About the Author

There was once an About the Author section on this website that had traceable personal details about me, but thankfully, it is lost to time, and can definitely never be dug up by anyone, for any reason, ever.

This version is more fun anyway: here I am statted out in Unknown Armies. I guess I could milk this as a StatSat article, but that would be kinda lame.

Moonglum Games

Obsession: Autonomy. I want to have complete control over my own life and my own body.

Rage stimulus: The capitalist world order and the way it makes us all worse people. No ethical existence, etc. etc.

Noble stimulus: Self-expression through creativity. Realistically, art is the closest I expect to get to the sublime.

Fear stimulus: Being unable to trust my own judgment (Self). 

Helplessness: 3 H / 2 F

Isolation: 6 H / 2 F

Self: 4 H / 1 F 

Unnatural: 1 H / 1 F (I don't want to talk about it.)

Violence: 2 H / 0 F

Socialist 35%: Substitutes for (class) Struggle, Coerces Self, Resists Shocks to Helplessness

Trans Woman 30%*: Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Helpessness, Casts Rituals

Antipsychiatry 55%: Substitutes for Connect, Therapeutic, Resists Shocks to Self

Statospheric Saturdays: I Was A Teenage Werefrog

My second entry for the game jam I mentioned last week. Content warning for harm to children, again (don't worry about this become a pattern. It's FINE). This is a mess in dire need of editing because I was rushing to meet the deadline. For now I'm posting it as is, warts and all, but eventually I plan to revise it and maybe even run it (crazy, I know).

I WAS A TEENAGE WEREFROG 

 

Introduction
This is an investigative scenario with the premise that a UA lycanthrope, played straight, is weird enough to be the entire crux of a mystery. Set it anywhere in suburban America.

Objectives
Here are several possible setups for the scenario, plus associated objectives.

A Sleeper cell from out of town: Make sure “The Kevin Situation” doesn’t wake the tiger. Starts at 20% due to being grounded in the unnatural from the outset.

Local rubberneckers about to have their trigger event: Find out the truth behind Kevin Liao’s disappearance. Starts at 10% due to the reduced firehose of new faces and names to keep track of.

Private investigators hired by Kevin’s father because he’s noticed his son has abruptly stopped spending his money: Find Kevin Liao and make sure he’s safe. Starts at 0%.

Note the different implications about possible resolutions.

Timeline of Events

13 days ago: Kevin meets Patricia Albrici at a Humphrey Bogart marathon at local indie theater UnReel. She uses him to charge but he realizes she’s magick and insists she teach him. 

10 days ago: Patricia gets sick of Kevin following her around and lures him into conducting a ritual that gets him possessed by a lycanthropic demon. 

9 days ago: Kevin transforms for the first time. He spends 9 hours as a bullfrog in the O’Neils’ house over the weekend without attracting special attention, then reverts. 

7 days ago: The demon takes over Kevin’s body for about two hours before school. It uses this time to make meticulous notes in Portuguese on all of the children in his neighborhood and plans to abduct and murder them. After school, Kevin takes the time to translate a couple sentences of this weird stuff he doesn’t remember writing, freaks out, and returns to UnReel to try and get answers. He holes up in a disused projection room.

6 days ago: Patricia manages to duck Kevin’s notice at UnReel thanks to a deployment of random magick (“I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”). She begins asking checkers if Kevin has done anything bad that could be traced back to her and buys a “sexy cop” Halloween costume.

 5 days ago: Having learned that Kevin’s been absent from school for several days, Patricia dons her “Officer Albrici” persona using the Stock Wardrobe spell and does damage control at Kevin’s school while she tries to find out more.

 3 days ago: The demon regains control of Kevin, sneaks out of UnReel in the dead of night, sneaks up to a house to snatch a toddler, then gets displaced by the bullfrog’s spirit, which idly stares into the window for four hours. Kevin reasserts himself just before daybreak and flees, though several neighbors saw him in bullfrog form.

