The Ruins Still Obey
- story-driven
- Difficulty: intermediate
- About 1800 min
- solo
- Game Systems: Special Movement (New), Ambient Audio (Live), Dynamic Portraits (Live), NPC Possession (Live), Attachment Slots (Live)
- dark-science-fantasy
- political-drama
- conversation-led
- no-combat
- body-horror
- three-inheritances
Sixty years ago the heroes saved this valley unasked. Three of them rule it now. In Draskell the queue turns its heads at once and means it. In Whole the mist seals a man's arm before he can pull it back and he thanks it, mouth still shaping no. In Entire a brass desk reads your tag aloud and says whether you are an organ or a growth. You arrive carrying one of the powers that broke the place, and everyone wants it aimed at someone. Nobody dies here. They are taken apart where they stand.
Plays in a web browser on a desktop or laptop computer.
The Road In
Something Already Asked
You did not come here to be read. It happened anyway, a hundred paces back, at a post beside the
road that speaks and does not wait for an answer. There is a note of you now, going somewhere nobody
told you about.
Three People Saved This Country
Sixty years ago, and none of them asked first. One took a city's wish to fight and the war stopped
that afternoon, and that city has not been able to defend itself since. One put a healing swarm into
the air and every wound under it closed, and his people have not been able to discharge themselves
since. One took the water, the roads and the hospitals for an emergency nobody has declared over,
and gave none of it back. They were the heroes. They are the government. There is a slab standing in
a swept square that carries the saved on its front, name by name, and the weather's dead on its
back, by number.
They Are All Still Working
The queue ahead of you is calm and well fed, and at some point every head in it will turn at once for
the same reason and none of them will think it odd. The mist at the border stands a hand deep
over swept stone and stops at a painted line, and it will seal a cut on you before you have finished
deciding whether you want it sealed. The desk in the city reads your tag aloud, so the queue hears
what you are at the same moment you do.
You Are Carrying One of Them
Not the office. The power - the small private version that got into a body during the worst year this
world has had. A face that is not yours and holds while you wear it. The ground letting go of you. A
body rebuilt out of the wreck. Exactly one, for good, and everyone of consequence here will work out
which one you have and start thinking what they would do with it.
Walk up to the post, let it finish reading you, and find out what it does with what it took.
What Awaits
- Three rulers, each working, sincere, and impossible to simply beat.
- One inheritance, chosen once and never traded, that changes every door in the valley.
- Eighty-five adults with their own reasons, a few of them struck off a list while you watch.
- A freehold that stays free by selling the rulers what they want kept quiet.
- Four ways this valley can end, and you will see one of them.
Content notes
Contains: minds rewritten so that an order feels like a wish of your own, and whole districts coordinated that way; medical treatment given to people who said no, including a decision about whether a patient's body may carry a child, taken at a desk by a clinician who believes she is being kind; bodies altered, sealed and classified without consent; lifelong dependence on a treatment that can be withdrawn at a table; psychological domination and inherited compulsion; predation and bodily harm; mass and individual death in the world's history; the permanent ruin of named adults during play, which nothing later undoes; romance and intimacy with rulers who are dangerous and are not redeemed by it; betrayal; and the option of working knowingly with any of it.