Announcing ONIROS + Protospiel Rochester 2024

 I have been working on-and-off on a standalone card game for a couple years now, and the second prototype is nearing completion, just in time for an upcoming local protospiel. Here's the rundown:

 

ONIROS is a 3-6 player card game that begins with a co-op phase, then transitions to a competitive phase. Players are radicals living under a fascist Regime, worked so hard that the only time they can contemplate revolution is in their dreams. With the titular, experimental wonder drug ONIROS, however, they can manifest their Dreams into reality and use this power to topple the Regime. The players all have Visions for a better future, but not all their bright ideas will see the light of day. Even if they overthrow the Regime, only one will emerge as the glorious new leader.

In the co-op Revolution Phase, players use Dream cards to defeat the Regime deck before it can reassert control after an initial Catalyst. They must also try to stockpile Vision cards, which will further their goals after the fall of the Regime.

If this is achieved, players turn on each other in the Iconoclasm Phase, competing to play the most Vision cards and sabotaging each others' Dream cards. Players who have no Vision cards left instead become Nihilists, and must thwart the remaining revolutionaries from meeting the criteria to play their Vision cards.

Throughout the game, players can use doses of ONIROS to get an edge in various ways.

As of the writing of this blog post, I have written up the rules and templated all the Dream cards, Regime cards, and Vision cards, so all that's left is to design the Catalyst cards and then draw some placeholder art, some of which I will probably post here later.

This is good timing because (not to go ahead and dox myself) there is a protospiel in my area on September 6-8, less than 2 weeks out! If you're not familiar, a protospiel is essentially a tabletop game convention where all the games played are all still in design, and the goal is for designers to gather feedback while they work on their projects. I've never attended one, but I'm excited to hear there's one in my area. If you're near Western New York, you should come check it out! Here's the link for further info. 

Watch this space for more info on ONIROS, both before and after the protospiel.

Escape from All-Mart: Session 5 Writeup - "House of Renunciation"

The PCs:

• Julianne, a computer whiz who fell on hard times and had to take a “temporary” job at All-Mart over a year ago.
• CC, an obnoxiously upbeat new-agey internet personality and crystal collector. She has recently begun to question her worldview.
• Darian, a full-time computer science student on top of his All-Mart job, also with a curiosity about the occult.
• Star, a washed-up, self-aggrandizing grifter.

 

Three nights after the shootout, All-Mart is still bustling with reporters, cops, and unnatural phenomena. John has brought on his unhinged and untrusting cohort Nicholas as unofficial store security. Although the shootout has mostly been kept under wraps by the police, the PCs learn that Marie was fatally shot that night, albeit killing one more cop and injuring another in her last minutes alive.

Most of the PCs have had their wounds patched up but are still sore, unable to properly recuperate while having to keep coming to work. The surviving stockboys are gone, leaving the onerous task of stocking solely to the night shift. Darian’s family frets and can’t understand why he still keeps going to work after everything that's happened to him. CC, who is still missing, is blowing up in the true crime sphere online.

Darian, Julianne, and Star are back at work as usual on the night of Tuesday, November 28. Julianne starts a new, secret exostock stockpile away from security camerasa, which she tells Darian about without revealing its location within the store. The PCs have also found an exostock item in the stockroom since the night shift took it over: a Gaiawave, a weird, “eco-friendly” microwave with lots of “mother earth”, crunchy branding.

New exostock also comes in that night: eight sets of oversized nail clippers priced in a currency that doesn’t exist as far as the PCs can ascertain. Star trims all ten of her fingernails with a pair but sees no immediate effect, although later in the night she notices they seem a bit thicker and shinier – but perhaps she's just seeing what she wants to see.

While Star is at the register checking her nails, Mr. and Mrs. Smith come in. Mrs. Smith, apparently desperate despite her husband’s nonchalance, grabs Star and demands she show her to the Gaiawave, as she's certain there's still one in the store despite failing to find it so far. By this point, Star has plugged it in a few aisles from the register and tried heating a drop of her own blood in it, but failed to see anything unnatural happen.

Mrs. Smith explains to her that the Gaiawave can resurrect dead things heated inside it for exactly 3 minutes and 33 seconds, then follows up with the bombshell that she wants to use it on her stillborn child, which is in a cooler in her car.

Star agrees to let her use it in exchange for $600 (ten times the Gaiawave’s MSRP) and being allowed to take Mr. Smith home with her. Mrs. Smith writes the check on the spot but warns that "transferring control" of Mr. Smith is no trivial feat. Meanwhile, he diligently retrieves the baby’s corpse.

Star and the Smiths watch the baby rotate slowly inside the Gaiawave, and Darian happens by while the timer runs. Upon seeing a baby in a microwave, Darian panics and freezes, transfixed until the requisite seconds have passed. With the unsettling odor of cooked meat on the air, Mrs. Smith retrieves her daughter, who is in fact now alive, and now bawling.

