Egress: Some Materials

To give you an idea of the physical artifacts of play:

This is the sketch page where Hamhambone and I came up with Ruby and Axel. We worked from the character creation in My Body Is A Cage together with her own handmade Homestuck OC generator(!), then sanded down the edges and riffed and drew and ran lines until we had something fun.

This is the journal page where I played Act 1, Act 1, Scene 1. My blot writeup expands what’s here from shorthand into narrative in a way that aims to represent of what I was imagining (and sometimes playing out loud) at the time, plus how I’ve grown to think about it once I write it up.

When I played with someone else in person, I asked them to sign their name at the start of the session. But those are for us, not for the reader.

August 16, 2023

Egress Act 1, Act 1, Scene 1

Credits | Hamhambone

It’s Thursday morning, April 13, in a bougie North American suburb called Forest Lake. The sky is clear, the cars have left their driveways, and Pony Hateno has overslept. That never happens.

Pony rouses from dreams of a neverending passage. He stayed up late last night, past even his midnight red line for finishing homework, so he could install Egress on his phone at the moment the software unlocked at 12 AM. The servers were chugging, but he remembers clicking at last through TOSes and EULAs and loading screen gags (“Summoning Meteors” - ha!), being prompted to ENTER NAME…right after that, he must have crashed.

He fumbles for his phone, not charging on his desk, but tangled in the bedsheets. The clock tells him that he’s late for school oh heck oh FUCK

🐴: ITS 9

🦊: Dont worry i called you in sick. You needed the sleep

(🐴 is typing…) DAD WTF!!! MY PERFECT

🦊: Sorry about your perfect attendance

🦊: Take it easy today. Breakfast downstairs. Breakfast emoji

Pony gurns. This is the worst of all possible worlds.

[[I spitballed with Hamhambone about Pony’s home life. I had an idea that he might have lost a parent, but it didn’t gel. We drew a card for an Elemental Motif (from the main Calypso table) for inspiration and got Fox — Cunning. She suggested that Pony has two dads, whom he calls Fox Dad and Wolf Dad. Fox Dad is a reformed trickster turned stay-at-home parent who’s trying to be the stable and firm authority his very boring teen seems to want, Wolf Dad is a salaryman and Earthbound-style voice on the phone who’s always at the office. The wolf provides and the fox guards the den so the pony can grow up into a proud stallion!

That was the moment Pony became an actual character for me, not just a narrative instrument: I was immediately beaming and cheering for him! I became more excited and invested in playing him as a PC, but also squeamish about putting the character in danger and asking hard questions about stakes and consequences.

Pony starts with two Conditions at 1 each: Rueful Role Model and Adversarial Ally. These represent his relationships with Ruby and Axel respectively: she’s doing all the cool creative self confident stuff that he wants to do, while ze pushes him to competition to draw out his entrepreneurial spirit/is kind of a dick. Relationship Conditions are a special kind that can be drawn on for Light Dice or modifier bonuses. He also has one Trauma at 1: Overwhelmed. Pony has a lot boiling under the surface while he tries to keep his 4.0, no breaks, no escape, no way out that he can see. What is he even doing it for?]]

Axel or Ruby aren’t blowing up his Convoke with Egress takes, which is weird. If he knows his pals, they’ll be playing by now. Even Ruby would have logged in for first impressions before class. The Convoke bunny icon is vibrating, but his chats won’t load properly. All he gets are old snippets cached on device.

===

stringedMaven: It’s so unfair that they make you close and open.

sM: It reminds me of this song “Wages or Sin.” I’ll link you the fanwiki!

grindsetAmbassador: Is that from that rap violin musical that you like?

gA: The gay one?

sM: Yeah!

sM: um

sM: Remember when I asked you to not say it that way?

gA: Gay as a pejorative, not gay like your dads.

