All right, luvvies? It feels like a long time since I did one of these, even though I sent out that extra one between the last proper issue and this one. Have I got my dates mixed up or is time just unravelling?

Coming right up

1. Merely Roleplayers

2. Wreck This Deck

3. In Your Benevolence

4. Badges from better times

A change of season

in Sherrydown as in our world. The first act of a new Main House production opened on the Merely Roleplayers feed this week. The British weather has very obligingly set an appropriate mood for the new story, with a slightly unseasonal cold snap…

Vigil: Playtime was our introduction to this world, this town, our tone. We deliberately kept the supernatural time-travelling and monster-hunting stuff located in mundane surroundings - the library, the school. Vigil: Cold Snap pushes the premise as far as it’ll go in a folkloric fantasy direction. We’re venturing into the woods, mingling with the fae, working within season cycles and long, long ceremonial traditions. Vigil is about history and memory. There’s the institutional memory (the protections lost when the Department of Omissions is downsized), but here we’re delving into the ancient, bedrock-deep cultural memory of the English countryside. It’s going to be a wild ride.

Jump aboard

While we’re on Merely Roleplayers, thank you to everyone who took me up on the offer of a free copy of the Sherrydown Enquirer! If you find there’s any vital information missing, or anything unclear or contradictory, please let me know in the comments on the download page - I’ll be pulling together issue 2, which ties in with Cold Snap, around March/April time, and any feedback on issue 1 will help make issue 2 better. And if you use issue 1 to run Playtime for a Monster of the Week group, please let me know how it goes! You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram.

Wreck This Deck

So this is how I’ve been spending lockdown3:

I’ve briefly mentioned Wreck This Deck before, a few newsletters ago. It’s a solo-but-not-exactly roleplaying game by Becky Annison of Black Armada games. You play a budding magickal practitioner with a community of some kind to protect, and the ability to summon and bind demons into a deck of playing cards. You modify and deface cards in various ways as you go, making your deck visibly less and less mundane as you grow in power.

It’s a very good lockdown game for several reasons.

1. It’s a little bit crafty. The game encourages you to think of creative, evocative and meaningful ways to modify your cards. It makes you look at mundane things around your home, like staples, tape and pens, as potential tools of demonology. When you’ve been looking at the same four walls and furnishings every day for months, something that makes them all seem new and strange is very welcome.

2. It’s compelling. It sets you up with a simple story engine - a defined set of priorities and stakes for your ‘character’, a tarot-style technique for fortune-telling, and an initial set of meanings for each card - which quickly sweeps you up in mysteries to solve and crises to address. It’s exciting - and when you’re not seeing much of the outside world, feels thrillingly possible.

3. It’s solo-social. It’s possible to play completely solo, but encourages players to post pics of their defaced, demon-infested cards on social networks (there’s a hashtag, #WreckThisDeckRPG), and to involve other players in their personal stories. You could ask others for advice on achieving a difficult binding, or see whether anyone wants to step into the shoes of the arch-rival that the cards keep insisting that you have. For me, it’s the perfect balance between solo and group play for lockdown: it’s only social when you want it to be, you don’t have to coordinate schedules, and you can sprinkle play throughout the week, as often and for as long as your attention span lasts, instead of concentrating it all into a few hours fixated on a screen.

It’s that third point that I keep fixating on. The encouragement to play this solo game out loud, in public. Because you could just view it as an aside, an addendum to a game that’s already rules-complete without it. But it also brings a completely new dimension of fun to the game: it gives you permission to act up. An excuse to be a little bit weird on main, and to invite other people, friends and strangers, to join you in your weirdness. If anyone calls you on it? You’re just doing what this game you’re trying out tells you to do.

It’s like … hopscotch looks like very odd behaviour from one angle, but as soon as you point to the grid marked out in chalk, it becomes an acceptable way to act in public. The hop, skip, jump is fun to do, and the visible framework of the game gives you permission to have that particular kind of fun in front of people who might otherwise look at you funny.

The rest of the game - the fiction of it, the rules for fortune-telling and summoning, the physical wrecking of an actual deck - give you permission to indulge in magical thinking: something we all do all the time, but generally resist or beat ourselves up for doing. It gives you permission to listen, for once, to the part of your mind that says it must mean something that that card keeps coming up in all my readings or maybe by acting on this card that represents my problem, I can exert some control over the problem itself. And then the social rule encourages you to share that permission with others, and invite them to take advantage of it themselves. I’m absolutely delighted by it.

Get Wreck This Deck

In Your Benevolence

is a micro-fiction podcast I was planning to start pitching to networks this time last year, when I was still thinking of 2020 as the year I’d go to more conventions and networking things.

Season 1 of the Ragged Scratch podcast includes a proof-of-concept episode. The premise is that every episode is a plea someone is making to a higher power. This being is known to hear all such petitions, but to grant only some; how they decide is ineffable. Maybe some things are beyond their power, maybe they’re making moral judgements, or maybe they’re working to a plan.

We, the audience of the podcast, hear each petitioner’s plea as if we are that higher power. All we hear is the plea itself - none of the events leading up to it, and nothing to indicate whether or not it’s granted. Through the things people plead for - and the details that sneak in around the edges - we build up a picture of this other world, and how the presence of a benevolent, but somewhat fickle, supreme being has shaped it.

The idea is to experiment with building and revealing a setting through an incredibly narrow lens, and to explore need, and want, and desire, and desperation. In what circumstances might someone make a plea like this, knowing it’ll be heard, knowing the listener is capable of miracles, but not knowing whether they’ll get what they wish for? Would you just ask every time you wanted anything, on the off-chance? Or only resort to it for things you know you could never accomplish with your own power?

Each episode would be 10 minutes long at most, one voice, and maybe some atmosphere. The first 10 episodes are all scripted. I could just reach out to some friends and get it made, but I decided I want to try getting paid for this one. If the … whole situation goes on much longer, I’m going to have to look into how I’m supposed to pitch to networks and producers when there’s no chance of meeting in a convention bar…

Talismans of together times

I picked up both of these at conventions. And I intend to wear them to conventions again! Perhaps within the year! (please don’t jinx it please don’t jinx it)

Left: Hodderscape badge from Nine Worlds, the one where I randomly ran into someone I hadn’t seen since school and she got me in front of the editor of Tor Novellas to pitch a thing I was writing at the time. Right: knitted Black Mage badge from BooMakesThings, bought at PodUK 2020, just over a year ago, where Alex and I were promoting Merely Roleplayers in the podcasters’ promenade, thanks to Rob from Kaiju FM. I think the thing I’m missing most about conventions is the chance encounters. Running into people you realise you kind of know from that one thing.

One day maybe I’ll run into you by chance at a convention. Until then (or next newsletter, whichever comes first), practise magical thinking, and chip away at that border between ‘play’ and ‘life’.

Matt x