Inspiration
Although the archetypal game of Solipsist is created on the fly (and has to be to a large extent, because the game world usually changes too deeply to plan very far ahead) no one can think up everything without having good material in their head already, which is where the inspiration comes in. It's a good idea to think of ideas for the Shadow before the game starts. At the very least you should think about how the Shadow should first manifest (which you will usually narrate).
Since most games of Solipsist begin in your own city, look for the things that are driving you crazy there, and use them as sources of inspiration. Dream of creepy things to make Shadows out of. Search the world around you for unsettling images. Fill your head with the surreal and you'll be in the right mood.
So what sort of things make for good Shadows? A Shadow is not simply something menacing or scary, it's something that corrupts, or corrodes, or breaks apart order and sense. A Shadow may be an impersonal force, like a storm, or a plague, that destroys because it has no understanding, or it might be something embodied, like an evil corporation that is reducing your city to destitution and ruin. The horror in the Shadow is the way it destroys and undoes whatever it touches, love, life, order, and dreams.
Of course existential horror is all very well, but it's not always easy for players to confront. For this reason it's good to think of more tangible aspects of the Shadow for the Solipsist's to face, the weirder the better. Men with the faces of animals controlled from within by chittering insects, skeletons in verdigris encrusted diving suits, discarded puppets crawling from the sewers to destroy the things children love. Minions of the Shadow should be wrong, cobbled together from the discarded and perverting what passes for ideals in your world.
Another good thing to have in mind are the ephemera of the Shadow, the things that alert you to the fact that the Shadow is around, before it's been engaged with directly. Like a mystery story most Shadow encounters start with a few clues: like a strange letter in the post, or a tale of dead crows found hanging from telephone wires, or a friend asking for help to find a missing child. When the Solipsists turn their attention to these things they turn into threads, and the threads lead inevitably to the rest of the Shadow.
For example
In Edinburgh (where I live) at the moment, the city streets are being torn up in a mad rush to install tram lines, redirect traffic, close roads, change and reorder the streets. When I walk down a once-familiar street and see once-familiar landmarks gone, roads diverted, the ground torn up I feel a sense of both frustration and dislocation … this is something that can be built on.
So I think of ideas of the Shadow being a person or corporation behind a series of crazy changes that are leading, not to a new transport network, but to endless and confused disruption. Or I imagine the Shadow being beneath the earth, flexing like a grave worm and breaking up the earth as I go. Maybe it's taint brings forth shades from the earth, memories of things forgotten, like the ghosts of the old trams that ran in 1911, or the memories of soldiers who died in the great war, who boarded a train home but never arrived. Maybe the trenches opened in the ground lead into dark places that are twisting the city from beneath.
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