Dragonbane and a Missing GM - Three Ways to Keep the Game Alive
| Image by Free League |
[10 min read]
Most roleplaying games don’t fall apart because of bad systems or lack of enthusiasm. They fall apart for human reasons. Someone’s ill. Life gets in the way. The Game Master has to cancel. That quiet assumption — no GM means no play — is doing a lot of damage to our hobby.
This article exists because I don’t think that outcome is inevitable.
I’ve been spending time with Dragonbane, and one of the things I’ve come to appreciate is how deliberately it lowers the barrier to play - not just the system, but what's included. Right there in the core box you get a solo supplement, a short adventure booklet, and a ruleset that’s happy being bent a little. Here you'll find three ways to keep the session alive - either with just you, or your group.
- Two that come straight out of the Dragonbane box and emulate the GM role
- And one optional twist that flips the problem around and emulates the characters instead
None of these replace a great GM. That’s not the point.
They do something else that’s just as important: they protect the slot. They let you keep playing, learning, and imagining — even when the plan falls apart.
- The Obvious: Playing Solo with Alone in Deepfall Breach
- The Option: Use the Same Tools - but Play Co-op
- The Odd: Running a Dragonbane Adventure by Emulating the Players
- Keeping the Slot: What Will You Choose?
The Obvious: Playing Solo with Alone in Deepfall Breach
At its simplest, this is the most obvious response to a missing GM: you play anyway, on your own, using tools that emulate the GM’s role. You ask questions of the fiction, roll on tables for answers, and let uncertainty do the work that a human facilitator would normally handle.
That’s how I first used Alone in Deepfall Breach. I wasn’t trying to replace group play or prove anything about solo RPGs. I just wanted to learn Dragonbane without pressure.
Alone in Deepfall Breach gives you three things that matter when motivation is fragile and time is limited:
A clear structure — a patron, missions, and points of interest give you momentum without demanding prep.
Oracles you can trust — fortune tables for yes/no questions, and inspiration tables that combine action and tone in a way that sparks ideas rather than stalls play.
Just enough mechanical support — especially in combat — to reduce mental load without flattening tension.
When I reached a location that had been sparsely described by my patron, I didn’t invent the whole scene — I asked the oracle tables.
Are there inhabitants present on the plunging path? Fortune table roll: Yes
What are they? Random creature roll: Cultists
How many? Fortune table roll: Six (gulp!)
What are they doing? Inspiration table roll (twice): Protect, Prisoner
How would they react? Fortune table roll: Extremely Hostile
Each answer pushed the fiction forward without me second‑guessing whether I was “doing it right”. After this, I play out the scene using normal RPG rules and see what happens. You can see an example of this type of solo play in my game notes.
This is why solo play works so well as a fallback. When a session collapses, inertia is real. You don’t want to design content or solve organisational problems. You want to play as a first option. Alone in Deepfall Breach lets you sit down, roll, respond, and move forward within minutes.
With the least organisational friction, that’s the obvious path forward.
| Suggest not to serve this up to your solo protagonist Image by Free League |
The Option: Use the Same Tools - but Play Co-op
What I didn’t expect was how easily those same tools would support co‑op play.
One Sunday, I had to GM on short notice. I asked the group whether they wanted to play D&D or Dragonbane. They chose Dragonbane — partly since it is low overhead, partly because it was fresh.
There was friction: I hadn’t prepped anything.
Instead of scrambling, I suggested we try something different. We’d play Alone in Deepfall Breach together, co‑operatively, sharing the GM role.
What made this work is that Alone in Deepfall Breach already has a narrative scaffold. Discrete scenes. Clear prompts. Known and unknown locations. All we had to do was decide how to share authority.
We agreed to rotate scene leadership. Each player would take the lead for a point of interest, using the same fortune and inspiration tables I’d used in solo play. I ran the opening scene, largely to demonstrate the flow: when we don’t know the answer, we ask the tables and then interpret the result together.
The first real scene was slow, as everyone adjusted. The second scene is where it clicked.
That location wasn’t described by the patron. One of the players had to do the heavy lifting: rolling to determine what the place was, whether it was inhabited, what risks were present. He did it live, in front of the table, interpreting results on the fly. The rest of us reacted as players.
- What is the next room? Area table roll: An abandoned outpost
- Was the outpost inhabited? Fortune table roll: Yes
- Were the original inhabitants still there? Fortune table roll: Extreme no
- So what lingered instead? Creature table: A dragon
- Is it powerful? Fortune table roll: No - thankfully - weakened
That combination suggested a sick Lindworm trapped somewhere it shouldn’t be, blocking our progress forward. Nothing in the text told us that. The oracle didn’t author the fiction — it constrained it just enough to make our imaginations engage.
| This was our Lindworm, in happier times Image by Free League |
By the end of the session — about four hours — we’d played through five scenes. Everyone had taken a turn leading. The flow improved dramatically as we went. People started suggesting likelihoods before rolls, nudging probabilities, shaping the fiction collaboratively. We had a satisfying conclusion that was driven by the dice and our shared imagination.
It felt liberating.
No one had prepped. No one was “the GM”. Yet the game had momentum, tension, and coherence. The alternative that day wasn’t a different RPG — it was no game at all. Against that benchmark, this was an easy win.
