A small wooden desk with no one behind it. Upon the desk sits
Welcome, those curious or inquisitive.
A fair warning, if you enjoy the mystery or like to theorize, this may be an exercise in disappointment. Both answers and a lack of answers lie ahead, and putting aside the layers of obscurity both intentional and unintentional and exposing what I have for what it is could be interesting but also could make things permanently more boring.
In short, proceed with caution, for the sake of your own enjoyment. Also, most of the time the writing part of this is going to be really informal. I'm not very good at staying in character for these.
I'm currently trying to fill up at least the sections that I've set out, but this will likely update on a schedule of whenever I feel like it, so good luck keeping track of what's here and what isn't.
This bookcase is rather empty. However, there are a few books here.
Book that has a sad-looking man on the cover "Giant Rat" The cover has the image of a closed eye Volume 74 of something Musty book This book is completely blank
The book is printed in a tired monospace font. The ink is still wet.
Title Page Page that seems empty, but there is text Page that smells of motor oil
Here you are, on this website. Originally I thought this would be a nice place to host an image gallery for the art I make and maybe also the some of the sparse bits of programming I've done, but since I don't know how web design actually works, it's become a fun maze of mostly nothing. Maybe one day this website will function in a way that most people can figure out, but when it does, don't expect me to get rid of the stuff that's broken, beyond just making it even more inaccesible than before.
Why is the website named Giant Rat? I warn you, the reason is silly and mostly arbitrary.
One day, a friend was playing Project: Gorgon, this strangely generic fantasy mmo which i will not explain further and mentioned that he had a pet Giant Rat. Someone else recommended that he name the Giant Rat after me, but naming pets is apparently not a function in this game. So instead I changed my name to Giant Rat so that the Giant Rat would be named after me but backwards.
At least a year later, I was finally getting around to getting my own website, but what to call it? I considered briefly using my actual name, but as I was looking at the domain prices for various combinations of my own name or screen names that I would eventually not like, when I tried giantrat. giantrat.com cost something like 15 thousand dollars a year, whereas giantrat.net cost about 12. As in $12. This made me laugh. Therefore, the website is now giantrat.net
I know.
Ok so this started out as a combination appropriate-sounding-place-for-people's-comments and Dishonored reference. Dishonored was on the mind both because it is a good game and also because rats. If you think I put any more thought into this you are wrong.
Both whenever I get around to it and also sometimes never. One time someone sent me poetry and the character limit cut it off mid-sentence. Even if I got the whole thing I don't know how I'm supposed to respond to that. Also sometimes people send things and the only response I can think of is "no" regardless if it's a question. If you really want a response, try being a little more interesting.
Oh yeah the Eternal Worm? I mentioned the Eternal Worm at some point in relation to the void and it was just a Have a Nice Life reference. Then I got some questions about it and I answered precisely one of them.
Car comics started out as a bunch of pages in a notebook from middle school. After the long face comic it meandered for a while before actually focusing on cars. Originally there was even a comic that was just a friend of mine being protective of his hair, and then just a little doodle about how sponges are the only animals without tissue. The website also used to be hosted on some free service and had a .tk domain.
Back then I had a very ... let's say "limited" knowledge of cars, and half of the comics that actually involved cars ended in them crashing into each other. Nowadays I still know very little about cars and still don't have a driver's license, but as I redraw old comics or make new ones something in my brain is telling me to at least make this very real fear not so obvious for a lighthearted comic about cars but also sometimes not cars.
Also can I talk about the way the site was built for a moment?? When I originally made the site I didn't (and to be honest, still don't) have any clue how to build a website and as a result had such fun additions as a text file for each comic's desciption text, a text file that was nothing but the number of the latest comic, and also for some reason if I include the "<!DOCTYPE html>" that precedes most webpages, the formatting breaks. It's like an extra layer of jokes but only for me. Ok well, it's all just jokes for me, but this one isn't very obvious.
More of a folder than a book, a collection of slightly crumpled pages written in a variety of colors
Title Page Nightmares Glimpses Journey of Hammer Man The Power Station Murder and Museum Barn of Death A Friend's Spine Wire Animals Monkey Bridge Shallow Water Stormfield Crossing A Conversation Between Friends (unedited) Several Rooms Repeated Rusted Rooms and Outside People Die in This One (unedited) The Pepsi Maze (unedited)
Sometimes I dream. Figured I would collect some of them here, for fun.
