Egress: Introduction + Inspiration
When I want to explore some idea creatively lately, my medium is solo gaming. I used to play variants on Kevin Crawford’s OSR solo system, as seen in Scarlet Heroes, but lately it’s been a breath of fresh air to play Calypso by katamoiran. Calypso is a narrative solo ttrpg system, powered by the apocalypse, that opens the floor to any kind of premise involving characters who want things, the consequences of pursuing them, and the context that grows inevitably all around. My longest Calypso game before this has been an adaptation of Mage: the Awakening 2E; I’ll do a write up series of that game here another day. This series is about Egress, the game I’ve been playing in 2023.
The idea for this game sprouted while listening to Homestuck Made This World and talking to friends about that comic (I was an outsider until the podcast) and ways of reading it and other works. I like an Apocalyptic Otherworld Online Teen Feelings story as much as anybody, and that’s fun for itself, but I’m even more interested in the context. Why do people hook onto these kinds of stories and their characters in the ways that they do? How do the source work and the paratexts talk to each other? What are the conditions under which those things are made, consumed, remixed? I didn’t want to play a story that was like Homestuck (and Persona, and Neverending Story, and many online fandom-oriented works of the 2010s) so much as I wanted A Story That Was Like Homestuck, an original thing on which I could work other transformations. I wanted to run a little virtual machine, fast-forward through the narrative with quick oracles and random events, and have a homegrown story to play with right around the part where it starts getting really weird. (we’ll see how that goes for me.)
My original idea was to port Egress by dexDavican, a PbtA “SBURB fangame,” directly into Calypso (using its guide for plugging in other PbtA games.) The conceit of dD’s Egress is that it’s an in-universe Act 1 GameFAQs homebrew adaptation of SBURB into a ttrpg, bringing in Homestuck’s multiple layers of audience-author-player-character. dD’s Egress focuses on Classpects as the building blocks of player characters; your playbook is the Knight of Life or whatever. This is a popular way of imagining both source text and fan characters in the fandom — dD’s Egress even has rules for the endemic fan theory of Classpect Inversion — but it isn’t my main lens for understanding characters in the story itself. Still, part of me likes the idea of assigning a character “Maid of Hope” and only rarely tagging the stats on their character sheet (the ways that they’re legible to the game), for the same reasons that I like playing an OSR character who’s statted as a “Warrior” or “Expert” but is doing their own different thing during play.
A system in dD’s Egress that I like quite a lot is Trouble, representing damage of all kinds, rated from 0 to 4. I love its setting-appropriate outcomes for when you hit Trouble 4: you’re Dead in some way, but the story being what it is, you’re not necessarily out; maybe you can be resurrected, or that was actually your robot body or dreamself that got killed, or the timeline gets rolled back, or (my favorite) another character emerges who fulfills your same role in the story. (“I love you, Better Dave.”) I wanted to port this onto Calypso’s Complications and Trauma damage mechanic, but it wouldn’t blend. There’s also a mechanic of Connections, giving game meaning to the emergent callbacks and in-jokes that power the source text, but I couldn’t quite plug it into Calypso’s Motifs and Light/Dark Dice in the way that I wanted. In the end (at least through Act 1,) I didn’t end up using much from dD’s Egress directly, but I kept ideas and the excellent name.
I used more material from My Body Is A Cage by Snow. I’m a sucker for games like No More Heroes, Deadly Premonition, and especially Persona that mix a daily mundane life layer with surreal videogamey action. My Body Is A Cage is exactly that, and a super strong and stylish realization of the concept — the graphic design in this book is beautiful, evoking Persona 5’s scrapbook-collage aesthetic but creating something completely original. Your characters work day jobs, try to make ends meet, relax when they can, and dungeon-crawl by night in the treasure-laden dreams of your town’s troubled souls. Characters move fluidly between archetypes like Fighter, Rogue, and Magic User, marking bingo cards of Fighter/Healer/Rival/etc Things done in mundane life and the dungeon. (this game is so sick.)
My Body Is A Cage uses a town map of distinct locations (the convenience store, the park, the library, your house) to visit during the daily life layer — this is the implementation of that I’ve been looking for. Like Snow’s other work, such as The Sun King’s Palace, this is a fantasy setting that centers a particular kind of character: young, poor, queer, frustrated, yearning. This particular kind of humanism figures into your stats, rolled on two d100 tables of positive and negative personality traits: your PC might be +Creative, +Venomous, -Sincere, -Obedient. I drew on these for my game.
I heavily referenced Behind a Truck Near the Docks to the S.S. Anne by Ben K Rosenbloom. This game is about the folklore that emerges around games and glitches, and has the players narrate how to play through some videogame so as to unlock a secret (like a hidden Mew.) It features two different oracles for quick inspiration, one using dice, the other using randomly drawn Pokemon cards (wonderful!!). I mixed these in with the Calypso motif tables for videogame secrets in particular. I want to use it to generate an “optimal playthrough” of the SBURB-alike, then chop and screw that timeline with Ultimecia, their post-Scratch evil sorceress remix of Microscope by Ben Robbins.
From Calypso itself, I used a few appendices on top of the basic rules — katamoiran has truly put in the design work to make this book a widely useful toolkit. Knowing that I wanted to play multiple protagonists, I played a short test game using the Troupe Play rules (“a prince emerges from exile in an isolated castle, but which faction’s scheming envoys will he side with…?”), practiced how to stage scenes when multiple PCs interact, and learned that tracking six character sheets is way too many. I decided to use the broad Traits suggested for simplifying troupe play: Teenager-2 is the stat I roll, rather than a Teenager trait with several specific tags to combine under it. I also tried out the Cyclic Framework, a gameplay mode for striving against multiple ticking clocks (like food and water in the post-apocalypse, or props, thespians, and applause at a floundering show) while you roll random events and look for a way to escape — I had an idea for the first phase that the protagonists would try to solve their SBURB-like game before a meteor squashed Earth.
With all that bundled together, I had my notes full of ideas for little systems and scenes I wanted to play, plus cool art and music. Much of that art and music was by my beloved girlfriend and Egress’ #1 Big Name Fan, hamhambone (check out her music, homestuck, and ttrpg work on her github!) Sharing ideas and theories as the fiction developed, playing towards her concept art and theme music, and posing for her illustrations has brought so much life and fun to this game — our collaboration and paratext makes the idea of Egress, the imaginary text that is shorthanded and summarized and illustrated, more real. I’ll embed her art and music in future updates as it comes up, but she’s posted all of it so far (as of August 2023) as an album on her bandcamp with art for each track: Egress Soundtrack, Act 1 | Hamhambone*
That’s how I got there. In the next post, I’ll write about the premise proper and session zero.
* (buy it (buy it))