Daedalus
@regular-dog Hello! I am your holiday truce gifter this year! I hope you enjoy this labyrinth-themed fic. Happy New Year!
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Only three years in, and it was already impossible to tell how big Amity Park was. Normal methods of surveying didn’t work. Physical maps were either always right or always wrong, and sometimes both at once. Driving across the city at a constant speed didn’t help, either. The outgoing trip and the return trip never seemed to match, and there simply weren’t enough one-way streets in Amity Park for that to be the answer to the problem.
Asking the residents didn’t help, either. They couldn’t even agree on how big the city they lived in was. Some of them acted like Amity Park was the second coming of Chicago, others expressed confusion when Amity Park was referred to as anything but a small town.
(The census data was almost worse.)
But no matter what version of Amity a particular resident believed they lived in, there were always similarities. There was always Casper High, and its Ravens, and every student went there, and learned from Mr. Lancer, and heard the rumors about Sydney Poindexter. There was always the Nasty Burger, and Valerie Gray working one of the many distasteful jobs that the place had to offer. There was always Amity Park Park, confusingly named and full of even more confusing paths, whether it was a city park or a county park, or something else altogether.
There was always Fentonworks, rising tall and strange from a small, ordinary neighborhood.
There was a heaviness there, around that particular building. A weight that drew in other things, that twisted. It was the heart of a labyrinth of streets, of old roads and new, of forest paths and disused hiking trails. It was the heart of Amity Park.
And it should be said that, at the heart of any labyrinth, there was a monster.
And it should be said that, at the threshold of every labyrinth, there was a princess.
And it should be said that the one thing that every labyrinth waits for is a hero.
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Samantha Manson wound golden string around her fingers, thinking. It glowed faintly in the dark of her room, like the thinnest, purest beam of sunlight cast through morning mist and a thick canopy of leaves overhead.
However, her eyes didn’t linger on it. Instead, she looked out the window over her– garden– conservatory– greenhouse– private park– the place where she went to grow plants, and be among them, that may or may not have changed in nature and size while she was looking. Which may or may not have had many natures and sizes.
She closed her eyes. Insight was useful, as vital as the blood in her veins and the lightning in her nerves, but it had its drawbacks.
When she opened them again, a hedge maze stood dark and tempting beneath the light of a moon that should not be full and should not be there and had never been that big, in any case. The lights of Amity- rising high with skyscrapers or low to the ground and scattered among farmhouses– laid beyond it.
In her hands, the string hummed, as if it had been held taught and plucked. A single, clear note filled the air.
“Do you think it will work?” she asked.
There shouldn’t have been anyone in her room, and there wasn’t. But her nearest neighbors could be five miles from the walls of her home or five feet, and she rarely spoke to them. The distance between friends was greater, but also infinitely less.
Tucker looked up from his computer, which sat at his desk, in his own room, in his own house, the light from the moon shining in from the window behind him. His glasses reflected the pale, bluish light of his computer screen. The wheels of his desk chair rolled across the carpet of his room - so different from hers - with a squeak.
“You’re not getting cold feet now,” he said. It wasn’t so much a question as an exclamation.
Sam sniffed. “Of course not. But I’m not the one taking the biggest risk, am I?”
There was a third room. This one dark and starry. The glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to every available surface were normal. The patterns they were in were not. Nor were the eyes that stared out from beneath star-spangled bedsheets. Nor was the moon, gleaming from windows stationed on either side of the bed.
“I’m not sure if it actually matters if it works,” said the owner of those eyes, blinking slowly. “I mean, if it works the way it’s supposed to work. We’ll just go back to plan A if it doesn’t.”
“No offense, Danny, but plan A sucked,” said Tucker.
“How am I not supposed to take offense to that?” whined Danny. “Plan A is fine. It’s a normal plan. I know my city.” The last was said with a casual but deep possessiveness.
“Plan A wasn’t even really a plan,” said Sam. “Your plan was to just fly in and find them, never mind all the other things that are happening.”
“That’s not so different from this plan,” protested Danny. “It’s basically the same. It’s just the how that’s different.”
