Archive Delving - Inscrutable Cities

Welcome back to another archive delve! Well, kind of - the text I'm reading today is close to the top of my pile! After securing my personal pan pizza, I think I want to shake up the format a little bit, and mix in some recent releases with the older stuff, maybe meet in the middle kind of Memento-style. I might switch up the title scheme! But for now Archive Delve will be specifically for stuff I crowdfunded, and hopefully I'll publish some other reviews of other stuff I'm reading, just for fun. 

Today, we're reading Inscrutable Cities, by Julian K. Jarboe, and published by Possum Creek Games! I'm a fan of PCG's other stuff, like Wanderhome and Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast (they have a bigger, cool catalogue, but those two are the standouts to me). Inscrutable is obviously riffing off of Calvino's Invisible Cities, which I also quite enjoy, so I have high hopes. Let's delve!

Inscrutable Cities is specifically a single-player rpg, the first of its kind to appear in a review here! I have a little experience with solo gaming, mostly inspired by my friend KB (whose incredible writing can be found on her blot), but it's a lot harder for me to sustain "play" than in a game with other people (even an agonizingly slow-moving play-by-post game). So I'm curious to see if this text seems like it will hold my excitement! The blurb promises that the text will help me "explore a world unbounded by time and space, to move from a mundane mode of storytelling into a fabulist one." That's a big promise! If it even can help me do that a little, I think that's an accomplishment.

The book arrived fairly recently (after about a year of printing delays - oof!), and it's quite nice! It clocks in at 83 pages and is split into 9 sections, including a pretty hefty "notes" section which looks like what I might call an "appendices" section in another book. Section 1 is the introduction.

The introduction opens with a fairly tame version of the promise, and a provocation that by now is fairly familiar to me, that by reading the book, I might consider myself to have begun playing. It continues with a definition and exploration of "fabulism" which I found a little frustrating! Or, at least, of mixed excitement and frustration - the inducement to chase the extraordinary and "blur rational categories" are exciting to me, but the way the text teases these doesn't always hold that excitement, particularly for the third principle that fabulism "adheres to internal laws and moralities", with a winking reminder that "there must be method to this madness." There's also a strange breakout here for objects, quoting Calvino, but the text doesn't tie this idea very strongly to this principle! Is it a general note for fabulism as a whole? Anyway, frustrating.  I do appreciate that the text consistently prods me to simply write, without a thought for quality or similar concerns. I'm amused that the text does insist on specific numbers of cycles for play - I would be playing incorrectly if I played only two cycles (particularly if I had meant to do three but had gotten bored and thus concluded without ending). It's walked back a little - the text suggests that maybe I'm just taking a break, and "breaks can be of any duration." There's also a citation for thinking about the importance of particular numbers in folklore, which is fun. The very final part of the introduction drops some of the authorial voice to address the reader directly about the difficulties of writing.

Section 2 is called World Unbuilding! After reading the whole thing, this is the section about choosing to play (and stopping participation in the "Old World", the world you and I are living in now). The first page is only a single direction, and it's also the first time that I have noticed how frustrating some of the font choices are. Special text is in a font with special cursive letters that are annoying to read, and some text is lighter green (and quite thin) against a pink background. I'm switching between the book and the pdf to write this - the effect is more pronounced in the pdf, which luckily lets me zoom in. The introduction did mention that there's an entirely black-and-white version with an easy-to-read font available!

The second direction is to undertake a ritual to begin play, spanning three pages, and mostly not very helpful to me. In fairness, I am a reader disinclined to this kind of ritual! But for now, the text's nudges about the power and purpose of ritual aren't enticing to me. I can appreciate its reasoning, though! I don't think the citation here is very interesting to me, either (at least in this context). Also, this direction gets the subheading "A Dreamer's Cartography," a phrase I am very excited about, only to discover that it is entirely about the process of leaving the waking/real/old world behind, and has nothing to do with the cartography of the dream! Bah humbug. It ends at least with a very funny little joke.