The first nightmare I had was pretty simple. There was no movement, but I am staring up at my dresser from the floor. All I can see are the drawers with two knobs, one on each side, looming over me, reaching further upwards than anything I had ever seen. In my mind I am trying to create some pattern with lines, crossing back and forth, but it is not working. There are not enough knobs, or too many knobs, and the pattern isn't lining up properly. I am getting increasingly distressed. I wake up in tears and stumble towards the bathroom but I don't make it. I puke in the hallway. I was six years old or something close to that.
The second nightmare I had took place in my neighbors' backyard. We are playing around with some small laser tag toys and I manage to hit both of them with the lasers. They are frustrated and want to do something else. I enter their basement but they don't follow me and I find that their basement has been replaced by a cramped store, dimly lit by a scattering of lanterns. The man in charge of the store is round and sits in the far corner. He tells me that my neighbors are dead and that I have killed them. I know that he is talking about the laser tag toys and that I am absolutely sure that he is correct. I can see them getting hit by the lasers again and again. I leave the store/basement and they are still standing there and can still move around and talk but I know that they are dead. It stresses me greatly. I think this dream happened a few years after the other one and it so disturbs me that for the next week, upon seeing my neighbors in the waking world it is all I can think of, but I do not dare tell them.
Just occasional details from dreams where all else is forgotten.
- Physical sign advertisement for "David's Vinegar", as in just a poster on a post on the side of the road.
- Someone eating out of my purple oatmeal bowl.
- Someone else was sitting in my chair and ruining the floor with it, even tearing through the garbage rug I put under the chair to prevent this.
- Someone was making a peanut butter and jelly but both sides were peanut butter and I was very confused.
- My teeth break off and grind against each other.
- I am weighed and learn that I have unwittingly lost around twenty pounds.
- A muffled "You're not Alexander" from the other side of a wall makes me laugh.
- Being able to taste blood.
- Putting up a nonsensical road sign next to a fence overlooking a flooded school.
- I had a really cool orange.
- Left my shoes in a place that has become a crime scene. Those are my only shoes and I don't want to go through the airport and go back home without shoes.
- Leaned a door into the frame because I was too tired to attatch it to the hinges.
- Confusing a peacock with my hand pantomoming a bird's head.
- Obstacle course turns into an impromptu improv session. My face turns into a tree and I realize this is stupid.
- Wake up and take a while to realize that it is a few months prior. Resign myself to just repeating those months.
This one will take a while to type up. give me some time.
A large group of people are exploring this very large power plant looking facility, very rectangular, lots of chain link fences. It is the middle of night and the group is split into two, one group on either side of the facility, orbiting around the center. I view them from above, the shapes of light from their flashlights circling around the unnaturally dark middle. Everyone seems to know that what they are looking for is clearly there, but instead of venturing further in, occasionally individual people would split off, look out into the distance and see some flashing lights. I view the figure from behind as the lights increase in intensity, lighting up the ground and sky, turning them into a small sihouette. The constant barrage of light becomes overwhelming to the point that the person will cover their head and run back to the group, who notice neither the person's absence nor the lights. This happens several times.
The last time the lightshow begins, we cut back to the point of view of the group this person has come from. We cannot see the lights, but instead there begins to exist both the sound and wind from a helicopter directly overhead, only, without an actual helicopter being there. It is the middle of the night, so it's hard for anyone in thr group to see much of anything, but my point of view has pulled back to show me nothing obstructing the low light on one of the faciliy building's walls. When the person who has split off returns to the group, the sound and wind stops, but people then begin to argue about if there was any physical evidence of a helicopter and, if not, then how any of that that happened, where the noise and wind came from, etc. My point of view follows them for a time, as they resume their orbit, but soon it turns towards the center of that facility, it's dark mouth yawning open, and starts to slowly pan forward, the arguments becoming muffled and distant as I stare further into the center. What they are looking for is right here, but they will never find it, because they would not dare to go in.
I am in a market with a friend. Dozens of alleys lined with small shops, each with their own tarpaulin awning. Two people we do not know start following us, trying to make conversation and tag along. Without saying a word, my friend and I agree on a plan to get rid of them. I help to distract one while my friend gets the other to split off for a moment so he can kill them and take their place. Once the one I am distracting sees who they think is their friend, they leave to go to chase them down. I try to follow indirectly, in case my friend needs help, but I'm trying to get a vantage point and I end up just climbing up a bunch of ladders. In fact, I end up climbing far too high on these ladders that I have completely lost my friend and the stranger. Going into the building, it is made of mostly concrete, and looks like two buildings have leaned into each other and collided. There is a seam at which two right angle grids collide marked by a smattering of holes in the concrete, but these holes have been sealed with glass. Not wanting to stick around for any longer than I have to, I find an incredibly wide set of stairs and descend.