“Pretty big how, though,” said Tucker. “And I thought you liked this plan.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Danny. “I’m just saying, I’m just saying that even if it doesn’t work, we won’t be any worse off than we were at the beginning, before, you know. The research.” He pointed vaguely in the direction of his window.
Somehow, Sam knew that he was, in fact, pointing at the stack of thick books sitting on her desk. Only, instead of pointing at them across the there-not-there division between their rooms, he was pointing in their true direction, across the streets and forests of Amity Park.
The covers of the books shouldn’t have been legible in the darkness. Sam could read them anyway. Greek mythology. Sympathetic magic. Recurrence. Narrative causality. Daedalus, Icarus, Theseus, Ariadne, Asterion.
Four days ago, New Athens High School had sent a bus bearing the fourteen members of their track team and their coach to a meet in Elmerton. On the way back, the driver had made a wrong turn, knifing straight through the heart of Amity. The bus, the driver, and the coach had come out the other side. No one knew what had happened to the track team.
Danny had spent three of those days looking for them. Amity Park had spent those same three days winding itself more tightly than the ball of string sitting on Sam’s desk. Whether it was downtown, or the forest, or the suburbs, the part of Amity New Athens’ bus had passed through was a maze.
A labyrinth.
They’d thrown themselves into research, then, begging for information from their allies. Or, rather, from Danny’s allies. Most of them, with the exception of Dora, were there for him more than for the rest of them. Pandora was the one who had finally noticed the connections, the links with old stories, the resonance.
There was a labyrinth. There were sacrifices. Other roles–
“Or, if you don’t want to leave it, you could send Tucker in,” said Danny, shrugging slightly. “If it doesn’t work with just me. You know.”
Sam’s fingers slipped.
Sam was the obvious choice for the role of princess. Danny was the obvious choice for the role of hero.
He should have been, anyway.
“Hence why I’m asking if you think it’ll work,” said Sam, sharply.
“I hope it’ll work.”
Sam huffed. “Not what I’m asking.”
“It won’t hurt to try.”
“It might,” said Sam. “The monster dies at the end of the story. The princess is abandoned. Even Theseus doesn’t have a happy ending.”
“And we aren’t those characters. It isn’t as if Tucker is going to cut my head off.” Again, Danny waved in Tucker’s true direction, rather than across the emptiness of his room. “We’re the ones making the decisions. We’re just using the stories for– For narrative clout. Or however you described it.”
“Danny…”
“It’ll be fine. I mean,” he looked up at her with those too-bright eyes, the rest of his face black with shadows, “if you’re having second thoughts, it’s fine. We can try something else.”
“I’m not having second thoughts.” Sam began to unwind the string from around her fingers, wrapping it around the rest of the ball. The maze outside her window had become a winding garden path, and the neighbors were once again nearby.
Tucker cleared his throat. “First thing in the morning, then? We ride at dawn and all that?”
“Before dawn would probably be better, honestly,” said Sam.
Danny sighed. “I’ll set my alarm clock.”
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It might have been neater to enter the maze in Sam’s backyard, or to start from the spiraling center that was Fentonworks, but that wasn’t where the bus had disappeared. The bus had disappeared going through downtown Amity Park.
Well. Insofar as the bus had disappeared in any particular location. And insofar as Amity Park had a downtown.
The lack of permanence of place made discussing things like this somewhat difficult.
Still. At the moment, there was a downtown. A historical shopping district, as a matter of fact. As he walked down the sidewalk in the crisp, gray, predawn light, Danny could feel beneath his feet a hum. The shopping district here was the mainstreet of small town Amity, even as skyscrapers loomed overhead, and the layers felt real enough for Danny to reach out and rub them between his fingers.
(They weren’t really, but they felt like it.)
He stopped in front of an alley that smelled of cinnamon and sea salt. Here, the layers parted, and you could slip between them, into the interstices and forbidden places of Amity Park.
“Is this the place?” asked Tucker.