Mrs. Smith starts to explain to Star the details of her relationship to Mr. Smith, or more accurately, the Mr. Smiths, as there are actually six of them which she's been bringing to the store interchangeably. As Mrs. Smith explains it, her “husbands” are actually people without souls, who she has learned to track via a ritual and whom she has found she could control by implanting a fragment of her soul into them (using a different ritual). At this point, with only a seventh of her soul left in her own body, she's barely still human, and her memories of the rituals she once knew are hazy at best.

She says she doesn’t want to teach Star the soul-splitting ritual out of fear it would bind them to each other through the Mr. Smith, but agrees to try and remember other useful rituals to pass along and to leave the Mr. Smith she had brought that night at the store.

Later, Julianne draws a connection between the Mr. Smiths and the stockboys, seeing as they both had a hallmark forgettability and anonymity to them. However, the stockboys became distinct the night of the Christmas party and shootout, leaving this connection an open question for the time being.

Before Mrs. Smith can leave, Nicholas, having seen the baby go in the microwave over the security cameras, stomps up and demands an explanation from the PCs present. When they dissemble and refuse to hand over the Gaiawave, he brandishes a rifle with obvious willingness to use it. Star throws the magickal machine on the ground, breaking it, and then Nicholas shoots it twice for good measure, saying it's for the best that all exostock be destroyed. He then returns to the security office, fuming, and Mrs. Smith leaves the store with her resurrected daughter. Some time later, the PCs hear another gunshot from elsewhere in the store.

 

 

The Gaiawave, courtesy of Kristina,  Darian's player

 

Somewhere else entirely, CC awakens, cold, hungry, thirsty, and in extreme pain. She's laying in the snow near an unfamiliar hedge maze and marble pavilion, her wound still untreated. Vince is nearby, and when he sees she's awake, he begins complaining loudly. CC’s limbs shake uncontrollably for a time as she comes to, and Vince tells her she’s been comatose for days, and that they're trapped in their current location for reasons beyond him.

CC wanders into the hedge maze. Vince makes no effort to stop or follow her. Despite the area’s extremely low temperature, neither of them seems to be suffering from hypothermia. CC passes ice sculptures of people familiar to her, specifically people she’s wronged throughout her life in pursuit of her goals. The guilt welling up inside overwhelms her. She topples and smashes the sculptures in a fit of pique until her physical pain outweighs the emotional. Watching the sculptures fracture only makes her feel worse.

She delves further into the hedge maze until she finds a clearing in the center. In it, Hamzah kneels and stares into a pool of fresh, clear water. CC approaches him and he expresses great remorse at bringing her into the fold of the occult underground and thus allowing her to be injured and trapped with him in what he believes to most likely be hell.

With difficulty, CC gets Hamzah to explain what he thinks is going on, though she fails to console him despite blaming all her woes on John. Hamzah admits that there's a possibility that this isn’t, in fact, hell, but part of the rumor-shadowed House of Renunciation. He feels it's unlikely, though, seeing as three of them had entered it together (while normally the House admits one person per room at a time), but based on the feeling he got from looking into the pool, he thinks it's possible.

CC feels it too: a clear sense that to drink that water is to give up her goals and ambitions, and lose a core part of herself. She convinces Hamzah to bring Vince to the pool and try and think of a way out. Hamzah believes that if this is indeed a Room of Renunciation, drinking the water would let them escape, but he's afraid of what would be left of him without his obsession with anticapitalist martyrdom.

If only out of their hunger and desperation, Vince and Hamzah oblige CC in a meditation that culminates in the three of them drinking from the pool. However, both Vince and Hamzah hesitate at the last second, prompting CC to do the same. Vince reflects that the people who got to know him generally hated him, and he ends up dunking his head under and drinking first thinking it might not be such a bada thing, despite CC’s attempts to get him to wait until Hamzah is ready to do it together. Vince immediately disappears, seemingly affirming the Room of Renunciation theory.

Hamzah explains to CC that he believes Vince and his cohorts are part of a hit squad for The New Inquisition, a magick-hoarding criminal organization led by millionaire Alex Abel. He also tells her he has actually performed two major spells: one to prevent TNI’s goons from ever catching up to or harming him (which must apparently no longer be in effect, to Hamzah’s surprise and dismay). The other was to tank the All-Mart corporation before Abel could buy it out for the exostock that appears in its stores.

Hamzah admits that merely eating valuable objects was insufficient to power these spells; for that, a plutophage needs something priceless. The solution he's found lies in the symbolic weight of the corrupt rich people who manipulate the capitalist machine. In the early 2000s, he ate a stew containing the remains of J.P. Morgan, granting him the mojo for his first major spell. In 2020, he ate the recently-deceased body of John McAfee to harness that same power.

