Hi everyone! I’m JJ Laurier, but most people around here call me Jess, so feel free to do the same. I usually use they/them pronouns, but she/her is also fine.
I’m an interactive fiction writer/indie game developer, and thus far I’ve published one game, Fields of Asphodel, which might be what brought you here. At the moment, I’m working on its sequel, Blood of the Living, and may or may not be sneakily developing another project in my spare time.
This blog is mostly a place for the occasional update, asks, some art or reblogs, and all of that. I happily take questions, but please read the FAQ and Ask Policies linked above before sending anything in.
I’m also on Patreon, if you’re interested in more frequent updates, bonus goodies, and various levels of early access to my projects.
I track the tags ‘asphodelgame,’ and 'chrysanthemumgames' but if you want me to see something it’s probably safer just to @ me.
Welcome to the blog; stay as long as you like!
Project descriptions under the cut.
Steam || Play Store || App Store
Forced into an arranged marriage with the God of the Dead, only you can decide what to make of your new life. Befriend misfit deities, repel giant attacks, find the culprit behind the river goddess’s mysterious illness, and use your powers to nudge Fate in your favor! Decide what kind of deity you want to be—whether you’ll answer prayers, how you’ll develop your powers, and what role you’ll take in governance.
Fields of Asphodel is a ‘cozy’ game—not an action-packed adventure or dramatic soap opera, it focuses on daily life and developing relationships. In fact, FoA lacks mechanical stats at all, relying instead on a system of traits and roleplaying. The romances are very light and slow burn, particularly in this first installment, and there’s a heavy emphasis on consent and self-determination, as well as platonic relationships.
Demo || Forum Thread || FAQ
Blood of the Living continues the story of Fields of Asphodel, consisting of six distinct routes, one for each possible RO/PO, as well as subplots focused on the Player Character and their family. As the PC grows closer to their friends and potential romantic interests in the Underworld, they will quickly find themselves tangled in those characters' stories, even as they shape their own development as a deity, and how their relationship with their blood family moves into the future.
Steam || Other Links TBA || Releasing 6 August, 2026
Forced out of your ancestral home, your people must sail to the south, where only your vanished father has ever been. But even after you've found a place to live, your problems are far from over. A mighty empire controls the nearby coastal city, and the local raiders want it back. You'll need to find your place in the conflict, seal an alliance, track down an ancient artifact, and fight for your right to belong.
Diaspora is a project I started with my friend Vince in about… 2016. At the time, it was my first interactive fiction, and in some very important ways, it still is, even if not the first to make it over the finish line. For the most part, it's classic, even dated, by IF standards, with numerical stats, personality bars, and so on, all nestled in the context of a low-to-mid fantasy game about exploration, adventure, and some culture clash.
July was about what I expected for progress—I did actually end up finishing Chapter Ten just in time for the end of the month update on Patreon, but I'm not releasing it publicly quite yet.
Basically, I'm going to bundle its public release with that of the epilogue, so you can read the end of the story all at once. I anticipate this will happen sometime around mid-late August, so keep an eye on the blog if you'd like; I'll be sure to let everyone know when I have a firm release date.
After that, well, I'll be taking feedback and trying to beat the first draft into the kind of thing that won't cause a professional copyeditor retinal damage. Then: submission!
But all that's a little farther away yet. I'll be back soon to say more, I hope. Until then, I hope you all have a lovely August.
i read that ask about makaria calling pc mom, and my headcanon is that makaria would say it in the most offhand kind of way. like makaria would run off to her lessons and go, “bye, mom!” as she runs out the door. and now poor pc is choking on her drink and can’t breath. or they’ll be walking past each other and makaria would go, “hey, mom!” and suddenly pc is falling face first onto the floor bc her brain glitched and she forgot how to walk
Felt the 'can't walk and process at the same time' right in the chest, honestly.
