A few days ago I posted an example of a beat chart, which included the difficulty of challenges based on the point in the story where they take place. It’s a series of prompts for gamemasters to build adventures on; not quite fill-in-the-blanks, but add your own characters and contexts to get the story to flow logically without railroading players into a single path to fulfilling their goals.

Those prompts also work for solo play, i.e. a journaling game. Write the first scene with your character. Roll dice or draw cards to face the provided difficulty. This is the fulfillment of the design principle of aiding busy schedules. I think the concept of a game that can be played alone or with a group is neat. Even cooler is the idea that you can do both, and write backstories and side adventures when you’re between sessions.

Journaling is going to be a major part of Ghostlight, and The Suspicion Engine in general. I’m not going to go on any more “I hate character sheets” diatribes. Instead, in the character creation section I’m going to go straight to “first, get out your journal…”. The same goes for the gamemaster section; this is how you set up your journal, what you need to put in it, and how you should update it. This is how the game works, that’s all. It’s not what most publishers have been doing for the past fifty years, sure, but in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not most publishers.