Principle 1: To steal your watch and sell it back to you at double price
Alan Watts coined this for me. For me, it basically means to explicitly allow something that is already implicitly allowed.
This illusion—or ritual—makes it feel allowed, and real.
I want everyone to be able to say exactly what they think they can do.
I want child’s play. I want the cottonmouth tenor girlhood manifesto.
I want
that game we would play when we were young enough to effortlessly change things without talking about it, and remember only what was important and joyful. only now we are older, and years distant from ourselves and each other. and so we have to write down things about the games we want to play so that we remember them and why we are playing with each other.
As they say, I think we’ve grown beyond it, in a lot of ways.
Until a moment of heat or interest arises, where our emotions make us do something—and we forget the systems that seemed a moment ago so stable. Comfortable prisons.
So:
Instead of saying, you can always do what you want to, with the natural consequences of that action...
I say:
You can act. The GM hears your approach, evaluates it, and comes with the worst result.
You choose whether to slip (deny the consequence, but get something of equal measure),
compromise (get something not as bad, based on the fiction),
test and risk it all,
or accept things as they are and be rewarded.
If you feel a big emotion, you may reroll—or lobby for better results with regards to the object of your emotion.
Yes, there are levels of consequence that the resolution forces upon the player.
But they can choose whether to avoid, to find a middle ground, to risk it all, or to accept things as they are.
So, we arrive at
You can always do what you want to, with the natural consequences of that action...
As an effect of the total conglomerate of the rules.
But a roundabout way that allows that imprisoned mind to have it feel more real. Every mechanical twist is just an added hug. Something that takes the inner child in hand. Learns it to come out once more.
There are those of us that have lost of the inner child, or rather we regain it when we are the subject of our emotions - and that emotion should be allowed to freely express itself. A system that recognizes play, immediacy, and emotion is the knife with which we cut the string that holds that adult mask, to let the clown inside out. The emotion of the player and the character are equals here - the lines should blur.
And one day, we can let go of mask and knife, and use mechanics just when we need to. We no longer need hug-illusion, and dance freely once more.
But it starts there, in the illusion-totality that allows you to do what you wanted but in roundabout ways.
I steal your childhood watch,
and dip it in Rolex paint
In the hopes that you scratch the layer of paint away.
Principle 2: The law of equal measure
The idea that any of my worlds (and thus systems) reflect the characters within—and vice versa.
It is not about better or worse—
Rather, it is about push and pull.
This is the balance my systems walk.
Not fairness. Not even symmetry.
But fictional reciprocity.
Characters are the world.
The world is made to match them.
If you are powerful, you are known.
If what you have is powerful, that is known.
If it’s rare, it is coveted.
If it’s not rare, others have it.
The little life has as much value as the grand.
A sword-saint and a midwife can go together.
Life and death hangs in the balance at birth.
You want to protect someone?
The world must test that love.
You want a rare item?
The world must hunger for it.
You want a quiet life?
The quiet must be something that others disturb or want with you.
Dare make a game of quiet aches.
Make the birth and the swordblow equally interesting.
And I want everything to be invokeable by everyone.
Everyone is a character.
The player characters are precious.
The NPCs are precious.
Death is meaningful, But even moreso is life.
Kill someone and the world grows teeth
Tend it, and it blooms.
This is not balance as story.
It’s balance as justice and physics.
A law of weight and witness.
Both the lightness and weight of being can be made unbearable—and beautiful.
Example:
This is what, for me, solves many of my problems.
“If it worries the world player how to manage powerful name-deserving parts of the world:
If something is powerful and commonplace, others already wield things like it.
If something is powerful and rare, others will come for it. It is coveted.
If it is a relation without much power, threatening it is easy—the player character likely has to respond.
If it is a relation with much power, that relation can be caught in intrigue, coveted, the subject of jealousy.”
The first principle is agency. This makes it agency that matters from a freedom to act
Principle 3: Entanglement, not violence.
I want violence in my game.
