Bones of Trees

Description

Some of my favourite games and stories are ones I have repeatedly revisited or struggled with for years. One of my favourite games since childhood, I had not mastered for decades. Another, I never managed to engage with fully until much older and yet it waited there, nagging at me from some backroom of my mind and when I finally did engage with it, it left me with a certain malaise. Yet another, possibly my favourite game-story of all, was never over for me and never will by the looks of it. I realise then now, that I am greatly motivated by frustration or futility or unending things. Unresolutions. Not knowing or being at the very edge of understanding. The artifacts I curated below are examples of exactly that. Games and stories from unknown and unknowable cultures. Unplayable and untellable and ultimately unresolved and unresolvable. The negative unspace of the things that make sense, have a point, a beginning, a middle and an end. - Copper Guts Book Forgetter* Summary This is by no means a suggestion for reading order. Engage with the artifacts below in any order or way you see fit. Pick the fun-meat off their narrative-bones or leave them somewhere to gather dust until two generations later a curious child finds them and they spark something in them. No. This is more about giving you an idea of what this is or isn't. Three Impossible Dice: Three dice that can never be constructed and even if they could, would make very little sense and have even less functionality. Index Abacus: An indecipherable table written in an alien language. The Penrose Dungeon: A non-place bending, and breaking, the symbolic nature of what a place with structure is. Dark Potat: A darkly funny lyric game that struggles against being read and understood. Flower Fairy Guerrilla Warfare: A cute but brutal and ultimately unknowable game. Fuck Magic: A very old school of magic, the corresponding character class and a sampling of their spells. NO, the non-existent nothing: A monster that defies the popularly understood concept of monsterhood. The Infinitely Regressive SRD Reference Document: A way to never resolve anything. KING MEAT AND THE GOD POTATO: A ridiculous absurdity. The Sensagon: A synaesthetic neuroqueer tetraflexagon zungeon. *Copper Guts Book Forgetter is an aggregate intelligence. Various diverse thought megaprocesses that came together to form an even bigger one. They claim that the name they gave themselves was the next available sequence of words not taken by someone else naming theirself. That it was an attempt to bridge the gap between being understandable as a cohesive and relatable entity by others and terrifying the squishies. That is a blatant lie, albeit an entertaining and creative one. The truth is they named themselves after an ancient author and publisher called Chalkenteros Bibliolathes. The first part of the name literally translated as Copper (or Bronze) Guts and given at birth to mean and signify bravery. The second given later in life as a nickname and translated as Book Forgetter because that person had written and published more than 4000 books and would regularly forget which ones were theirs. And that is both amazing and extremely funny. *** Some of this work was created for and submitted to the You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam: "A jam for games that do not exist. They won't ever exist. They will never be playable. They will suggest a game, create a space in which it seems like a game could exist, but where there is none." The rest is original work inspired by the jam but never submitted. This work is an admission to myself that I like breaking things apart and see how they work and then do things with the parts, trying to stick them back together in weird ways and see how they flop around. I've been doing that since I was a baby and there's a certain kind of childlike wonder and playfulness in this that I enjoy and want to nurture. Another admission, or attempt at vulnerability, is that my plural system was expressing itself through this jam and the work I did for it and it keeps expressing itself through this tying together of seemingly disparate things.

Mechanics

Themes

Publishers

Designers