Section 3 is about starting play, and called Begin at the End. The idea will be to describe someone coming to the end of their travels, but first we have to decide who our traveler is. There are some nice little lists to pick from, professions, goals, carried objects, and a list for how you're feeling at the end of these travels. Then we have some questions to answer to flesh out the context, and finally an optional "plot puzzle." These lists, questions, and puzzle are all unfortunately laid out the same way, and in the style that is annoying to read on my computer! And that's it for the third section.

Section 4 is simply Arriving. This is the section with prompts to describe your travels - how long did you travel, through what circumstances and geography, to what city, etc. And after these, further questions to contemplate as you write out your notes. If you're inclined to draw a map of the city, there's a prompt to imagine what the shape of the city is as seen from above, with options such as "bat" or "flame" or "key".

Section 5 is Visiting, and has a process for an "encounter" in the city. It has a list of kinds of places that I quite like, and then ten prompts, one for each digit; you pick the one that corresponds to the minute it is when you check the rules to find the prompt. You'll answer the prompt's question, then flip a coin to get an additional detail, and finally you'll imagine the outcome. I like it! Not all the prompts are equally exciting to me, and some of the coin-flip results are also kind of whatever. I think ten prompts is probably a little small, if I wanted to visit a lot of cities.

Section 6, Departing, is the shortest so far, with just two quick questions to answer about why and how you left, and some rules to forbid you from repeating choices from lists, if your cycle is continuing.

Section 7, End at the Beginning, is also quite short, although its questions are a little weightier. It invites you to consider some details, and has a conclusion to the puzzle you might have pursued. I think the "character dissolution" prompts to end your journaling are some of my favorites, and play nicely with the frame the text asked us to pick up.

Section 8 is World Rebuilding, for leaving the game. It has the first "hidden" reference to Invisible Cities that I've noticed, and concludes with a Calvino quote that I generally like but is not really justified by the text or the thematic work the text has been attempting.

That's it for the game, unless of course we consider reading the text the game. The final and 9th section, Notes, opens with another take on the idea of fabulism which is much more interesting to me than the first one. There's a note on the "method" used to write the game, which involved sorting all the words in an english translation of Invisible Cities by their frequency - that's fun. There are two "examples" of play at the back, which I did not like! I was hoping to read some that would really ignite my excitement for the text, but I found them mostly formulaic. The text is very clear that the writing should not be to please other people, so who cares about my opinion! But it does mean I'm walking away without much of an interest in actually using this text for anything.

There's one other note in here that I thought I would talk about just a little bit, which starts as an exasperated cry of frustration about the way ttrpg texts (and to a large part, I imagine, culture) fail to examine how the act of playing (sitting down and talking for hours on end) can involve physical strain. But the majority of this section is given to a denunciation of "safety tools" as they're utilized in many texts, and a pretty excoriating indictment of "game designers" (particularly those who are engaging in "safety discourse" to bolster their own reputation). I've seen something like this sentiment here and there, or at least a reexamination of the idea of "safety" and "safety tools", most notably in PCG's Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast. I'm in agreement with what I take to be Jarboe's position here, that the text cannot by itself keep you safe. I'm far enough away from "the industry" to not really have a stake in "game designer behavior" beyond the baseline, so I'm really just noting it because I'm curious what's next. Yazeba's solution was to have an "in-character" exploration of the topic, where the reader is literally addressed by one of the characters about some strategies and behaviors players can use. I think it's unlikely that that approach is taken up widely (although it's the major inspiration for how I want to handle it in my "upcoming" planar fantasy game). It might just be that "safety tools" become part of the assumed play culture, and get taken out of the "core" texts  - something kind of like how OSR culture assumes a certain kind of behavior or shared norms of its players. But I also don't have a sense for how quickly this sentiment is spreading throughout the space. Or really, how deeply the practice of inserting safety tools into published texts is anyway! Which is probably good cause to doubt how useful my viewpoint is, so that's probably enough pontificating out of me. 

That's it! Unfortunately, like I said, I don't have much of an interest in playing using this text, but it might appeal to other people who are deeper into the journaling game space, if you're looking for a book with some genuinely pretty good prompts. I don't know that Inscrutable Cities helps evoke Invisible ones for me very well - which is fine, there's a whole other book for that, but I was hoping for a little more of what I liked from Calvino making its way here. I'd be very interested to read an essay from Jarboe about their thoughts on Calvino and fabulism, though!