Yesterday: The demon wins out again. It uses Kevin to snatch a different child, Kaighley Vass, and then butcher her with a garden trowel. Kevin comes back to himself in the midst of scattering the pieces at a trash dump. He runs off into the woods in the midst of a total mental breakdown.

GMCs

Ruoxi “Kevin” Liao: A Chinese foreign exchange student-cum-were-bullfrog. He attends Angus Academy on the dime of his father, the CEO of a major rail company. Even before his lycanthropy, he was a bit of a wild child. He deliberately flunks math and science just to buck stereotypes, and has adopted a slightly ridiculous “All-American” persona to try and fit in; he feigns passion for baseball, Westerns, and the Rolling Stones.
His dream is to become a bigshot Hollywood director; he really loves Tarantino. Most likely, he’s somewhere on the Autism spectrum and he self-medicates with weed in the school parking lot. Lots of people know 
about him, but nobody knows him well.For a week and a half, he’s had to share his body with a sadistic and murderous demon and the mellow spirit of a bullfrog.

“Detective” Patricia Albrici: A cinemancer (Book 1: Play, p. 148) with a penchant for gritty crime flicks and a complicated relationship with the prevalence of misogynist themes often found therein. She knows there’s a demon in Kevin, but not that it’s lycanthropic. 
Alongside Terry Kidd and Patrick O’Neil, she’s inserted herself into the hush-hush management of Kevin’s disappearance as “Detective Albrici,” and won their trust and silence. She takes her cue for this performance from Fargo (the movie, not the show, of course). She’s starting to freak out about the lack of news regarding Kevin’s whereabouts that her occult underground contacts have brought her. When she finds out about the dead little girl, she’ll go apeshit.

Patrick, Lena, and Conrad O’Brien: Kevin’s host family. They never saw much of him, which Lena finds sad and Conrad is amused by. Patrick, a workaholic corporate lawyer, doesn’t even know that Kevin is fluent in English. Lena volunteered to host Kevin because she hoped he’d be a well-behaved geek who might bring Conrad in line. For his part, Conrad is more or less a pampered neo-nazi with aspirations in what is to him a political environment full of promise.With Kevin gone a week, Patrick has begrudgingly starting pulling strings to keep things quiet; he wants to avoid Kevin’s father finding out what’s going on at all costs.

Terrence Kidd: The principal of Kevin’s school. Like Patrick, he was late to hear about “The Kevin Situation,” but is going out of his way to keep it under wraps. A surprisingly spry Vietnam vet, he wishes he got to run the school like a boot camp and grouses often about participation trophies and the like.

Stepan Kovac: The media studies teacher. As a Slovakian immigrant, he’s sympathetic to Kevin’s struggles fitting in. He recently agreed to supervise Kevin on an independent study to shoot a feature film, with the hopes he can elevate the boy’s taste above derivative film bro crap. Now that Kevin is missing, he’s sweating bullets, fearing how their relatively close relationship might reflect on him. He’s also the one person really invested in making sure Kevin is safe and accounted for. So far he’s been trying to snoop around on his own, but he’s reached the conclusion he’ll probably have to come clean to “Detective” Albrici at some point.

Kai McDowell, Dong “George” Feng, Nicole Dittmar: Kevin’s hangers-on, or what pass for his friends. Respectively, a nihilistic nonbinary senior who’s checked out of their life until college; a homesick fellow Chinese exchange student whose rebellious streak has just about petered out; and a freshman who’s crushing on Kevin, albeit in a creepy, orientalist way. Since he stopped coming to school, they’ve enjoyed debating what exactly was wrong with him, and where he might have gone.

Key Locations

Angus Academy: The private school Kevin attends. An odd amalgamation; teaching styles range from old-fashioned and conservative to loosey-goosey, post-Montessori weirdness. Its students are roughly 80% filthy rich American kids, 10% filthy rich foreign exchange students (like Kevin) and 10% the offspring of teachers and staff (who get free tuition as a benefit).