“Yeah,” said Danny. “I think so.” He motioned them to the mouth of the alley, where they’d be covered by shadows and next to unnoticeable by those who were firmly in any one version of Amity Park. “Sam?”
She teased out the end of the golden string and cast it towards Danny. As it flew through the air, it twisted and knotted itself before falling over Danny’s head. The loops shrunk around his neck, creating a narrow golden collar.
Danny raised his hand to touch it and made a face. “It’s tight,” he said.
“Sorry,” said Sam, glaring at the ball of string as if it had betrayed her. “I don’t–”
“It’s fine,” said Danny, waving it off. “Just unexpected.”
“Right,” said Tucker, stepping forward. “Your sword, Theseus.” He handed Danny a Fenton invention that had a passing resemblance to a lightsaber.
Danny rolled his eyes and took the small cylinder. “Thanks. But don’t call me that.”
“Hey, that’s the story we’re trying to tell.”
“We’ll give it a tug if we run out of string,” said Sam.
“Mm,” said Danny. “Well. Might have to give it more than one. Don’t let me drag you in.”
Sam snorted. “What, like you drag us into everything else?”
“Seriously. Just let me go if I start pulling too hard.”
“No way,” said Tucker. “We’ll just tie you onto some building or something.”
“I have been known to bring down buildings.”
“Well, don’t,” said Sam.
“Wow. No sympathy here, I see.”
“Nope,” said Sam and Tucker together.
“Now go save the tourists,” said Sam, pushing him forward.
“They’re not really tourists,” said Danny. But even so, he stepped across the line and into the gap.
Into the labyrinth.
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The in-between spaces of Amity Park did not immediately look like they were the in-between spaces of Amity. Danny sometimes liked to imagine that they were what Amity Park used to look like, before it became a dozen different, mutually exclusive places. That had to be impossible, though. There was too much, too many different things, afterimages and fantasies and illusions.
People walked on the streets, and cars drove, but they were transparent, projections from the layers of Amity immediately bordering this space. Sometimes, they walked through each other, not noticing at all.
Danny still flinched when it looked like cars were about to run into one another, and let out a breath of relief when they instead seemed to phase through each other.
So he walked.
He walked, and as he walked, the road began to change. He began to change. Facades paled. Grecian columns reached up the sides of skyscrapers and ranch homes. Brick turned to marble. Danny’s t-shirt and jeans slowly, gently, became a chiton and chlamys, trimmed in red. The Fenton Saber became a sword of green-tinted bronze, strapped to a belt around his waist. His shoes became sandals, laced up to his knees.
It wasn’t the first time Danny had worn clothing like this. He did visit Pandora. But he’d never worn it in Amity Park. It was a little embarrassing. The ancient Greeks’ idea of underwear was… lacking, in Danny’s opinion. But it wasn’t as if anyone here could see him.
The act of walking here also felt strange, and Danny couldn’t understand why this was needed. Not really. Not the act, not the ritual. By virtue of his nature, he could duck in and out of anywhere in Amity whenever he wanted. Mostly. At least, he could find places to duck in and out whenever he wanted.
He should have been able to find the missing students without any problem.
But he hadn’t.
And he still wasn’t finding them. There was no pull. No indication of what direction he should go, what direction he could find them in.
Danny sighed, and the sky above boiled with stars.
He looked up, not having expected that, then shrugged and continued to walk. Things here were strange.
There were words on the walls, now, carved into the marble alongside window displays for cell phones and stationary. Ἀστερίων, Ἀριάδνη, Θησεύς. He traced Ἀριάδνη with his fingers. It sparked gold, the same color as the string around Danny’s neck.
And then the string flexed. Pulled. Spooled forward, winding into a ball in front of Danny. A short thread was thrown off of the rapidly spinning ball and settled on Danny’s head before solidifying into something heavy and cold.
(Elsewhere, the end of the string tears itself out of Sam’s hand, disappearing into the rift between.)
“Oh,” said Danny. He bit his lip and closed his eyes, and mentally apologized to his friends for worrying them. “Theseus was from Athens. Ariadne wasn’t just rich, she had authority over Crete. We had the roles wrong.”