But not the kind that breaks the toy.
Not the kind that flattens complexity into initiative orders.
The one that entangles initiative with emotion.
Who talks first is a measure of respect.
Who strikes first or may run first is a measure of fear.
Equal measures of spear and bag—
And the spear only inside the bag.
When there is violence, it is a product of entanglement.
Blood that nourishes seeds.
And i remove as much of the system as possible
So birth and swordblow are equally interesting
Two vectors of entanglement.
Sharpness that only matters because something soft is near.
A midwife is only powerful if there is a mother.
A fae only tempting if there is something worth stealing.
So: I don’t build big cities.
I cannot keep together the details. The vast courtly intrigue.
I cannot sit by and love senseless bloodshed.
I have it not in my bones and aching heart.
I build tight ecosystems of need.
I care too much to be cold, and so do my NPCs—if they are not forces of nature.
As i can be too when roused.
Remember: As the characters reflect the world,
the world should target their sheet.
Not to be a fan of them, or against them, or a monster.
The worlds actions may be a threat—but it’s just that: action
and a source that may change.
If there are characters that are midwives.
There must be mothers in need if there are midwives.
So make mothers. Because I will never be one,
yet have many ideas how to:
The miller-knight: too ordinary, too busy, too inward.
Much like a millstone.
Already has a groove to roll in. A patience that grinds the wants of others to flour.
Caring for those who blow the wind on the mill.
He doesn’t care about your drama unless you put it beneath his will to crush.
He will care with gifts and bread and hearth should you help.
For you only the purest flour. Tender large hands.
And a millstone kept in the backroom, bloodied, for use in war.
The pregnant woman conspires with demons and deserves no help.
The fae queen banished for true transgression.
The corn withers.
Stuck in the same groove - but there are rightfully others to blame.
One fae queen with too much beauty and not enough power—
Given paltry offerings to make the corn grow, but she has gone sour. No gift worthy of a queen.
village-rejected now, for turning her vengeance on the town now. It is not enough to sate her.
In need of a changeling child, but fascinated with the idea of an everpregnant thrall.
Desperately alone, needy for praise.
Things bloomed around her once. Now it is rot that blooms.
And it want to spill.
A pregnant woman—A hut on the outskirts
a kind hedge-enchantress, alone.
Sulfur-scent clings to her home from deals with demons past, to protect her in times of dire need.
Desired by the fae - and knows it: But desires a child, freedom and a quiet life.
Therefore unable to braid the garland of fae hair that protects from wolves
that stalk the hut.
Giant wolves, hungry for meat, and full of ire.
The before-forest are now corn fields.
Black-bile has replaced animal wisdom.
Their pack kept away from the town by the fae-hair garlands
that were once offered by the queen.
Each deserves to be left alone.
Each pulls you in.
Will the fae queen curse the corn, sicken the town?
Kill them in vines and rot?
Will the starving township offer the pregnant woman as a thrall to the fae?
And will the fae keep her side of the bargain?
Will the pregnant woman be the subject of the party’s pity?
Will the giant wolves get the woman first—
or will the woman steal or remove the last garland at night for her own protection?
Will it end in blood?
Will it be birth or death or both?
Entanglements make the violence matter.
Desire makes the danger sharp.
This isn’t about balance.
It’s about ecosystems.
About rituals of meaning that only make sense if someone bleeds.
I only want a lover if they wield a knife.
I only want to ask “which door?” if all doors are lovers.
You walk through.
You bleed.
You become.
My world is true and real,
but it crystallizes in contact with players.
I let meaning bubble up from their actions.
I prep what I really really want. These things are true.
I look to the players’ sheets, see where their eyes light up,
where they say OH I KNOW.
That is true.
Its crystallisation by way of precedent,
in an ever-expanding viscous territory.
And it ain’t vinegar crystals.
It’s lifeblood.
Its the material for the first two principles. This is where the world-player really makes the dance theirs. Its not a mechanical response, but something set at a tipping point. A precarious ecology and a life that pulls back in.
