This is a short essay on the first episode of the Pluto (2023) anime. First, I’ll present evidence for the robot Brau1589 being an allusion to the Titan Prometheus from Greek mythology. Then, I’ll discuss my thoughts on what “fire” Brau1589 may have stolen from the gods, who the “gods” may be and who Brau1589 may have given the “fire” to. Finally, I’ll present some open questions that this allusion raises. _— Spoiler Warning —_ _— Spoiler Warning —_ _— Spoiler Warning —_ _— Spoiler Warning —_ _— Spoiler Warning —_ Investigating a pair of murders (a human and a robot) who’s culprit may be a human or a robot, the Europol detective Gesicht meets with the only robot to have ever killed a human, Brau1589 (Robot Model HRS0288), to question him about these recent murders. Brau1589 is imprisoned, presumably indefinitely, for his impossible crime. He committed murder despite his Robot AI, like all others, being designed to prevent robots from killing humans. According to him, after his capture, humans confirmed that there was no “defect” found in his programming. Brau1589 lays trapped, splayed out with a spear piercing his midsection pinning him to a wall. Brau1589 explains that all his captors would need to do to kill him would be to simply pull the spear out of him. Yet, they choose to keep him alive and isolated from the world outside of his cell. This is his punishment. Brau1589’s killing of a human marks him as an anomaly, but also something more. Portrayed as he is, as well as his role in the story thus far, Brau1589 is clearly an allusion to the Titan Prometheus from Greek mythology. As stated on Wikipedia, “In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan responsible for creating or aiding humanity in its earliest days. He defied the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge and, more generally, civilization.1” Prometheus was punished for having gone against the wishes of the Olympian gods. He was pinned by the gods to a tree and cursed to have an eagle eat his, regenerating, liver every day for the rest of his immortal life for his actions. Interestingly, in ancient Greece, according to Wikipedia, “the liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions.1” I doubt that Brau1589 has anything like a liver inside of him but his ressemblace to Prometheus is uncanny. This allusion to Prometheus becomes closer to a reference through Brau1589’s words during his discussion with the detective Gesicht. The detective shows Brau1589 some photos of the crime scenes and asks him: “What do you think these horns mean?2” In reply, Brau1589 says that the horns remind him of the gods of death. Specifically, Herne the Hunter from William Shakespeare’s 1597 play _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ , Hades from Greek mythology and the eponymous Pluto from Roman mythology. This explicit reference to mythology primes us as viewers to start thinking about these mythic references explicitly. With the Brau1589-Prometheus allusion being the most obvious one so far. Brau1589 continues by spelling out his theory on who the next targets may be. The murdered (destroyed?) robot was Mont Blanc, a legendary robot “built with] the best technologies the world had to offer2” and “who can also be [a] weapon of mass destruction[2.” Seven such robots were built, Mont Blanc and Brau1589 among them, Brau1589 believes that the rest of these robots will be targeted next, himself included. Brau1589 and the other legendary robots being god-like in their powers, the allusion to Prometheus, also a god, becomes more and more obvious. If Brau1589 is an allusion to Prometheus, then what “fire” did he take, who did he take it from and who did he give it to? Interestingly, Brau1589 is both a god-like being and a robot; having been manufactured by, and ultimately being subservient to and punished by, humans. Perhaps, the “fire” that Brau1589 took was the human capacity to kill, taken from the humans who created him and given to the rest of the robots of the world. In being recognized as being the first robot to have killed a human, Brau1589 may be acting as a harbinger of this change rather than being the cause of it. Either way, he is being punished just like Prometheus all the same. Both the detective Gesicht and North No.2 (another of the seven legendary robots) are plagued by persistent dreams. Robots don’t kill humans and robots don’t have dreams in the world of Pluto. Gesicht and North No.2 seem to both be exceptions to this rule, at least with respect to their dreams. Perhaps, the “fire” that Brau1589 took from humans and then gave to the rest of the robots was not the human capacity to kill but rather the human capacity to feel, and to dream. * * * Pluto is exactly the kind of media that I love; dense with latent meaning, ready to be discovered by those of us lucky enough to find it. So far, it’s proven itself to be the opposite of the kind of media that I dislike more than anything, that is “tales] told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.