A New Year, a New City

It’s a new year, and I’m not quite sure how to begin.

So I make my best guess, head on in, and hope that’s enough.

Today, I released the January update of my odd little City23/24 project. I absolutely did not do it the way I was meant to - ideally, City23 is simple thing: you start your year out writing a little bit about a city at a time, one day at a time. By the end of the year, you’ve got a hefty chunk of worldbuilding on your hands, testament to the power of slow and steady work - to how much you can accomplish when you’re able to take things one day at a time.

I have not been very good at taking things one day at a time. Not in life, and disappointingly, not with this.

I began late - heard about the idea sometime in October on a Discord server. I was immediately enchanted with the idea, but with the year nearly over, my choices were to either make a rather limited kind of city, or wait a few months until Jan 1 for City24 (or, honestly, just start then and mark a year any way I wished, I want to stress that no one is keeping an eye on this project, it’s meant to be done your way, in your time, as relaxedly as possible).

What I decided instead was to start my city late - and describe a city in its final days. Count down to its destruction by December 31st, and on Jan 1st write the first piece of the city that would come after. It was an idea that excited me - and as with most ideas that excite me, it quickly grew beyond what I knew how to handle.

Let me make one thing clear here (if it wasn’t abundantly clear already): I do not have a handle on my ADHD yet. I was only diagnosed last year, and trying to figure out how to work with it has been an uphill battle that I do not have the stamina for, more days than not.

So it was perhaps not the best idea to turn the concept into a game of interactive fiction, where you explore the city through text passages that link to each other like a good ol’ Wikipedia-link rabbit hole. It was definitely not a good idea to try and tie the game into NaNoWriMo and significantly increase my daily expectations - and it was especially not a good idea to do this during a month when I’ve been travelling.

Nevertheless, I have worked on it, and I can present you this: City23/24. It’s a game that feels like a microcosm of my productivity in 2023; less than my ambitions had hoped for, but enough for me to be proud to share. I want to talk a little about what went into the game - and what plans I have for it (and games in general) for 2024.

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Twine is an incredibly useful program. It makes branching narrative simple. I am only using it at its most basic level - tracking interlinked paragraphs of story and information. I recommend anyone dealing with branching narratives - from people making video games to people planning out TTRPGs - to mess around with it. The basics are very easy to learn, and when you’re done, you have a neat little mind-map of everything you’ve done - here’s a look at what a part of my game’s map looks like at the moment -

The interconnected arrows can look intimidating from the outside, but when you know how everything fits together, it’s immensely satisfying to see it all laid out like that. It also lets you know what part of your story might be a little underdeveloped, or what parts of it are pillars - essential parts you can’t remove without destabilizing the everything else.

Oh, hey, speaking of pillars, though - let’s talk about something else that helped me through this game. Something that made it bigger than it should have been, but also something that really hooked me into the story I’d started to tell.

I’m talking about Icarus: A Storytelling Game About How Great Civilizations Fall, written by Spenser Starke.

I’ve always been fascinated by fallen civilizations, though I couldn’t tell you why. My first love in TTRPGs was Numenera, a game set in a world a billion years into the future. Where legends say eight (probably more) civilizations reached their zenith, where the fundamental laws of physics were playthings for their machines, where they’d unlocked answers to questions we couldn’t even begin to understand - but where each of these civilizations fell, and you and your party live in the ruins of what they’ve left behind.

The game draws you in with its love of the inexplicable, and the bizarre, but the more you play through it, the more you’re drawn in by the deeper mystery of how these civilizations fell in teh first place, if they were capable of such wonder. Nothing in the Numenera playbooks seeks to answer those questions - the most you get are hints at possible answers.

Icarus is a game about finding those answers - and was a perfect aid to what I had planned for Varrolikkel. The game has everything you need - the early stage helps you (and the people you may be playing with) set up a little worlbuilding about the Civilization you’ll be breaking down. It grounds the story in people - each person you play with will be given a character, someone who is representative of the larger pillars of this society as a whole, but not necessarily in control of them. The Farming pillar, for example, could be represent by a simple farmer reacting to failing crops and trying to find a way to feed his family in teh face of that - or by a Minister of Agriculture, trying to figure out how to feed a nation.