Sentry Street: The affluent cul-de-sac where Kevin lives with his host family, the O’Neils. Also the home of the family that bullrog-Kevin stared at three days ago and the Vasses, whose daughter is missing, because demon-Kevin killed her.

UnReel: The indie movie theater where Kevin met Patricia Albrici, and where he’s spent a lot of the last week and a half. It used to be a big attraction listed in guidebooks, but now half the rooms are shut down and its only staff is its geriatric owner and a couple of part-time college students.

The Woods: Kevin’s current location. Really, it would be more accurate to call it “The Park,” because it’s well-maintained and nearby homeowners like to call the cops on people who walk their dogs off-leash. Needless to say, Kevin will have to move on soon.

Complications

Sprinkle some or all of the following in as pacing and bungled investigation demand (other than Transformation, which has to happen):

Ribbit: Every time Kevin tranforms into a frog or gets possessed by the killer demon inside him, the surrounding area is beset by unnatural phenomena: the buzzing of nonexistent flies fills the air and patches of the ground or floor turn into swamp muck and cattails (permanently). If the demon takes over or Kevin is reverting to himself, a physical quirk lingers for 1d10 minutes, such as a long, prehensile tongue or webbed digits. If he’s turning into a bullfrog, it’s the inverse, such as 1d10 minutes of human eyes or a bowlcut on his slimy little head.
These things could happen while the PCs are in Kevin’s presence, or have been witnessed by a GMC. Maybe the GMC functions as a clue dispenser, or maybe they’re losing their shit following a failed Unnatural check, and now they pose a danger to the PCs.

Your Worst Nightmare: If the PCs threaten Patricia (including outing her authority as a magickal farce), she can go all Rambo on them – see the Cinemancy formula spells as a starting point.

False Flag: If the PCs go to the police at any point, it will sooner or later come to light that Patricia is not who she claims she is. This will likely kick off Your Worst Nightmare, and could easily lead to the cops wasting a lot of the PCs’ time and generally obstructing their efforts, if not just arresting them. This is also bad news for most of the GMCs listed above. Depending on how much information has ben gleaned, and how much is then shared with the cops, a manhunt for Kevin is not out of the question.

Transformation: Kevin’s body is again taken over by the bullfrog for 1d10 hours. Ideally, deploy this one in the midst of a conversation with someone who’s seen Kevin recently, and/or in a context that would make his… being a bullfrog, and always having been one a mindfuck. Especially if the PCs are local ponies, this is one of the GM’s best opportunities for a big Unnatural check. Also feel free to fudge the exact point he turns back for similar dramatic effect.

The Bullfrog Strikes Again: The demon gains control of Kevin’s body for another 1d10 hours and kills another child in horrific fashion, with even less effort toward covering its tracks as it continues to indulge its Urge.

Too Many Cooks: A group pursuing one of the objectives your players didn’t pick from the three above gets in their way or misconstrues their involvement for complicity in something really bad.

Inverting the Objective System

Try this as an experiment for using the Objective system for a one-shot: the players know what their objective is from the outset, but aren’t given any milestones. Once you’re almost out of time and ready for a climactic last scene and/or denouement, consult the list of milestones below. Let the players roll the points for each one they completed, plus any other noteworthy actions they took that aren’t listed that you feel should still count.

Then, (in the likely event they are below 100%) have them roll it as a kind of oracle (in the solo RPG sense). Suggestions for a final scene are listed under the different Endings sections, based on the level of success.

The milestones can also help you as GM figure out where to steer the PCs, since most clues are not tied to specific GMCs.

