Storygaming as Mechanical Sandbox

 

The Fall of the King of Sota: Chapter Fifteen

 

I have a real problem with smarmy bullshit. so it was a kind of interesting week to follow up on, with this gigantic butterfly. So, I did what I could. And I think it worked!

October 30th through November 5th

The people flock around the giant butterfly, which talks in their minds with a calm, gentle voice: Maalijna, the ground listener. She is gentle, and kind. Children quickly learn to trust her, climbing atop her with no fear whatsoever. When asked to give rides in the sky, Maalijina always chuckles in a high-pitched mental trill: "Your mothers would never forgive me if I did".

The mothers agree. And realize they love her for it.

The "plague" ends immediately. Everyone attributes it to Maalijina.

Around Newport's northern farms, however, things are far from calm. King Lucian collapses all the remaining tunnels between Newport and Montport, and heads back up to Montport, cooperating with Lady Marie's forces.

Doing so results in not one, not two, but three violent deaths, the third one done by Seren, the Bearer of the Blade of Uriel. They were all confused, rushed, and thoroughly strange.

A few animals in the northern farms die, with their heads crushed.

The water in Montport is discovered to be poisoned. Maalijina promises to go there and purify the water there, too, when she's done purifying the ground around Newport.

November 6th- Chapter Fifteen

One of the things that Ross, who finally came back to play with us, said later really stuck with me. There's an interesting kind of loneliness that happens with Crescendo, Ross told me. All these players having these private stories between sessions. They're doing serious emotional buy-in between the sessions, and then suddenly that story is put on public display, full-blast. Without the context.

It's an iceberg of story and emotion and tragedy and comedy, all at once.

Sorta like a Gene Wolfe story. Oops.

A Literary Trail for Crescendo: Out of the Silent Planet

 

The fact that it only occurred to me now to leave a literary trail for Crescendo is silly. I should have considered it sooner. So we'll go in chronological order... sorta. We'll start with the first book that actually woke me up as a child. Like, I still remember sitting on my couch in Aurora at 13, listening to Out of the Silent Planet and drawing and drawing the Sorn. There was something in the description of Mars that haunts me to this day. I recently returned to this book, and realized just how indebted I am to it, especially with Crescendo.

Lewis's prose relaxed me. I'm not sure why it is, but something about the way he writes, just in general, puts me into a flow state. Focused. Better. It's really wonderful, actually. And, for whatever reason, the way he narrates in Out of the Silent Planet scratches some itch in my psyche that I realize I eventually found solace in, with Wolfe.

Ransom's problem felt eerily familiar: a stranger in a strange world. Ransom had to contend with the fact that the things in his head were just as strange and real as the world he was now in.. and he realized there wasn't that much of an operative difference. Mind and world were something that Ransom had to handle with similar levels of dispassion.

The villains felt realistic. Their great evil was... being boring. They just wanted more money. More commercial opportunities. The fact they couldn't figure out just how wonderful and beautiful and tragic Mars was wasn't shown as terrifying, but as sad. Almost silly. The universe was big and awesome and the villains were just so... dumb. Not even in a way that wasn't menacing, just dumb.

Meeting true spiritual beings was unsettling, as it should be. Lewis described them as having a completely different center of gravity, and that fit. There was something strangely comforting in just how eerie the "angels" were. Somehow, you meet something that weird, that unsympathetic, and have it love you. And to have absolutely nothing in common with it, at all.

This eeriness, and how comforting it was, have stuck with me all my life. When life isn't like that, I find I miss it.

In so many ways, this book is the beginning. Ransom sitting alone under a strange sky, realizing that his own mind and the alien world required the exact same quiet dispassion—that is where the seed of Crescendo was planted. Not in tactical combat or spell lists, but in the terrifying, comforting encounter with a universe that is far larger than you are.