As I travel down flights of stairs, the building looks less and less abandoned, and at some point I look up and think it looks like I am in some kind of luxury apartment, nice furniture lining the walls, lit by various hanging art installations. There is a child next to me on the steps and I can sense that he wants to ask who I am and what I am doing in his house, but I continue down the steps and out of sight before he can find the words. I reach a floor that opens up into a museum and decide to take a look at what it has. One painting very obviously references another but I cannot find the second. Another painting features someone's face wrapped in a shawl that billows out and up, a second face made of brass staring directly out from the plumes of fabric. I stare at this painting for a while, with a deep feeling that I had seen it somewhere before. I try to exit the museum but small ceramic sculptures are overflowing the halls. I wake up and it is almost 5 pm.
I am looking for an artifact and I am being followed by car. This objective seems so much like a video game that in order to escape my pursuers I drive to an empty parking lot behind a factory, manage to flip the car upside down and into the dirt, clipping the roof of the car through the ground and allowing me to turn the car off and let it slowly glide uphill into a forest. This shakes off those following me and I can return to my search for the artifact, for which I have a small detector in my hand telling me in which direction I should go. I walk deeper into the forest. The forest opens up into a clearing, with a building much longer than it is wide, like several barns have been stacked upon each other. A dirt road circles around the building but it does not branch off, so I assume my approach is from the back. I know the artifact I am looking for is in this building. Entering the building I walk up several flights of stairs to the top floor and then go down one of the center hallways when I come across a pile of stone and rebar blocking the way forward. To go around, I take the door to the right and walk outside.
Outside, the building is only one story tall because I am on the top floor. There is long grass as far as the eye can see, but closer there are some collapsed walls, as if the barn is the only structure remaining of something that was once much larger. A few people are playing in this field and some are just standing apart from one another, huddled against their own piece of wall. I try to ask questions but the words I recieve in response are indistinct. Instead, I can see in their eyes that they wish to leave but are unable to do so. I reach the other end of the barn and upon entering, there is someone there to guide me. The sides of the hallways are lined with cages, filled with severed limbs tangled around each other, being packed in by a collection of people whose faces are small and twisted, dressed in rags and crouched close to the cages to let people through. The guide brings me down the hall, singing praises of either me or where I am being taken, when I notice that the artifact detector is no longer pointing down the hall, but off to the side. There is a door in that direction and I know that behind the door is both the artifact I am looking for and the grave of a friend. I can see the grave in my mind but cannot visualize if the artifact is next to the grave or buried along with my friend.
The guide leans forward, trying to distract me from the door and lead me further down the hall, when I am pulled out of the barn by my mother and sister. My mother begins to have a panic attack about seeing all the cages with dead limbs while my sister helps to calm her down but I am glaring back at the guide, telling her that my family will eventually forget this, trying to convince her to leave them alone. The guide smiles as we leave, knowing that I am right, my family will forget, but I will return. I wake up.
Dreamt a boss fight for the video game Sekiro. Which was odd because at the time it had been a while since I played it last.
You begin fighting a normal looking man in a small hallway. The fight is pretty easy but when you kill him the body jolts as though struck by lightning, starts burbling, and then scurries out the window. Following him you see him grow and transform into what appears to be a giant sculpture with horns, hanging off the side of a building. You have to fight a bunch of smaller enemies and avoid his large hands and feet trying to hit you off the side of the building to reach his head, where the final killing blow is immediately available. The animation is three slices, cutting cleanly through as if he is actually made of clay. One for each horn, and then one down the middle, exposing his spine, which you reach out and grab to crush with your hand. In that moment you are brought to a scene with the original, human version of this boss. It is unclear if this is a flashback or just a vision. The room is small and warmly lit. He turns to you and asks if you are his brother or a friend. In my dream I lie and tell him I am his brother, though I know this choice does not matter. He admits that he is scared and after a brief silence we hug. The vision fades away and we are brought back to reality, the clay giant flaking into dust and falling off the building and into the mist below, and "SHINOBI EXECUTION" comically appearing on screen.
Felt as though there were hooks going over my teeth. Upon closer inspection I discover that there is a bundle of barbed wire in my mouth and the loose end goes down my throat. I attempt to remain calm and do not pull it out because I know that it is designed just to make me panic, but every time I swallow i can feel it. I am suspended in a ball of probably more barbed wire rolling down train tracks and a pair of people keeping up with me tell me that there is someone else in the same predicament as me coming down the train tracks at me and when we collide it will all work itself out. The dream ends before I get to see what happens.