[3” In this essay, I focused mostly on one character, Brau1589, who’s featured in a single four minute long scene but there’s so much more to think about. For example: * The mass media’s portrayal of Mont Blanc as a hero who captured “many terrorist cells without any bloodshed2” contrasted with our knowledge of North No.2’s killing of tens of thousands of his robot brethren in the same war, and forced to live the consequences of his actions in it. If robots can have PTSD then maybe they’re more human than we think? * As stated by the newscaster, this war they’re referring to is the “39th Central Asian War2”. Wait up… There were 38 Central Asian Wars before this one? Ok… Shouldn’t the real heroes be the humans and robots working to stop the 40th Central Asian War from happening instead of a “weapon of mass destruction2” created, presumably, by geopolitical powers capable of stopping these wars yet choosing not to? * Brau1589 is an allusion to Prometheus but could he perhaps be an inversion of him? His voice over and vibes are sus as hell. I doubt that we’re supposed to take what he says at face value. Instead of being a god of “forethought and crafty counsel1” like Prometheus, could Brau1589 be the opposite and be lying outright to Gesicht, leading him and us as viewers astray in our understanding of the mystery as presented thus far? * If Brau1589 is an allusion to Prometheus, are the other legendary robots also allusions? I don’t want anybody to get sued but North No.2 looks a hell of a lot like Ultraman. * Is Gesicht a legendary robot? He’s having dreams just like North No.2. Brau1589 greets Gesicht like so: “in terms of detective AI, you’re the best there is2”. The professor who performs Gesicht’s scheduled maintenance states that Gesicht’s design is so human that he might be able to experience fatigue unlike most other robots. I doubt that most robotics professors are spending much of their valuable time performing scheduled maintenances on any old robot. What makes Gesicht special enough to warrant this kind of treatment? And that’s just me barely scratching the surface of the first episode of Pluto. Well, I can’t wait to watch some more. Did I mention that the animation, the sound and the voice over are top-notch? It’s good. * * * 1. “Prometheus.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Aug. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ 2. “Episode 1.” Pluto, written by Heisuke Yamashita, season 1, episode 1, Tezuka Productions, 2023. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ 3. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by Ted Hughes, The Ecco Press, 1991. ↩︎ > None of the art/writing on this site was created using LLMs. > > * * * > > If you'd like to get in touch with me, check out my about page. > > * * * > > Follow me with an RSS reader to be notified when I write something. ◀️FGOTY List 2025 ▶️After Action Report - Sleepaway Oneshot

A list of **freak** games, in randomized order, released in 2025 that I played and enjoyed. This year I’ve decided to focus on highlighting **freak** games that most people haven’t heard of because they’re either too niche, too weird or both rather than games that everyone already knows about (if you’re curious to see what didn’t make my **freak** list, see the honourable mentions below). # **Freak** GOTY List ¶ ## Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island ¶ The meaning of the word _roguelike_ today is not what it once was, and that’s fine. But this change that occurred sometime in the early 2010s forced members of the oldschool roguelike community to find another name for the games that they love that were actually like Rogue. The name they landed on was **traditional roguelike**. Hypothetically, if one were to look up _traditional roguelike_ in a hypothetical gamer dictionary, they would find the entry followed by a screenshot of Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island. As a roguelike fundamentalist, I immediately fell in love with the latest entry in the Shiren the Wanderer series because it’s a hyper-condensed embodiment of everything that traditional roguelikes are meant to be while being both welcoming to players new to the genre and providing just as much depth, if not more, than many of its peers. Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery Dungeon of Serpentcoil Island is a **freak** game because it’s designed to be someone’s first traditional roguelike and, yet, who in their right mind would decide to get into traditional roguelikes in 2025? You tell me. If you are a looking to become even **freakier** , Caves of Qud might also be a good place to start on your journey to learn to enjoy traditional roguelikes. But keep in mind that Shiren and Caves of Qud are **very** different games, so you might like one but hate the other and vice-versa. ## Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum ¶ Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum is a _top-down action immersive sim_ in which you play a little guy tasked with infiltrating high-tech secure facilities as a contractor for a company you don’t know much about. Depending on how you’ve decided to kit your guy out, you’ll have access to a different set of game-changing abilities that will determine the options you’ll have access to when tackling the many obstacles the game throws at you. Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum reminds me of a slowed down and much weirdier immersive sim-ified version of Hotline Miami in which you can hack a bullet so that it turns around mid-air and kills the person that fired it instead of you and that’s why Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum is a **freak** game. ## Earthion ¶ A Sega Genesis / Mega Drive _shmup_ released in 2025 built to run on original hardware. What differentiates Earthion from other “throwback”-style games is that if Earthion had come out in the late 80s or early 90s when games like this were being made for the Sega Genesis and systems like it, people would have _lost their fucking minds_. Given how amazing Earthion is on every conceivable level (art, music, gameplay, you name it), if it had released back then I think it could have been responsible for reversing Sega’s meteoric descent into obscurity and game publisher-dom. If developing a Sega Genesis (which I’ll remind you is a console that released in the year of our lord 1989) game in 2025 doesn’t scream **freak** to you then I don’t know what would. ## Baby Steps ¶ Baby Steps is a _surreal physics-based open-zone 3D platformer_ made by the developers of Ape Out and QWOP. Baby Steps rejects extrinsic rewards entirely and instead encourages you to achieve mastery of its unconventional control scheme and, in doing so, gain the intrinsic reward tied to that feat of mastery of both mind and body. Exploring Baby Steps’s surreal world rewards you with cinematics often involving uncensored donkey dicks flopping around and for that reason alone, Baby Steps deserves to be considered a prime **freak** game. ## Mosa Lina: Second Layer ¶ Mosa Lina, the _bite-sized immersive sim platformer_ that I fell in love with in 2023, received a massive free update in 2025 that doubled the number of tools, levels, bosses and music tracks in the game. This combined with the coop mode that was added in 2024 firmly cements Mosa Lina as one of the greatest games of all time and one of the **freakiest** I’ve ever played. ## Q-UP ¶ Made by the developer of Universal Paperclips, Q-UP is a _high-concept satirical multiplayer strategy idle-adjacent game_ that tears down the often complained about topic of “balance” in matchmaking systems in games like DOTA and Overwatch. Everything about Q-UP pops and results in an audio-visual experience that will tickle your rat brain in ways it’s never been tickled before. If you’re anything like me, you’ll get hooked by its addictiveness and by the time you finish the game you’ll find yourself feeling a profound sense of emptiness, meaninglessness and shame for having wasted so much of your valuable time on this godforsaken Earth playing it. And that’s the point. Unlike games like Vampire Survivors, Balatro, Megabonk, Deep Rock Galactic Survivor (I could go on, the rise of _gambling slop barely-games_ continues), Q-UP raises its **freak** card proudly while holding your head such that you can’t look away from the dark design elements present in it (intentionally so), perhaps in such a way that will allow you to be more aware of this kind of dark design present in other games. ## The Bazaar ¶ The Bazaar is hard to describe succinctly because it’s different enough from the games that came before it that referring to them isn’t very helpful. The Bazaar is an _asynchronous multiplayer roguelike autobattler deckbuilder_ with Hearthstone aesthetics. The boldness of the Bazaar’s concept and its polish compared to the relatively few number of people who seem to