Petty milestones

- Interrogate Kevin’s host family, teachers, or classmates

- Interrogate

- Use minor charge(s) to try and locate Kevin

- Sic the police on one or more involved parties

- Provide proof of Kevin’s location and/or status to a relevant authority

- Prove to a relevant authority that Kevin has not been acting entirely of his own volition

Weighty milestones

- Interrogate Patricia Albrici about

- Use gutter magick or significant charge(s) to try and locate Kevin

- Kidnap, seriously injure, or traumatize one or more involved parties

- Take action to directly ensure Kevin is permanently prevented from harming himself or others

- Exoricse the lycanthropic demon (through some means outside the scope written here)

Endings: Sleepers

00: Kevin transforms somewhere public and wakes the tiger. The PCs get caught in the growing rampage of torches and pitchforks (i.e. gasoline cans and shotguns).

Matched Failure: Kevin’s transforms in front of ponies and wakes the tiger. The riot is small and should be easily contained in the short term, but deciding what to do with the witnesses may be difficult…

Failure: There’s no riot, but enough different people have seen enough of the unnatural around town that the PCs will have weeks of cleanup ahead of them, best case scenario.

Success: The PCs’ only option to keep the tiger asleep are to kill Kevin or some innocent bystander who happened to have seen too much.

Matched Success: The shocking news about Kevin’s violence gets out, but the PCs successfully suppress any unnatural tinges to the story.

01: The PCs get a golden opportunity – through a stroke of luck or possibly occult means – to keep this entire situation under wraps, if they so choose.

Endings: Locals

00: The PCs end up going to prison, either framed for crimes Kevin committed, or else for any illegal actions they took in pursuit of the truth. They don’t get any clear answers as to what Kevin’s ultimate fate was.

Matched Failure: The whole thing ends up a wash. Though the PCs can get off scot free if they lay low for a while, they never find out what became of Kevin, nor can they sift through the various rumors that pile up for any juicy occult truths.

Failure: The PCs don’t get a neat answer as to Kevin’s role in everything, but they do get some undeniable proof of the occult, either from unnatural phenomena related to his transformations or interactions with Patricia.

Success: The PCs gain a complete understanding of Kevin’s sordid last two weeks, but are oblivious to any wider occult implications, and likely have a very inaccurate understanding of how lycanthropy works.

Matched Success: The PCs figure out pretty much the whole of the big picture of the scenario. But if they want to get into the occult underground, they’ll have to find their own ins.

01: The PCs figure out the whole of the big picture of the scenario, and Patricia Albrici or one of her local occult underground contacts ends up teaching them a ritual, cinemancy, or some other real magickal knowledge as thanks, due to blackmail, or for some other compelling and relevant reason.

Endings: PIs

00: Kevin is killed by raiding policemen. The chief (if not someone higher up the totem pole) now has a lot of pointed questions for the PCs about their involvement.

Matched Failure: An occult bloodbath ensues when cops come for Kevin. When the PCs get there, they have to deal with a literal bullfrog handful of dead, metaphorical pigs.

Failure: Kevin is arrested for killing Kaighley Vass. Technically, prison is a safe place, but the PCs are probably not getting paid much, nor having many burning questions answered.

Success: The PCs find Kevin before the cops or anyone dangerous do. He’s freaked out, missing memories most of the last two weeks, and worried about what he may have done He’s also still a lycanthrope, not that he knows it.

Matched Success: The PCs find Kevin having been purged of lycanthropy. He’s freaked out and has little memory of the last couple weeks, and a ton of scary questions. The PCs can send him back to the O’Neils and get paid, but there will be some uncertainty, and maybe some guilt, at the loose ends.

01: The PCs find Kevin in the hands of some sympathetic occultists who’ve just purged him of his multiple undead visitors. He remembers blessedly little and the PCs are happily unaware his body committed at least one child murder when they collect their hefty paychecks.

 

Stat block: Ruoxi "Kevin" Liao

Obsession: Becoming someone people will respect.

Rage stimulus: People's rigid ideas of what I should and shouldn't do.

Fear stimulus: Being treated like a weirdo for reasons I can't control (Isolation).

Noble stimulus: Finding my place in the world.

