide for a quick one shot over the weekend and have found that as described the guide did work as expected. I found that the PC setup as described worked well and did not take any longer than normal to do. Since this was just a test of the system I did not flesh out any PC traits and merely fleshed out the starting mechanics. My PC was a Monk Lvl 1. The action economy of the guide did work quite well for me as did the hit point modification. Being the sole PC it is a given that you are going to be targeted on EVERY attack.

One thing the guide did not address was specifically was movement during combat, but it did say character actions so i took movement as a part of the adjustments. It also didn't address OA due to movement and was curious to resolve this, but I simply allowed a 50/50 chance that movement out of the area adjacent resulted in an OA, and this worked quite well. Being a single PC means OA could quickly overwhelm a character since everything is focused on you.

Adjustments to numbers and attacks as specified also did what I expected, as did the downward adjustments at specific hit point thresholds. This did well to replicate a PC in a group going down thus limiting the the amount of actions in an encounter.

I was concerned about how adjusting actions in the initiative order would work but it was suprisingly easy to work with and helped visualize the flow of actions during a combat sequence as the PC moved about taking actions while the monsters did as well, knowing full well that a single PC could never take 3 actions in a 6 second span. I think it really was engaging to play like this. I didn't do much concerning exploration or social interaction for this initial, but moving forward I certainly will.

I do plan a few more one shots as I ease into those pillars, but overall if they work as well as the combat pillar recommendations did I think it will be just as enjoyable. I have thus adjusted my initial 4/5 rating to a 5/5 as a result of my experience this weekend. Well done Olly.

This is a truly innovative product. I tried playing solo through a one page dungeon and I was blown away by how user-friendly and intuitive the experience was, thanks to these mechanics. This entire guide is very well designed and the charts and tables provided really simplify social encounters and combat. This effectively makes solo play without a DM really accessible and downright fun. It doesn't take a lot of effort to understand these new mechanics either, which is a great relief for new players / DMs. Yes, DMs can also use this product, not only to playtest their adventure but also to organize their games and make them flow in a more logical and cohesive manner by adapting the logical way of thinking that this guide puts forward.

Great stuff, I totally recommend it!