SATAH: Welcome to Folio, an actual play podcast about solo and epistolary TTRPGs. I'm your host, Satah, and I'm showcasing multiple possible experiences of self-paced games by inviting guests to play them alongside me so I can compile our stories together. You can support the show financially at patreon.com/foliopod, or join as a free member to get access to the bonus podcast feed. This week on there, I will be posting the edited, audio-only version of December's livestream of Peach Garden Games’ Into the Glacier.
This is episode one of our games of Alone Among the Stars, “a tabletop roleplaying game about exploring space and experiencing wondrous sights” by Takuma Okada.
The other cosmonauts blasting off with me are Jess Levine and Dusty. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about them between planets at the break.
Alone Among the Stars is inarguably one of the most influential solo games of all time, even just looking at the number of how many hacks it's spawned. The very first game on the show, Michael Klamerus' Accomplice, is one of those hacks, and I feel safe assuming there will be dozens more in our future because it really has just been that inspiring to that many people. Playing it, it's pretty easy to see why.
In Alone Among the Stars, you are traversing through space and landing on planets to see what you find there. At every planet, you lay out a die roll's worth of standard playing cards, and those serves as prompts for what you find. The suits are types of discoveries, like plants or ruins, and the values are locations, such as on a glacier or deep underground. The only other mechanic really is a die roll that determines how difficult something is to find. These three simple pieces of information combine so elegantly and evocatively, it is no wonder that it's inspired as many other games as it has.
I will note there isn't a unanimous interpretation between the three players here of how to use that die roll– of how difficult something was to find– but no matter where it's employed, it always adds something to the story, which is exactly what, in my opinion as a certified Tables Freak, a rollable table should do.
With that, finish your checks, strap in, take a deep breath. We're launching in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, liftoff.
GAME: PLANET ONE
JESS: Okay, let's do some space travel!
DUSTY: Let's go to the final frontier, which is space. Allegedly.
SATAH: Let's go to space! [Laughs]
DUSTY: Even though we're traveling through stars, so is space truly the final frontier, or is it just a step along the way?
JESS: I actually really love solo space travel stories. I… for a long time I've done these, like, midnight Twitter threads about, like, a solo space explorer in first person and I– I don't usually comment on them, especially during the day. I just, like– they’re just a little secret surprise for people up at that time. I guess it's now a secret between you and me, listener, but. Yeah! So it's a very familiar setting to me, so I'm really excited.
DUSTY: This is actually maybe my first experience doing a solo game like this. I'm very adept at just talking and such, so it's not going to be too hard. I'm very excited. I love sci-fi stories, space stories, and the idea of just getting to explore planets is truly just lovely and fascinating for me.
JESS: I've played ALONE AMONG THE DERELICTS, which is a hack of Alone Among the Stars about exploring derelict spaceships by CLAYMORE, the person who made FIST. It's a fantastic game. But I've never played Alone Among the Stars itself, which is really funny considering how into solo space exploration I am as a general concept. But that just means I'm really excited to play it here.
SATAH: The first time I played Alone Among the Stars, I played the two-player version, Together Among the Stars with a friend as a… prequel? Uh… we were playing a game of galactic, and we were all very into our game of galactic, and so we had a bunch of spin-off games with different groups of people, and a friend and I did a prequel game in Together Among the Stars as…  oh, ah, probably… spacefaring… probably had to do with the space between. But that memory is somewhat lost to time, which feels fitting, in many ways. [Cards being shuffled]
DUSTY: I haven't thought too much about this.
SATAH: I haven't thought very much about the circumstances of my journey.
JESS: I haven't really decided who I am and what I'm doing, because the game doesn't really have you do that up front.
SATAH: Which is somewhat unusual for me. I like to sort of have a grounding of a character with a goal or a group that they're working for, but I'm just gonna try and hop into it the way that the game presents itself, and I'm really excited to see how it plays.
DUSTY: I imagine I'm just a solo space, um… not hitchhiker, because I have my own vehicle, but like a space nomad, like a cowboy drifting around the plains, except the plains are different planets. That kind of deal.
JESS: I'm very tempted to go with my usual solo space explorer on some sort of civil exploration mission, kind of like Star Trek The Next Generation, but what if you were alone and kind of melancholy, but I'm gonna see where the random takes me, and we'll figure out if I fall back into that comfort zone.
So 1d6. [Die clattering] Two. Okay, two things on my starting planet, which means… oh yes, cards. I'm gonna need cards. So. [Cards being shuffled] We're gonna deal two cards face down.
DUSTY: So I'm rolling the dice. Two. Two cards are gonna describe what I find.
SATAH: [Die clattering] So our first planet has one thing to discover.
JESS: And to discover something, I roll a six-sided die to figure out how I discovered it, and then flip the card. Okay, here we go. [Die rolling] That is a three. I come upon it suddenly, and it is… a three of clubs. “Plants and other immobile forms of life” “by a gentle river.”
It's really interesting to me immediately that I come upon something so seemingly gentle so suddenly, right? Like it's a calm, natural environment, it's a plant, but I come upon it very, very suddenly. And I think I want that to… be more about the thing itself than about how I come upon this river. So for whatever reason, I'm here, I'm following this river maybe. I'm already picturing at the very least a scientist, someone whose goal is to catalog and- and collect and get information on these planets. And so I'm going along this river looking for sea life, wildlife, vegetation, everything, you know?
And I– at one moment… [Gasp of realisation] it's an algae bloom. That's what it is. It's like a very… I have no idea how fast an algae bloom is in real life. That could be something that takes a season, for all I know, but on this particular planet, it happens very quickly.
And so I'm here at this gentle river– like I would say, even, I'm sitting down taking notes and just documenting the smallest little life forms. And then [Soft explosive sound] we just see like red bloom and run down this river faster than the current itself, turning the blue red. And it just continues to flow like that– little, like, bits of algae sort of moving around, giving the whole thing this reddish tint. And I put down my notebook and I'm just stunned for the moment.
