Mountain Missive Nr. 13

The Superstition

The Superstition

Asm remembers the death of twelve teeth. Two to teenage rampage. Six to a war crime. One to running for his life. Three to slowly dying in the gutters. But this morning his wounded jaws reach closer than yesterday and everyone knows what happens when your thirteenth tooth gets taken away while you sleep.

Is omitting the 13th revelation of a blog on game design superstition?

Labeling aspects of an indigenous culture as superstition is colonialism, judging worth, deflating relevance, and wounding. Who draws the line between truth and superstition? There are layers of make-believe in all facts and truths, eyes of viewers shaping observations. Which layer is of more worth?

Mountain Resonance tries to not assume worth, yet every player brings their own set of values to the gaming table. The benefit of a session 0 is not superstition, it’s lived fact-finding for correct interpretation. In the world of The Kingdom Of The East exist two layers of storytelling. The remote and distant one sees the country and the king, the intimate and close one sees the individual human and their pain. There is a purposeful gap to create a safe space without defining an indigenous or a colonist culture, breaching the players’ safe space, without drawing the line where culture ends and superstition begins. However, the gap opens the diegetic storytelling up to GM and player bias. The game system framework is about the specific attrition of a single human. The game setting framework is less defined, a gaping wound. Where is the line between opportunity and challenge?

In the bleeding gap between the two narrative layers culture emerges from repetitive diegetic interactions of the player characters with the world. And players bleed into the game and character experiences bleed backwards, attrition of many cuts, connected by the line we draw with blood. Players and characters violently rubbing of on the worlds, again mirroring attrition, cut out a space perceived as diegetic culture and true in the game world, a sum of accumulated interpretations.

The GM is an especially burdened player with a non-symmetry of responsibility. The GM’s refusal to resolve these interpretations rejects drawing the line between culture and superstition. Truth hides, truths split in layers, escape empirical justification. The rejection of legitimation needs to take the players into account. Those who bleed shall not suffer. If in daubt the safe space becomes real through a magic trick, misdirection in repetitions to shape a narrative focus and a world.

Recently, I did my first Actual Play of Mountain Resonance (for KiwiRPG week), a significantly different moment for the game in many coexisting non-parallel worlds. A comparable baseline by sheer existence of a live recording. Not yet repeated, so not game culture yet, not a truth to adhere to, open to interpretation. In it, all fantastic players, I bow my head. One player defined a supernatural element arising from specific localised cultural knowledge, a monster haunting the mixed colonialist and indigenous group with two souls. Instantly valued as superstition by the colonist characters, diegetic culture by the introducing indigenous character, unobserved and non-interacted by the second indigenous character. All of it extremely non-judgable regarding all external watchers’ reactions that can’t be observed, yet with access to the recording become temporally non-bound participants in the game. Also non-bound by safety tools, non-symmetric lurkers invited to judge. By non-engagement, non-introduction, the haunting entity remains in the gap between narrative layers, a diegetic fragment, non-evaluated for its worth. If that was the right way, hard to judge. A safe way, probably yes, certainly to be judged. Watch the recording yourself:

Twitch-Link (valid until 24/07, then head to the KiwiRPG-YouTube)

In the microfiction above, do you consider Asm an indigen or a colonist?

Jesse Talbot, Tropical Scenery–Early Morning, 1850

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