Principle 4: Rhizome, Knot, Hole
Everything I write reflects everything else.
Not in neat architectural symmetries—no.
But in wild, rhizomatic growth.
One post references the next.
Looping. Tangling. Buried. Blooming sideways.
My systems are not diagrams.
They are knots of yarn and holes punched through paper.
Mark and kiss your sheet.
They vibrate when you pluck them.
You have to stick your fingers in and wiggle until something bites.
You want a fae world? Be fae.
What is a fae to you? Answer that.
You want to be kissed by a thrall and cursed by a demon? Good.
You want to be a demon-thrall cursed to kiss? Good!
You want to slay demons and thralls and sit atop the pile? Also good!
There are no universal mechanics here, or innately right or wrong.
Just action, the content-kiss you send with it, and consequence.
Each procedure depends on the objects you place inside it.
Each rule is part of a ritual logic, a lens for emotion —never a law.
If you want to know what a “test” is, ask your table.
You already know what kind of tension you like.
There’s no glossary.
There’s no guarantee.
There is only invitation.
To entangle yourself in shibari-webs of relational push-and-pull.
Not absence. Not oversight.
(Okay. Sometimes, also oversight.)
This is the design. This is the offer.
A system that I hope is like Arvo Pärt playing ADHD Jazz
A cornucopia of singular procedures.
You may need one, or many, or none.
You can write a thousand things on your character sheet.
You can write just one word:
GUN.
Consequences don’t come from procedure. They come from poetic interpretation, an equal-in-reaction happening, alive at the table. The blood-crystal grows from interest. In a litany of scribbles, or in GUN. In those things lie the budding consequences.
Give me more, and give me less. But give me your care.
The entanglements and violence matters, but how depends on the interest and content. Kiss. Midwife. GUN.
Principle 5: Be in your enjoy
Be in your enjoy,” says my theater clown maestro, Antoine, when we improvise, in his broken poetic English.
“Your anxiety can be your enjoy. Don’t leave the work. Live the work.”
This is how I write.
This is how I play.
This is what I give to you.
There is a paradox inside every procedure.
A tension between structure and invitation.
Between desire and consequence.
Between altar and chaos.
You are not a sklave.
Thanks, Antoine.
A clown is never a sklave.
Not to props, not to audience expectation, not even to their own ideas.
One moment, a shoe is a shoe.
The next, it’s an unknown treasure.
Then a phone. Then a shoe again. Then forgotten.
The clown needs not know what they do, it just needs to be visible what it is then.
But not too much, not something pre-planned. no story-telling.
Why a big story? You can have a big story, but not now!
If the action is unclear, he says:
What are you doing, clown?!
Not a slave to anyone, not their ideas, or the audience, not story. Nothing.
But the clown should be in the process, and that process should be visible.
If we fall into entrapping ourselves, rejecting an idea, we get a loving
Why not?!
Because we need to flirt with becoming and with doing:
Reject nothing that the atomic body wants to do. The wants, the needs, the inner child.
A clown is process, not product.
To be a clown is to live inside the moment of
of becoming.
or
of just being.
to be able to do
or
to enjoy your stop.
That’s the work.
And you—you—must stay in it.
And when you do, you are not you
You the clown-you.
Not flee into explanation.
Not into perfection.
Your anxiety can be your enjoy.
The anxiety of you can be the extra-ordinary anxiety of the clown
The extra-ordinary / extra ordinary karaktéer (characteristic) of the clown
The big empathy generator of the larger than life, inside yourself, character that lives within your adult shell.
It won’t just fail to compute.
It also won’t explain itself.
There’s no clean glossary.
No single mechanic.
If you want to know what a “test” is—ask your table.
You already know what kind of resolution you like.
I already said that. But another point to the same phrase:
This is not escape.
This is not slavish technique.
This is me saying stay in the work.
Don’t leave the work.
Don't leave your process!
Now leave the stage - onto your destiny.