It is a physical notebook, despite being a space traveler. Maybe- maybe I'm nostalgic in that way. And I have to go back to my ship and dictate it all into an electronic system to transmit back to whoever has sent me on this mission. But I think when I'm in the field, when I can, when I can sit down and watch the algae bloom, it's a physical notebook that I calmly set beside myself and just sort of watch the aftermath and the flowing algae.
Yeah, that's a nice start. There we go.
SATAH: Rolled a five, so I spotted it while I'm resting. That card is a four of hearts. Hearts are “ruins: mysterious obelisks, vine covered temples, abandoned dwellings for people bigger than you, a wrecked spaceship, et cetera.” And a four is “in a steep canyon.”
Alright. So while I'm resting on this very first planet, I spy a ruin of some kind in a canyon.
So I think I'm actually going to make this an origin story. Like, this is the planet that I live on and I'm doing some sort of job… just, just doing like day labour? And I go on my lunch break and I'm chilling by this canyon because the temperature is much cooler over there. And I go a little bit further in than anyone else because I just need a break from all the people and the noise.
And I see… a crashed spaceship. I'm going to go exactly with one of the examples that they give of a wrecked spaceship. But I think it's, it's big. It's like a… no, it's, it's not that it's big. It's just, it's a ship that doesn't look like anything I've ever seen. And I think space travel is fairly normalized in this world, but to the– that– in– to the extent that it's, it's like a commuting thing. You know, it's like, if you were just used to seeing a bus all the time and then you saw a tank for the first time and you were like, “What the fuck is that used for? It has the shape of some things that I understand. It's got wheels. There's a place inside for a person, obviously. But I don't understand how it possibly relates to the thing that I'm familiar with.”
And so I see this wrecked spaceship in this canyon. And I think because it's a ruin, it's old. Yeah, there's, there's like… fauna have started to nest in it and that kind of thing.
And I am scrambling down this- this- this cliff side and I am investigating it and just like– it's like something just snaps in me that I'm like, all of a sudden, very aware of how big the universe is. And that I have been living my life on this planet, taking random jobs, just sort of getting along. And seeing this ship starts to wake me up.
I think the thing that really instigates me is that I go to share this with some of my team, like my coworkers, and I'm probably, I'm probably– friendly people. Like I work with them fairly regularly and I'm like, “There's a big crazy ship down there. Y'all want to go see?” And they just have like, a lack of curiosity.
Some of them have a lack of curiosity. Some of them have a smugness that’s kind of like a, “Okay, so there's a ship? Like, you've never seen a ship before?” or whatever. And I realise that I am alone in this incredible feeling that I'm having that the universe is so big and that I've seen so little of it.
And so I start my journey!
I think… I get the ship- I get the wrecked ship hauled to like a garage and– I'm not going to fly off in it, but I do think that it deserves to be, like, repaired and investigated. And talking with the person at the garage, they're like, “Oh my god, I haven't seen anything like this in so long. This looks like the first generation of this type of ship.”
And they're talking about it and I'm like, “Yeah, you should keep learning more about that. I need to go and see where this could have come from.”
And they… give me… they manage to extract some navigational data logs from it that are, like, super corrupted and not very helpful, but they do indicate places where the ship may have landed at some points, or at least areas of the galaxy that it spent some time in. And so I'm going to go and investigate some of those places and see what I can find and what drew this person here. Or just work backwards like, “Hey, this person ended up here. Maybe if I work backwards, I will want to end up here as well.” You know?
DUSTY: [Die rolling] So on the three or a four for this game, I come upon this planet suddenly. I think what this is, is… I kind of like this idea that I'm, like, a traveling, like, space cowboy, essentially. Yeah, let's go space cowboy. What does that mean? That just kind of means I'm a wanderer, a person with no home. And maybe I'm flying through a sector that either has no, uh, like official maps or coordinates or logging about it. Or even more mysterious, like, I'm coming upon a planet that shouldn't be there according to all the logs and maps.
And I feel like the ship I have is something that used to be a more professional, maybe corporate-esque ship. And now it's getting converted to essentially like an RV.
And so I come upon this planet and I need to find out what's here since it's not logged, it's not tracked anywhere. Let's see.
[Card flipping] So my first discovery as I descend onto this planet is ten of clubs. So the clubs stand for “plants and other immobile forms of life” and ten is “on a cliff face”.
How I think this comes upon is that I'm descending and… I see what from above may look like a lush, like– a mesa, but incredibly lush with life. And when I land, I land below it just so I could see a bit better its shading from whatever source of light this planet provides, sun, two suns, three suns you could say.
And I realized that the cliff face and this mesa is actually all organic. It's all trees, all bush, it's all vines that have grown as the thickness of tree trunks.
And I walk up to it and see that there is even more just bristling life beneath it. All these weird insects, these weird, like, mushrooms that are, like, floating off from these vines, these trees, leaves.
And I'm trying to grab onto it to see if I could climb and it doesn't give way, but even though these look like normal vines and such, it feels strange to put hands on it because there's some kind of buzzing, vibrating deal with it.
I think I get onto my ship and try to go to the top and as I'm descending, like flying over it from like a lower height– um, there's a word for it, but– I'm looking below and not only is the mesa part– like the top of it, also, it looks like a canopy, but there's definitely things moving, whether it be the trees itself or the– there's something in it, but the top of this seems to be pure canopy. Maybe that would not even be easy to land on.
And there's both excitement, but also fear, because what does that even mean? So I think I will keep flying on my ship, low to the ground. And seeing that perhaps like this is kind of a spot of concentrated life, concentrated trees, vegetation, and that it's more like the rest of the plains and such are perhaps more rocky, more mountainous.
JESS: So second card, let's go ahead and roll 1d6. [Die rolling] That's a four. I also come upon it suddenly. I'm experiencing revelation.
That is an ace of diamonds. That seems like an auspicious one. That's not an ace of diamonds. That's an ace of spades. That feels auspicious, also, in different ways. Um, so spades are “natural phenomena.” Examples given include “huge crystal rock formations–” [Correcting herself] “Crystal formations.” Crystal, rock, similar. “Mirages, vividly colored lightning, et cetera.” And an ace is “in a field taller than me.”