There is a gang of animals and they are trying to escape from a constantly growling man, but they are all stuck on a small landmass in the middle of a river. The largest dog puts the man in a chokehold to knock him out and then they steal his canoe and take it downriver. The dream cuts to me, much later, in search of the animals (who are my friends). I have found the canoe banked along the river and I take it further downstream. Arriving at a large house, I steer the canoe ashore and stow the canoe under some mossy rocks. When I try to climb up the rocks, I see a flashbang grenade (blue) and so let myself down before it goes off and decide instead to take the long, not-climbing-up-rocks way around.
The large house is set up as if it has been hosting an important event, but things are not quite right. I learn from the host that she was to be making some kind of important political announcement but someone interrupted it by dropping some grenades (explosive) around the house. During this conversation, we walk to the security area and I watch some of the footage that was recorded on one of the security cameras. The video is pointed straight at the ground outside the large window where the announcement was being made. the grenade lands directly in the middle of the frame and the camera zooms in as if it is trying to figure out what it is. The grenade explodes and the camera falls down.
I ask the host, admitting that this is probably not the best time, but that I had actually come here in search of this pack of friendly animals and she says oh yes, she had found them after their canoe got stuck and adopted all of them, and tells me where in the house they are, so I make my way over there. There are a whole bunch of animals but only one of the animals I know is left. I play with the animal for a while. We talk about the other animals and good memories. It is nice.
I get back to where I left the canoe and it isn't there anymore! Returning to the host to tell her my theory that the grenades culprit stole my canoe to get away, but before I can, I have a knife. A bunch of guys hop out of the bushes and say they want to fight me. I try to leave and say that I have other things to do but they insist that they will fight other people in the meantime, and then will fight me when I am available. As I walk back through the house in search of the host, more than witnessing the group actually fight anyone, I mostly keep seeing this one guy repeatedly try to fight the group, but they keep telling him he isn't good enough and so he looks discouraged and walks away but then maybe two seconds later he'll try some new ridiculous way of getting them to fight him. I finally reach the host and she informs me that the cameras we were looking at before were a separate system to the ones that would be pointing at the canoe, and so I would have to figure out how to access those because they never configured them properly and I get so frustrated that I wake up.
I was near the end of a line of people walking through some very shallow water. I had come there with a person who was just behind me but they decided to go off to the left because they thought what everyone was looking for was over there. I realized that they were in some kind of lacy historical 1800s dress which was very inappropriate for the task at hand, but also that as they were going off to the left, the water was getting deeper and they had to start swimming. Everyone else in the line also started swimming as well, even those who continued forward instead of heading to the left. I did not want to swim, so I walked back to shore. On land there were various patches of snow, not covering everything, mostly on the trees. I found a small bubble of ice and started hitting it with something to get at what was inside, but as it breaks open i realize it was connected to a much larger bubble of ice containing a human skeleton. The rest of the dream was spent wandering around some wooden structures, partially collapsed from the snow.
Took shelter in one of the many little entrance overhangs of some building as it begins to pour rain. I really want to cross an adjacent field, but I can hear the thunder of the storm getting closer. There are people in a different entrance overhang, telling me I should wait for the rain to let up but I ignore their advice and begin running across anyway. Barely a few meters away from the building and I am struck by lightning. Instead of it immediately hurting it seems to have bounced me upwards and I am now tumbling through the air. I can feel the lightning is still arcing to me, keeping me in the air, but since there is no singular exit point for the current, the feeling of shock is very spread out through my body. It is distracting enough that all I can think about is how much it will hurt when I finally hit the ground. Eventually I reach the other side of the field and the lightning arc diverts away from me and explodes a nearby tree instead. Because the constant strikes of lightning are no longer holding me in the air, I fall to the ground and the remaining electric charge shocks me straight into an entirely separate dream.