Is what he says when we should close the act. Find a close.
If we turn, he says with lightning snap
No Stay, you only have now and then its onto your destiny.
And we end up there, inching slowly towards the way out, and back in when there is reaction.
The border where the curtain is life and death and fate and doom that we so gleefully can overstep, all that we want, back and forth.
Now Disappear, Now Re-appear! It is not over just because we think it is.
You can have a special round. A gift. one more time. Ressurection is entirely possible.
Look at the audience. Be in the others eyes, find contact
and now just yourself, until tomorrow, until tomorrow, a very big dream. Stay with yourself, with your enjoy.
NOW LOOK AT THE AUDIENCE!
Disappear
now re-appear.
Find your stop!
No Stay!
Then suddenly, when a pose is especially beautiful
*CLAP* That means freeze. Utterly. a total, enjoyable stop. Nothing. No movements. Why are you moving clown?!
If you hold it to long and—YOU ARE NO SKLAVE
If you point yourself inward fade to nothing and—NOW LOOK A THE AUDIENCE!
What are you doing clown?
“FUCK YOU ANTOINE,” is what he says when he wants to remind us that we are our own.
That we must make the paradox work ourselves.
Here are all these principles—but you are no sklave to them.
“Have the conscience to leave the conscience.”
He says “conscience” but he means “consciousness.”
And yet conscience is better—more beautiful.
It means: Know the technique so deeply that you can throw it away.
Understand the ethic so fully that you can violate it, honestly.
You must have the awareness to abandon form when it fails joy.
And the integrity to do so without leaving the work.
You leave it when you want to, to stay clown.
You leave conscience to stay in the process.
It is paradox. And yarn knot. And too much freedom.
It's hypnosis and clear-headedness.
It is also silence. And bendability.
It won’t break if changed.
It won't break when we effortlessly change things without talking about it, and remember only what is important and joyful
Once we are delirious with principles
Held in tension by paradoxical instructions
We are entirely in the moment
just reacting
And when we find that moment
He says nothing
You want to follow every principle?
Good.
You want to rip them up and only keep the ones that make you ache?
Better.
You want to write your character’s desires as a three-page poem?
You want to write just one word:
GUN.
So, with needed irreverence
Say to me:
FUCK YOU JOY.
This is being held by the system, and holding it back in return.
Deal with it.
Find your way
Make the world and characters matter.
Make the world a stage for clowns in their process.
Make the world something that creates that process.
That is FKR to me.
I made this whole system, and I want you to set it on fire.
Not to escape—
But to stay in the flame, laughing.
I want to give everyone nukes, red noses and orgies.
Give them indescribable power and a hair-trigger.
Should I make them my thrall?
Should I be theirs?
Why not? That can be a way for you.
The question is not if you can.
The question is:
What does it mean to do it?
What does it mean to them that you did?
Why do you want to set them free?
This, to me, is what Vincent Baker meant when he probably said about the fruitful void
Design a game to pose a question—then don’t trample on the answers.
I don’t write answers.
I write altars.
I write invitations.
I write clown costumes and stages to dance upon.
Props for you to leave so you can live.
I give you three nukes, an orgy, and a kiss.
I write the tension between all the things you cannot do all at once.
A paradox where it all cannot be accomplished—
And an open invitation to try.
And like he says when we must free ourselves from it all:
No sense, no sense!
Because this is play, not game.
Principle 6: The Gotcha Is the Knife That Cuts Both Ways
I write systems where forfeits matter.
Where names bind.
Where a mask might slip and someone owes a truth.
Where you reach out to kiss and find your lover already has a knife.
I love these moments. I need them.
Because they mean something.
Because they turn play into ritual consequence.
Because a gotcha is only powerful when the power was real to begin with.
You revealed your identity. Now you owe a forfeit.
You offered your true name. And someone else used it.
These moments are dangerous.
They must be.
First thing we learn as GM's.
Don't do gotchas.
Telegraph traps.