What does it mean for a field to be taller than me? Are we talking about like a field of crops and, like, the corn is above my head? Or, you know, what if I interpret this very generously, very sci-fi-y, very Star Trek and Stargatey as I am wont to and say whatever this natural phenomena is, it expresses itself as a field. An energy field, a cloud, whatever. Um, and it's taller than me and I come upon it suddenly. Interesting.
So maybe it's the same day that I've experienced this algae bloom. And I'm heading back to the ship to do that cataloging that I– that- that data entry that I have to do because I use my notebook. And I'm retreading ground that I've already been on. And so I'm not really paying as much attention. I'm distracted and in my own thoughts. I might as well already be back on the ship mentally.
And so I hardly notice the first little signs that this is happening, the changes in the air. If I had been paying attention, there would have been some more warning signs, a electrostatic hum, some crackling in the air. And then, just like the algae, but this time the, like… blue-black of dusk splitting into this electric blue as little, like, bolts of- of lightning, like as if it might be arcing down from the sky, but it's connecting between points that are just in a field around me. Just these tiny– almost as if the air was- was static shocking itself. And it's, it's all around me.
And I look up because I'm staring like– eyes seeing through the ground in front of me, just watching my step as I- as I'm elsewhere. And then one of those shocks hits my suit. I've got a fully helmeted suit on, just being careful. I don't really know exactly how habitable this planet is for humans. And it zaps my suit and I'm stunned. And then I look up and I see this, like, localized miniature lightning storm that is reaching up into the, like, sky above me. It is not just taller than me, but like, I can't imagine I could climb out of it, even if there was somewhere to climb on this open plane.
And so I have a moment of just once again being wowed. I signed up for a mission like this in part because I love this sort of phenomena. I love taking it in and be– letting myself be amazed. And then it hits my suit again. And I get the first little, like, warning alarm about, like, an electric overload in one of the circuits. And I'm like, “Okay! I do not know enough about the safety of this place to be without a functioning suit.”
And I start to, like, pick up the pace a little bit and see if there's like an– if the edges of the field are anywhere nearby? But it's taller and wider than me, and so it turns from like a quick walk to a sprint as there keep being these little zaps. And it's not painful, but I just– I'm so worried that any one of them could be what, like, shorts my suit.
And I'm bolting, running. And then just as suddenly as it came, it's gone. There's just no storm anymore. And I just stop. That's so cool and surprising in and of itself. It's almost like this little gentle prodding not to be lost in my own thoughts. And I calm my breathing and I still keep a brisk pace, now, because who knows, that could happen again. I don't know what caused it. And I'd rather be back on my ship and maybe get my ship out of here. Do my data entry in orbit before it gets hit by an electrical storm. But… I still– I think I'm glad that I was in it. It was so cool and I wish I could stay to study exactly why that happens here.
But that's not my job. I come, I catalog. I note what I can in the time that I'm here and I move on. So I climb into my cockpit, slide it forward, lock and latch and take off. And as I'm flying away, I look down and I see a bunch of little localized pockets of those– those storms. This was not an isolated incident.
And I think maybe someday I'll come back to Orion 6 and try and figure out what was happening here.
DUSTY: [Card flipping] Interesting. This next one is the king of diamonds. So diamond is more about living beings and maybe similar to what I found. And kings, I find “floating in the air.” That's really interesting.
I think as I'm flying away from this kind of mesa of trees and organic life and such like that, I am coming upon, uh… kind of almost like the reverse of what I just found, where it seems to be, instead of a mesa starting from the ground, I see there's this formation of stone, like, but it's now floating in the air, almost like a castle in the sky kind of motif. Like, with green vegetation, almost going down to the ground. Just barely, almost as if it's like a rope ladder, but it's just a thin line connecting that to this thing, which, like, is now hundreds of feet in the air.
And as I go to get closer, I see that… this is even stranger to perceive. It’s almost where the rock ends and meets the air is actually filled with water. It's this, like, dome of water that is above this floating rock. And I blink a couple times just to confirm what I'm seeing. Not that it's the strangest thing I've seen in my travels, but it's definitely abnormal.
And as I get closer, I see that there are… fish-like beings, fish-like animals, maybe sentient creatures, kind of getting almost to the edge of the water. And the water is holding it in. It doesn't seem to be moving or rippling from the outside. Perhaps it's in the actual dome. Perhaps there's some kind of technology or some kind of something more mystical holding it in place that's hard to understand or comprehend. And these creatures that look like between, um… sharks that I've seen on other planets, just longer fish, some like mammalian whales and stuff.
It seems to be, like, aquariums, which is something that in my travels I haven't experienced in person, just from the planets I’ve been to, but I’ve heard stories, I’ve seen videos, I've heard all these tales of aquariums where people would gather fish to be seen in the museum, except this seems to be a place.
And whether this globe of water is there to protect them from below, or below is vice versa, which is why it's been set up this high, hard to say.
And as I get closer, I see that a lot of these fish and such are starting to converge close to where my ship is kind of floating, you know, a hundred feet away to keep distance. And I see something bigger behind them, huge, starting to fly through it. And I think that spooks me. And I set the ship for a course to go back into space, as I don't want to learn what that was, or if it had ill intentions towards me as I was encroaching on its land.
When I leave a planet, I believe I give it a name. Is that correct? “Each time you complete a planet, give it a number or a name and find a new planet.” I did not experience as much as this planet to give it a good name, but… I… maybe let's call it XT, like, for “cross terrain” or something like that. That's what I will put down in my notes or my logs for myself.
I don't think I put these cards back, so I'm going to go ahead and roll for my next planet.
BREAK
SATAH: The gods of randomness decided that you wouldn't hear from me very much in this episode, which makes me very grateful to have two incredible guests to, you know, make the show for me.