Hamzah tells CC this to explain he's repulsed by his own behavior and the harm he’s caused in his obsessive quest against Abel for the past several decades, but he's still reluctant to give up his crusade and his whole identity to escape the Room. Failing to sway him, CC drinks, and returns to the All-Mart, at the base of the stairs to a crawlspace, where she, Vince, and Hamzah apparently crossed into the Room. She no longer bears her obsession with natural materials, and that may just be the tip of the iceberg.

She stumbles into the break room and sees Nicholas there, clearly up to no good. He says he's going to call John to tell him that CC is back back once he realizes who she is, but after she ineffectually tries to physically prevent him from doing so, he reluctantly calls her an ambulance instead.

 

Although the PCs are reunited on the material sphere, it’s clear things are ramping up and time is running out. Have they forged enough allegiances and gained enough knowledge to see their goal through to the end?

We’ll find out in the next session of Escape from All-Mart!

Sadly, this won’t be for a few weeks due to the bane of all UA cabals, scheduling.

 

Objective progress: 60%->68% (the main progress here was CC learning about the existence of TNI and its role in their objective.)

 

Click here to read the previous session's writeup 

Click here to read the next sesion's writeup 

Apocrypha from All-Mart (includes a news article handout I gave the players) 

Escape from All-Mart: Session 4 Writeup - "Bloodbath"

The PCs:

• Julianne, a computer whiz who fell on hard times and had to take a “temporary” job at All-Mart over a year ago.
• CC, an obnoxiously upbeat new-agey internet personality and crystal collector. She has recently begun to question her worldview.
• Darian, a full-time computer science student on top of his All-Mart job, also with a curiosity about the occult.
• Star, a washed-up, self-aggrandizing grifter.

 

In the midst of mapping out the secret passages of the store, Julianne overhears people nearby. She sneaks closer and finds the stockboys in the stockroom with Rex, the regional manager, as well as Darian and Star, who have their arms bound and mouths gagged with duct tape after being captured last session. A few of the stockboys have improvised weapons, and they're looking to Rex for instructions, but he remains uncertain, making a call on a flip phone instead. Seeing they don't appear to be in imminent danger, Julianne sneaks off in search of implements to help rescue her coworkers.

Elsewhere, CC emerges from her communion with Hamzah and finds that John is now alone in the break room; the party has ended. He's agitated and preparing for something, gun drawn. He insists CC draw her own blood with a plastic knife to prove she's not a shapeshifter, and after continuously arguing with her about it, he eventually elevates from threatening to shoot her to popping a cap in her gut.

CC tries to struggle with John for the gun, but he maintains control of it. Seeing her (copiously spilled) blood appears human, he tries to get her to come with him for an unspecified purpose, but when she insists on calling an ambulance he eventually leaves her alone in the breakroom, frustrated.

CC tries to bandage her wound, then goes out front of the store to wait for the ambulance, intentionally setting off the fire alarm on the way. She livestreams this whole process. John passes her on his way back inside with his copy of My Name is Dirk A. under his arm, along with what looked like the laptop Star stole from him. He loses a couple pages of the printed-out book, one of which CC tries to read, but it's pretty incoherent on its own. Based on my description and John’s known libertarianism, one of the players likened it to Ayn Rand’s books, which I felt was pretty apt, although from what CC could glean, the page in question didn’t have to do with politics. When CC tries to get her stream audience to identify My Name is Dirk A., it's abruptly taken down by Twitch mods.

Julianne comes back to the edge of the stockroom with a boxcutter and a ratchet strap, remaining undetected under the noise of the fire alarm. She swings the strap around a big shelf and yanks it over as a distraction, then in the tumult ran in and cut Darian free. In her absence, Star tried to struggle free and is now pinned on both sides by stockboys, although they seem uncomfortable doing this, though whether it's the violence of the act or the proximity to Star is unclear. For whatever reason, the stockboys (who had previously seemed almost inhuman) now talk just like anyone else, and the PCs notice features by which they could now be told apart.

Once the fire alarm started, Rex went out back of the store with one of the stockboys to continue his phone call, leaving a total of six in the stockroom, half of whom are armed. Once Julianne gets moving, Darian extricates Star from one of them, and Julianne threatens the other one on Star with her boxcutter, causing him to loosen his grip rather than fight back.

Darian, Star, and Julianne flee the stockroom, pursued by stockboys. Julianne manages to cut Star’s arms free while running (somehow not lacerating her in the process), and the PCs that had been captured tear the tape from their mouths. They overturn a shelf to slow the stockboys and then split up, with Julianne heading to the front of the store while Darian follows Star to the hunting section for weaponry.

Simultaneously, paramedics arrive and tend (fairly ineffectually) to CC’s gunshot wound. One of them is familiar to CC; he's often sent to the All-Mart at night to deal with injuries relating to the heroin addicts that often hang around the area, and is often drunk on the job.