(Not that Danny really wanted authority over Amity Park. That… just wasn’t his thing. He didn’t want to be in charge. He just wanted to protect.)
But this meant… He needed to find one of the New Athens kids and get them to be Theseus.
He didn’t want to do that. He was here to rescue them, not to force them to rescue themselves. And… iIf he could find one of them, couldn’t he find the others? Finding them was the problem he’d started with. If he could find them, he could bring them out.
He stumbled as the section of string wrapped around his throat tightened. That actually hurt!
Then it loosened and Danny took a deep breath.
Narrative weight, right. They were already trying this story. Changing it or aborting it halfway would have consequences. Ones that Danny didn’t want to deal with.
He swallowed. He couldn’t help but remember that in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, many people, many Athenians, had died before Theseus had finally defeated the Minotaur. When it was Danny in the role of Theseus, that hadn’t been a concern. He was certain he could fight any monster, any ghost in the role of the Minotaur.
But some random kid from New Athens? One who had probably never seen a ghost, and who had been stuck here for days?
That… that he wasn’t at all confident about.
Sam had been right to be wary of the risks. It was different, when someone else was facing them.
He rolled the ball between his hands, feeling it over. Power thrummed between his fingers, brighter and sharper than before. A thin stripe of gold ran down the sidewalk, twisting over on itself and turning away from the main street.
Danny sighed, and started to follow.
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Danica was starting to panic.
One moment, she’d been on the bus, falling asleep after a difficult meet despite how risky it was to fall asleep anywhere near Georgie and his so-called ‘artistic impulses.’ The next thing she knew, she was waking up on a sidewalk in some kind of nightmare city. A nightmare city full of things that looked almost like people but were transparent and walked right through her as if she weren’t there.
She didn’t know how long she’d been here, trying to figure out how she’d gotten here, where the bus was, where everything else was, but it felt like hours, at least. She was starting to get hungry.
She was starting to wonder if she’d gone crazy. Or if this was what it was like to be dead. And that was before the buildings started to melt into weird, semi-Greek-Revival messes.
It was weird here, and she hated it. She wanted to go home. She wanted her mom. She wanted to quit the track team and never have to deal with anything like this ever again.
“Hello?” called a soft voice.
She whipped around. Up until now, this place had been eerily quiet.
Standing just a few feet from her was a boy, one who could have stepped out of a history textbook. He was wearing something like a cape, and a Greek-style tunic, white trimmed in red. Tangled in his hair was a thin, golden circlet. But the strangest thing about him was the ball of glowing golden string in his hand. One end of it was wrapped around his neck.
“You–!” said Danica, suddenly more furious than frightened. “Did you bring me here? Why?”
The boy shook his head. “I didn’t bring you here. Actually, I’m hoping to help you get out. You and the rest of your teammates.”
“They– They’re here, too? And the coach–?”
“No, just your teammates,” said the boy. He made a face. “You guys kind of… Ran into a story.”
“A what?” demanded Danica, incredulous. She’d also, incidentally, started to back away from the boy.
“A story. Have you heard of Theseus and the Minotaur?”
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“What if I don't want to do this?” asked the girl, after Danny had finished explaining. “What if I can’t do this?”
Danny stared at her, a bit baffled. The thing about being a ghost, even half a ghost, the thing about thinking like a ghost… Sometimes it was hard to wrap his head around other perspectives. Especially when his friends, the only people he really talked to, were just as eager to jump in and help as he was.
He hadn't wanted to make anyone risk themselves. He wanted to bring them to safety without that. He also hadn't expected that anyone would just… not want to help.
“Well, I suppose… I suppose you could follow me until I found one of your classmates who could?” he said. “Although… I’m not sure if we can do that with this story. It might be that I have to find someone alone and then they find everyone… In which case you’d just have to wait for them. Speaking of which, how long has this been for you? On the outside, it’s been a few days, but you look a little too good for that.”
“I– What? Days? I haven’t been here for days.”