Jess Levine is a designer of award-winning TTRPGs, musician, and sci-fi author with work in Clarkesworld and also in a recent anthology you should pick up, either physically or digitally, Embodied Exegesis: Transfeminine Cyberpunk Futures. I've had the pleasure of editing a bunch of Jess' work and there are simply few people who are as satisfying to have deep-diving, big and small picture, joyfully nitpicking conversations about game philosophy and the utility of authorial voice with. You can get a sense of the full scope of her work at jessfrom.online and find her games at jumpgategames.itch.io. Make sure to follow her on Twitter and Bluesky at jessfromonline so you won't miss the launch of a very, very exciting crowdfunder in April, as well as the unrelated release of the new edition of her satirical sci-fi skirmish storytelling game PLANET FIST another time this year.
[Laughing] You should see how much I'm gesturing as I say this. It's really out of control.
Dusty is a game designer, producer, and podcaster-about-town. Their gentle enthusiasm during the process of putting these episodes together has been hugely uplifting to me and I am so excited to direct you towards their games work, which spans an impressive array of genres and includes such evocative titles as Lesbian Werewolf Crime Fighters, Trans Vampire Cowboys, and Dracula Owes You Money. [Laughing] Sorry, that last one really gets me. Check all of that and more out at FromDustToDice.itch.io. You can find them on Twitter and Bluesky as dustehill, which is D-U-S-T-E-H-I-L-L, and hear them in what I am assured is the gayest award winning Pathfinder podcast in the multiverse, Goblets and Gays.
As for me, I'm Satah. and you are currently listening to my show. Thank you! You can find more of my work at gaygothvibes.online, which will direct you to some TTRPGs I've made and also to some music that I've made, including the EP I released on the last day of 2024, it’s really only, which I've gathered is a wonderful way to spend about 10 minutes a little worried about me! [Laughing] It is– I think it's pretty good. I think it's pretty good. It is sad. What are you gonna do? You know? You gotta, you gotta write the stuff. What?
Uh, there's a segue brewing. What is it? So, I was just talking about how the music was sad, and it's something about, like, sadness being based on, uh, something about Earth, living here being difficult. So let's instead be in space. By getting back to the game.
I'm not gonna workshop that segue any further. That's the final draft. That's the final draft of that segue and I'm gonna stand by it.
Let's get back to Alone Among the Stars. My god.
GAME: PLANET TWO
JESS: Here we go. Planet two. Let's see how many things we're gonna find. [Die rolling] Six! Okay. Busy planet this time. [Six cards being dealt]
SATAH: So, planet two. [Die clattering] Oh my goodness. Another one.
DUSTY: Oh, okay! So this one has four. So four cards for my next discovery.
JESS: And we roll a die and we come upon the first one. It's arduous to get to. So it's not sudden this time.
Let's find out what's arduous to get to. That is a king of clubs. So we've got more “plants and immobile forms of life.” So maybe my character specializes in botany? Or it's just what's standing out. But I think maybe, maybe that's her specialization. But you know, you have to be somewhat of a generalist if you're gonna pilot a spacecraft alone and then catalog a whole new planet, right?
So king of clubs. Oh, “plant or immobile life” “floating in the air.”
Okay. So I'm immediately fascinated by “immobile” and “floating in the air.” But I think the explanation that I like is actually a very mundane one. Because I would say that dandelions are an immobile form of life that float in the air. They move, but they're not moving themselves, you know? The wind carries them. And so…
Okay, okay. What if we combine this? Space jellyfish. But on a planet. But in space, because I've gotten there through space. It's space to me. It's space to my character.
So. This planet has lower gravity than my home planet and than the earth that you and I know. And there are these plants that– their natural, like, life cycle reaction, like their photosynthesis and whatever has a gaseous byproduct that is lighter than air on this planet. And it fills an internal chamber with this gaseous byproduct, causing it to float into the air and sit there at basically neutral buoyancy. Like, once it matures, the mature ones just hang there, and the other ones are, like, growing out of the ground. And they– I'm becoming so fascinated by the biology of this plant. I'm sorry, we'll get back to my character's place in it, but I love these plants. Um. And so as they mature, they eventually produce enough of the gas in that inner chamber to pull off of the roots that hold them to the ground. And then they float there until the plant begins to die, and then it sinks back to the ground.
And it's “arduous to get to.” I think the important part about that detail is that it justifies me staying there to get all of the information that I've just given you. It's like, okay, well, I had to, like, free climb up a cliff and then go down into this ravine and then cross through, blah de blah de blah de blah. I am far from my ship. It's not going to make sense to go back to my ship tonight and sleep there and then, you know, move my ship like I usually do. This justifies camping.
And I brought along camping supplies, both because it's good safety, and then also because I was kind of hoping that something would justify a little camp out and getting to go in, like, deep on something. That's something I don't get to do a lot.
And so I come upon these floating plants and of course I am fascinated. Like what is this? And I want to know how it works, and… I'm not going to get all the details; I probably don't know exactly the cause of the off-gassing and all of that, but like I get to stay through the night. And in that time, I get to see a few of those plants mature. Just be there in the moment that they, boop, and the like little pitcher plant expands enough and then pops up into the air. And watch some of them die. Watch that whole sort of cycle happen. And I’m– I've got guesses on why and on how. I'm writing them down in my little notebook. And I'm fascinated. I wish I could stay, but one night of camping is I think all I could justify. There's probably someone who reads my mission logs and is like, “Hey, you gotta– you gotta move on. We're not paying you–” Are we paying? Is there pay? Are we in a Star Trek post-capitalist utopia… asterisk… failures of the imagination… we're moving on.
Okay, so.
DUSTY: So, two. A one or two is that's arduous to get to. I think how this looks is that my journey from that planet made me curious as to what other planets are missing. I think being that I said this is kind of, like, more corporate, maybe I worked at a place where I have logs of just all the sectors of known universe that we're able to travel to. And I search and dig deeper as my ship has plotted course just towards, you know… away from the planet towards a random destination.
And I see… I see a log about information that was cited only in passing where it was… a planet that was seen across a dangerous asteroid field. It seems that's the only way to get to it from where they were. Almost as if it was like a ring of Saturn, but more heavier, and the planet seems to be smaller.
And feeling brave… or stupid, or determined… I decide to go check it out. It's- it's a journey for sure. I don't think I get through it with my ship unscathed. Perhaps it got some chip damage along the way. Not enough to have me stuck; at least that's what I think. But I get through and I appear upon this planet.