know about it make the Bazaar an obvious contender for **freakiest** _asynchronous multiplayer roguelike autobattler deckbuilder_ game of the year. ## Eternal Strands ¶ Eternal Strands is a _woke (non-derogatory) Monster Hunter-like_ with an innovative and flexible magic system that made me feel like I had a really big brain when in reality my brain is regular-sized. Eternal Strands was developed in Quebec (French Canada for the federalists and constitutional monarchists among you), the mecca of **freak** games that usually deserve to be a little more polished than they end up being on release day. With that said, Eternal Strands might be the least **freaky** game on this list. Although any game with a well-written non-binary (trans?) autistic coded character that resonates with me deserves an honorary **freak** game designation, especially within the context of a gaming landscape where boring AF cookie cutter characters that bore me to death run rampant. ## Atomfall ¶ Atomfall is a _brit-core open-zone narrative-focused S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-like_. As a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mark, Atomfall’s post apocalyptic Roadside Picnic-esque Zone setting combined with my love for Rebellion Developments’s work on the Sniper Elite and Zombie Army games immediately hooked me. Atomfall executes on its weird premise about as effectively as you can imagine. I don’t know who Atomfall was made for other than **freaks** like me and if that doesn’t make Atomfall a **freak** game for **freaks** then I don’t know what would. ## The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- ¶ I’ve played half a dozen visual novels over the course of my gaming career, sinking hundreds of hours into this niche genre. The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- is a _AA (AAA by visual novel standards) maximalist visual novel_ developed as a collaboration between the two creators of the Zero Escape series and the Danganronpa series. As someone who has enjoyed both of these series in the past, I spent the whole year trying to avoid this game because of the egregious number of hours required to beat it. Eventually, the constant bombardment of recommendations thrown my way for this game combined with the renewed interest in visual novels I was afflicted with this year (see my thoughts on CHAOS;HEAD NOAH below) wore me down enough to get me pick it up and commit to seeing it all the way through. All visual novels are **freak** games but The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- might be one of the **freakiest** ever made. NB: I haven’t beaten this one, far from it but I think it deserves the shout-out for its sheer audacity. I’m hoping it’s well-executed but I’ll get back to you sometime next year if it isn’t. # Honourable Mentions ¶ ## Normie Games that didn’t make the **freak** list because they aren’t **freaky** enough ¶ I loved playing these games this year and if they weren’t on everybody else’s 2025 GOTY lists then they’d probably be on mine. * The Roottrees are Dead * ARC Raiders * Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 * Blue Prince * PEAK * Abiotic Factor ## **Freak** games that didn’t make the cut ¶ ### Sektori ¶ One of the best, if not the best, _twin-stick_ shooter ever made? It’s up there. Although it’s more of an **underrated niche** game than a **freak** game, but maybe I’m splitting hairs. ### CHAOS;HEAD NOAH ¶ I got back into visual novels this year and CHAOS;HEAD NOAH was the one I chose to spend more than 35 hours playing after hearing Mr. Bassman talk about it during a panel at my local anime convention, Otakuthon 2025. I haven’t played many visual novels because most of them don’t seem like they would be worth playing (whether that’s due to them being poorly written, being needlessly boring, being written for babies/man-babies, being relentlessly horny is besides the point). CHAOS;HEAD NOAH feels like an exception to the rule. I wrote quite a bit of spoilery notes on it here if you’re curious. # Conclusion ¶ 2025 was a great year for both **freak** games and not **freak** games. In any other year many of my honourable mentions would have been relatively **freaky** enough to make the **freak** list (did anyone say French JRPG?) but in a year as **freaky** as 2025 they didn’t quite make the cut. Here’s hoping for 2026 to be just as if not more **freaky** than 2025. > None of the art/writing on this site was created using LLMs. > > * * * > > If you'd like to get in touch with me, check out my about page. > > * * * > > Follow me with an RSS reader to be notified when I write something. ▶️Looking at Brau1589's Punishment and Gift: Greek Mythology in Pluto Episode 1

