I've talked in the past about possibly doing some kind of solo Shadows Over Garenport; taking my outline with some characters, and using randomizers to influence what actually happens, in a manner not at all unlike solo play, and then reacting to those randomized actions. It's not quite as random as some guys' solo play is, where they randomize pretty much everything; I do already have a map and an outline, for instance, but still. My travel rules in the Appendix will work pretty well. I have several random table books, including ShadowDark's pretty extensive random tables, Knave 2e's pretty extensive random tables, two different books titled "Book of Random Tables" and of course, access to plenty of others online. Even going through an outline, I want there to be unpredictability and I want the process to surprise me from time to time.
When I'm done, maybe I can convert some of that into linked short stories or something too.
I've got three characters prepared already, although I think I'm going to make it a group of four and add one more with an outdoorsy specialty. So, that's one more task that I'll need to do. Although I don't really have classes per se, that'll give me (sorta) a fighter, a thief, and a sorcerer plus a ranger. Clerics don't make sense in my setting, but someone who really specializes in outdoor travel really does; especially if I'm using my optional appendix travel rules as the source of a lot of my randomization.
But mostly what I really need is what has come to be called an Oracle. I don't know where this term came from (well, other than Delphi, of course) or how it came to be applied, but what it really means is if you're solo-playing and there's a question about how something will shake out, and you need a randomizer to ask, you have some process to follow to determine it. If you walk in the tavern, will you see the person that you're hoping to find in town? Roll for it to see. Is the person you just fought and killed a member of the cult, or did you just make a terrible mistake in attacking him? Roll and see. Is the monster waiting in the swamp to ambush you when you find its soggy lair, or did someone beat you to the punch and you find only its rotting corpse and a loot-less lair? Roll for it. But roll what exactly?
I think I'm going to do my Oracle as follows:
Firstly, you need three sets of dice, hopefully that are very visually distinct and different color so that they can be easily distinguished at a glance. You can use whatever you want for normal rolls, but for Oracle rolls, you need one of each set. For ease of description, I'll assume that you have a Red, a White and a Blue set of dice (in spite of the fact that I added a picture of some green and yellow dice. Deal with it.) When you need an answer to one of those yes/no questions, you roll one of all three. The Red dice means yes, the Blue dice means no. The White dice? We'll get to that in a minute. Whichever has the highest roll wins. If you roll three d6s, and get a Red 5, a White 2 and a Blue 4, then Red beats blue and the answer to your Oracle question is Yes. If you rolled Red 2, White 6 and Blue 6, then the answer is No. But, is it a d6 you roll? You don't need a whole set of dice for that. Well...
Secondly, you can use the dice to influence probability. If you think one answer is more likely than the other, you can use a dice with more sides. You can roll a Red d8 and a Blue d4, for instance, if you think that it's quite a bit more likely to be Yes than No.
Thirdly, what if you get a tie? Well, there are two things to address that. First off, if you don't want many ties, roll higher dice. A d2 (flipping a coin) only has two sides, so you're much more likely to get ties very frequently. A d20 has twenty sides, so the likelihood of you rolling the same number on both d20s is very low. I'll probably roll d6s most of the time, but if you don't like ties, you can influence your likelihood to get them. But very low probability is not no probability. That's what the white dice is for. Or at least one of the things the White die is for. In case of a tie, the white d6 (and it is always a d6) determines who wins. A 1, 2, or 3 result goes to the No, and a 4, 5, or 6 result goes to the Yes.
Fourth, the white die can also be a qualifier. If there's not a tie, the White die is still important. On a roll of 1 or 2, then whichever result you get is actually even worse for the characters than a simple yes/no result would be. If it's 3 or 4, then there's no qualifier, and if it's 5 or 6, then the answer is even better for the characters than it looks like. If the roll was a bad one but you get a 5 or 6, then there's a mitigating factor that makes it not so bad. If it was a good result for the characters but you get a 1 or a 2, then there's a complication that they have to deal with as part of the food result. However, if the result was bad for the characters but they roll a 1 or a 2, then there's an additional complication besides the already bad result. If it's good for the characters and they roll a 5 or 6 on the White die, then they get an extra benefit in addition to what they were hoping for on a simple result.