It is Pitch Dark: Through the Gate-To-Many-Places

Our first game of It is Pitch Dark was a suc­cess!  From 8/19/13 to 8/20/13, Bill Coberly ran the game through Twitter, which ended at 320 tweets.  Here below is the tran­script of the game and some quick thoughts from the author.

We hope you’ll join us for our next game of It is Pitch Dark, start­ing this Friday, 8/23/13, at approx­i­mate­ly 6:00 PM EST.  Ontological Geek con­trib­u­tor (and Pitch Dark illus­tra­tor) Matt Schanuel will be run­ning his game, The Lizards on Phobos, and it ought to be a darn good time.

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Through the Gate-To-Many-Places was a delib­er­ate vamp on the old Lovecraftian Dreamlands sto­ries, such as Celephais and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, though it was a lit­tle more swash­buck­lery than those by the end.  I want­ed to do some­thing which allowed a lot of room for impro­vi­sa­tion and strange verbs on the part of the play­ers, and so set­ting the game in a dream-space seemed a nat­ur­al choice.

It was incred­i­bly fun to see what sorts of real­ly clever respons­es the play­ers came up with.  I was a lit­tle wor­ried I would just get basic, bor­ing com­mands like “open door,” ” go left,” sprin­kled with the occa­sion­al smart-alec, but I also got a lot of real­ly cre­ative com­mands that made the game much more fun than it would have been oth­er­wise.  When faced with a hor­ri­ble, charg­ing mon­ster, the first com­mand I got was­n’t “stab mon­ster,” it was “flick the switch on the hal­berd, the one just below the blade.”

So here’s the game, and I hope you enjoy read­ing through it as much as I enjoyed run­ning it, and thanks to every­one who played!  I’m look­ing for­ward to play­ing Matt’s game this week­end, and I’ll def­i­nite­ly be run­ning more games in the future!