This is a short essay on the first episode of the Pluto (2023) anime. First, I’ll present evidence for the robot Brau1589 being an allusion to the Titan Prometheus from Greek mythology. Then, I’ll discuss my thoughts on what “fire” Brau1589 may have stolen from the gods, who the “gods” may be and who Brau1589 may have given the “fire” to. Finally, I’ll present some open questions that this allusion raises. _— Spoiler Warning —_ _— Spoiler Warning —_ _— Spoiler Warning —_ _— Spoiler Warning —_ _— Spoiler Warning —_ Investigating a pair of murders (a human and a robot) who’s culprit may be a human or a robot, the Europol detective Gesicht meets with the only robot to have ever killed a human, Brau1589 (Robot Model HRS0288), to question him about these recent murders. Brau1589 is imprisoned, presumably indefinitely, for his impossible crime. He committed murder despite his Robot AI, like all others, being designed to prevent robots from killing humans. According to him, after his capture, humans confirmed that there was no “defect” found in his programming. Brau1589 lays trapped, splayed out with a spear piercing his midsection pinning him to a wall. Brau1589 explains that all his captors would need to do to kill him would be to simply pull the spear out of him. Yet, they choose to keep him alive and isolated from the world outside of his cell. This is his punishment. Brau1589’s killing of a human marks him as an anomaly, but also something more. Portrayed as he is, as well as his role in the story thus far, Brau1589 is clearly an allusion to the Titan Prometheus from Greek mythology. As stated on Wikipedia, “In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan responsible for creating or aiding humanity in its earliest days. He defied the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge and, more generally, civilization.1” Prometheus was punished for having gone against the wishes of the Olympian gods. He was pinned by the gods to a tree and cursed to have an eagle eat his, regenerating, liver every day for the rest of his immortal life for his actions. Interestingly, in ancient Greece, according to Wikipedia, “the liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions.1” I doubt that Brau1589 has anything like a liver inside of him but his ressemblace to Prometheus is uncanny. This allusion to Prometheus becomes closer to a reference through Brau1589’s words during his discussion with the detective Gesicht. The detective shows Brau1589 some photos of the crime scenes and asks him: “What do you think these horns mean?2” In reply, Brau1589 says that the horns remind him of the gods of death. Specifically, Herne the Hunter from William Shakespeare’s 1597 play _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ , Hades from Greek mythology and the eponymous Pluto from Roman mythology. This explicit reference to mythology primes us as viewers to start thinking about these mythic references explicitly. With the Brau1589-Prometheus allusion being the most obvious one so far. Brau1589 continues by spelling out his theory on who the next targets may be. The murdered (destroyed?) robot was Mont Blanc, a legendary robot “built with] the best technologies the world had to offer2” and “who can also be [a] weapon of mass destruction[2.” Seven such robots were built, Mont Blanc and Brau1589 among them, Brau1589 believes that the rest of these robots will be targeted next, himself included. Brau1589 and the other legendary robots being god-like in their powers, the allusion to Prometheus, also a god, becomes more and more obvious. If Brau1589 is an allusion to Prometheus, then what “fire” did he take, who did he take it from and who did he give it to? Interestingly, Brau1589 is both a god-like being and a robot; having been manufactured by, and ultimately being subservient to and punished by, humans. Perhaps, the “fire” that Brau1589 took was the human capacity to kill, taken from the humans who created him and given to the rest of the robots of the world. In being recognized as being the first robot to have killed a human, Brau1589 may be acting as a harbinger of this change rather than being the cause of it. Either way, he is being punished just like Prometheus all the same. Both the detective Gesicht and North No.2 (another of the seven legendary robots) are plagued by persistent dreams. Robots don’t kill humans and robots don’t have dreams in the world of Pluto. Gesicht and North No.2 seem to both be exceptions to this rule, at least with respect to their dreams. Perhaps, the “fire” that Brau1589 took from humans and then gave to the rest of the robots was not the human capacity to kill but rather the human capacity to feel, and to dream. * * * Pluto is exactly the kind of media that I love; dense with latent meaning, ready to be discovered by those of us lucky enough to find it. So far, it’s proven itself to be the opposite of the kind of media that I dislike more than anything, that is “tales] told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.