RIP: A game of life, death, and afterlife
Posted: June 21st, 2011, 1:33 pm
I have this weird little game I wrote currently called Requiescat in pace: A game of life, death, and afterlife that I could facilitate if there's interest. It's super-alpha experimental, meaning I don't know yet whether it does what I want it to do or even if what it's meant to do is interesting.
The gist is that you play a disembodied spirit recently liberated from your body. Why? Now what? How does this afterlife thing even work? What is the afterlife? These are all questions you get to explore and answer as part of play. It's very player-directed, with everything from the point of a scene to the basic metaphysics of incorporeality up to the players. You explore this afterlife, doing whatever it is a ghost with unfinished business does, until you either get what you want or dissipate into nothingness.
It's weird in a number of ways. It's a strictly two-player game, with a just-died role and a not-really-the-GM guide role. It's short, and more of a roleplaying koan than a roleplaying poem. The rules are simple and leverage social contract for some major moving parts, but the point of the rules and the emergent effects of using them isn't obvious on reading. By "koan" I mean that part of the process of playing is in discovering how to play the game, what the point is, and how to get the outcomes that you like—ideally played twice (or more) in a row so that you can use what you've learned to better bend it to your will next time.
It plays quickly, so two or three games would fit nicely into even one of the short 2.5-hour slots. Or, it would fit well in a slot with some other short games, experimental or otherwise.
If there's enough interest I could facilitate a few tables of players, or experiment with the more-than-two-players daisy-chain rules I've been pondering.
The gist is that you play a disembodied spirit recently liberated from your body. Why? Now what? How does this afterlife thing even work? What is the afterlife? These are all questions you get to explore and answer as part of play. It's very player-directed, with everything from the point of a scene to the basic metaphysics of incorporeality up to the players. You explore this afterlife, doing whatever it is a ghost with unfinished business does, until you either get what you want or dissipate into nothingness.
It's weird in a number of ways. It's a strictly two-player game, with a just-died role and a not-really-the-GM guide role. It's short, and more of a roleplaying koan than a roleplaying poem. The rules are simple and leverage social contract for some major moving parts, but the point of the rules and the emergent effects of using them isn't obvious on reading. By "koan" I mean that part of the process of playing is in discovering how to play the game, what the point is, and how to get the outcomes that you like—ideally played twice (or more) in a row so that you can use what you've learned to better bend it to your will next time.
It plays quickly, so two or three games would fit nicely into even one of the short 2.5-hour slots. Or, it would fit well in a slot with some other short games, experimental or otherwise.
If there's enough interest I could facilitate a few tables of players, or experiment with the more-than-two-players daisy-chain rules I've been pondering.