Mountain Missive Nr. 14
The Bleed
The Bleed
Ylot non-returns, the stream flows backwards, his wounds close. A deer next to him dries up until unborn, the stream flows backwards. Confused nature grows and dies twofold, one stream unfolded into two directions. A fish next to him drowns. Ylot is half the man and twice the vengeance. Before the wound closes fully he reaches in and takes out the warm jagged shrapnel, his new tool of choice.
A post about layers of bleed and reverberation in the game design of Mountain Resonance.
Mountain Resonance lives simultaneously in various stratospheres in which it only reverberates when observed.
The stratospheres are vast rooms allowing different versions of reverb, with different access to time domains.
Bleed can be the tug and pull between your real world emotions and your character's in-game experience. A dynamic system without clear division, leaking like an open system, leaking like a wound. The real world emotions grow on prior experience and last longer than the game, attack and decay. It is dynamic emotional information persisting through psychological space. Reverb is an evoked emotional response from a unreal or real physical space. The space is pre-existing and the emotional response lingers after the sound has passed, attack and decay. Depending on the size and the distances involved there is a delay before the reverb is felt. This is true for bleed, too, it does not need to be instant. Depending on the style of reverb, dark springs and inharmonic metal plates, distortions occur, bend and break. This is true for bleed, too, it can be inharmonic, distorted and messy.
A sound without reverb can be clinical and sterile. Ask Omri Cohen, reverb is life, but you can drown everything in it. Does this translate to bleed in roleplaying games? Is there a vital degree of bleed? Has a vital game always bleed?
Safety tools for a safe space. But with dynamic spaces no one is truly safe. If the game shrinks will you fit? If it expands, will you be lost? We all occupy different spaces, dynamic needs and different backgrounds. If it bleeds, we can kill it. If we bleed, we can be killed. To be killed, we must be vital, alive, breathing, blood pumping though leaking wounds, bleeding Qi. Emotional transfer between worlds as a part of play. Don't be dead inside, work towards safety, reverberate in a space vast like the stratospheres, attack and decay.
Can you drown in your own blood?
Fan Kuan - Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, ca. 1000
Get Mountain Resonance and its supplements for free on itch.io or RPG-Trader and sign up for the upcoming print run of the expanded version on Kickstarter.