===

timelostPlayboy: [oopsie! our server bunnies couldn’t load this attachment]

stringedMaven: Oh my gosh wow!

tP: the skirt needs a hoop but its comin together

sM: I love this one! It’s so like…

sM: 🫖🧁🍬

tP: thats what im going for

sM: Did you make that fabric yourself?

tP: lol no

tP: its from these drapes i found

tP: [oopsie! our server bunnies couldn’t load this attachment]

sM: Oh my gosh wow!!

===

[Hmm…well, that’s not supposed to happen. We’re having trouble loading Convoke, and the bunnies can’t tell what’s wrong. Maybe try checking back in a couple-few minutes? Now’s your chance to get that snack you’ve been craving…we’ll wait.]

[[To find out what’s happening, I roll the Oracle move: “Has the game started already and taken down Convoke?” I get match dice, meaning the assumptions of my question are flawed somehow. Rather than discard the question, I opt to act on my flawed assumptions and take 1 Dark Die for Pony. I’ll track each PC’s Light and Dark Dice separately.]]

When he logged into the game at launch and let it run while he slept, who knows what trouble he unleashed? Rival Egress players could have already shut down Convoke somehow to gain an advantage!

Pony YOUTH ROLLs out of bed, still in pajamas, and opens the curtains to take a look around his room. It’s a normative upper-middle-class suburban subdivision home’s bedroom, decorated with revealing glimpses into his interests:

a bookshelf dedicated to BUSINESS ACCOUNTING, TEST PREP, as well as SHEET MUSIC
his very own CELLO in its very own CELLO CASE, sparingly decorated with CUTE STICKERS
his DESKTOP PC, store-bought and equipped with keyboard and neatly sorted MANILA FOLDERS
a stylish and calculation-ready GLASS BEAD ABACUS, a well-meaning gift from Fox Dad
a mint condition box containing WOODY WOODPECKER RACING for GAME BOY COLOR, an investment piece from Axel
a promotional poster for CAREER BOY by DORIAN ELECTRA, a playful present from Ruby
a large framed poster for BACCHANALIA, depicting the full cast and crew in a dramatic costume tableau

Bacchanalia is the musical Pony likes, but it’s so much more than that. It’s art. The beauty of the violin mixed with the power of spoken word and the grace of modern dance, breathing new life into hip hop musical theatre to elegantly, ruthlessly skewer the political and media worlds of ancient Athens…or is it modern America? Bacchanalia asks: what if our democracy will be saved by satire? Or even — satyrs?

(Axel is sadly mistaken: there aren’t actually any textual gay or otherwise queer characters. But culturally, it feels like a representation win. And that’s not getting into satyrsonas,)

Oh. There’s also the mysterious FORMAL HELMET that Wolf Dad gave him for his birthday. He’s never been sure what to do with it, so it just looms on his shelf.

[[Pony hits the Key of the Mundane for describing his room decoration and interests, plus the details about his perfect attendance record. +1 Dark Die, taking him to 2.]]

The best thing to do is check whether the game even activated once he installed it. Maybe he’s worrying over nothing?

Pony opens the Egress app. It goes right into the title screen music.

▪︎ = # Welcome to Egress: Cyan Version # = ▪︎

Your Adventure Into the World of Egress Begins Now!

oh gawd it’s already happening.

Egress Is an Alternate Reality Game.

Isn’t it augmented reality? Is there an ARG component? His anxious brow creases as he taps through, looking for the TOS he remembers accepting last night.

Turn the Things, People, and Places in Your World Into Fuel for Magical Adventure!

To Begin, You’ll Learn How to Use the Capture Grid.

Hold up Your Phone or Other Device to Enter Capture Mode.

Pony follows the prompt, hoping to get to some kind of menu. His phone screen renders his room through the eye of the camera - he must have already granted device permissions.

[[Calypso suggests rolling only when your dramatic instincts say you should. This feels like the right time for a Strive roll. I declare the Goal I’m after, the Danger threatened, the Trait I’m rolling with, and any modifiers from Conditions or Light/Dark Dice. Getting creative with framing a Strive’s stakes opens it up to a wide variety of moves.

