A Place That Was Never Real

The story ends like this. Shards of the sky fall around the island academy, crashing into the ocean and flattening the terrain. Six fourteen meter tall slate grey death machines, used only for training up until now, turn their weapons to the hole in the top of the world. 

Two of the machines sprint to a third and support it, as the third reaches a hand to the sky to catch the inbound thermobaric rocket bleeding down the throat of the night. A brilliant fluorescent striped flower ringed in butterflies blooms upwards from its hand, dwarfing the academy and catching the rocket harmlessly- and is then suddenly gone. Briefly, a cheer raises on the open communication line. Another of the machines gives a thumbs up to the flower-bloomer before its cockpit is riddled with high millimeter rounds from above and is crushed by the red marked heralds rocketing downwards. The cheer is replaced by a scream torn apart.

Earlier in the year I had an idea to run a sort of high intensity game with a small group of players, just two. I only really had the idea in my head that it would have giant robots and that it would take place over years with the characters growing throughout, possibly thanks to some influence of reading through Spectres of Brocken. 

So I pulled together some simple rules, which I'll talk about more below, and then invited my players over with the instructions that the game would probably take about two days to play and that they would need to prepare an invocation of a muse. 

We got time off work, picked a day, and started around the afternoon. To set a tone we began with the invocations of muses, lighting of candles, and a brief overview of the system I'd cobbled together.

The story ends like this. Three scarred teens sprint from a bunker out into the flickering landscape beneath the fallen sky. Behind them, it steadily pulls itself upwards and outwards towards them, grabbing trees and snapping them in the process. One of the teens shoots a flare, revealing the its extent and bathing the shattered landscape in red. They run.

36 hours later and we had finished, all in all we played for about 24 of those hours in the wildest, most invested game I've ever run. The experience was so emotionally, physically, and creatively draining that it took several days to really recover. My brain was jello. Since then, both of my players have had nightmares tied to the game, and we've all agreed to play it again. It was the most satisfying experience I've had running a game, and it was probably the best I have ever run.

@OddOblivion

There is a wound in the heart of their world. It has been there since before they were born. Though by now they have made and suffered their own wounds, this first wound is special. It was made for them, and through it they see the goldenrod shores and hear the winnowing song beyond the gray.

The Set Up

Going into the game I had a few goals in mind. I wanted to get the players maximally invested and attached to both their characters and their development and relationships. Secondly, I wanted there to be some mechs and maybe a bit of magic in it. And finally, as a glutton for horror there would be something to tingle the spine. 

Towards the first goal, I implemented two techniques. Firstly, a little bit of ritual at the beginning. The invocation served not only as a bit of showmanship to get the juices flowing but also to set a defined boundary between the game world and the real world, figuratively crossing the threshold and entering the Underworld.
Secondly, taking a note from Beyond the Wall, I had very little defined already before the game. At the start there were several vague concepts (Mech training school, bildungsroman, stars, gravity), a character (Father), and an island to hold it all.

Initially, the idea I had was more about how to run the game and less about what it was to be structured around. After toying around with a few ideas thrown about lately I pilfered from Steel Hearts Zero, APOCALYPSE FRAME, pulled together a list of star names, dove into the well of Polaris by Ben Lehman and drank heavily- though perhaps not heavily enough- of it, and inhaled the fumes of a stray working copy of Chris McDowall's Blighters that I had stumbled into download of. Finally, I decided the players would be kids in a batch generation of mech-pilots to be. All assigned a number, and each choosing a star for their name. After that I sprinkled in some passages plucked from Omnicide and ruled the mess was ready to go. 

Here it is.

It's a bungle in more ways than one, but it suited our purposes. The best thing that I can say about it is the use of gravities as inspired by Steel Hearts Zero. I treated Gravity as being not only things the characters were attached to, but also their skill sets and their relationships with other characters. This combined with the pool of personal die to boost necessary rolls, as harvested from Lady Blackbird along with the refreshments rules, led to the players more carefully considering not only their character's roles but also how they should spend their time in the world and develop. 

The last few touches were to select a few tracks for a playlist and plan to riff off of that and let it vibe in what directions we needed to go.

Taking cues from the variety of great collaborative storytelling systems, my plan relied heavily on the players designing the world with me as we progressed through it, and having them flesh out other characters and their motives as they came about. With that, the entire game was mostly ad-libbed. 

As for the experience of running it ad-libbed, everything went shockingly smoothly. While I had rough ideas that we'd touch briefly into the characters at a young age and then fast forward, these plans were entirely uprooted and thrown aside in favor of a much wilder story. Together we kept loose notes of who was what and where, and I held on to the control of major antagonists and the ultimate workings of the story, but the players were more than content to spin off on their own with their character and the other characters they ran as they came into play.

I started by describing a northern Pacific island with a single centralized low-mountain peak, and a high tech academy on the western side. From there I asked for what other landmarks were on the island, what the buildings looked like, what the dorms looked and sounded like, and from there we painted in the story stroke by stroke. 

By the end of it all, we had a total of about 40 or so named characters, with maybe 10 still alive. I have the rough outline of all the events written up, but I find the experience and the plot a challenge to talk about. It's all here mostly written down, some 24 hours of gameplay and lunacy condensed into a few sheets on a google doc that I'll try and transpose into something digestible if there's any interest.

I hope I can run more games that are just as if not more fulfilling.