Get really specific in describing combat
But I had to unlearn to learn
Gotchas, in my system, aren’t traps.
They are inflections.
A shift in balance. A turn of attention.
A chance to show who you are—when it’s already too late to hide.
You can use that forfeit to:
Make the other character stab themselves.
Take from them a memory that hurt too much for them to bear.
Offer them silence, or submission, or delight, or the weight of being seen.
The forfeit given as a task is an offer to:
Show them your accusatory glance as you slowly nestle the knife in your intestines. "I will not let you forget this."
to sigh with relief of forgetfulness, and then tell how the fae experiences your former horrors.
To hold onto the other, and say why this means love to you.
Each one is a ritual cut. Two sided.
And it is the care, the why, the “who are you to do this?”
that makes it worth bleeding for.
Like clown theater, this work is dangerous.
It is built on vulnerability.
Sometimes the instructions compound. Are impossible to follow.
That is a gift to make it meaningful.
And we stand there, the red nose more an amplification of ourselves and our nakedness than a minimal mask - that is its power, it is the mask that accentuates the face.
We emerge skinless.
And sometimes, that skinlessness does not harden into scar—
but opens again and again.
Until one day, you let it show calmly.
Until the skinlessness becomes just nakedness and enjoy.
And in that nakedness, the others find theirs in empathy.
Your anxiety can be your enjoy.
Don’t leave the work. Live the work.
Now!
You can act!
The world will respond!
Entanglements matter!
The rules are holes
go fill them with your Enjoy
What happens when other fills it with theirs - pulls at your threads - in ways unexpected?
Principle 7: Precarity, Consent, and the Ritual of Hurt
Safety is therefore paramount.
Have the X-card.
Draw your veils.
Negotiate the consent clearly.
This is always right.
But do not mistake preparation for protection from meaning.
And do not make it a barrier to meaning.
A safeword matters because the spank must be real.
The risk is what makes the healing possible.
The weight is what makes the transformation earned.
The forfeit must carry the chance to hurt,
—or it can never mean.
This isn’t about being “edgy.”
This is about being with each other.
This is about listening.
About loving the other players—not abstractly, but attentively.
Letting them find their enjoy with you.
Helping one another to each’s enjoy.
And when it’s done—to clap.
This play can be gentle domination.
Playful switching.
Ritual surrender.
It can ache, and be beautiful.
It can ask someone to hand you a truth they didn’t know they still carried.
It can let someone take from you a piece that hurt too much to bear.
Or hurt just right.
It is not just danger.
It is invitation.
To be soft. To be seen. To bleed.
To say: this too is part of the game playing.
And to also be able to tie the bandage around the wound
or lend a helping hand
as part of the playing
Let it be dangerous—but let it be tended.
Not protected into stillness.
Not bound in over-structure.
We choose the pains and aches that are welcome
What kind of meaning we can carry together.
Let it move. Let it bite. Let it bloom.
In the theater troupe, we do not clap at every trial performance's end because the clown was perfect.
We clap because they were willing to fall apart in front of us.
And then return, smiling.
Skinless. And at some point, unafraid.
Yes, dip the watch in rolex paint.
But it is anothers childhood watch, handle it with care.
The weight is real. Watch your throw.
Lift the crown lightly, don it slow.
Spikes point out and in, you know.
The fae may steal the child, but you should not steal the player.
If the world is an abyss, the players must hold one another close.
Ritual without care is not sacred skinlessness
just a wound that never scabs.
To live the paradox means being soft enough to hurt well
and wise enough to stop when hurting turns to harm
Aa forfeit can be beautiful
But it must be wanted or accepted
And clapped for.
well here's the thing is i'm clapping! i am!
ReplyDeleteThanks! This was my hardest post to write.
DeleteBecause it is vulnerable, and argues for precarity, when I also don't want to take a dump on the safety that is the bedrock for that delicious danger.
I feel it is less clear (and that I fear)
But it is true that it needed out just like this.
Love that it transferred.