Budding film bro 40%: Subs for Knowledge, Reads Obsession, Protects Self

Rich kid 35%: Subs for Status, Protects Helplessness, Protects Isolation

Aggressively American 25%: Subs for Connect, Subs for Lie, Subs for Secrecy

Violence: H 1 / F 1 

Unnatural: H 2 / F 1

Helplessness: H 2 / F 2

Isolation: H 4 / F 1

Self: H 2 / F 1

Kevin the Demon

Urge: Stalk and Kill Children 70%

Elementary School Teacher 25%: Subs for Connect, Subs for Lie, Protects Helplessness

Psychedelics Abuser 35%: Subs for Notice, Protects Unnatural, Coerces Unnatural

 

Kevin the Bullfrog

Bullfrog Soul 15% (functions like a demon's urge (see Book 2: Run, p. 110)

Bullfrog Bod 10%: Subs for Fitness, Subs for Pursuit, Subs for Struggle

 

Stat block: "Detective" Patricia Albrici 

Obsession: The seedy underbelly of society, as captured in cynical films.

Rage stimulus: Optimists and kids, and especially optimistic kids.

Fear stimulus: Being trusted (Self).

Noble stimulus: It's a dog eat dog world.

Cinemancer 65%: Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick (adept path)

Armchair Criminologist 30%: Subs for Pursuit, Subs for Secrecy, Subs for Knowledge

Mean-Spirited 25%: Subs for Struggle, Subs for Lie, Protects Isolation

Violence: H 1 / F 0

Unnatural: H 5 / F 1

Helplessness: H 3 / F 1

Isolation: H 5 / F 0

Self: H 5 / F 2

Statospheric Saturdays: Butter Knife (short story)

I forgot to queue this up in time, so this week it'll be Statospheric Sundays, I guess. It's going to take me forever to charge back up after breaking taboo, again. Sigh.

This is a short story based on the ritual of the same name described in Book 4 of Unknown Armies 3e. I wrote it for the 2025 Jam-o-Ween on the UA fan discord. Next week's post will be my other entry, which will be actual game content.

Content warnings: graphic descriptions of gore, harm to children

BUTTER KNIFE

Mikey woke up to the sobbing of an unfamiliar voice. He held his blanket tight with one hand, and his stuffed hippo with the other. He watched the door to his bedroom, waiting to hear Mommy’s or Daddy’s voice. Sadie, the babysitter, had put him to bed before they came home, but he guessed by the dark poking through the bottom of his window shades they would be home by now. 
    He heard only the one person, crying in a way he had never heard. It wasn’t a tantrum, which Mommy had told him not to use to get attention. Neither was it quiet, in the way he had seen Daddy cry sometimes, when he thought he was alone. They – he thought maybe it was a woman’s voice, but he wasn’t sure – went from just crying to screaming, too, then back into a low, shaky kind of cry from deep in their chest. It sounded like crying because they were scared.
    Mikey was scared, too. But he also felt sad for whoever this grownup was, and a little curious. He wondered what could have made them so upset. He got out of bed and reached up to open the door of his bedroom. Once he was at the top of the stairs, he could tell they were down below, somewhere near the back of his house. He breathed faster as he moved further away from his nightlight, by he didn’t think of the grownup as a stranger, or an intruder. Just another person. He was a timid four-year old. His parents had yet to feel the need to issue any lectures on stranger danger.
    By the bottom of the stairs, he could tell they were in the kitchen. He stopped when his foot touched the cold tile of the foyer. The person got quiet suddenly. He thought they might have heard him. They sniffled. He saw through the front door that the street was empty. 
          There was no more sound from the kitchen for a while, so he snuck closer. Rounding the corner, he thought about how good he was at hide and seek. Mommy always took ages to find him. He calmed down a little. He saw the grownup in the kitchen. It was a man. The only light came through the door to the back porch. It hung open a little, letting in moonlight, and it had a new dent in it on the outside, just above the knob.
    The way the man peered over his knees around the room was also less scary. There was something about how carefully he held himself that reminded him of other kids from daycare more than any grownup he’d ever seen. He shuffled a little closer and saw the door to the oven lay open. The man had shrunk into the opposite corner. Something glinted in his hand. He kept looking around the kitchen and seemed to look right past Mikey. 
    He didn’t know what to think of that, but he waved “hi” anyway. As far as he could tell, the man couldn’t see him, or maybe he was too scared to say hi back. But there was nothing scary that Mikey could see. Maybe he had been chased into their yard by the neighbor, or the neighbor’s big, mean dog, and found his way here. 
    He kept walking toward the man, but then he changed all of a sudden. He got up fast, standing over Mikey, making fists and an angry face with his jaw clenched. All of a sudden he looked dangerous. He growled like the neighbor’s dog. Then he shook his head just as suddenly, like a fly had gone into his ear. He brought his hands up. They were still in tight fists. He kept growling.
    The change in the man and how fast it happened made it impossible not to see him as a grownup and a stranger. Mikey ran right back upstairs.

