Egress: Session Zero
In the last post, I wrote about some of the inspirations for this game. This post is about the premise of the game itself. There wasn’t actually a session zero (great post!), just ideas swirling in my head for a few weeks until I put enough of them to page to start playing. I should schedule a devoted planning and prep session next time: even with solo play, focused time is more productive and pushes me to use what I have instead of endless drafting.
My goal at the outset was to play a game about (paraphrasing Homestuck Made This World) “teens growing up with too many computers,” on Earth and in a fantasy otherworld. I wanted to take a light touch at first and play to build up a world and characters that I could later ask new questions about: play to find out, draw maps and leave blanks, stuff like that.
The premise I landed on: a bunch of highly online teens in alt-201X play a new videogame, Egress, that turns out to be a cosmic gateway to a new world and apocalyptic farewell to the one they knew. I wanted them to play this game for a few days, balancing their IRL lives with the game until suddenly IRL as they knew it got blown up. I’d play to find out exactly how that would happen. I wanted Act 1, going from Earth to the new world, to be short: meeting the characters, establishing some basic mechanics, learning details about the world, then getting them through the big glowing door. After introductions, Act 1 would mostly be Calypso’s Cyclic Framework as the PCs tried to win the game before the looming end of the world, then I’d play a climax using tools from the Three-Act Framework.
Doing game design for a fictional game within the game I was already prepping nearly melted my brain. Going from freewriting in my notes to just putting things definitively on the page of my gameplay journal and running with them cut through the gridlock. I needed a fictional premise that was clear enough to improvise about, in the way I could improvise monster ranching or business accounting. I wanted Egress, the in-fiction game, to work enough like SBURB that the fiction could develop in an analogous way. I was also interested (drawing on ideas from dexDavican’s Egress about what SBURB is and what Homestuck is about) in the way that new technologies become second nature to younger generations before established adults really understand them; the way that highly online young people experience a different world; different layers of digital reality overlaid on the same physical space. I was thinking too about datafication and surveillance, and how the everyday harvesting is put onto the people using an app. Egress evokes Ingress by Niantic (which I played for a while as a boring and sad student), whose player-created geolocation data, the physical world of non-players made legible to the game, was repurposed to develop the much more popular Pokemon Go. I thought about large language models and “AI” trained on stolen books and artwork and performances, and also about Homestuck’s kernelsprites and prototyping, and that took me to the idea of Egress gamifying the exploitation of Earth things-places-people as data that could be regurgitated into an alternate reality: the Medium in which the true game is played.
Egress is an AR game; what that A stands for is ominously ambiguous. It’s a physical card that you slot into your smartphone like a Y2K gaming accessory. It’s a suite of new layers and verbs to interact with the world, a UI, a screen. It’s a doorway to a new universe. It’s a cosmic infovore that converts reality into content which a lucky few can win a chance to consume.
I tried coming up with PCs using various methods (Homestuck OC generators, Liminal High School by Evlyn Moreau, spitballin’) but didn’t see silhouettes emerge until I rolled some random personality trait stats from My Body Is A Cage. Mannerless + Imaginative + Envious looked like a character, and so did Methodical + Dangerous + Pessimistic. Hamhambone and I talked about the kinds of characters who we wanted to follow and what their “mundane” lives would look like, boring to them but interesting to play. I wanted characters who knew each other already and had a good relationship, but could also potentially backstab or play off each other in a battle royale scenario. (I’d play to find out how edgy and sharp I wanted to get.) Once we had a good grasp on them in the fiction (and their four + six letter names, chat handles, and guardians of course) we gave them Calypso game statistics, slimmed down to run three characters at once. Here’s who we came up with:
Pony Hateno, stringedMaven (uncomfortable he/him)
Conformist-2, Escapist-1, Studious-1, Teenager-1*
Suburban private high school student living with his dads, diligently pursuing the career-oriented life he thinks he’s supposed to want. His given name is Panjuri, but he’s been going by Pony.
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Cope: when you’re overwhelmed but push through anyway, step up your roll result and take or +1 a Condition like Binge, Obsess, or Avoid.
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Theme Music: you have a persistent Light Die you can use when fitting music plays, but if it rolls 6, it’s the enemy’s theme music and danger escalates.
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Key of the Mundane: hit when you show what normal life is for you, change when you leave normal behind for good.
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Key of the Malleable: hit when you do what someone else tells you, change when you defy a friend.
Ruby Goslyn, timelostPlayboy (unbothered she/her)
Envious-1, Imaginative-2, Mannerless-1, Teenager-1
Big city arts school fashion student living with her grandmother, refuses to lower her head and play along but lonely for real friends. Her mom named her Ruby; she’s focused on her PhD out of state.
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Shove It: add +1 to your final roll total per rank in Conditions worth of new problems you take on.
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Perfect Drip: when you plan an outfit for the occasion in advance, gain a persistent Light Die while it applies.
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Key of the Mundane: hit when you show what normal life is for you, change when you leave normal behind for good.
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Key of the Loyal: hit when you show up for someone else, change when you leave them to their fate.
Axel Xemnas, mindsetAmbassador (unapologetic ze/zir)
Ambitious-1, Dangerous-1, Methodical-2, Teenager-1
Rural high school dropout living independently, looked after by zir boss at the pizza place, whom ze resents, idolizes, and quietly fears. Ze chose the name Axel first, then Xemnas (after the one guy.)
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Just as Planned: if you need a small item or contingency, you have it, but roll d6: 4+ it betrays you later.
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Gamer’s Choice: when you crush an energy drink, gain 1 Light Die. If you ever have 0 Gamer Dice, take a rank-3 Condition like Craving, Desperate, or Hangry.
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Key of the Mundane: hit when you show what normal life is for you, change when you leave normal behind for good.
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Key of the Player: hit when you treat someone as a game piece, change when the game is over for you.
* every PC has the Teenager trait. It’s rolled for catch-all things that a human teen could do: get around, get into trouble, get mad online. Teenager would probably do the same stuff for aliens, depending on how weird their planet is.
Pony, Ruby, and Axel have never met in person, but they became friends on Convoke, the popular server-based social platform with the corny error messages. The three of them were tight until recently, when Ruby and Axel had a falling out over some dumb shit ze said about her new clothes. Pony is trying to stay friends with both; he isn’t close to anyone like he is to them, and more worryingly, he has a malleable personality and shuts down when he has to choose between people he likes.
Once I had these three, I made myself stop planning and prepping and actually play. It happened to be April 13th, and it didn’t feel right to let that day go by without starting. In the next post, we’ll meet Pony and see how Egress plays.