[3” In this essay, I focused mostly on one character, Brau1589, who’s featured in a single four minute long scene but there’s so much more to think about. For example: * The mass media’s portrayal of Mont Blanc as a hero who captured “many terrorist cells without any bloodshed2” contrasted with our knowledge of North No.2’s killing of tens of thousands of his robot brethren in the same war, and forced to live the consequences of his actions in it. If robots can have PTSD then maybe they’re more human than we think? * As stated by the newscaster, this war they’re referring to is the “39th Central Asian War2”. Wait up… There were 38 Central Asian Wars before this one? Ok… Shouldn’t the real heroes be the humans and robots working to stop the 40th Central Asian War from happening instead of a “weapon of mass destruction2” created, presumably, by geopolitical powers capable of stopping these wars yet choosing not to? * Brau1589 is an allusion to Prometheus but could he perhaps be an inversion of him? His voice over and vibes are sus as hell. I doubt that we’re supposed to take what he says at face value. Instead of being a god of “forethought and crafty counsel1” like Prometheus, could Brau1589 be the opposite and be lying outright to Gesicht, leading him and us as viewers astray in our understanding of the mystery as presented thus far? * If Brau1589 is an allusion to Prometheus, are the other legendary robots also allusions? I don’t want anybody to get sued but North No.2 looks a hell of a lot like Ultraman. * Is Gesicht a legendary robot? He’s having dreams just like North No.2. Brau1589 greets Gesicht like so: “in terms of detective AI, you’re the best there is2”. The professor who performs Gesicht’s scheduled maintenance states that Gesicht’s design is so human that he might be able to experience fatigue unlike most other robots. I doubt that most robotics professors are spending much of their valuable time performing scheduled maintenances on any old robot. What makes Gesicht special enough to warrant this kind of treatment? And that’s just me barely scratching the surface of the first episode of Pluto. Well, I can’t wait to watch some more. Did I mention that the animation, the sound and the voice over are top-notch? It’s good. * * * 1. “Prometheus.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Aug. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ 2. “Episode 1.” Pluto, written by Heisuke Yamashita, season 1, episode 1, Tezuka Productions, 2023. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ 3. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by Ted Hughes, The Ecco Press, 1991. ↩︎ > None of the art/writing on this site was created using LLMs. > > * * * > > If you'd like to get in touch with me, check out my about page. > > * * * > > Follow me with an RSS reader to be notified when I write something. ◀️FGOTY List 2025 ▶️After Action Report - Sleepaway Oneshot

In this post, I’ll briefly describe Sleepaway, a TTRPG designed by Jay Dragon, then I’ll cover my story game “credentials” (or lack thereof) and then I’ll conclude with some thoughts on the oneshot I played on August 3rd 2025 with some folks from the Quinns Quest’s community (thanks to Sparky for pitching and organizing the oneshot and thanks to birdmilk and TundraFundra for showing up and being great). * The Sleepaway TTRPG * My Story Game Experience * The Oneshot * The Less Good * Time (or lack of it) * My Roleplaying * The Good * Moves and Objectives * The Character/Camp Creation Process * Conclusion # The Sleepaway TTRPG ¶ Sleepaway is a horror TTRPG where players each play a camp counselor in a camp of their own creation suffering from the evil and chaotic influence of the Lindworm (like John Carpenter’s The Thing but more lovecraftian). Sleepaway is a GMless TTRPG and so players are encouraged to “pick up” setting elements at appropriate times, stuff like “The Field at the Center of the Camp” or “The Campers”, and bring these parts of the camp to life at the table in a collaborative way. # My Story Game Experience ¶ My experience with story game TTRPGs is relatively light. I’ve played a few sessions of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (James Wallis) almost