Blue Moon Aurora
Roleplaying and More
Duet Roleplaying
Duet roleplaying is where you have one narrator and one player and is the area of roleplaying that I can safely claim to be a definitive expert on. I have been running and playing in duet campaigns for over fifteen years and have probably been involved with more duet campaigns than any other roleplayer out there. I have also written and discussed the topic a lot over the last few years. My first real attempt at discussing and analyzing duets was the Guide to Solo Campaigns on the WotC forums. This began as a project by Illion the Red (Doug Lohse) and myself but expanded to include the thoughts and ideas of many other excellent GMs. HeavensThunderHammer took upon himself to condense this uber thread into a Word document of 70 pages:
Expeditious Retreat Press is the only RPG company that directly supports duet roleplaying. Expeditious Retreat Press has an entire line of one-on-one adventures that is highly regarded, but I can't speak of their quality as I personally haven't purchased any of them. That's just because I don't usually buy adventures and reflects no opinion on the product. You will notice that this company uses 'one-on-one' for its term for this type of roleplaying, actually, the industry in general uses 'one-on-one', but I do not like this term. It sounds either kinky or confrontational, thus I used to use 'solo', but there are genuine 'solo' products in the RPG industry like Kenzerzo's SoloQuest (basically, like the classic Choose Your Own Adventure series), additionally, most computer RPGs are in fact 'solo' adventures - just one player. Thus I coined the term duet. I think this better fits the nature of this style of play which is a cooperative, almost musical, style of play.
What follows are some of the writings I have done on duet roleplaying and they are well worth the read if you are interested in this rewarding style of play.
Duet Articles
I have written a few articles on the subject of duet roleplaying that have been, or were to be, published in various e-zines. With these articles I did most of the writing, but am indebted to Michelle and Doug Lohse who helped make these articles as good as they are - and they are quite good. The first article was published just before Knowledge Arcana collapsed and the second article was published in the inaugural issue of Phoenix Lore. I also did another article for Phoenix Lore that never came out as the magazine seems to have died. All three are here for your perusal:
Duet Gaming Basics: Guide to One-on-One Roleplaying
Duets: RPGNet Column
In late 2009 I started a monthly column at RPGNet about duets that can be found here and discussed here. I have to thank Shannon Appelcline over at RPGNet for letting me do the column and editing them. I also have to thank all those who have read and commented on the columns, because really that is the main reason for doing the column. For ease of reference here are direct links to the columns:
Duets #7: Romance (same article as Duet Campaigns: Romantic Encounters)