I played a five person game on my lonesome, just to get a good mix of perspectives in. Some of them appear in the Varrolikkel game - some of them don’t. It helped me chart the story of the city, from what put it into so bad a position, to how people reacted to it falling apart - and to what, finally, made it fall.

Playing through the game is like unwrapping a mystery, step by step. You know that this civilization you’ve built will fall - you just don’t know what of its many problems is the thing that does it. Doom is built in - you know how it ends. It’s the stories that crop up in the face of that that are so powerful. When people are at their most desperate, and when there is no longer a reason - or, indeed, time - to hold anything back, what will they do? Who holds onto goodness, and who gives into their most ruthless impulses?

There is a physical version of the game (and I am intensely jealous of anyone who owns one), but the digital version has a special rules translator that lets you map its prompt cards onto a standard deck of playing cards - and from there, it’s a short hop to map them out onto a standard deck of playing cards, my go-to when I need TTRPG inspiration.

(also a, say, nine of wands is so much prettier than a nine of diamonds)

The game sparked so many ideas of what I wanted Varrolikkel’s final days to be. I wasn’t, however, able to get all of it done in time. What I was able to do is leave the door open a little.

When this started, you could only explore Varrolikkel’s final days, sometimes from the POV of a citizen of the city. That’s changed somewhat. When you start the game now, you have two options - to explore the new city that’s being built, or to sort out the archives of the city that fell, usign a mix of files and memory chips that let you see through the eyes of the people who came before.

The past is still being discovered, even as the future is being written. I am going to learn to pace myself, but I am looking forward to these stories being told.

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So where is all this leading?

Well, aside from the satisfaction of a game well done, I want this game to become a full tribute to the first TTRPG I ever fell in love with, and turn the new city into a Numenera sourcebook. It’s a big swing, but I’m excited about what this could be - and if you start reading now, you’ll be there to see a pile of rubble turn into..well, whatever this is going to turn into.

The City is going to be updated every day, and I’ve made it easier to track what’s been updated - though some updates will still require a little exploration to be found. Read through it, keep track of things you want to see explored in further depth - there’s a lot to see, in the fallen and rising cities.

There’s a lot more I’m planning for 2024. Weave Games - a gaming company that consists of me and my partner, the incomparable Poorna M. - have a few things on the cards we’re excited about releasing.

• The first of those is an update and expansion to our holiday-themed, make-your-own-romcom game, Love is on the Cards.

• I’m planning to run a lot more games going into the new year. I have so many TTRPGs, and not enough people to play them with! I need to rectify that, and if you’d like to be one of those people, here’s a handy form for you to fill!

• I’ve already gotten some responses, from friends and strangers alike, people I am excited to play with. I mainly have this form in place to figure out scheduling, which remains TTRGs’ greatest bane - but I’m planning to run a few games textually, playing by post.

• For the fun of it, I’m even planning to run a few games via honest-to-goodness physical letters. Don’t ask me how it works, I’m figuring that out - just let me know if you’re interested!

• As always, you can contact me directly about playing a game here.

• I’ve got a follow-up post to my writings about The Mad Sisters of Esi and A House of Many Doors. I’ve finished both of them, and have some thoughts about Madness - how it appears in games as a mechanic, and what The Mad Sisters of Esi has to say about the topic.

• And I will continue to write for ComicsXF until the day they kick me out of the Slack - and coming up next, we’ve got another fallen civilization on our hands, as Tony Thornley and I team up to cover the first issue of the Fall of X!

• I have contributed an encounter to GothHoblin’s fantastic collection of TTRPG-related content all themed around Ancient Magic. 140 pages of magic at your fingertips - I’m honored to have been a part of it.

The past is a fallen place. On the ruins of that, we build our new year. I hope you’re as excited about yours as I am about mine.

Armaan Babu