Investigation Check: The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox

For this Investigation Check, we’ll be doing a quick review of The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox and its follow up, The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox Part 2: The Toolbox Expanded.

---

This was the first solo resource I started using. Even though I have since moved on to using the Mythic Game Master Emulator, I would still recommend it for someone just getting started with D&D Solo gaming.

The book gets you into the mechanics used by this solo system pretty rapidly, and you’ll be gaming before you know it.

Pros

• A great resource if you’re just staring out with Solo gaming and D&D.
• Plenty of random tables to generate a variety of random encounters for character levels 1 to 15.
• Once you have a basic understanding of the core mechanics of D&D, you’ll be off on your own solo adventures utilizing this book.

Cons

• Honestly this really isn’t that big of a problem, however it relies on you having access to the D&D Monster Manual and Volo’s Guide to Monsters if you want to get the monster statistics from the creature tables via the page references there. This wasn’t an issue for me, as I had those books, however I would have liked if on the Source column for each creature in the creature tables, if perhaps it listed creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules. However, I do believe most of the creatures ARE from the basic rules, so you could easily look up their statistics there.

---

---

As Paul notes in the first chapter:

So, what about this book then? Well, the idea
with this is to provide a broader experience.
Within these pages you will find tables and
tools to provide a more detail-rich game of solo
D&D. This book simply builds on the first,
providing more generators, whole new random
non-combat encounter tables, new systems for
playing solo, and many other resources.

This book introduces a new 6d12 method for generating adventure elements on the fly that is actually quite interesting. However, I never actually got around to using it. By then, I was using my own techniques that worked just fine for me.

I highly recommend this video by one of the many RPG YouTube folks I follow, Ginny Di, which covers utilizing this very system for solo game play.

Pros

• If you enjoy and find value in the first book in this series, you’ll surely enjoy this expansion on the toolbox.

Cons

• No Cons really, I just think I personally outgrew this system and developed my own techniques that I preferred to use by the time I decided to dig deeper here.