I should note the context. This worked especially well because the group was full of experienced GMs. The others had limited solo experience, but once they understood the loop — ask, roll, interpret, move on — they ran with it. In a different group, you might suggest that one person stays the lead facilitator, at least initially.
The key insight is this: co‑op play is much easier when the game already has a strong solo scaffold. Without the structure of Alone in Deepfall Breach, this would have been harder. With it, the experience felt natural surprisingly quickly.
Between solo and co‑op, Dragonbane gave us two ways to keep playing when the GM couldn’t make it — both by emulating the GM role, just distributed differently.
The third option flips that problem around entirely.
The Odd: Running a Dragonbane Adventure by Emulating the Party
Instead of asking, “How do we replace the GM?”, the third option asks a different question:
What if the GM is present — but the players aren’t?
In this solo mode, you run a traditional, prewritten Dragonbane adventure, but you emulate the player-characters rather than the world. You know what’s behind the door. You’ve read the text. The surprise comes not from the adventure, but from how the characters behave.
The tool that unlocked this for me is a one‑page system called Triple-O.
| Image by Cezar Capacle |
Triple-O is designed to answer a deceptively simple question: what would this character do? It frames every meaningful decision around three possibilities:
The Obvious — the most likely action, given the character’s traits.
The Option — a reasonable alternative.
The Odd — something unexpected or out of character.
Probabilities are assigned on a six-sided die weighted heavily towards the Obvious, slightly towards the Option, and least towards the Odd. Then roll to see which one happens. It is simple, elegant, and the rules fit on one page. Watch the designer demonstrating Triple-O in this video to go deeper.
I tried this while running Riddermound, one of the short adventures included in the Dragonbane box. I already knew the scenario. Normally, that would drain all tension from solo play.
Instead, the tension shifted.
In one scene, my elven hunter Orla was scouting ahead and caught the scent of goblin in a chamber. Her character traits made her hatred of goblinkind explicit. Her character sheet literally reads "Nightkin such as orcs and goblins are evil and need to be fought".
The Obvious action was clear: seek out and kill the goblin.
The Option was caution: withdraw and report back.
The Odd was restraint: attempt contact, interrogation, or even cooperation.
The odds favoured violence.
The dice agreed. Orla dispatched the goblin mercilessly, removing a potential NPC with some information to provide. You can see how the whole adventure plays out in my play notes. But beware, there are spoilers for the Dragonbane adventure booklet!
But what if the Odd outcome was chosen by the dice?
Suddenly I would have had a different problem to solve — not tactical, but fictional. Why would this character hesitate? What just changed? A single roll can reframe the scene, introduce an unexpected NPC interaction, and plant the seed for character growth that wasn’t in the text and wasn’t planned.
Running Triple-O across a full party adds a layer of controlled chaos that feels uncannily like real table play. Different characters advocate for different courses of action, based on their motivations. The system resolves whose voice carries weight in a way that mirrors real group dynamics surprisingly well. One tweak to the Triple-O one-page rules I made - resolve the prioritisation of the different outcomes based on which character succeeds on opposed Persuasion checks.
On the way to the Riddermound, the party met a random encounter of battered adventurers fleeing the dungeon, starving and desperate. One character wanted them gone. Another wanted to barter. A third wanted answers.
We rolled.
The outcome wasn’t written. The consequences weren’t balanced. But the result felt earned. The party took them in, traded food for knowledge, and picked up a new complication: a dead dwarf whose body needed retrieving before any deeper exploration.
None of that exists in the printed adventure.
This isn’t the first option I’d recommend to most players. It requires a willingness to rationalise unexpected behaviour, and some tolerance for mechanical overhead when running multiple characters. But for GMs with shelves of unread adventures, it’s an amazing way to experience them without needing to organise the group.
You already know the story.
You just don’t know the party anymore.
| Running four characters solo is not for the faint-hearted - but very rewarding |
Keeping the Slot: What Will You Choose?
Between these three approaches, you have real options the next time a session starts to wobble:
Play solo, and stay connected to the game with no scheduling friction. Dragonbane is great for this.
Keep the group dynamic and play co-operatively, using a similar solo structure with scaffolding, and share the GM load across the table.
Or take the odd route: run a prewritten adventure and let the characters surprise you instead with Triple-O or another player-focused emulator.
Let's replace the quiet assumption that a missing GM means a cancelled game. That if a group falls apart you need to find some other form of entertainment.
Once you know these options exist, the emotional weight of a last-minute cancellation changes. The question stops being “So… what do I do now?” and becomes “Which version of play fits tonight?”
Sometimes the answer will still be “let’s reschedule.” That’s fine. But other times, the missing GM becomes an invitation — to explore the system more deeply, to try a different mode of play, or simply to keep the rhythm of play alive when it would otherwise stall.
If nothing else, I hope this leaves you feeling prepared.
The next time the GM can’t make it, you don’t have to shrug and go home.
You can still play.
And occasionally, the option you reach for in a pinch turns out to be the one you keep.
Dashmeister
| Image by Free League |
This blog is written by me, with a little help from AI editing for clarity and tone. All ideas, feelings, and memories are mine.
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