Goal: Capture something useful.

Danger: Cause problems.

Roll +Teenager, Pony’s just messing around.

7-9: the danger hits, and instead of achieving his goal, Pony takes 1 Light Die called Wacky Antics. silly slapstick stuff happens!]]

Pony fools around with the camera until a lock-on reticle appears on his bedroom doorknob. The game software has recognized it somehow as [KNOB]. He can’t tell what to press or click: “sure, capture,” he says, and -

doink!

The doorknob is gone. Clean off. It’s just a door now.

“wh”

[Knob] Added to Object Grid!

“how”

Pony tries the door, but there’s nothing to try. It won’t turn or budge. There’s no way out of his room.

Oh no! Pony Hateno has been SKINAMARINKED. That never happens, either.

[[I decide the fiction calls to give him a Condition from his Cope Edge. I have a little table of all his problems: Binge, Obsess, Dream, Spill, Avoid, or Blank. This time he rolls Spill. Stammering, spouting, oversharing - but with Convoke down, who will he even spill to?

Conditions: Rueful Role Model •, Adversarial Ally •, Spill •

Trauma: Overwhelmed •

Light Dice: Wacky Antics, (Theme Music)

Dark Dice: 2

This feels like the time to end the scene and cut to someone else. We’ll leave Pony stuck in his room, and next time, meet Ruby. see ya then!]]

(all art and music by hamhambone)

August 8, 2023

Credits | Hamhambone

Egress: Act 1, Act 1, Scene 1

It’s Thursday morning, April 13, in a bougie North American suburb called Forest Lake. The sky is clear, the cars have left their driveways, and Pony Hateno has overslept. That never happens.

Pony rouses from dreams of a neverending passage. He stayed up late last night, past even his midnight red line for finishing homework, so he could install Egress on his phone at the moment the software unlocked at 12 AM. The servers were chugging, but he remembers clicking at last through TOSes and EULAs and loading screen gags (“Summoning Meteors” - ha!), being prompted to NAME THE PLAYER…right after that, he must have crashed.

He fumbles for his phone, not charging on his desk, but tangled in the bedsheets. The clock tells him that he’s late for school oh heck oh FUCK

Pony gurns. This is the worst of all possible worlds.

[[I spitballed with Hamhambone about Pony’s home life. I had an idea that he might have lost a parent, but it didn’t gel. We drew a card for an Elemental Motif (from the main Calypso table) for inspiration and got Fox — Cunning. She suggested that Pony has two dads, whom he calls Fox Dad and Wolf Dad. Fox Dad is a reformed trickster turned stay-at-home parent who’s trying to be the stable and firm authority his very boring teen seems to want, Wolf Dad is a salaryman and Earthbound-style voice on the phone who’s always at the office. The wolf provides and the fox guards the den so the pony can grow up into a proud stallion! That was the moment Pony became an actual character for me, not just a narrative instrument: I was immediately beaming and cheering for him! I became more excited and invested in playing him as a PC, but also squeamish about putting the character in danger and asking hard questions about stakes and consequences.

Pony starts with two Conditions at 1 each: Rueful Role Model and Adversarial Ally. These represent his relationships with Ruby and Axel respectively: she’s doing all the cool creative self confident stuff that he wants to do, while ze pushes him to competition to draw out his entrepreneurial spirit/is kind of a dick. Relationship Conditions are a special kind that can be drawn on for Light Dice or modifier bonuses. He also has one Trauma at 1: Overwhelmed. Pony has a lot boiling under the surface while he tries to keep his 4.0, no breaks, no escape, no way out that he can see. What is he even doing it for?]]

[[To find out what’s happening, I roll the Oracle move: “Has the game started already and taken down Convoke?” I get match dice, meaning the assumptions of my question are flawed somehow. Rather than discard the question, I opt to act on my flawed assumptions and take 1 Dark Die for Pony. I’ll track each PC’s Light and Dark Dice separately.]]

