Rev Casey, creator of the Platinum best-selling Motif Story Engine, has released a webapp called the Motif Oracle Notebook, which provides an online interface for asking questions from the Story Engine’s TTRPG oracle.
Even better, the webapp includes tinyMCE-powered rich text fields for recording notes, a printable view, and the ability to save and load sessions, so you can run an entire solo RPG in the webapp without needing to switch screens regularly.
We’ll get into the webapp’s bells and whistles in a minute, but first…
What is a TTRPG oracle?
A TTRPG oracle is a tool used to answer questions, primarily for use in solo or GM-less TTRPG play, usually using dice or some other number generation method.
When playing alone or with a group who doesn’t have a GM, a TTRPG oracle allows you to randomly generate the responses you might otherwise get from a Game Master to questions like “Are there guards in the vault room?” or “Is Brother Thorvald telling the truth?”
TTRPG oracles can be as simple as flipping a coin or rolling high-low to answer yes/no questions, or can be complex with tables of weighted results.
For example, Mythic GM Emulator, another oracle with much more complexity than Motif, introduces concepts like a Chaos factor and Likelihoods to influence the results.
Motif Oracle Notebook strikes a middle ground, using three six-sided dice to answer questions:
- An answer die answers yes/no or yes/no/maybe questions
- A modifier die decides if there’s a complication or judges the certainty of the answer
- A context die adds additional relevant context to the question (for example, to judge an NPC’s Disposition towards the player or the Safety of a situation)
Using Motif Oracle Notebook
Using Motif Oracle Notebook is simple.
- On the Oracle tab, Just ask your question (you can type it in the provided text box, although this is optional) and select your options from the drop-downs.
- You can write your story in the Oracle tab, or use the Character, Scene Notes, Story So Far, and Extra Notes tabs to record anything you like.
- The About tab has notes about how the system functions.
In it’s most basic form, the Motif Oracle Notebook can be used for guided creative writing. Here’s a very brief example:
Bob the Janitor has just finished up cleaning the library, when unearthly moans break the silence of the book stacks.
Oh no, the walking dead have risen from their graves! Bob needs to escape!
[6:37:35 PM]
Q: Are there zombies in the courtyard?
A: 4, 1, 6 | Yes | But |Shambling undead horrors roam the library courtyard, but…something is unusual about the situation!
[6:38:14 PM]
Q: Are the zombies contained?
A: 3, 5, 5 | Yes | And | Very SafeThankfully, the Miss Liza the Librarian remembered to lock the fence gate when she left for the evening.
The zombies are trapped behind the fence gates…for now.
Italicized text are my own writings to set the scenario and interpret the Oracle’s results.
This little scenario wasn’t created with any particular TTRPG system in mind. Honestly, it doesn’t need one for me to continue writing the story of Bob the Janitor’s survival in a world of shambling zombies.
Rev’s press, Thought Punks (formerly Thought Police), has developed several TTRPGs such as Dinosaur Wizards in Space or Eat Trash! Do Crime! which work out of the box with Motif Oracle Notebook, but the webapp doesn’t actually require any of them — you can easily use it with any TTRPG ruleset.
There’s no reason I couldn’t use d20 Modern or GURPS or any other system to give Bob a full character sheet if I wanted to play a solo game in those systems.
That said, it’s worth noting that games that are balanced around using a party of characters (like Dungeons and Dragons) may work best if you’re running multiple characters at once, although that’s has more to do with running D&D solo than anything to do with Motif Oracle Notebook.
Managing notes and sessions with Motif Oracle Notebook
One of my favorite features of Motif Oracle Notebook is the ability to save, load, and export sessions.
With these tools, you can easily manage multiple characters or even entire separate solo TTRPGs.
Exporting your session allows you to download a zip archive containing a json file, so you can store your sessions offline (or transfer them to another device).
I played around with this and it worked like a charm transferring files between my PC and phone — I just tossed the zip file into cloud storage from my PC and I could instantly import it into a session on my phone.
A Project of Recovery
When Rev first started posting about this project on Bluesky, he shared that a bad seizure spell had impacted his ability to program projects like the Motif Oracle Notebook.
Although I’d been following Rev for a little while (he posts a lot of great community-centered posts on Bluesky), this was the first time I’d realized he experienced epilepsy, a condition I also have.
We got to talking about our experiences:
Wobblerocket: How long have you had epilepsy, if you don’t mind me asking?
Thought Punks: Indeterminate, but probably since childhood. Due to a graphic head injury in youth + family disposition.
Wobblerocket: I feel that. I wasn’t diagnosed until my 30s, but probably had it most of my life. My mother has it.
Thought Punks: Lemme put it this way: You know those old lawn darts they banned? I was one of the kids why they banned them.
A particularly bad cluster of seizures caused Rev a lot of long-lasting problems.
Thought Punks: One big seizure with ideal resolution takes a good couple days to get to feeling back to normal.
Wobblerocket: I understand. I went through a really bad seizure cluster late 2023 and it took me the better part of this year to recover from those. People don’t tend to think about how seizures can have long-lasting effects.
Thought Punks: I had a whole series of cascading seizures. I barely remember it but it was Bad™. My partner at the time thought I was entering early dementia kind of bad. And it’s taken a long time to somewhat recover, especially with periodic seizures we’re trying to eliminate and a bunch of trauma processing.
Maybe this is why I wanted to write this post and champion Rev’s success with this project.
It’s a way for us to celebrate overcoming, even if in a small way, a condition that affects us all day, every day. 💪
More from Rev Casey and Thought Punks
- You can follow Rev on Bluesky.
- Browse the entire Thought Punks catalog on DriveThruRPG.
- Grab lifetime access to all Thought Punks releases on Rev’s Ko-Fi. Rev is running a HOLIDAY SPECIAL on this: grab one lifetime access, get one to gift to someone else!
Photo of dice by yawning hunter.