But yeah! Supposing Makaria had the inking that it'd be okay, I could definitely see her dropping a name/title change very casually, whether that be with a 'mom' or 'dad' or just using a nickname for the PC that they liked. :)
Okay, so I know when the PC goes after the people who attack Laüs, and the LI/FI (love interest/friend interest) is like, “Be gentle about it.” But it seems like PC’s reaction is pretty tame in the first place. I was curious to know if there was an option that leads to the PC like absolutely losing their shit, just full on God-Mode. but before they can actually do damage, the LI/FI is able to calm them down? Kinda like in the beginning with the court. But if not that’s totally okay too!!! I am more than content to HC my normally calm and friendly PC snapping. (I have yet to decide on what their god-form would be, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out.)
On a side note, I also wanted to say how much I love this game!! It really is cosy, so well written, and I am so glad I found it. Hope you’ve been doing well!!
I'm really glad you're enjoying it, anon!
In trying to find the moment you describe, I'm not quite sure I've landed on what you meant, but if you're referring to when the PC is advised to use a 'light touch' or be careful in how much magic they draw from a source other than themself, that's not because their reaction is too extreme or anything, it's literally just because using too much magic that isn't their own might have consequences they don't intend, and might do more than they want to if they're not very deliberate with it, so it's almost the opposite of anyone thinking PC has snapped or flown off the handle, so to speak.
It's possible a caution about being moderate with the attackers shows up in another part of the chapter I can't find right now, but if so, the intention is just for the characters to be trying to remind the PC just in case, rather than reacting to anything they've actually done or said so far. Everyone knows this is a situation that could get highly contentious, emotional, or difficult to handle, and the reminder is just a way of letting the PC know they are present, willing to help, and well aware of the risk of things deteriorating quickly.
If something appears that isn't in line with that, I'd welcome the feedback, particularly if you have a phrase that seems to be discontinuous with what the PC is actually doing! I tried searching 'be gentle with it' but I take it that was a general paraphrase, because it doesn't appear anywhere in the chapter.
There aren't any options that lead to the PC 'losing it' in front of the other characters, though they may do some version of that if they pursue the attackers first, alone with Nikos, and are not therefore somewhat 'moderated' by the presence of the others.
BWUUH?????? YOU WRITE DIASPORA? HUUUUUUH??????????
Indeed, two nickles is not a lot, but weird that it happened twice. I like to think I have a wide range of genre and character-type interests, but perhaps there are some things that Keep Coming Back(tm).
Mostly an accident in this case, and also probably a lack of self-awareness. -_-;
Had to do a triple take. I had no idea you were the same author! :O I loved Diaspora so much back then and I was rooting for it to be finished over the years. Absolutely estatic it is coming to steam. Congratsss!! Very excited to see all the characters again and see how it all ends.
Thanks, anon, that's really sweet. The outpouring of support has made me realise that a lot more people have actually read the game at some point than I thought!
Some parts of the ending have proven a bit... divisive, but I do hope that overall it turns out to be enjoyable when you get there. :)
No more than is already there is planned for the game at the moment. I might consider trying to find somewhere for it in edits, but it just didn't really organically come up anywhere but in the scene with Herakles, so most likely not.
I do apologize if that disappoints.
Of course not, I thought it could have come up in a PC/Hades "fluffy/vulnerable" moment or in a patreon story/drawing! But I'm curious 😁 does he have wings or a tail? Does his face change a bit besides the sharper teeth?
And do you have in mind a God/Goddess form for Demether, Hestia and the others dodekàtheon?
Last question I swear! 😂 In some myths/authors Dionysus becomes/is one of the twelve, do you think, that given time, PC could become that powerful/worshipped etc?
Well, one of the nice parts of this not happening on screen is that I can leave a lot of that to interpretation. :)
I never really settled on any one concept, but a few ideas I've tossed around include trying to figure out exactly what I think qualifies as 'titanic' size and how much of it the second/third generation that would eventually be the gods inherited, how many horns is too many horns, whether he'd just outright 'die' (i.e. heart stops, breathing stops, etc,) or sort of be half-mottled with the early stages of rot, or whether some bone would be exposed, and so on.