When the paramedics load CC into the ambulance and try to drive away, the vehicle won't move, and they initially can’t discern why. CC, now doped up on pain meds as well as freaked out, issues them cryptic warnings about the inescapable clutches of All-Mart. She tries and fails to coerce the oft-drunk paramedic (whose current degree of sobriety is unclear) to carry her away lest she get him cancelled, but he's unfortunately too out of touch to take the threat seriously.

The paramedics soon realize they had somehow missed a gash in the ambulance’s fuel tank that had drained by the time they pulled up to the store. As they lack the equipment they need to repair the damage and siphon gas from another car, CC hobbles back into the store despite their suggestion to stay put.

CC runs into Julianne, who has moved up to the registers, and they fill each other in on what's been going on. When Julianne asks CC to send John her way if she saw him, CC responds that she would prefer to “send him to hell”. As the paramedics had promised CC upon hearing about John's behavior, a policeman enters the store and approachs CC and Julianne. He's slight, middle-aged, and has a strong Russian accent. Initially he agrees to wait with the PCs for his partner to come and root John out, but then two other cops walk in, and it's immediately obvious that they don’t recognize this guy.

The imposter cop acts quickly, taking CC hostage. As the two real cops try to navigate the situation, Marie (Vince’s brutish colleague and Julianne’s blackmailer) sneaks up from behind with a shotgun and a shoddier police disguise. Julianne sees her and warns the cops, prompting Marie to duck behind a shelf of potato chips. As the cops approach Marie, Julianne moves to try and topple the shelf on her. However, as Julianne pushes the shelf, Marie shoots one of the police officers, transforming much of his face into gore. He drops but remains conscious.

The other cop has to move as the Russian guy lays down suppressing fire, but Julianne successfully pins Marie under the shelf, injuring her, though it's unclear how badly. CC accuses the Russian of being in league with Julianne’s blackmailers, which prompts the Russian guy to drag her behind a register and inject her with something which knocks her out within 30 seconds. CC’s last utterance is an attempt to call for Hamzah.

Meanwhile, Star grabs a hunting rifle and tries ineffectually to load it; Darian picks up a combat knife. When they hear the gunfire at the front of the store, they begin approaching cautiously, only to stumble upon a stockboy that John is shoving in front of him as a human shield. John fixes Star’s gun for her and the four of them draw near the ongoing firefight.

By this time, Julianne has recovered Marie’s shotgun after crushing her under the shelf, but Marie has drawn a hidden handgun in the intervening seconds and she headshots the other cop as he's radioing for backup and seeking a hiding place. Julianne, untrained with guns, still manages to inflict a decent wound on Marie, who apparently reloaded the shotgun just before the shelf knocked it out of her hands. It's still hard to tell how bad she is now; it seems significant, but not debilitating.

The others arrive, and John pushes the stockboy into harm’s way first. Marie kills him with a single shot, and John (following a successful Self check for sacrificing another person to protect himself) tries to shoot Marie, but accidentally hits the falling corpse of the stockboy and falls underneath it. Julianne tries to disarm Marie with a kick, but Marie catches her by the ankle and drags her to the floor, knocking the back of Julianne’s head hard on the tiles.

Star gets within range to shoot and hesitates for a moment, weighing whether to shoot John or Marie. She opts for the latter and, with another fluke of beginner’s luck, hits Marie’s upper arm. At this time, the Russian guy, who hasn’t been seen for a while, comes running toward the gunfire with an expression of absolute fear and disgust on his face. John shoots him just above the knee, then he and Star subdued the Russian.

From there, John watches over the downed imposter as Star goes for zipties. Marie manages to half-crawl further into the store to wherever she came from (having evidently not entered through the front doors), dissuading Julianne from pursuit with her handgun. A backup quartet of police arrive and find signs that someone has recently opened the ceiling near where CC was last seen, though it seems unlikely she could have gotten up there from the store floor. As paramedics come in to tend to Star’s broken nose, Darian’s shoulder, and Julianne’s head wound, two of the police follow the trail of Marie’s blood. Three shots resound from that direction, followed by silence.

 

Though this session lasted less than an in-game hour, it was by far the most traumatic for the PCs’ bodies and minds. What will be the fallout of this showdown? How will our protagonists cope? Will Star and John have a bond now that she saved his life? How do the blackmailers, shooters, stockboys, Rex, and John all fit together? And what the hell happened to CC?

We’ll get answers to at least some of these questions in the next session of Escape from All-Mart!

 

Objective progress: 34% -> 60% (both identifying Rex’s connection to the stockboys and the greater conspiracy, and contributing to the unnamed Russian fake cop’s arrest, as well as Marie’s wounding at minimum were minor milestones)

Click here to read the previous session's writeup

Click here to read the next session's writeup