radiant fracture

Hey, it's creators' day on Itch.io, meaning the site doesn't take their cut of the sales today, so it's a great day to get a few indie TTRPG games at the most benefit to the game creators.

For example, check out Métis game designer and educator Taylor Daigenault's This Vineyard Will Be Our Salvation, which I and the crew played recently and found very entertaining, with zero prep. Yes, it appears to be about ducks, and it is, but also it's about labour, and faith, and whatever else you care to make it about. We laughed a lot.

Or maybe you want something to do with your tumbling block tower and you'd like to own the legendary catastrophic romance game Star-Crossed from Bully Pulpit.

Or if you're too broke for those, for a mere $2.04 (US) you can own Corvyn Appleby's astounding Pull Me From the Earth, a 2-person Q&A game about a murderer and a bog body falling in love. (Which game I have reviewed elsewhere on this journal.)

(It is true that I, too, have some games on Itch.io, and it is further true that I do need to make 77 more cents in sales in order to be able to initiate a payout because Itch doesn't do payouts until the combined total adds up to $5, but honestly I'd be just as happy if you bought the duck game, or any one of thousands of others.)

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I’ve been thinking about how much I like question-and-answer as a game mechanic. It’s a gentle yet powerful way to get deep into story without the players having to perform actions that feel more like performance or improvisation, things that might feel difficult or vulnerable, a barrier to play or story.

By question-and-answer mechanic I just mean that the game is written as a series of questions. That mini-game I made is a very simple example. The games that inspired it, In the Air Tonight and Big Fight Feel, are more developed versions. Pull Me From the Earth, the game I'm talking about here, is one layer more complex.

But in essence, all these games are just sets of questions. On the page, they hardly seem like games at all, and yet they work.

If you and I enter into the contract that we will ask and answer these questions with sincerity and attention, magic happens.

To get granular, we could notice different ways the questions can be offered to the players: in a prescribed order, in an order chosen by the players, or randomized using a tool like dice or cards. Each of those methods will create different affordances. Randomness allows the most player surrender, which can give a sense of safety; a prescribed order imposes a certain narrative; a flexible order lets players adapt the flow of questions to the story they're telling.

(Do you have a preference, or an intuition about your possible preference?)

Working on that solo journalling game has made me notice how a question makes a strong prompt. I think a good prompt offers just enough specificity to start the imagination going, and then as little as possible that blocks that momentum. For example, say I write this:

That’s a pretty good prompt, but by the end of the sentence the event's already over. What about this:

Just that question mark pushes the energy beyond the end of the sentence, whereas the period stops it.

The second prompt is a little more vulnerable because it’s less defined, but I think it's also more likely to spur something really rich for the player.

I think letting in metaphor and meaning slippage is important, too, because that's invention happening before you consciously invoke it. So


--Fun, but what about

It's potent to add a slightly unexpected second question, one that swerves a little or raises the stakes, like “do you ever get home?” That invites the player to think about a story that's less safe, and therefore more vulnerable and with more possibility of going somewhere deep.

Speaking of deep, let me tell you about this game where you play a bog body in love.

Q&A really comes to life in a two-player game, particularly when the players ask each other the questions in turn (rather than pulling the card and answering for themselves). Something about invoking the cross-exchange, the formalities of real conversation, gives another layer of momentum, and almost always careens you towards some kind of intimacy.

( Review: Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game for Two )

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All quotations taken from Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game by Corvyn Appleby, copyright 2020, downloaded from https://corvynappleby.itch.io/pull-me-from-the-earth in January 2022.

If you'd like a small colourful PDF of my little road trip conversation game / story prompt Getting There, you can download it free here on Itch.io. I've already posted the full text in this journal here, and a delirious run-through with sabotabby here, so the PDF is just for those who might want something more visually appealing to use on class slides or something like that.

I dunno. It's yellow. Might be cheerful. Just trying to get everything in one place.

Game Jam

I joined a game jam for the first time, but then I got buzzy and made a whole game before the jam even started, so now I need a new idea starting at 10 pm tonight.

The jam is to create a solo journalling game -- a game whose form is a series of journal entries you make in the voice of the character.

This format wasn't something I'd particularly thought about creating, but this jam was one of the few jams I identified that was a) for TTRPGs, not video games; b) starting soon; and c) asking for something I thought I could produce.