Honestly, I think unless and until I really need to decide, I'm perfectly happy to let everyone have their own ideas.
Demeter, Hestia, et al certainly have different forms, but as with everyone else I didn't really bother firming exactly what they'd look like. I did have a distinct image of Hestia's hair turning into fire in hers, and I'd want to do something kind of 'life smothering itself' with Demeter. Like choking vines, carnivorous plants, something in that vein. Again, though, nothing definitive.
Zeus's beard and hair turns into clouds, though. That much I do know haha.
Most such forms are meant to have at least a hint of the eldritch, creepy, or just unnecessarily aggressive about them, because they either hail directly from or are inherited from a time of primal power and warfare, as far as the history of the gods goes. As they get more distant from the influence of the Titanomachy, such aspects might lessen, but at least a tiny bit of something not pretty and not subtle never goes away.
As for the Twelve, well, they're typically known as the Twelve Olympians, as I recall it, which is a bit of a problem for a PC residing at least half-time in the Underworld. But certainly, given time and investment in the mortal realm, they could become something equivalent. It would certainly take some doing, though, and may ruffle some Olympian feathers in the process. :)
Hello!
Your Hades is very calm, rational, polite, and tries to avoid confrontation. However, is there anything that could really set him off? Perhaps an attempt to harm his daughter? Persephone? Any inhabitant of the underworld? I don't mean he'd simply be upset, but genuinely angry.
I feel like I've answered this before, but it was a while ago. Anyhow, the answer isn't particularly unusual I don't think. Obviously Hades can get angry, and generally the way to do it is harming the people he cares most about, or treating them poorly.
He'd definitely also be upset about harm to anyone in the Underworld, as those are the people under his protection, but of course how personal the anger was would depend to a degree on how close he was to the people in question.
The person who can most easily make him angry without actually doing/attempting/threatening any of these things is Zeus, though actually he doesn't often use the most reliable trigger for doing so, which is speaking poorly of their mother, because Zeus doesn't really want to do that either. Still, even without that, they're brothers, and for better or worse they're very good at getting under one another's skin. Poseidon too, of course, but in some ways he's actually intermediate between Hades and Zeus, so he's sort of less likely to upset either of them, whether accidentally or on purpose, on a normal day.
But onto what I meant... So, the title seemed familiar to me, and considering I'm a "one canon playthrough" kind of player who plays hundreds of games, I actually keep a notepad document for every single IF I play with all of my choices listed in it. And so, I checked my IF memo folder, and I indeed had a document started for it. Apparently, I played through the prologue and chapter 1 quite a long time ago (last modification is in february 2024), but I can't remember at all what it was about (and reading the small synopsis for Steam doesn't help). It's probably because I wasn't far in the story, but I'm now curious about why did I stop... was it a time where I was in a small IF hiatus and forgot to go back to it? Or maybe it didn't have any more public chapters? I think it'd be weird if I couldn't get into it and just dropped it, so I'm inclined to think it was something else, but damn I'm confused now...
No, I don't have actual questions, I just wanted to share my big "huh...?" moment! Makes me actually excited to read it now and hopefully understand what led to this! At least I won't have to wait long!
That is a 'huh' kind of situation. I'm not really sure what might have interrupted you, either, mostly because I remember very little about the timeline for getting this game made other than that it was way too long and included some hiatuses that spanned... more than a year each, at least.
So I'm not much help on that front, but I do think it's cool that you keep a record of all the games you play! Maybe I should start doing something like that. My memory's a sieve sometimes...
No more than is already there is planned for the game at the moment. I might consider trying to find somewhere for it in edits, but it just didn't really organically come up anywhere but in the scene with Herakles, so most likely not.
Can I ask when did you submit Diaspora? I can’t remember if a demo was released.