had a dream, not sure if i was in it. there was a man and a woman who were having a conversation but the context of it kept changing. there were a bunch of back and forths so i don't remember all of them. she asks him to relay some information to someone at a counter but he intentionally says something else. she gives him a look to say what the hell but now they are at a restaurant and he has ordered something different from her. she says something, i can't remember what, but it puts him in such a defensive position that he begins to back up. they are outside now, in the city, and as he is trying to think of a response he bumps into someone who is very large and is now very angry and thus loses his train of thought entirely. he tries to direct attention to the angry person but she chides him for trying to change the subject. they are inside, in a hallway bathed in a sickly green light. he is still afraid and climbs into a cupboard with a sliding grate door and insists that she does the same, there is a similar cupboard right next to this one. she doesn't take him seriously until there begins to be heard some loud dull thuds. she gets into the cupboard and now they are both in a series of cramped rooms connected by vents. he hears her talk about whatever they are hiding from being close, and when he looks to the opening between their rooms it is filled with a flat featureless wall that he knows consists of her. he can hear her in pain as the wall extrudes itself forward, flat planes of flesh hardening and cracking apart. i'm not sure what happens next, but he somehow fixes her, or at least contains her.
then, they are walking down a long hallway with a nice carpet, and she is speaking of the good that he has done for everyone. she however does not appear as herself, but rather as something resembling a giraffe, although the head and face are obscured, either by smoke or memory. she is talking about how after what he did for her, he was able to help many others and now many advancements have been made. he is nervous and extremely uncomfortable hearing about this. she asks why he never had any of these modifications done to himself and he admits that it is because humans are more than just their brains, that by removing parts of the body those parts of a person die. at this point he is sobbing. he says when he looks at everyone around him all he can think about is what parts of them aren't there. he says he is afraid of death and breaks down completely. she says the parts of her that are still alive could only be alive if they had not been separated from the rest but he does not stop crying. he can't bear to look at her. i wake up and i am twenty minutes late for work
Played over and over again with the same structure, but each time slightly altered, maybe people say slightly different words or some actions are out of order. There is a room that I need to pass through, but there are three people with hats keeping their faces in shadow. If I bump into any one of them they unravel and break apart along these seams that run all along their bodies, but at the edges there were rows of tightly packed, very long and pointy teeth. Whichever one I had touched would then latch onto my arm, wrapping around it, but not biting into the flesh. The sensation is mostly of meat sliding against skin. In order to free my arm, all I can think to do is to use this mass and hit one of the other people to burst that one open and they would start meshing together, sliding between each other and exchanging teeth. Once the mass on my arm was heavy enough, I could dangle them over a spot in the floor that opened up into a pit with gridlines of very familiar teeth and meat texture to the things on my arm, but occasionally one of the squares in the grid would house a big ol' eye. I could dangle the mass my arm over this pit and shake it around, and eventually they would slip off. I understood that was their home and they would be happy there. In the same dream there was a man I would meet and take a small pinwheel from him to stick into my back. Depending on the version of the dream, I might also confront him about who he had betrayed and/or kill him.
The memory starts with a man who has gotten tricked into being in prison. The cells have unnaturally tall ceilings and open windows at the top. He climbs up to escape and notices there are red handprints along the ceiling, leading to cables he can use to climb along the ceiling of the hallways and into another window opening. This leads to a much larger room where the floor extends further down and has broken apart revealing deep crevices of a strange material. On the top surface it is a normal tiled floor pattern but the inside of the cracks appear to be made of stone with a red webbing crossing back and forth. The man is hanging from chains and hesitates, and I can hear other people discussing what he is doing. They are sure that he is going to descend into the crevices to retrieve some treasure but that if he does so he will definitely die. Hearing these conversations makes my mind register for a moment that the events I am witnessing are not actually happening. The man decides not to go down and exits the room by the far window.
Exiting through the window he is now outside the prison, but there is an armed conflict going on and he is unarmed. He ducks his head and tries to find a way out but quickly runs into someone that he knows. They tell him they have something to show him and drop all of their weapons, walk down an alley, turn a corner and are immediately killed. I won't go into as much detail as the dream did but they were extremely killed. The man scrambles to pick up the crude bolt action rifle his friend had dropped and at this point I assume the role of the man. I aim the gun forward to where my friend had just died and shoot the first person that comes around the corner but in the same moment, someone to the side that I failed to notice shoots me and completely destroys my left shoulder. There is an intense pain clouded by shock, but it is overwhelmed by the feeling of being pulled thin across time as I try without success to redo the previous instant so that I don't get shot. I regain control of myself a few minutes later, shoulder still in ribbons, but the fighting has stopped. I exit the alley to find something important my dead friend had but there are no bodies, only clothes strewn about. Someone very tall surrounded by much smaller companions is picking through the clothes. As they approach, I want to ask what happened but I can't find the words. I sit there as they rifle through my dead friend's pockets.
a bit of a warning, this one is a dream where my brain decided to show me graphic depictions of death.