    “Daddy! Daddy!” 
            Myra’s eyes came open a crack. Dave had adjusted back to sleeping through the night a while ago, but she wasn’t sure she ever would. Her head pulsed with pain as she sat up in bed. Drank too much again. When Mikey saw she was awake – and only then, she couldn’t help but bitterly note – he ran around to her side of the bed and started tugging at her hand instead. What made Dave the one to come to in a crisis? She always ended up dealing with him anyway.
    “Mommy! Mommy!” 
    “What is it, sweetie?” She grabbed her phone as she stroked his hair. Nearly four in the morning. She groaned inside, wishing this was a rarer occurrence.
    “There’s a man downstairs!”
    This was more original than his usual ploys to worm his way into their bed, but she was half-asleep. Dismissal was still the best tool she had a hand, so she told him to go back to bed. Usually it was better to indulge him a little, tell him Daddy would handle whatever it was he’d come up with to spook himself. 
             Sooner or later, Mikey would have to realize that his father was just as mortal and flawed as every other man. She took it easy with that because she knew he had his own daddy issues, but sometimes she worried he was unwittingly setting up the same chain of events in their son.
    “But there is a man! Wake Daddy up! Make him go see!”
    “Sweetie, go back to bed. Daddy’ll go downstairs once you're nice and cozy, and… Uh, talk to him. And make sure everything is OK.” 
    Apparently that sounded placatory enough, because he left her side, albeit still wide-eyed. She watched until he’d gone back into his room and closed the door most of the way. With him leaving it ajar, he’d no doubt be back again before morning. Maybe she’d just lay there and let him shake Dave awake next time.