And for it to be seen or noticed through this asteroid field, it's like bright, bright, like, primary colour. It's like a blue- blue planet, but different blue than like what you've seen on Earth or something like that.
But, uh, let's, let's do our first discovery. [Card flipping] Okay, okay, okay. So we're back to the club. So, more “plants are other immobile forms of life.” This is six, so, six of clubs. So, “on the snowy peak of a mountain.” So that does determine that there's snow here.
And I think how this goes is that I'm descending onto this planet and I see that this blue is primarily… both, water, but a lot of the Terra, a lot of the Earth, are actually this deep blue as well.
And there is snow. The snow seems to be just what snow would normally be: crystallized water turning white, kind of falling through the sky. And I see this peak of a mountain, as it's one of the first things that seems to be not only large enough for me to land a ship, but there are structures on it. And as I get closer, it seems that not only is the structure, um, huge, towering over this already– mountain that looks over the rest of this planet, it seems to be old. Incredibly so. I don some cold material, some cold gear to walk through safely.
And I approach these… almost pillars. These titanic growths coming from this mountain. As I get closer, the snow not falling hard, but falling enough to create crunches under my feet. They must be 50 feet tall. There's multiple of them, kind of forming, like, an arrow pointing towards one that's even larger than the rest. But they do seem to be… tree trunks, old wizened tree trunks, as I get closer. The only way that I could tell is that they have the natural grooves and the rings and the lines of that tree trunk wood. I see no leaves. In fact, almost no branches, but you see some of the bark has uh, peeled off, just naturally. And it's growing in these weird clusters that happens when cells try to reproduce what was there. So it seems to be barely living, and…
They're carved with a language I couldn't begin to understand. Or maybe they're just symbols, maybe they're gibberish. It's hard to say. I don't know what's here.
And as I get to the center, when I see this one has been primarily stripped of any of its bark, and now it's this dark tan, this dark brown almost of the trunk, but it's blemished with all these carvings, again, of these words, or symbols, or what have you, seemingly all the way up this.
And I'm kind of standing there, trying to determine what this is. And I feel the need to document it but at the same time, I feel like I may be encroaching on some historically or ho– like, religious importance that maybe I shouldn't stay for long. And the cold is not helping either.
I think I kind of go back to my ship and decide to check out the rest of this planet.
JESS: Six. Come upon this one as I'm resting. Maybe we're not moving on! Maybe this is while I'm camping, actually. Let's find out. [Card flipping] Jack of clubs! Clubs! “Life forms, plants, and immobile life forms!” Botanist! Here we go. Jack: “in the desert.” Interesting. Was I already in a desert? Or was that what was arduous to cross? Yeah.
So maybe- maybe this area of this planet– we're not doing Star Wars planets that are one biome. Sorry.– this area of this planet is fairly arid and hot, and so… I've done the trip there, and I knew it was very challenging.
And these little floating plants there, they're actually succulents. They're a strange form of succulent, but. We've moved on from those ones.
And I'm on my way back to the ship and even in my suit with all of my hydration equipment and all of that, with the suns beating down, it is truly just, like, grueling. And so I take a moment and find, like, a rocky outcropping to hide under and get some shade. And I tuck myself into that outcropping in the middle of this really open desert.
And hiding in the shade… it’s gotta be fungi, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know the relationship between fungi and deserts. There's got to be less decay, just because there's less life? But on this planet… 
Okay. So– so meet me here. Oyster fungus. Oh my god, we literally have something called oyster mushrooms in this world. But that's not what I mean. They're like… think of it kind of like filter feeders, but for dead things in the air.
And so, like, again… my character probably can't figure this out, can she? Well, maybe there's a feature on it that lets her have some sense of this. Because they're growing up the, like– they're basically terracing, these mushrooms are terracing this rocky overhang. And they're arranged in such a way that it almost creates this little wind tunnel-like effect between them. And the fungi are very spongy and open and they even have sort of Swiss cheese-esque holes in them.
And so I have some guesses, but if I knew, if I could stay to study them– and maybe I actually sample them because I really am like, why do they grow this way? And I sample them in a little tube.
And the answer is that they… how did I come upon this one? Resting. Yes, I was resting under the overhang. And of course I see fascinating plant life– or- fungus, not technically plants. And I just have to get this little sample and do all of this hypothesizing in my journal that the fact that I think they eat, for some definition of eat, dead cells floating and drifting on the wind. And that's how they survive and grow.
SATAH: [Die clattering] Rolled a two. So it's arduous to get to. That makes sense for the first thing. Let's see what it is. Five of hearts. Another ruin. And five is “in a treetop.”
[Laughing] This is– maybe this is so silly, but I think it's another ship. Like it’s the same ship. Maybe… hey… maybe this is going to be time travel-y and it is the exact same ship. Maybe right now I am– oh dear, traveling along the timeline of somebody who was on a journey and who died at the end of all of their journeys. They died on several different planets alone.
Yeah, I think there's some sort of unique marking on it that makes me so sure that this is the exact same ship. And maybe there's like an insignia on the inside; I recognize the pilot's name and it's the exact same ship, the exact same pilot. And it crashed here too. It's stuck in this treetop. And it's- it's– I am like, “Oh, I've been… there's a time loop happening here. And this person is trying to go somewhere and not escaping over and over again.” Choose your own adventure book where they just keep getting the bad ending over and over.
But I think somewhere they have to be alive. Or… maybe I can find the loop and take them out of it. Maybe that's my job. That's what I've- that's what I'm here for. This is my destiny, to find this pilot in the middle of this time loop and pull them out before they crash their ship and fly off with them maybe.
[Explaining some distant thunking noises that happened as they were speaking] Garold is thumping his tail like he maybe doesn't approve of this plan, but I think it's a really good plan, Garold. And I don't think it will go badly.
JESS: What's next on this planet? Uh, die roll is next actually. Two! “Arduous to get to.” Makes sense. This is an arduous planet. [Card flipping] That is a four of diamonds. We haven't had diamonds yet. “Living beings” “in a steep canyon.” Okay.