started with a guy who was maybe famous? there were a bunch of people crowded around him with interest but then one person out on the edge yells some childish insult at him and runs off. the guy was already acting a bit weird but upon hearing this, pulls out a gun and chases the guy down. at first people are running to see what is going to happen but then the armed man shoots the other person twice in the back. one bullet hits the left shoulder blade and the other hits the lower back. i see large chunks fall off the body and for a brief second he stands there just gushing blood. not spraying, more like a sink faucet. everyone who had been running along now starts running away and the armed man runs after them. he rounds them all up into a circle around him as hostages and begins threatening anyone should they act in a way that he thinks is suspicious. there were some gunshots during this so most people are scared and he is taken seriously. after way too long of people trying not to move but also wanting to be as far away as they can, the armed man decides it is over, shoots four times in the air, emptying the gun, drops it, and leaves. as people begin to stand up and move again, someone takes the gun, reloads it, and shoots themself through the front of their throat and out the back of their head. i have a clear view of their neck opening up. as people are leaving and wondering why no one showed up to help them, there is an oiled body lying face down with a bullet hole in its shoulder and neck. i swear i can recognize who it is
i had been tasked with making a section of some exhibit? escape room sequence?? people would have come from some other section that someone else had designed and then go through my section and continue to another section. i had no idea how long the whole thing was. more importantly my section contained an unfinished puzzle called the "pepsi maze" which was a series of doors and concrete hallways that in theory had a single 12oz can of pepsi at the end. i call it unfinished because partway through designing it i realized no one would ever get to the end and so i altered the rest of my section so that you didn't have to finish the maze to get out and put the pepsi there as a joke. at some point i crawl through the entrance to my section to see how it's been doing (it has been a while since its construction) and there is a logbook with entries from people that have come through. several entries are complaining about the pepsi maze, either claiming it to be impossible, claiming that they did get to the end but the pepsi wasn't there, or calling me a bitch
The leather binding smells faintly of iron. There are many pages but most of them are blank.
Preface A husk of a page Page coated in a layer of grime
I've frequently thought to myself that, as someone who enjoys video games, and has at least a vague understanding of art, programming, and game design, I should try to make a video game at some point. For years it had been rolling around in my mind until I played the RPG-Maker game OFF, after which I thought man, I liked this game but I probably would have enjoyed it more if the part that was turn-based combat had been replaced with actual gameplay. Since then, however, I have come to understand why people make these kinds of games in RPG-Maker, because it is much easier to finish a game when the core system has already been built. I feel pretty much the same way about visual novels built in RenPy, that it's a great way to get a project finished, but I am reluctant to do it myself because they are just not the kind of games that I would enjoy playing more than once, which is kind of required if you're testing it to see if it works, and also I don't see a whole lot of point in making a game if it isn't fun.
So after I came up with a simple enough concept to fit a video game, (walk down a mountain and smack the weird monsters along the way with a pipe until you get to the bottom,) I then got caught on just a bit of a snag. That is, I had about zero idea how this game would actually play. I had various ideas but they were either limitations I wanted to place on the mechanics that I didn't have or concepts that I had no idea how to translate onto an actual screen. At one point I tried describing the idea I had at the time to someone and they interpreted it as a kind of sideways Frogger, so if you've ever seen me refer to something called NOTFROGGER, that's just this, because I am terrible at naming things.
So here the concept resides, in this limbo of being an idea I would really like to flesh out, but being hesitant to really give it form until I've figured out how to make a character move on a screen in a way that feels good.
Civilian is the main character of all this, and the description of Civilian has only ever been a raincoat over a hazmat suit. The obvious point of this is the basic "the Civilian is the PLAYER," but also for the sense that the story can definitely repeat after the conclusion, meaning that every time you play you could very well be someone entirely new. Part of the reasoning for this is that I tend to be rather averse to the idea of coming up with actual characters with personalities as that kind of writing is definitely not my strong suit.
The name Civilian was originally supposed to be just as generic as possible, but there were a few thoughts I floated around about the wall perimeter cleanup being a part of gaining citizenship in a kind of Starship Troopers dystopian kind of way but since you were never meant to spend more than about two seconds in the city anyway I didn't think about it much more than that.
There was also an idea of a secondary character to start the journey with Civilian, who then dies very early on, putting into motion the actual events of the game and saving me the time writing more than a few lines of dialog. Another part of that was that the only line Civilian was going to speak would be something along the lines of "I'm not looking at that" upon trying to interact with their friend's corpse, and then the rest of the game would be completely silent. Not sure if that'll stay in should I ever finish this, but it's a thought.