    Dave snuffled out of sleep with a hand clamped over his nose and mouth. He still let out something of a bellow, eyes searching the darkness to make sense of what was going on. The hand pushed down harder. With only a trace to see by from Mikey’s nightlight down the hall, it took him several seconds of squinting before he trusted the fact that he recognized the face peering down at him. Confusion overwhelmed his fear momentarily. Then he saw the knife, and he resumed his freakout, reflexively reaching for something on his nightstand that might function as a weapon.
    “Lay still and shut up.” 
    And he did, as a grisly vision of his son flashed in front of him. His son, his baby boy, slit open across the belly with one long, rough laceration, blood and viscera just beginning to poke through. 
            His body was motionless as he came back to it. Questions as to what Eli Hillam was doing in his bedroom with a truly grotesque blade in hand sank beneath abject terror. He saw the jagged edge already dripped blood and forced himself to look to his side. As far as he could tell out of the corner of his eye, he hadn’t hurt Myra yet.
    Eli peered down at him, evidently taking in a lot in the nearly total dark. He didn’t look angry or excited, just… Harrowed.
    He had drifted in and out of Dave’s classroom almost five years ago. He didn’t like to admit this about any of his students, but he had been forgettable. Quiet, did most of his homework on time, middle of the pack when it came to exams. He’d seemed lonely, but not in any unusual way for a middle schooler. Drew religious symbols in his notebook? Or had that been someone else?
            Clearly young adulthood had not been kind. What had begun as the awkward, blotchy beginnings of facial hair when Dave had known him was now an unappealing crust around his mouth. His hair was oily and he smelled like the street, and also like he’d maybe just pissed himself. His dark eyes had receded into restless pits. 
    Dave wanted to ask what he wanted, but that awful vision of butchery appeared in his mind when he opened his mouth. Eli held the knife up to his mouth as if it was a finger, shushing him. He remained grim, his face barely moving. Dave thought he saw the traces of tear-tracks down his grubby face. 
    “Get out of bed.” 
    The vision returned when he hesitated. This time he saw the cut had gone through to his son’s ribcage, which was no bigger than a basketball, and bile rose to his mouth. He leapt up, hoping to purge that horrible sight from his eyes. Somehow, that worked, which left even more troubled. He stared toward Mikey’s room.
    “I haven’t touched him,” Eli whispered, mouth close to his ear. He took Dave’s shoulder and steered him toward the bathroom. “Go get your first aid kit.” 
    Dave recoiled as his mind filled again with his worst fear. He wracked his brain for where Myra kept the damn thing, but all that came up were similarly awful sights of her. Disemboweled as well, with entrails hanging over her shoulder. Her head lay hanging away from her neck just enough for him to tell her throat had been slashed deeply open, despite her facing away from him on their kitchen floor. He started to weep.
    “Fuck’s your problem, man?” Eli said, then gritted his teeth. At first Dave thought he was worried about waking Myra up, but then he saw blood along his lower teeth, and his demand made more sense. He noticed a dark patch under the kid’s armpit, and how he held his knife arm awkwardly close to his body above the elbow.
    “Don’t get any ideas. Just get me the first aid kit.” 
    Gore overtook Dave’s eyes again. He opened his mouth to either speak or retch, but could produce nothing. 
    “Say it,” Eli said, back to speaking right into his ear.
    “I don’t know where it is,” Dave said. His voice was tiny. Deep down, under the fear, he was repulsed at how emasculated he was by this slobby teenager. But the way those things came to him every time he gave him a command-- something wasn’t right here. He wondered if it was a nightmare, but couldn’t find any solace in detachment. He was unfortunately as present and alert now as he had ever been in his life. The extent of the detail, the horror he felt each time he saw his massacred family, felt real.
    “Fuck!” Eli hissed. The word sent his spit onto Dave’s neck, and he recoiled. Eli gripped his shoulder hard, then pushed him out into the hallway. Despite trying to stay upright, Dave sprawled forward, and as he landed with a thud on the carpeting, the visions wracked him again. Eli ran up and yanked him to his feet. He held the knife toward him not so much like a weapon, but like something volatile he didn’t want too close to him, or even – though the thought felt incongruous – like a magic wand. As if to himself, Eli said,
    “I did not go through all this shit just to bleed out!” 
    As he spoke, Dave saw a shifting of the shadows behind Mikey’s door. His heart sank. He prayed Eli hadn’t noticed. 
    “Then just… Get me a couple towels and come downstairs,” he said. “Do you have any alcohol? I gotta clean this…” He looked down at the wound in his side, paling as he noticed how much blood continued to seep from it. It ran across most of his hoodie sleeve and right side now. His knife hand shook a little. Still, Dave did what he was told, as best he could in the midst of the waking nightmare Eli was somehow inflicting on him. 
    A moment later, Eli tucked a towel soaked with isopropyl alcohol he’d found under the bathroom sink under his arm, then bit into his lip to suppress his howl of pain. 
    “I-I can call you an ambulance,” Dave said. 
    “Like fuck you can,” Eli said. “Think I’m an idiot? Think the pigs are gonna bail you out? Hell no, man, it’s just you and me. You’re gonna do what I say, or-”
    And then they both heard a faint creak of the floor and saw Mikey’s door shift just a millimeter. 
    “Please-” Dave said, eyes clenched but still bombarded. “I’ll do whatever you want, just please don’t hurt my family! Oh, god!” The images got worse as he lost control and his voice climbed in panic. Now he saw them move, saw the blood pour from Mikey as his stubby fingers probed the wound, saw Mira’s chest rise and fall with her dying breaths. It was real. It was happening. There was nothing he could do to stop it.