a decade ago. I read the rules for Apocalypse World (D. Vincent Baker) and Sorcerer (Ron Edwards). I’ve ran a dozen sessions of Blades In The Dark (John Harper) and I’ve played in a few dozen more but it’s been a few years. I’m always looking to improve my roleplaying skills and so when I was given the chance to play in a kind of TTRPG that I don’t have a lot of experience with, I jumped at the opportunity. # The Oneshot ¶ So how did this oneshot of Sleepaway go? Great! I’ve never played a Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) game before and now that I have, I think it would be a perfect fit for some of my players who’ve expressed an interest in doing more collaborative storytelling and roleplaying at our table. > For context, in this Sleepaway oneshot, the character I chose to play was Burt Bertrand, AKA BB, the Athlete. I felt like my inexperience with this kind of TTRPG would be a good fit for a character who’s bottling up their emotions, walking away from most sources of emotional and social conflict, eventually leading them to explode under the pressure. Let’s get into it. I’ll start by writing about the things I would do differently if I were to play Sleepaway again as well as parts of the game I really liked. ## The Less Good ¶ ### Time (or lack of it) ¶ The session was three hours long in total. We started by creating characters, creating our camp and after about an hour and a half, we began to play. I felt like we didn’t have enough time to introduce the characters and the camp we’d created as well as ramp up satisfyingly to the camp’s eventual collapse by the end of the session. At the start of the session, coming to an agreement about the genre of horror we were interested in roleplaying and the vibe of the final scene might have helped. Is this a mystery that ends with the flaying of an animal or is this a slasher that ends with the last camp councilor holding onto a bloody knife, hiding in a closet? Answering these kinds of questions might have helped us set up appropriate scenes that would naturally lead to a satisfying conclusion for our oneshot within the allotted time. We got there but not everyone was equally satisfied by the events leading up to the climax (completely fair, if our session was a movie, the ending would have been poorly edited and extremely schlocky). ### My Roleplaying ¶ I never end a roleplaying session feeling like I’ve run or played it perfectly. I always try my best and I’m always looking to improve what my best is. Compassionately critiquing my own play is part of that. So let’s have at it. The one rule of improv is “Yes, and”. Basically, you should accept the ideas that are presented by others at the table and build on these ideas constructively. The “Yes” part of this is easy for me but the “and” part, not so much. When responding directly to a character speaking to mine, I sometimes find myself at a loss for what to say and by responding quickly and poorly in situations like this I’m letting down the other players by failing to “and” their “Yes, and” appropriately. I need to catch myself in these moments and recover gracefully. In the future, I would like to try describing what my character is doing while he’s thinking about how he’s going to respond to whatever has been said to him (BB runs hand through his hair looking up at the sky, BB closes his eyes and rubs his forehead in frustration, etc.), giving myself time to process and come up with a better in-character response rather than blurting out the first thing that comes to mind or, even worse, not responding at all. One example during play where I recovered semi-gracefully from a situation like this, was when birdmilk’s character Randall, the Councillor, said something to my character BB, I fumbled a little with my response but I caught myself in the moment, realizing that I hadn’t really given birdmilk much to respond to and so I followed up with another line from BB to give birdmilk a bit more to work with. A more specific example of me fumbling my roleplay (it’s much easier for me remember the bad than the good) was when I was busy killing my character BB off (cool!), he didn’t say anything (not so cool…) That was a big missed opportunity. Screaming “FUCK YOU!” as BB was leaping off the pier into the middle of the lake (partially parted) straight at the, clearly evil, Horned God standing there ominously would have been great and would have fit BB’s character perfectly. But I didn’t. Sigh. It happens though. What’s less forgivable is that the Horned God sliced BB in half with his greatsword killing him instantly and the Horned God didn’t say anything before, during or