“Not from your perspective, maybe. Time is weird. Even without all this…” He waved his hand, trying to indicate ghost weirdness in general. “... stuff, even with just the things we can look at scientifically, it’s still relative. Right now, you’re basically in a dimensional pocket. Pocket dimension? Whatever. The point is, is time running at different rates really that strange, comparatively? At least, it made it so that you didn’t starve before me and my friends were able to figure this out.” He raised the ball of golden string, ignoring how the movement pulled on his neck. “Right?”
The girl gave him a ‘why are you using science-fiction terms in what is clearly a fantasy scenario’ look. At least, that’s how Danny chose to interpret it.
He sighed. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“Danica,” she said, then looked angry at herself and shrugged. “Or Dani, I guess.”
“Huh, small world,” said Danny. “That’s my sister’s name, too.” Not to mention his. Maybe Theseus’s story wasn’t the only one being echoed, with a coincidence like that.
The girl continued to stare at him, this time with a ‘why the heck are you bringing that up while I’m having a crisis’ look. Probably. Danny tended to make a similar expression from time to time. Usually when the ghosts he fought started having lovers’ quarrels in the middle of a fight.
“So,” he said, awkwardly. “You can come with me, of course, just to… test out what will happen?”
“Oh!” said Danica, suddenly. “Just– Just give me that!” She held out her hands for the ball of string.
Danny beamed, and passed it to her. It glowed even brighter.
“Now what?” she asked, staring at it nervously.
“Now, you need this,” Danny said, taking off the sword and holding it out to her, hilt first. “And then you search for your friends, and when you find them…” He pinched a length of the string between the finger and thumb of her free hand. “You follow this back out.”
Danica was much more reluctant to take the sword than the string. But that was fine. One of the two was for holding things together, the other was for taking things apart. Danny knew which was easier, and which he was more comfortable with.
“That's it. Remember, it's just the members of your track team, okay? The coach and the bus driver got out.”
“Okay,” said Danica. She took a deep, steadying breath. “Okay. I can do this.”
Danny nodded encouragingly. “Yes,” he said, “definitely.”
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Danny stepped out of the in-between, back into the alley he'd left Sam and Tucker in. Except, it wasn't an alley anymore, but a thin dirt path between hedges.
He was immediately tackled.
“We thought we'd lost you!” said Sam. Then she pulled back and examined him closely before looking pointedly behind him. “Where're the track kids?”
Danny rubbed the back of his neck. “Well. In the story, Theseus is from Athens, remember?”
Sam groaned. “They're having to do it themselves?”
“Yeah. A girl named Danica. Dani. Believe it or not.”
“Wow,” said Tucker. “Really?”
“Really.”
Danny turned to look behind him, tracing the string where it twisted away from reality and into not-space.
Tucker sighed. “This is going to take a while, isn't it?”
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It took Danica surprisingly little time to find her teammates. For all the time she’d spent wandering on her own, after she’d accepted the sword and the string, she’d located everyone in what felt like an hour. Some of them were even in groups!
The problem was, she found too many of them.
.
“Mm,” said Danny, still worried. “Probably. I hope she doesn’t have to fight anything.”
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There had been fourteen of them. She knew there had been fourteen of them, because the coach and the driver had both done headcounts, because of the number of people they were allowed to field in each event at this particular meet, and because she remembered that someone had been sick. But there were, including her, fifteen kids now huddled in something that aesthetically hovered in-between the Parthenon and a shopping mall.
She couldn’t remember who had been sick. No one could. But everyone wanted to convince her that it wasn’t them.
Probably because she was the one with the sword.
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“I think that if there was anything, it would have gone after Danny when he was searching earlier, right?” asked Sam.
“Maybe,” said Danny. “Unless it was scared of me. I am pretty powerful.”
“And if Danny’s Ariadne in this, he was Ariadne at the beginning,” pointed out Tucker. “The story was already going. Ariadne never fought the Minotaur.”
“Astarion,” said Danny.
“Huh?”
“That’s the Minotaur’s actual name,” said Sam. She frowned slightly. “He was Ariadne’s half-brother, you know.”
“Yeah,” said Danny, slowly. “He was, wasn’t he?”