When he logged into the game at launch and let it run while he slept, who knows what trouble he unleashed? Rival Egress players could have already shut down Convoke somehow to gain an advantage!

a bookshelf mostly dedicated to BUSINESS ACCOUNTING, TEST PREP, and SHEET MUSIC
his very own CELLO in its very own CELLO CASE, sparingly decorated with CUTE STICKERS
his DESKTOP PC, store-bought and equipped with keyboard and neatly sorted MANILA FOLDERS
a stylish and calculation-ready GLASS BEAD ABACUS, a well-meaning gift from Fox Dad
a mint condition box containing WOODY WOODPECKER RACING for GAME BOY COLOR, an investment piece from Axel
a promotional poster for CAREER BOY by DORIAN ELECTRA, a playful present from Ruby
a large framed poster for BACCHANALIA, depicting the cast in a dramatic full costume tableau

Bacchanalia is the musical Pony likes, but it’s so much more than that. It’s art. The beauty of the violin mixed with the power of spoken word and the grace of modern dance, breathing new life into both hip hop and musical theatre to elegantly, ruthlessly skewer the political and media world of ancient Athens…or is it modern America? Bacchanalia asks: what if our democracy will be saved by satire? Or even – satyrs?

(Axel is sadly mistaken: there aren’t actually any textual gay or otherwise queer characters. But culturally, it feels like a representation win! And that’s not getting into satyrsonas,)

Oh. There’s also the mysterious FORMAL HELMET that Wolf Dad gave him for his birthday. He’s never been sure what to do with it, so it just looms on his shelf.

[[Pony hits the Key of the Mundane for describing his room decoration and interests, plus the details about his perfect attendance record. +1 Dark Die, taking him to 2.]]

The best thing to do is check whether the game even activated once he installed it. Maybe he’s worrying over nothing?

Pony opens the Egress app. It goes right into the title screen music.

oh gawd it’s already happening. Pony flop sweats.

Isn’t it augmented reality? Is there an ARG component? His anxious brow creases as he taps through, looking for the TOS he remembers accepting last night.

Pony follows the prompt, hoping to get to some kind of menu. His phone screen renders his room through the eye of the camera. He must have already granted device permissions.

[[Calypso suggests rolling only when your dramatic instincts say you should. This feels like the right time for a Strive roll. I declare the Goal I’m after, the Danger threatened, the Trait I’m rolling with, and any modifiers from Conditions or Light/Dark Dice. Getting creative with framing a Strive’s stakes opens it up to a wide variety of moves.

Goal: Capture something useful.

Danger: Cause problems.

Roll +Teenager, Pony’s just messing around.

7-9: the danger hits, and instead of achieving his goal, Pony takes 1 Light Die called Wacky Antics. silly slapstick stuff happens!]]

doink!

The doorknob is gone. Clean off. The door is just a door now.

“wh”

“how”

Pony tries the door, but there’s nothing to try. It won’t turn or budge. There’s no way out of his room.

Oh no! Pony Hateno has been SKINAMARINKED. That never happens, either.

[[I decide the fiction calls to give him a Condition from his Cope Edge. I have a little table of all his problems: Binge, Obsess, Dream, Spill, Avoid, or Blank. This time he rolls Spill. Stammering, spouting, oversharing - but with Convoke down, who will he even spill to?

Conditions: Rueful Role Model •, Adversarial Ally •, Spill •

Trauma: Overwhelmed •

Light Dice: Wacky Antics, (Theme Music)

Dark Dice: 2

This feels like the time to end the scene and cut to someone else. We’ll leave Pony stuck in his room, and next time, meet Ruby. see ya then!]]

(messages made with Pesterlogger, Undertale/Deltarune text box generator, and Earthbound Text Labs.

all art and music by hamhambone.)

