A//State

I’m a stretch goal (or, likely by the time you read this, an achieved goal) in the kickstarter for the new edition of the A/State kickstarter. A/State’s a sci-fi meets Victorian setting, a bizarre city ruled by corporations and guilds.

Along with Blue Planet – another game from that era that’s recently been revived, A/State had a fantastic setting, but wasn’t quite clear on what you were actually supposed to do with it. It dropped you into a world and gave comparatively little guidance on where to go or what to do. I know a big part of the new edition address that (Morgue has lots of details here), but back when I played it, it was a void.

So, in one game, I played with that void. I wrote up a document with a bunch of cryptic little snippets of memories – snatches of conversation, images, locations, people in the city – and cut it up, so I had a bowl of disconnected fragments. The player characters woke up in a sinking shipping container in a canal without any memories whatsoever. Over the course of the game, they pulled memories from that bowl, and slowly built up a picture of their previous lives and the corporate intrigue that doomed them. As everything and everyone came from that one city, everything connected up. It was a joy of a campaign to play.

It’ll be lovely to revisit some of those places one more time…