So we've got- we've got something alive that moves around and then, based on my own definition previously, of its own volition specifically.
So I think, of the many things I had to cross, that included like- like a really narrow, like, ravine or canyon, right? Like, like almost I could bound across it without– just not quite a jump, but I have to have some, like, speed, right, to get one stride. And then it's, like, a hundred meters down. Like it's- it's a little scary, just doing that stride, right?
And this time, I'm of course looking down, like how can you not, as I do. And I notice movement and I stop before I, like, take the stride, and I lower myself to the ground to peer out down this incredibly narrow canyon. And there's just this, like, march happening. It's just, like, one after the other. Like– I have no idea why I'm imagining it this way, but I'm imagining little tree-like guys. I guess I– I'm a, I'm a biologist. I'm a biologist, apparently. Little, like, Sudowoods? For, for Pokemon Gold and Silver fans out there. Um, and they're like waddling back and forth, sort of like penguins, each following each other in this single file line down the ravine. They're just like, you know, a half meter tall at most and just… bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop.
And I go, like, as quiet as I can. This is the first life I've seen on this planet. And also for some reason there's weird tree people in a desert… and I'm also not thinking quite like people, people. They're bipedal, but I'm not imagining something sentient. I'm not ready for her to deal with that yet. She's not ready to deal with that yet, my character.
Um, and so she's just watching them march down this little ravine and she's so tempted to follow, trying to figure out where they're going. Is it a water source? That's a good bet generally with animal life, especially in a desert. Or do they have some other purpose in mind? They're all– it's a- it's a long procession. Like I'm talking, it takes a minute or two from when I first spot them till they reach the end of the line. So it's a whole community on its way somewhere.
But I check my watch. I am not lucky enough to get to go in depth. I sketch them. I take a photo, which is what I'm supposed to do, and note some of their behavioural patterns. And I bound across. And I don't even think I see as my bound kicks a couple pebbles down the cliff and a few of them peer up, catching just the back of me, and noting me, like, I noted them. And then moving on because they're holding up the line.
DUSTY: Okay. Okay. So this is eight of spades. So spades are “natural phenomena” and eight is “on a glacier.”
So I think this leads me to fly off from this, uh, mountaintop and head down. And as I get lower, the snow seems to be lighter, but I do see, uh, like I only imagine is a tumultuous ocean, for– at least, from the shore. I see waves coming down onto this strange deep blue sand? Dirt? I assume it's sand because that's where the water is meeting and that's just natural, but again, we're on a different planet in a galaxy barely known.
So I continue on and I skim the water until I notice that it starts to become sheets of ice. And I see above, this glacier. This huge glacier, almost coming out of the earth like a spike driven into the ground, but reverse. And it's not the earth, it's the ocean.
And as I'm getting closer, I– my natural, um, instruments, like for determining where I am, like, scanning stuff, start to kind of fizzle in and out as if there's some kind of interference. Um, not enough to hurt the ship. I'm still able to fly in control, just manually. And I decided to use that moment to maybe essentially kind of park the ship in place in the air.
And then I realise that I haven't looked out at the glacier again. And I see that this glacier, kind of poking out, there seems to be this ring of light emanating from it. This ring of mist, of clouds, of snow, but bright and multicoloured, almost as if it was refracting, like a beam of light does to a mirror, and that point across the glacier. Then it tightens and almost becomes just a sphere right on top. And then the whole glacier, which was just stark white across this, begins to glow the same way.
And when it hits that, I think that's when I start getting alarming sounds as it's causing now more interference with all my instruments. Which snaps me out of what I was viewing, the beauty of whatever is happening. And I do think I need to at least move away from it a safer distance, in that- in order not to have my ship more damaged.
JESS: Okay, card four. [Die rolling] “Arduous to get to.” You know, nothing on this planet is easy.
Six of clubs! “Plants and immobile form of life.” You heard me shuffle these, listener, but we're going for plants and immobile forms of life. We love biology.
So that's “on the snowy peak of a mountain.” Yeah, no kidding that it's difficult to get to. So we're going from a desert to a snowy peak of a mountain.
Maybe I’ve– I’ve moved on at this point, and I made it back to my ship and we've taken off. And like I said, there are multiple biomes on planets and I fly in between them to make observations.
And so the mountain here is so steep, I can't put my ship down anywhere. There's no plateau where it's safe to have, like, you know– it's not just the size of the ship, it is the size of somewhere that I can see and safely bank a landing. And so I put down much nearer to the base of this mountain and then time to head up.
Any excuse, right? Anything that keeps me out in the field longer.
And so I get to the top of the mountain at the end of this day. Like I put down, very beginning of the day, and get to the top at the end. And when I'm reaching the peak…
I’ve focused so much on the air in this place. And I imagine that there has to be a reason for that. What if there's just, like, a lot of atmosphere here? Like… I've been reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy recently and they're constantly talking about millibars and adding adding gases to the atmosphere. And I don't– I don't have a great understanding of what it would mean to have, like, more and a heavier atmosphere, um, than Earth. But let's say that's happening.
And up at the tip of this mountain, this really tall mountain, is like, finally, the atmosphere is thinning a little bit to something I'm more used to. And it's a little easier to, like, move through. And the plants are almost more familiar here.
And specifically, this is where I run into space dandelions! The sort of stuff that maybe is getting filtered out of the air by those fungi. Maybe it drifts down off the mountain. It's– [Gasp of realisation] It's not snow. It's not a snowy peak of a mountain. I thought it was snow. I thought it was snow while passing overhead. But it's not. It's really, really arid here on this planet. And- and snowy peaked mountains are not, like, a common feature. But it looked like that because it is just masses and masses of fields of these little dandelion-esque plants that poof off into the air and throw up massive clouds of white specks. Thinner, like- not quite as big as an individual, like, dandelion seed, either. And so it looks almost as fine as snow when you look down on the ground at the top of these mountains. It's like a field of snow that the moment you disturb it, kicks up and flies through the air and sinks down, if it reaches far enough, then all the way off the side of the mountain.