    Daddy lay crying on the floor in front of the man. The man had a knife in one hand now, and he was leaning to one side. The knife was just the kind he got to eat his peas with now he was getting big, not the kind mommy used to cut his sandwiches. He didn’t understand why Daddy was so scared of it. But he was definitely crying from fear. The other man kicked Daddy in the side and then winced in pain himself.
    “Useless piece of shit!” 
    He looked at Mikey. He looked tired and desperate. Mikey thought maybe he needed to lay down. Grownups usually didn’t have problems that could get fixed with laying down or having a snack, he didn’t think, but grownups didn’t usually shout at each other and kick each other, so he didn’t know what would help. The yelling and the bad words scared him, but they shouldn’t scare Daddy. 
    He noticed a flash of light in Mommy and Daddy’s room as Mommy picked up her phone. She did something with it, but then dropped it on the floor because her hands were shaking really badly. The man in the hallway noticed. He turned around fast. Daddy had started to blink and look around again. 
    “Dave! Jesus!” Mommy shouted. The other man started walking toward her with the butter knife. Daddy grabbed him by the leg and started to get up, so the man turned around and held it right in his face. 
    “Don’t you fucking touch me! Don’t call the cops, and don’t let her call the cops, or I’ll make you kill them both!”
    And Daddy’s face scrunched up again and he started crying harder, that same kind of crying as the man had done before, the kind of crying that shouldn’t come from grownups, shouldn’t come from anyone. But he still held onto the man’s leg. Then he pulled him down on the floor with him. The man held the knife up over their heads, pointing it right up at the ceiling.  
    “I said stop, asshole!” 
    Daddy reached out fast and grabbed him under the arm and he screamed, and dropped the knife. Then Daddy hit him in the face and pulled on his arm and made him scream some more.
            Mikey couldn’t watch any more. He turned around and put his back to the door, and he covered his ears and shut his eyes and tried not to listen, either, but the shouting and the crying were too loud, and he could still picture Daddy’s face crushed up with emotions, Daddy’s fist hitting the man in his teeth, the whine he made as he started to beg, the way it faded out until all he could hear was Daddy panting and Mommy saying something he couldn't hear. 

October Update 2025: Moonglum Games Sells Out

 Just kidding, mostly.

 

Highly astute readers may have noticed I kind of just disappeared a month and a half into doing Statospheric Saturdays. This is due to a combination of tumultuous life events (which are mostly still unresolved, unfortunately) and the fact that I did a minor rebrand, for lack of a better term. Hence the title of this post.

I'm planning to start doing professional GMing online (feel free to hmu if you're interested!) and I also made the questionable choice to look back at my earliest published projects on itch/DTRPG, most of which I delisted since I think I've grown a lot as a designer even in just a few years. I've decided to leave this blog untouched with the exception of trying to remove stuff that can easily tie my personal life to this blog. Surely a fool's errand, I know, but what with the fascist surveillance state thing going on I figured I should at least try.

Anyway, there's a Halloween game jam going on on the Unknown Armies fan discord, so expect the return of StatSat soon, and eventually other stuff again. I have a short story (maybe more flash fiction) based on something from UA in the works right now and an idea for a scenario that also fits the jam's themes. Both will end up here if finished (which is the plan!)

 

Stay safe, fuck the police, and play more games!