radiant fracture

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.