Will write something here later, sorry.
It is intricately decorated, but has retained some damage.
Crumpled up preface Dry Page Bird's Page
I do want to explain where in my head the origin of this setting came from, because it was only afterward that I started to see some glaring similarities to other things that I like. Not to say that I was entirely working with original concepts here, more that these ideas at least started as something other than thinking that I like something, but what if I did it instead.
That being said, this all started during a point when I was trying to get my thoughts together on why freeform forum role-playing games seem so inaccesible to me (which, depending on what order you're reading these pages in, I may have already mentioned). This wasn't for anyone's benefit other than my own, I wasn't actually writing anything down at this point, only talking aloud to myself and repeating things over and over until I feel like my own thought process makes any kind of sense. I came to the conclusion that most of my problems come from the lack of structure or direction, the kind of thing that is usually fufilled by some kind of game master running literally everything that is not a player character. How hard would it be then, I thought to myself, to build some kind of extremely simple interface so that people could track where they were and what they had?
This, of course, quickly spiraled out of control. At first I figure, ok, keep it simple, just a value for what area someone is in, but then I start thinking, well, it'd be boring to just instantly switch between the different places. Maybe some kind of road system for traveling between different places, and having to just wait until you're somewhere new would also be boring, maybe some kind of encounter system as well, and oh does that mean there should be a combat system?
There were a lot of other trains of thought that just made this whole thing way more complicated than it ever needed to be, but the important part was once I thought about the possibility of random encounters and combat, I needed to account for the possibility of someone's health dropping to zero. I can't have people accidentally dying just from playing the game, I think, I should put something in place to make sure that when someone's health does drop to zero, they can continue playing, but not without some kind of cost. So I think well, this being a multiplayer context and wanting to encourage teamwork, what if another player had to pick up and carry the unconscious player back somewhere to heal them.
And, in a brilliant flash of inspiration, I completely forgot that doctors exist.
Instead my mind constructed this mini cathedral that would be the only area in which characters could be revived. There were thoughts about the mechanic of being revived but this has gone on long enough and I need to wrap things up.
At this point I had started to realize that this game had become far too complicated and there was no way I would ever build even part of this. But that's ok, because I also realized that this setting that I've constructed is way more interesting than pretending I know how to make some kind of pseudo-MUD. So I toss the game mechanics into the garbage. No more willpower-based magic, no more weird resistance associations and damage types. Now the only things that are certain are 1: people can't die but will only fall unconscious after sustaining some amount of damage/trauma, and 2: they only come back to life when brought to certain, probably sacred areas.
Will write something here later, sorry.
This guy wasn't actually designed for this setting originally, in fact, it almost feels wrong to say I designed him at all. The origin is a picture I made for some sort of contest that never went anywhere in which my thought process was to heavily reference a still from the movie Come And See, and then, since part of the contest was that the character was supposed to have a bird on their arm, I employed my usual tactic of "But What If Animal Was Big". Over time, the design became more of its own thing as I stopped referencing the photo and instead started using literally anything else as reference. Really, all I've kept is the squint and the jerrycan, so if anyone was able to make this connection without reading it here I would be surprised.
Bird as the character is pretty simple to understand, and has remained mostly unchanged in concept since initially being placed in this setting. His job is to retrieve bodies of those left unconscious and bring them back to the altar/church/temple/cathedral/whatever I end up calling it, where he lives. Locating these bodies is the job given to the actual bird half of Bird, who will wake him up, guide him to the body, and give absolutely no help carrying the body back. The only physical help the bird will give is if and only if something should happen to Bird, the bird will be very defensive and will carry him right back home. If you think calling one of them "Bird" and the other one "the bird" is confusing, I agree. I really need to give him an actual name. The jerrycan is also why I decided to make water the sort of force of life in this setting, as a kind of backwards justification for him carrying it around.
Once home, the required rituals or whatever needs to be done is taken care of by not Bird, but the one other person who lives there. Bird is mostly there for the heavy lifting of bodies and will also take anyone who does not wake up into the catacombs below. I never got much development into the other person who lives there, but she was mostly there to reacquaint any forgetful people with information they had forgotten. Bird, on the other hand, does not talk much and when not carrying people around usually just wants to go into the tower and fall asleep until the next time the bird wakes him up.
Upon opening, the pages fall out. Nothing has been bound and everything is out of order.