August 8, 2023

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.

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.
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.
Key of the Mundane: hit when you show what normal life is for you, change when you leave normal behind for good.
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.

Shove It: add +1 to your final roll total per rank in Conditions worth of new problems you take on.
Perfect Drip: when you plan an outfit for the occasion in advance, gain a persistent Light Die while it applies.
Key of the Mundane: hit when you show what normal life is for you, change when you leave normal behind for good.
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.)

Just as Planned: if you need a small item or contingency, you have it, but roll d6: 4+ it betrays you later.
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.
Key of the Mundane: hit when you show what normal life is for you, change when you leave normal behind for good.
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 13^th, 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.

August 8, 2023

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))

August 8, 2023

You’re Today’s Star! Idol Culture on Morbios-23

Idols, closely tied to the popular musical genres called Morbop, are a subcultural phenomenon in the Morbios cultural sphere: highly-publicized and celebritized performers, usually masked, often multi-talented, increasingly inorganic.

Despite its “pancultural” positioning, the musical hooks most associated with Morbop (like the bubbly doka-doka-doka and “blooming” synth crescendoes) have roots in the patriotic anthems of a semi-past era of Morbian history, mingling with popular Chibyo instrumentation.

Gen 1

Seeking to fill a market niche, the music producer Titane Oyono developed a concept for a new kind of entertainment product: a large group of semi-interchangeable performers, defined more by their group identity than individuality. Dancing Star Light expected all of its synchronized and choreographed women to sing, dance, and play instruments equally; while the young men of Teen☆Wink were differentiated as “the hot one,” “the cool one,” “the funny one,” until cooler, hotter, funnier replacements could be cast.

The Council was skeptical of individualized celebrity and the potential promotion of vice through pop media; the word “idol” was first used critically by mainstream media. To assuage them, Oyono developed fictional personae for his performers to adopt, discouraging “true” personality worship. He even drew heavily on the most-Council-approved popular music, the “canon” of pre-Scream records Mazin had promoted.

Audiences reacted positively! The bubbly, upbeat music with uncontroversial themes of friendship, chaste affection, and clean living were a hit with families, religious groups, and institutions seeking youth programming for discotheques and social clubs. This squeaky clean image was maintained then and now by strict contractual restrictions on the personal lives of idols: no drinking, no drugs, no parties, no partners. Check with your manager before wearing non-sponsor brands.

Gen 1.5

Expanding beyond Oyono’s signed artists, other acts and labels took the original idol group concept in new directions: the perennial second-place New Moons, mixed-gender Two•Nine•Eight, and artsy Slander to name a few.

Gen 2

By ten years in, idol groups had seen an explosion of popularity. While Oyono’s label maintained market dominance and ensuing creative control over performers, new names and rivals exploded onto the scene weekly. Thieves of Kisses ruffled conservative feathers with their mildly suggestive lyrics and bouncing hips, but audiences were more interested in their elaborate “thief” masks. The idol with an unexpected “secret identity” in their offstage persona became a stock character both in wider media and within idol storylines.

The genre expanded like a gas to fill other media niches. Sonon Glow was the first idol group to host a morning news broadcast; YahYa was the first to host in the evening, omitting the daily musical number. 27 members of ultra-popular Step Up!! 41 were elected to the Morbios Assembly, enough to sway legislation and secure two ambassadorships and the Tourism Ministry. (Iskandar would go on to head the Finance Ministry after retiring from music, and subsequently the idol group Finance Ministry after retiring from politics.)

Chafing against the restrictions of large ensembles, some performers struck out solo, but the most successful acts formed small groups and remained affiliated with wider “constellations” of sister acts for stadium-filling crossover performances and media-friendly storylines for the characters they portrayed. Mint’s bias was the singer and dancer Dark Sun Khadija [DSK], who broke from the corny-spooky (and awful work conditions) Enigma Manor group to pursue her own career and artistic image within a constellation called the Paradise. Her sincere coolness and ‘gentle rebel’ attitude attracted legions of fans looking for a role model; sales of her trademark antigrav roller skates soared.