And I just lay down. I lay down in it and kind of let that cloud envelop me. It fully obscures the sky for a moment and decide that's where I'm going to set up camp for the night.
DUSTY: The nine of hearts. Oh, that's interesting. So hearts are “ruins” and the nine is “deep underground.”
I think this is where it leads me as I'm trying to escape from the interference. I get further enough and I see that my instruments are back up and it's doing scanning of the terrain as I get to more land that's, again, riddled with this blue earth– like, contrasted with green rocks, green stones, green trees– or these dark brown trees, similar to what I would see in books or different planets.
And I get a blip on my radar scanning that there's something below me. At least there should be. I don't see anything but, curious, I decide to land, and I see that there's, essentially, like a cave entrance kind of popping out, but not from a mountainside. It's almost as if it's just a huge boulder carved with a tunnel going down.
I should think better of this than to just go into a tunnel on my own, but this planet has already caught my curiosity so much. So I think I just descend deeper into it.
And as I descend, I think– this tunnel doesn't have stairs, per se, but it's at an angle down where it's fairly comfortably to walk without slipping, without trying to slow my pace. And the earth below does not seem to be crumbly, does not seem to be freshly dug. This seems to be hardened earth.
And I'm walking one, two, five, ten minutes. And as I decide to think when to turn back, I see a peeking of natural light coming out. And I keep going forward and I'm met with what seems to be, now… there is light pouring from a hole in the ceiling, way above. It seems to be these underground… city? Village. It's hard to say. There seems to be buildings. It could be different kinds of structures, statues. All carved with, again, this blue or green stone.
And… I see, again, as I approach these buildings, and I see that there's the same kind of writing that I saw on those trees on top of the mountaintop. So I'm seeing the remnants of whatever culture lived here, whether it's connected, or that's just the main language on this planet. It's hard to say.
And I see– I see rooms, I see homes, I see buildings with no one here. It's definitely quiet except for the sound of my footsteps. And I… can't tell if this is… something that was built, it hasn't been used? Or something that was built so long ago that whoever used it has not left any signs of life.
And there's some things here and there– like, I find some tools on top of a crude table in one of these buildings that I couldn't begin to comprehend how to use. I see books and the books, again, are all written in these strange language carvings I can't understand.
And I get to kind of the center of this town, this city, where the light from above is pointing down directly on to what could have been said was perhaps a fountain, maybe a millennia ago. The bowl where water would be held has been cracked and broken open. There seems to be some kind of a statue or some kind of beautiful sculpture on top that has been since knocked down and crumbled to the ground in a million pieces that have eroded, are too small to try to put back together.
And it's hard to fully comprehend where I am or where I'm standing. These buildings that are all kind of abode shaped seem to be again made naturally from the earth around them. Nothing too tall, nothing too short.
I think… I am met with this feeling of… not loneliness, though I am alone, it's not lonely here. It's sad. It’s… tumultuous. And I think I'm getting the same foreboding feeling that I should not be here. And I think that feeling is only exacerbated by something blocking out the light from the hole above, maybe only temporarily, but enough to catch my attention. And I pick up the pace and go back the same tunnel as I leave, trying to leave this place behind me.
And I get up in maybe half the time as I'm a little rushing and get back to my ship nearly out of breath. But I still think I want to learn more. So…
JESS: Okay, next thing. Five… resting. Yeah, that is what I just did. Thank you for listening, dice.
Jack of spades. So we got a natural phenomenon. We haven't had any ruins yet. Not a single heart. I'm– I’m a biologist. It's “a natural phenomenon” “in the desert.” Okay, well, cards, you weren't paying attention. I left the desert behind.
Well, except… I just said that I thought this was snowy. I thought the biome was going to be different. Maybe we are on a Star Wars one biome planet. It's just really, really dry. Mars is dry. This planet can be dry.
And so, like, beneath these plants, it's actually very, very dry up here. They're soaking up whatever there is. And so I am in a desert and I was resting and I wake in the morning to a natural phenomena. And that natural phenomena is… 
How do these plants survive up here? Nope, I don't got it. Let's go a different direction. They… fold in. Oh, that's the plants again. Oh, I've got it. Okay, they do fold in and I've got it.
So like morning glories, all of that– like, the white specks get like drawn back into a pod at night and then they open up in the daytime. And of course, that's when I saw them while flying. And so when I wake in the morning just before dawn, because my character, unlike me, can get up that early, she looks around and the fields of white, of false snow are gone. And for the first time, she can see under them. They formed like a full canopy that was just a few centimeters off the ground, but fully obscured it.
And there is something immediately so cool. And I think it is these rock formations of different minerals running, like– you know when you do a vertical slice of a certain type of canyon rock and you get those like– this colour rock and that colour rock and this colour rock, because it got like sedimented or eroded; I don't know which way the process would have gone to give it these striations– but just like a centimeter or a few centimeters of different colours of rock. And that usually would happen with, like, a vertical cut, right? And you're looking at it from the side, a cool little thing in an eyewitness book or in a museum gift shop where you and I would see them maybe.
Um, but she's seeing them out in the wild, and it's not a vertical cut. It's fully horizontal. These striations are running just, like, across the landscape under these plants. And it's like– it’s like a cliff face turned on its side, or it's like just a whole bunch of different rocks got slammed together and smooshed until we got these, like, multi-layer pancakes, but again, on their side.
And she is fascinated and immediately starts, like, running her fingers along the ground looking for, like, grooves, but clearly it's been worn down on the top enough that it's like a fully even surface. And the plants are actually, like, very shallowly rooted, like, running mostly along the tops. Weird plants. I don't know how they survive up here. Um, but she's fascinated by the– the striations are just beautiful, so of course she's, like, immediately compelled by them. Um.
And she tries to determine if there's some regularity to the pattern and follow them to various, like, cliff faces and looking to get a sense of like, what could have caused this? And I think what she comes to is that there is no way she's going to know. This is the sort of geological study that is: one, outside her wheelhouse, because she's a biologist. Primarily. She's a generalist. She likes– she specializes in biology.
