radiant fracture

sabotabby and I played that mini-game I made for my creative writing class, and the results were so deliciously out of control that you get to see it on our journals.

The game is a dialogue created by asking and answering questions. I've removed the questions here, but kept the dialogue format.

Feel free to try the game with a friend and post the results in the comments, if you feel inspired.


The alleged car is a new type of EV, but designed by techbros who were far more interested in a grift than in making a functional vehicle. They were also, as it turns out, amateur occultists. The battery works, in theory, but in addition to charging, it on occasion requires a blood sacrifice. Not a whole human, necessarily. Just a little blood.
We're late because your biomechantronic arm caught a virus and went all evil hand and kept swerving us into the ditch. We had to pull over and have a long argument with it about fate and destiny and being a part of something larger than itself.
It's partly your fault for not downloading the software updates and partly whoever set loose the virus, and partly me for starting a conversation about free will with it in the first place (I was bored and stressed out), so everyone's in an extra bad mood now, and also it's possible we're too late to stop the pseudoSingularity which might, as we explained tersely to your rogue arm, render all this free will more or less moot.

We brought the runic silicon chips, which carry on them the ancient invocation that will debug the pseudoSingularity, but did we remember the manual for their deploy and operation? We would have, if you had ever been the sort to read the manual.

You're not wrong about me and manuals.

We're going to the Pit, that toxic junkyard of discarded magitech a thousand stories deep, with a seething lake of heavy metals and vampiric data spectres at its heart.

That's where the Sibyl sent us after a very rushed and expensive divination. There's at least a 50% chance that she's in the pay of the BludDies anyway, but we're out of options.

I'm frantically chanting every incantation I know in case one of them is the right one, so occasionally the windshield wipers start up, or flames shoot out of the hand-of-glory hood ornament.

Oh, and we're running low on blood.

Running my biomechantronic fingers over my scab-studded human one, I consider whether it's time for another blood draw. My nano-monitors are edging into the orange territory on the anemia marker, but what good will a normal WBC count do me if we stall out on the highway and get our eternal soul data devoured by ferals?

After all, the High Queen of the BludDies is an old friend and sometimes lover, and I wouldn't want to disappoint her.

I bowl out of the bloodEV with the silicon runes rattling in my hand as the howling hypotheticals come screaming out of the pit.

And there's the High Queen between me and the edge, her void eyes glittering, information streaking down her limbs like mercury, but she's not looking at me. I might as well not be there. In a minute I won't be.

I'm just the means to this end, you and this dead-eyed glory burning like a phosphorous flame.

It's never been you and me, not really. It's always been you and her, and it's you and her now, here at the last showdown before the next showdown.

And maybe you didn't even know what you were going to do when you got here, until you got here. Maybe you were teetering between hero and heel turn.

But you know now.

{rf} / sabotabby 

This one is for the game jasmine_r_s and I are planning to play on Monday night. She loves and has a great affinity for Oxford.

I know "dreaming spires" is a huge cliche, but its image of unreality fits in with the game.

* * * * * *

Oxford is Arnold’s city of dreaming spires, with its stone buildings the colour of parchment, of beeswax and tea; and it has been like a dream, to walk these streets, to drink in this history.

Ten days ago, the world went dark. A golden autumnal sunrise began to spot with blue-black as though ink were leaking into a page. The ink spread and covered the sky completely. You were plunged into absolute darkness – except that sometimes a shiver seems to run through that lightless sky, and for a moment a dull gleam shows, as on the side of a fish lit by a flash of phosphorescence in the deepest oceanic dark.

The ancient and irregular power grids of Oxford have failed, and the few insufficient generators are working overtime and running out of fuel. Students from around the world are stranded among the spires. At first, some classes continued by candlelight, as though everyone were travelling backwards in time together.

Five days ago, They came, and people began to disappear. Where a few dim lamps have been set out in the street, their shadows, cut loose of the owners, sometimes linger for a moment too long.

You don’t know anything about Them, except that they fear light.

Improvised barricades have gone up everywhere.

You happened to be on a tour of the Bodleian library when They arrived, so that’s where you’ve remained, locked in with nothing to eat but the cafe's dwindling provisions -- mostly endless checkerboard slices of Battenberg cake.

At first the librarians were strict, but lately they’ve let you wander. And that’s how you found it, tucked into a chained volume of Paradise Lost: a set of notes in the distinctively precise yet gently flamboyant script of C S Lewis. They are written in a cipher, but you think you have decoded it.

From reading through Lewis’ notes, you believe that he knew of Them, and that the Inklings, piecing together Their story, took measures against Them. If you understand the notes correctly, somewhere in Oxford, almost a hundred years ago, Lewis and his friends hid a means of opposing Them.

My excuse is that mass entertainments have failed me, or something.

I saw The French Dispatch this afternoon on impulse. I didn't like it. I ought to have -- Wes Anderson's films are a very particular taste, but they happen to have a flavour profile that usually works for me. This, though -- I was just bored.

When I walked out of the theatre, the rain that had been gently misting down was now trying to float the cars. By the time I got home, I was soaked. "Now," I said to myself, changing into slippers and a raggedy smoking jacket entirely out at the armpits, "marking, or another solo game of Ten Candles?"

To be fair, there's still time to do some marking.

Anyway, these posts are mostly to show myself that I am in fact doing creative work, if work that it's hard to see the exact purpose for.

Recap of Ten Candles: the game plays out in ten scenes; you make crisis rolls to see if your actions succeed, with a pool of dice that shrinks in each scene; when you fail a roll, the scene ends and you tell Truths to move the story along; also, the world has gone dark and They are coming to get you.

What is known of Them for this game: They are lonely.


The vice and virtue here came from boxofdelights .

( Jesse's Story )

{rf}

This game I didn't hear an actual play of -- I think Bryn Monroe mentioned it on Enthusigasm, Helen Gould's lovely new geek round table Pod on the Rusty Quill network. But I was intrigued.

I need things to occupy and delight me, so that I don't just work, or worry about work. I am having a lot of anxiety, and having a hard time each morning crawling over the broken glass of self-doubt to get to the room and tell people things. Today was hard. The class, of course, was fine. It's always fine. But I needed to think past it, so I promised myself that when I got home I could do a solo playthrough of Ten Candles. -- to test the mechanics.

Here, mostly for my own amusement, is the record of that playthrough. It's patchy, but then so am I.

Ten Candles

Content notes: Character death, discussion of eating disorders

I won't explain all the rules here: you can find out more about it on the website.

The guidebook (PDF $10) says this:

( The rules in brief )

( The Playthrough )

{rf}



1. There are some other rules about who gets to narrate which events, but they didn't really apply here because I am both player and GM.

2. I meant to type "Arthur" and then I liked the typo.