Thousand Year Old Vampire (TYOV) is a solo journaling RPG made by Tim Hutchings. I happened upon it on a Dicebreaker video about beautiful games. And it really is beautiful.
The premise is simple: your character starts as a person living at some point centuries ago, and an inciting incident turns them into a vampire. As the centuries pass (maybe they do become a TYOV), they lose parts of who they were and become something altogether new. This happens as a series of writing prompts determined by dice rolls. Prompts change the character by creating new memories, resources, relationships, skills, and marks. Or forcing the character to lose them.
This is expressed by turning the prompts into entries in the character’s journal. As they live far more than they can remember, writing becomes a way to keep track of their increasingly malleable identity.
I first played this over a couple weekends, sharing a character with my girlfriend, but it’s perfectly playable—nay, intended to be played—solo.
We started as Kjartan Singing Blade, a young viking chieftain who was doing pretty well for himself. His hall presided over a verdant valley in Northumberland, and his sister Revna—a seeress—had his back. Over his 29-prompt-long journey, he wore many names, caused much pain, and suffered a great deal himself. He met other immortals and lost things dear to him. His beloved sister reduced to a vague echo of a memory.
My second playthrough followed pacifist-zen-monk-turned-vampire Yozo through the Sengoku period to the mid 20th century. The process was conducted entirely within a Google doc, which I decided to make available here:
