Juniper Harper Lark

Kinda wild that if you make a list of 50 odd weird and wonderful gachapon saints for your corporate dystopia and then set a player base loose on them people will start recognising favourites, offering prayers to them, and treating them with reverence.

I think a lot about the faith in the Dispossessed and Ursula le Guin generally when doing the writing about faith for this game. The idea that no society would "advance" beyond culture and spirituality is so important to me as a writer, even if I am a fairly avowed atheist generally.

Kinda wild that if you make a list of 50 odd weird and wonderful gachapon saints for your corporate dystopia and then set a player base loose on them people will start recognising favourites, offering prayers to them, and treating them with reverence.

My goal with wandering saints in Arbor Point was to capture this feel of post-culture anti-social spirituality that treats the faiths of conquered worlds like a TCG. You get executives holding onto desperate scraps of culture trying to be "authentic" in a deeply meaningless late capitalist void.

Roleplaying as a sort of omnipresent, eminently helpful, but oathbound to secrecy triptych of station administrators is the closest thing I can imagine to playing a Radchai station ai without fully doing an Radch themed game and it fucking rules.

I earnestly think that the omnipresence of a discord admin role is the only way you could get this feeling. Earnestly an affordance the medium has over physical larps.

Its pretty traditional for larger fest larp type deals to have group concepts where you come in as a unit. We've actually had one of those in APA: they're the MurderGang, and they are led by Death, a woman from planet Clown. Its. Its honestly remarkable to watch. Big up @junefromjune.bsky.social

Happy Anniversary #over/under you made me profoundly strange, start a blog, develop a deeply peculiar perspective on my sense of self, meet several odd women, and then do knife play scenes with half of them. For real though, do not accidentality play one of these under your own regular name.

Finally if this is coming across your feed without any context, consider reading this helpful guide, which I've seen shared earnestly out in the wild like three times now which is fucked frankly. thegardenbelow.blot.im/d6-ways-to-e...

Happy Anniversary #over/under you made me profoundly strange, start a blog, develop a deeply peculiar perspective on my sense of self, meet several odd women, and then do knife play scenes with half of them. For real though, do not accidentality play one of these under your own regular name.

Also goes without saying that @lukegearing.bsky.social was one of the best parts of the whole thing. I think there is only one person to have broken the Beef/Ses message per day containment barrier since, and its a tall fucking order lemme tell ya. This was like, less than 11 days of play lmao.

Happy Anniversary #over/under you made me profoundly strange, start a blog, develop a deeply peculiar perspective on my sense of self, meet several odd women, and then do knife play scenes with half of them. For real though, do not accidentality play one of these under your own regular name.

Its also what kicked my experiments with TTRPG writing into gear. I never quite finished what I was noodling with, but im glad for the experiments. You can see so much DNA of what im working on now in these maps and snippets of writing.

Happy Anniversary #over/under you made me profoundly strange, start a blog, develop a deeply peculiar perspective on my sense of self, meet several odd women, and then do knife play scenes with half of them. For real though, do not accidentality play one of these under your own regular name.

Fun fact: the busted ass weird red lines that got put on my scanner during play are still there, and totally stop me using the document feeder properly for anything I dont want totally grungy lol.

Happy Anniversary #over/under you made me profoundly strange, start a blog, develop a deeply peculiar perspective on my sense of self, meet several odd women, and then do knife play scenes with half of them. For real though, do not accidentality play one of these under your own regular name.

This absolutely is neglecting a huge number of immensely formative books from my early childhood that are just lost to my truly shocking memory. Notable omissions likely include things like warrior cats, eragon, the inkheart books, the darran shan series, and likely way more I dont recall.

I thought long and hard about if I should put any Camus, Kafka, or Walser on here. All were really formative during my creative development, but my memory of them is poor. I'd need to re-read a few of them to see how much I stand by them.

This absolutely is neglecting a huge number of immensely formative books from my early childhood that are just lost to my truly shocking memory. Notable omissions likely include things like warrior cats, eragon, the inkheart books, the darran shan series, and likely way more I dont recall.

For a few weeks in the Arbor Point Discord i've been saying either "bosh" or "kachow" whenever i get a wiki update out. This has inevitably fallen to portmanteau, and the accursed power of the "Kabosh" now flows through me.

Just while im patting my own back, I feel the need to also say that all of these were drawn by hand, cut up physically with a knife to limit scouting ranges before being scanned back in and then labelled with custom iconography built from scratch. They're not perfect, but damn they're good.