“The library is alive.”
It’s remarkable what can be created from so little.
To be ultra clear:nothingwas prepared beforehand.
In fact, the only real rule in the game was youcannotprepare beforehand.
You establish the entire game world and rules, collaboratively, at the beginning.
Individually, the game-master asks you questions that will shape the world.
Then we individually make statements about the world, which become the rules and reality of it.
Then we briefly join the dots.
Maybe the library is inside a leviathan.
Maybe you need the trains to travel across the sea to find it.
But how do you get in?
That’s how you find it and how you jump in.
Then we make our characters.
“Bertie, who are you?”
That’s how long you get to think.
“Um, I’m a skeleton and I wear a skin cloak and pretend to be human.
And I’m called Fiddles, um, Clanky.”
There’s no limit here but your imagination.
We’ve been forced to imagine it.
And a library inside a leviathan, accessed via skimmer trains and whirlpools?
That would be a memorable location in any game, pen-and-paper or otherwise.
Or, “Can I trykissingthe metaphysicist as a thank you for rescuing me?”
Yes but it won’t go well (and it doesn’t).
There’s the book I need to get my body back!
But our enemies are using it to perform a mysterious ritual.
Iskim-readto find spells we can use.
Rowan usesprecisionto fry our enemies with her laser-eye.
We succeed and I interfere with the ritual and then I am sucked into a black hole and disappear.
The game ends, mission complete.
All of that in two-and-a-half hours.
But it’s the thrill of creation that pulls at me to play again.
This idea that the next time we play, we’ll conjure something as exciting again.