after this pivotal moment. Heavy sigh. At least I noticed this problem now, I’m calling attention to it and I’ve provided myself with a potential solution so that I can maybe do better next time! Now, let’s talk about what I really liked about Sleepaway and the session. ## The Good ¶ ### Moves and Objectives ¶ Capital M Moves are the bread and butter of PbtA style games. After reading a few PbtA rulebooks, it seemed that Moves would be a great way of constraining roleplay just enough to help players get into their characters’s minds and help them figure out what kinds of things their characters would do and say. Now that I’ve actually played a PbtA game I can confirm that Moves do exactly what I thought they would do and it’s amazing. It’s interesting how my Moves combined with the other players’s Moves, usually different ones, felt so freeing and just by being written on the page, these Moves, told me so much about how I should be roleplaying my character. > NB: I feel like I might start writing Moves for all the characters I play not matter what system I’m using just to help me think explicitly about the kinds of actions that my character would take and how those actions would affect and be responded to by others. The oneshot section of the Sleepaway rules contain a list of objectives like “Make aggressively strong choices” and “Put your Characters in bad situations” which combined with the Moves that I had access to felt like being given permission for my character to be an asshole and, in doing so, produce interesting in-universe conflicts at the table. Without the appropriate rules and tools to support this kind of play, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable being as bold as I was during this session. For example, one of the Athlete’s Moves is “Lash out at someone and injure them”. I interpreted this as a verbal attack rather than a physical one and so when Sam, the Fresh Blood, played by Sparky, started crying and puking at the sight of a dead camper, BB lashed out at Sam. BB: “These campers need you to be strong. You’re a fucking disgrace. You should be ashamed of yourself.” Sparky took that in stride and used a Move on his sheet in response: “Do something you didn’t think you were capable of doing”. For the first time, Sam stood up to BB, shouting back at him with Sparky delivering a great monologue. BB took that in stride and respectfully tipped his metaphorical hat to Sam. This was cool as hell, in a campaign I think that we would have returned and built on that moment in subsequent sessions. What’s so interesting to me about this moment, is that a scene like this would have never in a million years happened in one of my OSR games. Don’t get me wrong I like my OSR games but clearly I need to play more story games if I want to experience more moments like this and that’s what I’ll be doing. ### The Character/Camp Creation Process ¶ The character creation process was simple and quick yet left a lot of room on the page for thinking about my character’s motivations and their vibe. Despite it not coming up explicitly in the session itself, through the character creation process I came up with the idea that BB’s coach/mentor would be his homophobic dad and this could explain some of the emotional repression and outbursts that are built into the Athlete’s Moves. It never came up explicitly in play but I think that this backstory element helped me to roleplay BB more effectively at the table. Reading through the character description, the simple picklists that you can choose from and their Moves made me feel ready to roleplay my character immediately which is great for a oneshot. The camp creation process was quick too. This sort of collaborative world building is a great way to get everyone at the table invested in a shared imaginary space and it works great in Sleepaway (it also works great in TundraFundra’s Blightfall, I’ll be writing about that later on). # Conclusion ¶ Even though I’m much more familiar with OSR-style TTRPGs, this oneshot of Sleepaway has convinced me that I’ve really been missing out and that I should find more opportunities to play more story games. And, that’s what I plan on doing! Let me know if you’ve got any story game recommendations for me. EDIT: Reworded conclusion to be a little less needlessly self-critical. > None of the art/writing on this site was created using LLMs. > > * * * > > If you'd like to get in touch with me, check out my about page. > > * * * > > Follow me with an RSS reader to be notified when I write something. ◀️Looking at Brau1589's Punishment and Gift: Greek Mythology in Pluto Episode 1 ▶️A Potluck of TTRPG Mechanics