The demo was years ago, anon, before Dashingdon was replaced with CoGDemos. It was up until that site went down, and we did not replace it on CoGD because the files were at that point in a half-edited mess that wouldn't run.
Based on the feedback we got at the time, we made a handful of edits, and I submitted the game for a copyedit around early March this year. I was waiting to make a more official announcement until we had the Steam page, which is usually not long after the game has been submitted, but in this case it came along with the files being returned, so the gap between the page going up and the actual release date is quite small!
I’ve been rereading the Hades POVs on the Patreon (and I adore each and every one) and it made me wonder: when would you say Hades starts catching feelings for the PC, provided they’re on his romance route? During the walk with Kerby? The baking scene?
I can't answer this exactly, because it depends on the PC (even on the romance route). But I think at least in some cases, those would both be contenders. Hades falls rather slowly, compared to some of the others, but it can start relatively early in things. Basically, if he's able to get a glimpse of who the PC really is and start having the kinds of exchange that are personal, significant, and even just a little bit vulnerable, you know?
Diaspora is finally in the publication queue at Hosted Games! For those of you who aren’t familiar with this game, it’s a project I started with my friend Vince about… ten years ago. At the time, it was my first interactive fiction, and in some very important ways, it still is. Most of the writing on it was done from 2016-2021 or so, but the last parts ended up taking us much, much longer than they should have.
Regardless, though, it’s now finished, and to those of you who’ve been around a while and waited so patiently for this project, thank you. It means the world that you’ve believed in us for so long, and we’re so happy that you’ll soon finally be able to play the complete game, which will be a lot like you might remember, but with some edits that will hopefully improve the quality of the experience. It’s certainly an ‘early work’ in a lot of ways, but there are things about it that I’m very proud of, too.
You can wishlist Diaspora on Steam here, which would be a big help, and if you’d like to learn a little more about the game, I’ve added some information to my pinned post, or you can check out the ancient forum thread here, or our (now largely defunct, but perhaps good for a browse) tumblr blog for the game here. Currently, the release date is set to 6 August (2026), and I don't expect that to change, but I won't call it certain until it's actually happened.
Love your stories and the new uodate! Having some thoughts about what stuffs my persephone could do with her new domains (nature and life) and id like to think she can turn into any wild animal with the nature domain in the future. (Cue confused friends walking in on a random deer-phone in the common room struggling to walk on polished stone floors with hooves)
Haha, that one definitely sounds like a possibility with those domains! Transformation into animals is certainly something that some gods in the myths are able to do, and I think eventually a nature/life PC would become quite good at it, polished floors notwithstanding. :)
Really loving the new chapter for all the routes! I just have one question that's been on my mind.
In FoA during the confrontation with the giants on Hades' route, Hades gets smashed by the one giant (I can't remember his name off the top of my head), knocked out for a little while, and was bleeding a bunch. Then when he did get up his wounds automatically started healing. Later Hekate tells us he has a way of unmaking his injuries, which I'm assuming is partly because of his partial domain of time.
So in BoTL, he deals with Heracles trying to conquer Pylos and gets shot in the heart by Heracles' arrow that's powered by divine magic. Hekate had to step in and do special healing on him, and only after they got back to the underworld.
So I'm just wondering why that particular injury couldn't have been 'unmade' like the ones he got from the giant. Is it because Heracles' magic is derived from Zeus and therefore extra powerful? Or is it because that's kind of what happened in the actual myth? Or is there some other reason I haven't thought of?
Thanks!
Hi anon!
I think this might come up depending on the choices you pick, but the reason is because Hades does not use most of his powers (especially time distortion) in the mortal realm.
Utter fantasy nonsense below the cut, for anyone interested in the worldbuilding explanation for this reluctance.