But it's not just outside her wheelhouse. This is the sort of thing that would take years of study and multiple scientists to, like, estimate what are the natural forces in this planet that would produce these striations? And she wants to know. And I think she thinks for a moment, “Am I in the right line of work?” And then she remembers that she'd never have seen these striations in the first place if she wasn't going planet to planet all the time. That if she was stuck in one place for years and years, all of the things that cause her that curiosity and that awe, she encounters them because she keeps moving. And she'd miss that awe more than she misses the opportunity to explain it, you know?
DUSTY: Last card here is the queen of diamonds. Okay, so these are more living beings. And this is deep underwater. So that's interesting.
I think again, I go back to my ship and start just going in another direction. I then find a body of water that's on opposite of where I found the glacier. And… I see… from the surface… I think I see things similar to buoys, or something like that.
And as I'm going close, close, I see some kind of birds or some kind of flying creature land on one of these buoys. And then, as soon as the bird or creature gets comfortable, that buoy is then dragged underwater. Almost, like, immediately and with extreme force, extreme purpose, which… I turn my scanners on again and I see a lot of movement down there in the water.
I don't want to get out of my ship. So I think instead, what I do– I'm going to send a probe down there. Like, these little, like, little mechanised little robot body with a camera that connects to the ship. And I'm going to send it down there to see what's going on.
And as it goes into the water, which is as blue as the earth around it– which causes for this strange kind of perception, as you're really unable to see where the earth ends and the water begins as it's kinda the same color– and you're getting deeper and deeper, and I'm seeing more signs of movement. And then I see more structures similar to what I saw in that tunnel, more abodes, kind of the same deep colours. But now there's movement around here.
And as it's getting deeper, trying to keep my distance because I don't want to concern anyone or anything, I see that there are humanoid-ish creatures? But I think their skin is a deep, deep brown compared to that of the earth around them. And they seem to be just living their life down here.
I see another one of those buoys fall to the ground and realise it's almost akin to a fishing net, but just for anything above the surface. And I'm trying to notate, okay, so that means that whatever happened here, they’ve been forced, or adapted to live under the water.
And I think that's when that moment hits. It's like, well, they're supposed to be under the water. What does that mean for me? And I think I call the droid back, the probe droid back, and as soon as it hits on the ship, I think I decide I shouldn't be here. Either my presence is going to cause problems or problems are going to happen to me, because whatever is on the surface, the humanoid creatures do not want to interact with it. With that, I think I leave this planet.
And for this, in my logs, I think I'm going to name this planet just… [Thoughtful sigh] Endless Ocean. Endless Ocean, sure. Just for how blue it is as I put it down in my notes.
Okay. So I think, as I leave that planet in a hurry, I leave via the same route I entered, trying to do as little damage to my ship as possible, and I'm going to go to my next planet!
JESS: Okay, last thing on this planet. [Die rolling] Five, resting. Okay. Yeah, it's been an arduous planet and journey, so of course for the latter ones, she's resting a lot.
Jack, again, in the desert. Is that three Jacks? That is three Jacks on six cards here. Here we go. It's a desert planet. It's a Star– I lied. We are doing Star Wars single biome planets.
Um, jack of diamonds. So we've got “living beings,” again,” in the desert.”
Snakes. Or just some sort of slithering reptile comes to mind for the desert. Um… I don't know– reptile might be too earthy a classification. I don't really know what genuses and species and all that look like here, but I think– I think this is a bit of a fright for our character.
I think there's some, like… it looks almost like a mirage as she's crossing back towards her ship and decides to take a break in this hot desert. And moving along these- this striated rock– which she can see because the plants here got all kicked up, I guess– there's a sense that the rock itself is moving. And then she realizes it's this flat little scaled creature with coloured striations that match the way there's those thin striations on the rock, and it's the same, like, general palette of colors. It's- it’s not the rock moving. There is something moving over it that is so- it has evolved to be so camouflaged so effectively.
So it's not exactly a snake. It’s… we're going to go Pokemon Gold and Silver again here. You know, like a Dunsparce? Like a flat little scaly creature that's like… you know, like, if you miniaturised an elephant and made it even flatter, even thinner. Um, and that thing is just like… [Blorp-y fast movement sounds] across the ground, um, at me. And I just, like, leap to my feet, and, like, resting is over, and I start like running off to the side, truly spooked.
And it's not following me! It had no interest in me! It was just moving. It didn't know. I might have well been part of the landscape. So the moment I like bolt, it bolts. But I think it takes a little bit for me to, you know, come down.
Biologist isn't just plants. What's the word for just plants? I don't know. She doesn't like animals as much, is the thing. This happens with animals. Plants are immobile forms of life, as you could find out on page three of Alone Among the Stars. They don't move of their own volition. So anyway, she doesn't like this. She does note it. She does even take a picture as it's retreating. Um, she's not going to sketch this one because she doesn't have to, and that wasn't fun, um.
She's going to get back to the ship. She's had enough experiences on this planet. It's time for the new awe.
Okay! Yeah, that was… uh, Persephone-2! You're supposed to name– give a name and number as you leave. So we're going with Persephone-2.
And she leaves.
OUTRO
SATAH: This has been Folio, an actual play podcast about solo and epistolary TTRPGs. To find where you can find the show, check out foliopod.carrd.co. Sign up as a paid member at patreon.com/foliopod to vote on games and participate in live streams or join for free to get access to the bonus feed with edited audio-only versions of the streams a couple weeks after they happen.
You can find Jess Levine at jessfrom.online, jessfromonline on Bluesky and Twitter, and jumpgategames.itch.io.
You can find Dusty at dustehill, D-U-S-T-E-H-I-L-L on Twitter and Bluesky, check out their games at fromdusttodice.itch.io, and hear them on Goblets and Gays.
You can find Satah– that's me, at posatahchips on Twitter and Bluesky, and check out my other work at gaygothvibes.online.
Next week, Jess and Dusty and I will continue our games of Alone Among the Stars by Takuma Okada, linked in the show notes.
Thanks so much for listening, and take care out there.