Now I can't stop making them.

My current idea (the one that's nearly finished, knock wood) is a journal that gets written out of order and then filled in via memory threads that link different entries, or "how I draft everything anyway." I like the way this brings about connections and narrative arcs that the player/writer might not otherwise have come up with. Since it's moving back and forth that is the core mechanic, the effect is going to be kind of ephemeral -- the finished result will be a linked piece of writing, but the most pleasurable part of the experience, I think, will be making the links.

I'm pleased because I had drafted a very complicated mechanic for moving from entry to entry, and then as I was walking to work today I saw how I could vastly simplify it. Now I think I can get the game onto four pages. I can see that economy is a value in game design, especially in these little TTRPGs.

I didn't actually need to go in to work, but I did need the walk, and it was good to be in the office and grab a few things and print a few things and feel At Work, even if what I actually mostly did was revise the new game. No one else was around until the cleaning staff came by -- I got there pretty late in the day, and folks are still minimizing their time in shared interior spaces.

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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 was written with Trait and Moment prompts from jasmine_r_s .

I like things about this setting and this Them; the story did come out really long. As always, the narrative is improvised based on a sketched-in scenario, a few character traits, and the dice rolls.

This is actually the second round I did with these prompts. The first time, with a different character, I think I was trying too hard to make the story come out in a specific way, and it came to a head too early -- which would have worked fine in a group game, but sent me off in a weird direction in the solo game. Not bad, exactly, just sort of meta. So I thought I'd try again -- same prompts, but new character.

I tell this one in the third person, but I think the first person has more impact.

Anyway, enough caveats--

See previous playthrough posts for the game rules.

Content notes: Character death (always); child in peril; choking; gross space plants


The Character
Ghost
Age 17
They/them pronouns
Prematurely grey hair
Virtue: Logical (inference)
Vice: Exaggeration
Moment: I will find hope in … a message from a past self
Brink: [I forget what this was exactly; it involved other people, though, and I never got to use it]

( Ghost's Story )

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9/10 would recommend

(It's this or the real world, friends. So today it's this.)

My current thing is RPG actual-play podcasts¹, specifically Rusty Quill shows. What I tend to get captivated by, though, are the interstitial mini-games, the ones the cast plays three sessions of at breaks just for fun.

The first one I mentioned here was Twilight Abyss from the Magnus Archives feed. jasmine_r_s and M. and I had a brilliant online time playing our scenario New York 1979, modelled on the simple 2D6 rules of that game. Technically we have another session planned, although one character is currently unconscious on a bed of slugs and another is trapped inside a giant seafood organ. So things are not looking great.

I also heard the Magnus crew play Mothership,² an Aliens-themed space RPG with a great stress and panic mechanic. My birthday falling on a Tuesday, I declared the weekends either side as birthday gaming weekends, and made the local crew try Mothership two weekends ago.

That was also fun, although I had failed to really think through the process of interstellar travel, and so very early on we had an interesting moment where I was worried the scenario had broken, but actually there was already enough character development that they players could totally dig the story out if I just got out of their way and let them.

(Always more to learn about GMing. I'm not actually all that experienced. Just bossy.)

Last weekend was my second birthday RPG, but I'd vastly overestimated the energy I'd have for prep. I tried all day to fiddle the bits of my story together into the second half of a scenario.

At 5:30 I slumped back in my vinyl chair and thought: what can I do with this fatigue and this goodwill? I can't write all this, but I still want to gather my friends and play a game against the dark.

Hey. We can play The Quiet Year.

Do you know The Quiet Year?

This is, yes, yet another game I have been wanting to play since hearing the Rusty Quill Gaming crew play it on their break.

If you like collective storytelling and thoughtful map-drawing games about community, I recommend it. You can find it here on the creator Avery Alder's site, Buried without Ceremony.

( About The Quiet Year )

On Saturday, jasmine_r_s and I plan to play a game in Zoom with friends. Very excited to try it out in that format, and just to play again.

The Enthusigasm / Rusty Quill crew are also super into Monsterhearts from the same creator. Have you played that? I read it over and it seems like you'd need the right group to play it with, but with that group, wow.

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1. There's an old Onion headline, "Man Replaces Entire Personality with Podcasts." L'oignon, c'est moi.

2. Their Kickstarter just blew up big time.