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1 Introduction and Overview

ALONe--which gets its name from an early prototype I called A Lonesome October
Night--is a single-player role playing game (RPG) engine that focuses on narrative. ALONe’s
system helps you maintain internal consistency even while taking advantage of the most
important thing that a solo game offers: no feet to tread on.
In ALONe, all characters, abilities, and stories are equally valid. Whether you wish to
play a street urchin in a steampunk nightmare or an immortal demi-god leading an army from
out of shadow against the lords of Avalon, the same rules will apply. Without other player
characters (PCs) of differing power levels, or players who have different assumptions and
desires, ALONe can easily handle any situation.
However, to keep things interesting, ALONe allows you to impose randomness,
challenge, and the risk of not only failure, but of qualified and costly success. In order to do
that, a game of ALONe relies on the interaction of a handful of key concepts, and a deck of the
GameMaster’s Apprentice cards, as explained below.

The Game: A Lonesome October Night

The basic gameplay of ALONe consists of building characters and elements of
the world from Descriptors, and then playing through narrative scenes called Beats and calm
periods of Downtime by making decisions, drawing cards to randomize outcomes, and
managing a limited resource called Revision Points to change the story when you want to
assume direct control.
By default, ALONe gives equal weight to all things, so you can use the same system to
deal with everything from romance to combat. No given kind of scene will slow down the story,
or require more or less mechanical complexity. However, if you prefer a more traditional kind of
game, you can also plug ALONe into any other RPG; you can then use your preferred game
for task resolution and mechanical actions, while relying on ALONe to fill in any gaps and
generate new characters, quests, and story content, replacing the traditional Game Master
(GM).

The Engine: The GameMaster’s Apprentice

The GameMaster’s Apprentice (GMA) is a deck of cards that, on their own, provide
character traits, story seeds, random events, and over a dozen other helpful tools. One of
those things is the core of a solo game engine that runs the inner workings of ALONe.
You can read all about this and other possibilities in the instructions for the cards, which
are available for free on their store pages on DriveThruRPG, and are also included as a file
along with ALONe’s PDF (as is a half-length deck of printer-friendly cards from the GMA’s
genre-neutral base deck). However, in brief, ALONe makes special use of the engine built into
the GMA deck to generate inspiration, prompts, and the answers to questions you ask, in order