Stringing Together Narratives After Death

Forged in the Dark The Workshop
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I was watching a review of a game called Cultist Simulator - a Lovecraftian story builder using cards - and an interesting element was how each new playthrough begins with someone coming into contact with the previous playthrough’s character (who probably died, went nuts, got devoured, etc). I think the example given in the review was a student of the occult who died and who’s police case file was handed off to a police officer played by the player in the next playthrough, followed by a doctor who reviewed the patient file of the detective after they went insane. It’s this weird King in Yellow inspired take on character generation, and it got me interested in mapping its mechanics.

I love playing the Eldritch Horror board game and that too has a marvelous method of tying together stories throughout an ongoing playthrough. When a character runs out of health or sanity they become unplayable and go into an event state where any player character can go to where the terminated character was done in, play through an encounter, and possibly get their stuff and a reward.

I’ll be trying to map out this system on a basic level and seeing if I can mold it into a compelling mechanic for FitD. Let me know if you’ve played the game, or are curious about this idea as well?

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I have played Cultist Simulator, and my FitD game, Deathwish, has it come up quite a bit.
I just let players define how their new character relates to the previous one though, the relationship itself isn’t mechanical. However, I do have a built in ‘cheat’ in my setting, in the form of the “Tome of Heroes”. It records everything their previous characters did, so that there is no player-character information gap, and it marks them with a unique brand so that they can continue their relationship with NPCs in much the same way.

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I really jive with this phrase. Indeed, it’s perhaps most useful in terms of managing how NPCs get dragged into the PC’s line of fire. This notion of stringing together the threads of corruption that ever pull in the professionally or idly curious fit into a missing puzzle space I didn’t know was there in my understanding of game design. I can’t wait to try this game out some time.

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