Page that smells like cranberries Page with a strange connection
goof
A while ago when I was following some of my friends' tabletop games, they were starting a game of Kult and in classic form I read a bunch of the manual, was present for some of the pre-game discussion, and then did not participate at all in the actual game. But stepping backwards in that sentence just a little bit to the actually relevant part, in the pre-game discussions, there was talk of the character archetypes (think of them like classes, I don't have time to go into detail) and most people regarded the "Cursed" archetype as not being able to be too interesting. I think it was mostly due to the whole "makes it hard to stay alive" thing, but it's been a while so who knows. This reminded me of an idea I had for another roleplay game that I also did not participate in and look ok I know this is all kind of beside the point but I'll get there eventually just hold on.
This other game was some people I knew that were doing one of those forum roleplays, where people just sorta drop in and out and its incredibly disorganized, I honestly have no idea how it's supposed to work. Anyway, the setting they were forming for the roleplay was strangely similar to the gnostic parts of kult but with more of a focus on using the word "surreal" and most of the physical descriptions of the setting (far and few between as they were) manifested themselves in my head as a shifting labyrinth of pure concrete, reminiscent of the underworld in Kult. Honestly the main reason I bring all this up is because I thought the parallels between this amateur rp worldbuilding and Kult were funny, but also as an intro to this so that I'm not just immediately telling you about Random Person Who Has Been Cursed.
So the character has contracted a curse, (how? angered a supernatural force? chosen by cultists? burdened by guilt? pure misfortune? I never figured this part out,) but instead of taking a physical toll on the cursed until death, the curse manifests itself in a bit of a different way. Life, for the most part, is unaffected, until the cursed tries to pass through any door and finds themselves not in the room they expect, but a particular courtyard. The courtyard is walled in, and its space is mostly taken up by a circular garden, with several bushes and flowers planted around a central area in which there are two stone benches and some steps up to a marble statue that has been broken off mid torso (not sure why I had such a solid grasp of the garden's details). The cursed would be free to leave, and upon re-ntry the door would lead to the correct room. As the curse worsened, several effects would apply: the courtyard would appear more frequently, the door back may not lead back to exactly where you had entered but somewhere nearby, or the cursed would have to pass through a number of rooms and hallways similarly styled to the courtyard before returning to familiar territory. Eventually the cursed can be passed into the courtyard via hallways and turning corners as well as doors. Naturally, as this escalates it takes its toll on the cursed's mental state, likely forcing themselves into isolation within a single room, alienating those around them, that kind of thing. Eventually, when the curse has taken complete hold, the cursed finds themselves stuck within the courtyard, any exit only leading back into itself. and so the cursed would lay down, propping themselves up against one of the benches or the statue. At this point the cursed has completely given up.
The slightly silly part of this is that while coming up with this originally, this whole arc was just the cursed's backstory. Part of the reason I didn't think the character would work was because the nature of the character means they can really only act as an npc or a recurring encounter for the players. In the original forum format this was impossible, and in a tabletop setting it would be too infrequent and inactive a role to give to a player. Playing through the arc might be interesting, but I think I like the idea of a character who has lost to this kind of curse too much to really try to win against it.
As an npc, or encounter, there would be a few rules as to how the courtyard works, at least in my mind. First rule is that the players can leave, but the cursed cannot. Picking up the cursed and trying to leave will bring you back to the courtyard until the cursed is left behind. The setting of the courtyard is static, as in marks made and objects left behind will not remain, and if you try to put the cursed out of their misery they will be alive and still there to sarcastically greet you next time you arrive. Also, I definitely haven't ironed out the concept of time in regard to the courtyard. The cursed definitely should not age, being trapped there for eternity or something like that, but should be able to remember who they have met. The what and how for the effects on the players and the passage of time in and outside of the courtyard is definitely still up in the air.
Narratively, there was also the idea that, as a recurring character, the players would would become familiar and hopefully a little sympathetic to the cursed as a result of repeat visits. Most of the time the courtyard would just be in odd places and an interesting surprise, at least once the cursed would show up in the middle of some dire situation and, depending on whichever time/space rules are decided upon, either helps or severely inconveniences the main characters. More importantly, as these main characters travel some impressive distance and overcome numerous challenges in pursuit of some goal, the cursed shows up one last time, right before whatever story-ending confrontation the players have been fighting towards. Not with any sort of grand revelation, but just to hammer home the absurdity of the space all of them exist in. And hopefully, to give the impression that there's a faint chance that everything could have been skipped if they just walked in and out of the courtyard at just the right moments. Because you know, that's hilarious.