Fever Dreams

As I sat in a hospital last week, intravenous drip in my arm, I had a whole heap of revelations and moments of satori. Now that I'm in a state to write about them, do you think I can remember them?

I remember that there was stuff about the direction I wanted to take the "SNAFU SRD and Cookbook", including the idea of writing up a basic 'zine that covered the core rules and only the core rules. That's basically what most SRDs are anyway, and I've started thinking about the layout on that part of the project. The aim this time is to include avoid forgetting any of the important bits, while making sure I trim away anything superfluous. That's tough. At this stage I've tried to trim it down to 16 pages, but it's more realistically looking like 20.

There's also some vague recollections about those augmented reality games like Pokemon Go, and a few others that I've played over the years. I was imagining these from the perspective of a modern urban magic game setting, like the one I'm using with "Familiar". Imagine that there is some kind of magical faction in the background of these games. The games have players focus on certain points, perhaps walking or driving between them, and then doing something at those locations (engaging in a fight, getting some training, finding stuff, etc.). I've been on a walking app, where you pick up bonuses at different locations, but you have to be close enough to the specified spot before the bonus will activate, and that was one of the things that was going through my mind. What if these places were mystically significant? What if the unaware masses put a little bit of concentration, and a tiny amount of soul energy into the location when they thought about it. Not enough to be noticeable, but with enough people playing a variety of games it might accumulate over time. A mystic could wander through later and harvest that energy, or maybe the points in these games correspond to ley lines, and the concentration keeps them active and flowing... this would be some new techno-magic paradigm, something that the old world mystics and Illuminati might not have thought of. Perhaps these locations in game serve as blocks to traditional power flows, thinking about the location locks it into stasis for a few minutes, diverting the mystic energies along new paths... maybe different apps are controlled by different factions? Maybe there's a mystic who believes this is what's happening, but it's all a conspiracy theory and there's something else entirely at work. It's this last idea that really intrigues me because I want the setting of "Familiar" to be established by unreliable narrators with conflicting stories. The aim is for the various stories to collide, and for the players to work out which version of reality works for them.