Mountaintop Isolation

One of my favourite radio shows from the dim and distant past was Nightfall, creepy and disturbing stories of all sorts that used the power of radio and imagination to tell terrifying tales. The series often explored themes of isolation, loneliness and confusion with protagonists unsure what was going on or who they could trust. Characters were plunged into unfamiliar situations where the normal conveniences of life were out of reach. I’ve always enjoyed these stories as they tell us about a world outside our normal lives where the mysterious becomes tangible. This is a big part of the reason why I enjoy role playing games of all sorts - they give you a chance to live in other worlds, unchained from reality, where anything can happen.

Recently I listened to some episodes of A Game of One’s Own where the host Maddy Searle plays through a solo journalling game named Mountaintop Isolation. Maddy is a very engaging storyteller and her play-through thoroughly hooked my interest in trying one of these games out.

Given that many of them are based on the “Wretched & Alone” system, its no surprise that the tone and setting are usually pretty bleak! As the introduction to the game says

You have been invited to a ski cabin weekend with your old high school friends. It is late at night by the time you find your way high up on the mountain to the remote cabin, and you are the first to arrive. You fall asleep by the crackling fire you built with the few logs available inside. When you wake up, the fire has died down to embers and you hear a whistling noise outside. A glance out the window reveals a whiteout blizzard that has created 4- to 6-foot drifts of snow. There is no cell phone reception, and the landline in the cabin appears to no longer work…

I was immediately drawn into the character’s situation - why are they there? how do they handle the increasingly bleak outlook? what do they discover in the cabin? The huge appeal of GM-less play is that, as a player, you can be surprised by your own imagination. A prompt or two can lead to twists and turns that would never have appeared if you had set out from the start to plan the story. GM-less play gives us a chance to explore our own imagination and experience a story exactly tailored to how we think.

Mechanics

The game is played as a series of days during which various things happen (mostly pretty grim!). The process is quite simple - each day a d6 is rolled and the result dictates how many cards are drawn from a shuffled, jokerless deck. An index of suits and values assign meaning to each of the cards - water pipes have frozen, part of the cabin is destroyed, the weather worsens or improves and so on. Kings and Aces have special meaning with the former being somewhat of a death knell, while the latter gives hope and, maybe, a chance of escape.

To represent your character’s mental state, a tower of blocks (think Jenga) is built at the start of the game and at various points you are instructed to pull blocks from it. If the tower falls, you are lost to despair!

First Impressions

I like the idea of these games. When playing Ironsworn, Starforged or using the Mythic Gamemaster Emulator to run through solo adventures in other systems, I tend to veer towards bleaker, more desperate situations. Desperation brings tension and often conflict, without which there is often no story to tell! I like the mechanic and while I’m not sure how much longevity a particular game might have (given there are a finite number of choices and you’re likely to get familiar with most of the prompts pretty fast), it would be fairly easy to adapt the system to any situation - an astronaut floating untethered in space, a marooned pirate alone on a tiny island, a desperate engineer in the cab of a runaway steam train. I love the concept of dramatising those moments and being with the characters through their struggle. A well written “Wretched & Alone” game could let you do just that.