The Underworld, being essentially composed from Chaos, can generally handle the kinds of contradiction this produces without falling apart. Similarly, Olympus in this universe is based on fundamental Order (or something akin to that), so it's stable enough to essentially force the disruption to be extremely limited, and 'fix' any unforeseen consequences. (And beings that draw from primal Chaos to make things happen, like Hades or anyone Chthonic, are fundamentally weaker there to begin with, so they can't do as much as they could elsewhere.)
The mortal realm is neither. Messing with time there can create very dangerous paradoxes that are at risk of destabilizing the world as its residents know it. Smaller applications, like unmaking or even fast-healing wounds, are unlikely to do this, but from an abundance of caution, Hades refuses to use them anyway, especially when he can essentially just make his body 'dead' so the wound won't do to much to him before he can either return to the Underworld or get help from someone else.
Incidentally, this 'deadness' is the reason Hekate makes the comment about disliking healing him in that state/not being able to fully do so, because healing magic is generally designed to work on living bodies.
As for when they got back to the Underworld, he could have fixed it by himself, but given the distress he knows he'd caused the people around him, he opted to let Hekate do her fussing and heal him in a way everyone could trust was really fixing the problem, instead of just telling them he'd take care of it and waltzing off with a hole in his chest.
(Also it's just nicer. He doesn't like using the powers that used to be his father's, given their history.)
it’s just popped into my mind, but how different do you think an au where the pc is brought up by iasion rather than demeter would be? i believe this is deep in AU realms as i can’t picture demeter leaving her child and going away, and the arranged marriage set up of book one becomes very difficult to enact, so the logistics kind of make the AU stop before it can get started. buuut (and i hope this still falls under being okay to ask!) i was wondering your take on it! would iasion have ever been as controlling and helicopter-y as demeter? would the pc have been drafted into the war too? would they have ever met the wider chthonic cast at all?
thank you for the game(s), i love this game-dad and game-mom so much, iasion and demeter are really fun to read! have a great day :-)
So the only way I could see this happening is if Demeter had made the judgement that leaving her child with Iasion had a good chance of keeping them both out of Zeus's sight and therefore his mind. (She did, in fact, briefly canonically consider this, but it wouldn't have, because as it turns out, if Zeus suspects something's up, it's much easier to ask Apollo or Artemis to look for a baby demigod than it is to ask them to find some random guy you don't actually know much about. Iasion is also a demigod, of course, but Zeus didn't know who specifically Demeter had been with, so the point still stands.)
Supposing it had worked out this way, though, and the whole thing had somehow gone under Zeus's radar, I think Iasion would have been unsurprisingly a different sort of parent. Still protective as parents often are, but not to the degree that Demeter felt she had to be, because, well, the big obvious threat to the PC's well-being is not right there all the time. They'd have been raised as the only child of the king of Samothrace, which is certainly not the grandest of kingdoms but has a lot going for it, so they'd have lived comfortably, received a good education by the standards of time and place, etc.
When he got the call to go to war, he'd likely have wanted to leave them behind as the person running Samothrace in his absence, but if they insisted on going, he'd not have been able to say no (being a pushover with an adult child whose autonomy he also recognizes). The PC's gender might complicate matters here, but only slightly in terms of outside expectations and norms and the like.
From there, well, who knows? There might be some ways for the Underworld to become involved, of course, but it certainly would not have been through an arranged marriage plot unless a) Zeus somehow found them around then but not before and b) he decided that was the appropriate thing to do instead of just... you know, killing Iasion the way he does in the original myths.
Played through Hermes’ and Pyri’s routes today. No song came to my head for Hermes, but for Pyri it’s definitely Die With A Smile by Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga.
Also, does the mc get Artemis’ Dagger back if I choose to give it to Ikarios?
The title of that song sounds so ominous, though I suspect it's not actually.
As for the dagger thing, it's safe to assume the PC retrieves any item they gave him, but that the magic property it had is now inert. It's not always obvious depending on in what order you do things, but if you give him the dagger, Erigone does end up using it to kill one of the attackers, so the magic of it has been discharged.