Titane Oyono revolutionized the genre yet again by expanding the list of approved cuts and samples from Mazin’s official library to newly-discovered albums from his personal collection. This sparked the career of legendary girl group Alilat, who wore elaborate makeup and hairstyles instead of masks, as well as a wider religious debate in the Council about the canonicity of Mazin’s private notes and playlists.

Gen 3

Marked by the expansion of the official idol milieu to include performers of different languages and homeworlds, collaboration with Chibyo artists, and especially the development of VI software to create virtual idols. Frustrated by their stable of idols cracking and bending under pressure, failing to live up to audience standards, or worse - demanding contract renegotiation - labels began promoting virtual idols (like the still-iconic Melody Mode) who were only their characters.

In response to increased competition, artists and labels expanded their repertoire of talents: idols were increasingly expected to also act, paint, write, compose, pursue athletics, or wilder gimmicks. DSK took her art in new directions, releasing theme albums whose storylines intersected with her other projects, especially her growing professional wrestling career with the rest of the Paradise constellation. In a rare move for the industry, she even created and licensed her own VI, Dija Vu.

Public scrutiny increasingly turned to the abuses of the idol industry itself, not just tabloid scandals about performers’ personal lives. Titane Oyono was officially censured by the Council and sentenced to a short prison term, and his rivals stepped in to fill the gap. There was a moment of popularity for “anti-idol” punk group Everyone’s Grudge before they dissolved and rejected further spotlight. Holomallow successfully spun the atmosphere of scandal into promoting their library of VIs as a safe, respectable, values-based alternative to “live idols.” How could a program let you down?

The media-savvy cult around the psionic Lulodi Midimi drew Morbian entertainers into its orbit, prized recruits for their high profile and personal charisma. DSK, depressed and unhappy, became a booster for Midimi (her last album, a collab meant to boost other earmarked stars and be sold exclusively by local chapters, is an object of dark fascination) and saw her co-performers distance themselves from her and her popularity waver. Titane Oyono’s assassination in prison saw her wanted as a person of interest, until she fell off the grid entirely in the wake of Midimi’s failed coup. Fans grieved, left without answers, only the synthesized voice library of Dija Vu. Khadija’s frequent collaborator and tag-team partner Kraken Aisha, in a rare interview with unofficial fanzine Moon’s Room, compared it to “losing my heart.”

Gen 4

The current era has been defined by increasing VI-human symbiosis in sometimes unsettling, sometimes inspiring ways. Live idols increasingly use glitchcore techniques and copy dance moves that were developed for VIs to work within software limitations. Meanwhile, labels and independent artists craft “real lives” for virtual idols, invoking the gap between mask and face they were first developed to erase.

A new development is all-VI constellations (like 108 Stars and Angel Buster) whose members’ abilities are artificially limited. Following them in reality TV-like competitive social fictions, fans praise (and scorn) their idols, enhancing the singing and dancing talent and morale of their bias by voting (suffrage earned by purchasing sponsor products) or literally by uploading their own kinetic/vocal/facial data to improve the software. This has opened the door to new levels of parasocial anxiety and vicious fandom bullying, which the Morbian government has taken only piecemeal steps to regulate.

As the Morbop wave crests, idol fandom abroad is no longer limited to exotic novelty or subcultural half-underground datatape-trading. Mainstream audiences across the sector know the names of all seven of the Ring Generation boys, while domestic charts are topped by commercial-edgy R3D!BLQCK and the 36-member mixed human/VI ensemble Burn My Dread.

Tello Institute industrial mecha pilot Minerva Millennium Module, aka Mint Miller, represented as a doll on her workbench wearing a Dark Sun Khadija crop top.

(art by 🍰 hamhambone.itch.io )

July 20, 2023

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