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“Listen,” said Danica, trying to mask the shake in her voice, “I’m sorry, but– But based on everything, you aren’t who you say you are.”
There was nothing she could do about how badly the sword was shaking.
“I am!” said the girl, who couldn’t be there, because Eliza had taken the one place in the 100 meter, and Jaylynn did the javelin, and Lachandra had done the high jump, and no one remembered her competing at all. “I really am, I promise!”
It was convincing, her act. But it had to be an act, it really did.
“Dani,” said Lachandra, “is it really that important? I mean, if we take her with us? We just want to get out.”
“But she could eat us,” said Kevin, who was a bit of a mythology buff on top of being a track nerd. “She could– If this is the Minotaur story– She’ll try to kill us and then–”
“I won’t!” shouted the girl. Her eyes– For a moment, they changed color. Red. Her teeth were sharp, too.
Danica gritted her teeth and swung the sword down.
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Danny caught her wrist, panting. He’d followed the string back.
“Wait,” he said, breathless. “Wait.”
“Where–” said Danica, jerking back. “Why–?”
Danny turned towards the ‘Minotaur.’ “Hi,” he said, trying to be as nonthreatening as possible. “You’re one of Vlad’s aren’t you?”
Their face shimmered for a moment, and then– It was like looking into a mirror. This wasn’t Dani - his Dani, Danielle - but a boy with red eyes. He wore a chiton like Danny’s, but he looked starved, pale, terrified.
He nodded.
“There is,” said Danny, cautiously, “another story about escaping from the labyrinth. How would you like to be Daedalus?”
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“What was that?” hissed Danica, as they walked away from… whatever that was. “Why are you here, now, leading us out, when you couldn’t before?”
“Story is different now,” said Danny, tightly. “And I was leading you out before. Just with the string.”
“What if you get lost?” asked Kevin.
Danny grinned at him. “I won’t. He isn’t trying to keep you in anymore.”
“Who isn’t?” asked Danica.
“Daedalus. Him. He just wanted out, I think. Sorry for– I’m sorry about all of this,” said Danny. “I didn’t want to get other people involved in Amity Park stuff, and I especially didn’t want to get you involved in family stuff, but…” He shrugged, then caught sight of an out. It looked, from this side, like a slightly darker than expected gap between stately white pillars. “Here we go! And I think this one is next to the police station, too, so just, you know. Check yourselves in.”
“Just like that?” asked Danica.
“Just like that,” said Danny. “I will need those back, though.” He nodded at the string and sword.
“Right,” said Danica. She shoved both at him. “I can’t believe– I would have kill that– Whatever– Whoever–” She stopped, looking very much like she wanted to cry.
“I’m sorry,” said Danny again, softly. “But it is over now.”
The New Athens kids walked into the gap and vanished.
The string dissolved into golden, glittering light and then settled in his hands as a pair of equally golden wings. Danny laughed.
“Okay,” he said. He turned, bouncing a little. “I get the picture. I think we can avoid the Icarus problem, being ghosts and all.”
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How To Play The Revolution
So: I do not like the idea of TTRPGs making formal mechanics designed to incentivise ethical play.
But, to be honest, I do not like the idea of any single game pushing any particular formal mechanics about ethical play at all.
So here I am, trying to think through the reasons why, and proposing a solution. (Sort of. A procedure, really.)
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Assumptions:
1.
Some genres of game resist ethical play. A grand strategy game dehumanises people into census data. The fun of a shooter is violence. This is truest in videogames, but applies to tabletop games also.
Games can question their own ethics, to an extent. Terra Nil is an anti-city-builder. But it is a management game at heart, so may elide critiques of "efficiency = virtue".
Not all games should try to design for ethical play. I believe games that incentivise "bad" behaviour have a lot to teach us about those behaviours, if you approach them with eyes open.
2.
The systems that currently govern our real lives are terrible: oligarchy, profit motive; patriarchy, nation-states, ethno-centrisms. They fuel our problems: class and sectarian strife, destruction of climate and people, spiritual desertification.
