Solo Martial Blues is a hard-hitting martial arts tabletop RPG for one player. You're a violent loner, fighting against all odds, always just one fight from death. It's just you, your fists, and the mean streets.

• Single player TTRPG
• 5.5” by 8.5” paperback of 200+ pages
• Standalone, with no other material needed
• Art by Steven Wu, whose previous work includes Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, and Fight to Survive: Role-playing Martial Arts Meets Heart and more
• Written by Indie Groundbreaker Award nominated developer James Kerr, whose previous work includes Fight to Survive: Role-playing Martial Arts Meets Heart, The Children of Eriu, and Creatures from Fairy-Tale & Myth and more
• Construct your martial artist and fight your way through up to 10 years of adventure in the middle of the 20th century

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Life is hard and so is Solo Martial Blues . So go on—take the chance. See how far you can get on the mean streets of New Hope City. The fight is waiting for you.

 As fast as we can strike, here's Solo Martial Blues:

Mechanics At a Glance

• Conflict Resolution: You compare a few different "Moves" to use against your opponent—Punch, Kick, Block, and so on. Then you check the reference in the back of the book to see how successful those moves were, and if you won the fight...or got punched in the face
• Heart of the Story: Your fighter has Comforts—people, places, and things they care about—to fight to protect, and suffers Hardship from the struggles of a life of violence
• Unique System: Solo Martial Blues uses a unique, diceless, randomless, but mechanically precise conflict resolution system of "story-forward crunch"

Before each round of combat you prepare 3 Moves from among Grapple, Punch, Kick, Block, or Footwork. Each has a different relationship to one and other. You reveal your opponent's moves in the text, compare them, and see who wins the exchange. Did you defeat your foe? Or did you get your legs kicked out from under you? It's strategic, engrossing, and feels consequential.

Setting at a Glance

• Greasers and street fighters in the slums of a 1950s big city
• Focus on heartbreak. Low stakes but high feelings
• High martial arts action abounds—your fighter could end up with a teacher in boxing, sumo wrestling, kickboxing, karate, or more

Why You Want This Game

You want this game if you want to...

• Feel the heart of the fighter beating in your chest, page by heart-pounding page
• Experience the complex martial world and high drama of Fight to Survive: Role-playing Martial Arts Meets Heart, but you’re fighting alone these days
• Feel like you’re caught in a fight, using martial arts against a cruel and unforgiving world

Just as martial arts training is ultimately done by the individual, alone, so too is the experience of martial arts in Solo Martial Blues solemn and individual. So, let your fists be your guide. Embrace the warrior dreams of your fighter. Help them go the distance.

What Funding Means

Funding for Solo Martial Blues would allow me to pay for the art, for the editing, for the proofs, and the polish. It would allow me to turn Solo Martial Blues from a rough-and-tumble sketchy work into a refined and capable contender. For transparency's sake, it breaks down like this:

• Art - $1,700+* ($700 has already been paid)
• Editing - $1,000
• Sensitivity Reading - $300
• Marketing & Promotion - $200
• Taxes, Stripe, and Paypal - $400-ish
• Publishing House & Buffer - $100
  * Scales with Stretch Goals

Excess funding will let me expand Solo Martial Blues to include many more years of adventures, and, if funding continues, to allow a print run to be ordered, putting it into the strong hands of distributors like Compose Dream Games, IPR, and the IGDN.

As of now, the power is in your hands alone.

For fighting folks who want to wade deep into the Martial World, there may also be extended rewards as the campaign goes on...

Gameplay in Solo Martial Blues is broken down into "years" of play, starting in 1950. There are three years done (1950-1952), and six years planned (up to 1955) for for funding, but if we exceed our funding, we can keep expanding the content to include years more adventures.

How Far Along Is It?

The text for more than half of this project is complete. It was already released to the backers of the Fight to Survive: Role-playing Martial Arts Meets Heart Kickstarter. That covers 3 in-game years. I want to expand that with at least another 3, and, if we can, to 10 years in total. There are only a handful of art pieces in the book right now, so for the art sufficient to make it a bright and shiny work, we're only at the beginning of the journey.

Origins

Broadly, the content that most inspired this game is cinematic: 80s martial arts action movies, of both high and low quality. Bloodsport (1988), Hard Times (1975), and Streets of Fire (1984) are perhaps the biggest influences.

Specifically, Solo Martial Blues is based on Fight to Survive: Role-Playing Martial Arts Meets Heart, a tabletop role-playing game that captures the spirit of 20th century martial arts action cinema, with all its sincerity and emotion. It's a mundane game about tough folks in low-stakes adventures of down-to-earth urban try-and-die martial arts where most situations are violent, and usually end in sadness.

You do not need Fight to Survive to play Solo Martial Blues. This game stands on its own, and has everything you need to play, but if you want to be a part of the larger martial world, they make great companions. Find out more at www.radiojamesgames.com.

Mike from Games Played Badly  had publisher James Kerr on to discuss Solo Martial Blues:

The BAMF! podcast was kind enough to have me on to talk about Solo Martial Blues here...

I was on the Blasters & Blades podcast to talk at great length about martial arts, martial arts movies, the nature of violence, and how it all boils down in Solo Martial Blues. You can have a listen here:

Also the Scheduled to Launch podcast had me on as their guest to discuss Solo Martial Blues, and we did a fairly deep dive into how it works compared with Fight to Survive, and work through some of the reasoning behind the system's development.

More interviews to follow!

Let's meet the team behind Radio James Games who are working on Solo Martial Blues.

Solo Martial Blues will be James Kerr’s (he's/his) ninth published TTRPG book—you can find them all on DriveThruRPG if you go looking—but only his second with his eponymous Radio James Games publishing house. By day, James Kerr is a trade magazine publisher and broadcaster. At night, under cover of darkness, he runs weird games.

Steven Wu is a writer/illustrator based in New Jersey. When not drawing space warriors or writing fantastical fiction, he spends a lot of time making mistakes to (hopefully) learn from them. His Instagram handle is @wurtyurt.

Em Minthorn is a letter carrier, gardener, DJ, and dog enthusiast. Although she has spent most of her adult life avoiding exactly the kind of work her expensive English degree was meant to procure, she does have a few editing credits to her name, including a choose-your-own-adventure-style gamebook set in a surreal version of Peterborough, Ontario. She lives in the real version of Peterborough, Ontario, but only because she hasn't yet found a portal to Middle-earth.

Gemma Grover-Hinds (she/her) is a writer, copy-editor, and sensitivity reader living in the Cotswolds in the UK. A Canadian ex-pat, she spends her days baking, watching reality TV, and waiting for the rain to stop. After a stint as an MMA journalist, she fell in love with martial arts and their history. Queer, disabled, and from a mixed-culture background, she recognizes how multi-layered “good” representation can be in a complex world. A long-time TTRPG enthusiast, she loves story-telling and character development.

There's always risk in a fight. All wordplay aside, a lot of this project rides on one person, and if James Kerr gets injured or falls ill then the project will be delayed. The previous crowdfunding project, Fight to Survive, suffered a substantial delay when we needed more artists partway through. James' experience in publishing mitigates a lot of this risk. Having the book partially complete before launch mitigates a lot more, but, there is always some risk of delay.

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This time, you fight alone.