They are so total that the aspiration to ethical behaviour is subsumed by their logics. See: social enterprise; corpos and occupying forces flying rainbow flags; etc.
Nowadays, when I hear "ethical", I don't hear "we remember to be decent". I hear "we must work to be better". Good ethics is radical transformation.
3.
If a videogame shooter crosses a line for you, your only real response is to stop playing. This is true for other mechanically-bounded games, like CCGs or boardgames.
In TTRPGs, players have the innate capability to act as their own referees. (even in GM-ed games adjudications are / should be by consensus.) If you don't like certain aspects of a game, you could avoid it---but also you could change it.
Only in TTRPGs can you ditch basic rules of the game and keep playing.
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So:
D&D's rules are an engine for accumulation: more levels, more power, more stuff, more numbers going up.
If you build a subsystem in D&D for egalitarian action, but have to quantify it in ways legible to the game's other mechanical parts---what does that mean? Is your radical aspiration feeding into / providing cover for the game's underlying logics of accumulation?
At the very least it feels unsatisfactory---"non-representative of what critique / revolution entails as a rupture," to quote Marcia, in conversations we've been having around this subject, over on Discord.
How do we imagine and represent rupture, to the extent that the word "revolution" evokes?
My proposal: we rupture the game.
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How To Play The Revolution
Over the course of play, your player-characters have decided to begin a revolution:
An armed struggle against an invader; overturning a feudal hierarchy; a community-wide decision to abandon the silver standard.
So:
Toss out your rule book and sheets.
And then:
Keep playing.
You already know who your characters are: how they prefer to act; what they are capable of; how well they might do at certain tasks; what their context is. You and your group are quite capable of improv-ing what happens next.
Of course, this might be unsatisfactory; you are here to play a TTRPG, after all. Structures are fun. Therefore:
Decide what the rules of your game will be, going forward.
Which rules you want to keep. Which you want to discard. Jury-rig different bits from different games. Shoe-horn a tarot deck into a map-making game---play that. Be as comprehensive or as freeform as you like. Patchwork and house-rule the mechanics of your new reality.
The god designer will not lead you to the revolution. You broke the tyranny of their design. You will lead yourself. You, as a group, together. The revolution is DIY.
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Notes:
This is mostly a thought experiment into a personal obsession. I am genuinely tempted to write a ruleset just so I can stick the above bit into it as a codified procedure.
I am tickled to imagine how the way this works may mirror the ways revolutions have played out in history.
A group might already have alternative ruleset in mind, that they want to replace the old ruleset with wholesale. A vanguard for their preferred system.
Things could happen piecemeal, progressively. Abandon fiat currency and a game's equipment price list. Adopt pacifism and replace the combat system with an alternative resolution mechanic. As contradictions pile up, do you continue, or revert?
Discover that the shift is too uncomfortable, too unpredictable, and default back to more familiar rules. The old order reacting, reasserting itself.
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I keep returning to this damn idea, of players crossing thresholds between rulesets through the course of play. The Revolution is a rupture of ethical reality like Faerie or the Zone is a rupture in geography.
But writing all this down is primarily spurred by this post from Sofinho talking about his game PARIAH and the idea that "switching games/systems mid-session" is an opportunity to explore different lives and ethics:
Granted this is not an original conceit (I'm not claiming to have done anything not already explored by Plato or Zhuangzi) but I think it's a fun possibility to present to your players: dropping into a parallel nightmare realm where their characters can lead different lives and chase different goals.
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Jay Dragon tells me she is already exploring this idea in a new game, Seven Part Pact:
"the game mechanics are downright oppressive but also present the capacity to sunder them utterly, so the only way to behave ethically is to reject the rules of the game and build something new."
VINDICATION! If other designers are also thinking along these lines this means the idea isn't dumb and I'm not alone!
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( Images:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/victoria-3-dev-diary-23-fronts-and-generals.1497106/
https://www.thestranger.com/race/2017/04/05/25059127/if-you-give-a-cop-a-pepsi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
https://nobonzo.com/
https://pangroksulap.com/about/ )
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