#marn writes

[charaznablescanontoyota]

do you like fucked up houses? do you wanna build your own?

i've just released a 1.5 update of my gmless mapmaking game house, with some quality of life tweaks and a refreshed layout! purchasing it also now gets you a scp-flavored hack i wrote ages ago!

[charaznablescanontoyota]

hello do you remember the king gizz time loop heist game i wrote several years ago

it is pay what you want right now to celebrate nonagon infinity also being pwyw on bandcamp (along with the rest of king gizz's catalog) and i have a game jam going where you can write your own stuff for/based on/inspired by the game. check it out!

[charaznablescanontoyota]

CAN WE ERASE OUR HISTORY is a two-player, diceless hack of Time To Drop about relitigating a toxic relationship (or situationship) while being tossed through alternate realities in which it might have gone differently. it is also about listening to The Beths' 2022 album Expert In A Dying Field.

[charaznablescanontoyota]

i’ve been in the playbook mines for this isekai/metafiction inspired interstitial 2e hack for like a year off and on and i’m about to be out the other end so have some moves i’ve written that i really like

[charaznablescanontoyota]

MetaFiction is an Interstitial 2e hack about finding out you're inside a work of fiction, on top of being forced to play a death game for the entertainment of mysterious Patrons. The playtest edition is now public on itch - please check it out and tell your friends!

This is a MONSTER document with 16 playbooks and many, many pages of additional rules (and even secrets), and I am very excited for people beyond my social sphere to get to see what I've been tinkering with for the past ~1.5 years :)

[charaznablescanontoyota]

all you need to do (is call me)

sup is this the purple girl w the mask nd the shitty dad robin gave me ur #

the three unknown-number texts come in rapid succession; steph tosses her ap english homework aside and immediately dedicates more effort towards interpreting the eighteen words on her phone’s screen than she was ever going to do for wuthering heights. she flicks her way into the floaty frog app–which, actually a pretty good game, all things considered–and opens her dms with robin.

spoilerwarning hey are you giving out my number to randos???? wtf

the three dots that indicate he’s typing appear, then disappear, then reappear again. steph watches raptly as robin evidently types and retypes the same sentence for about five minutes before sending the finished product.

robinofficial Oh shit. I meant to tell you about that It’s been a week He’s one of the Phantasms, I’m trying to get them on the app they didn’t really know there were other teens out there doing what we ow hey hey come on man that’s just rude I’m clearly composing a text message here Sorry on patrol

of course he is. honestly, she’s impressed that he bothered to text instead of sending a voice memo. but robin always manages to say a lot in a few texts–steph’s been keeping loose tabs on the phantasm story, but had no idea they were a crew. let alone teenagers. maybe she’s gotta get better about actually reading the hundreds of messages in robin chat she wakes up to every morning.

she tabs back into her texts, saves the unknown number as “phantasm?” with a ghost emoji, and types back:

yeah this is she is this the grey guy with the mask and the killing mobsters?

the phantasm takes longer than robin to respond. so long, actually, that steph has drifted back to her reading for class by the time her phone buzzes once–and then, insistently, again. and again. she realizes, with an equal mix of bafflement and social terror, that the phantasm is calling her, and jabs the accept button before she can talk herself out of it.

the music in her earbuds cuts off mid-lyric, replaced by crackling and shuffling on the other end of the line. someone walking? maybe he pocket dialed her by accident?

“hi?” steph says, uncertainty pitching the word up into a question. it’s hard to shake the feeling she’s about to hear something she really shouldn’t.

“hey, sorry,” the phantasm says. his phone’s microphone is shit, but the words–and the thick accent, which is unexpected–are still mostly audible. “i hate textin’ on this piece of junk when i’m out doin’ shit.”

doin’ shit might mean cape business. there’s a muffled quality to his words that steph can easily envision coming from the full-face skull mask she’s only seen in blurry 480p.

“are you killing people right now?” she asks, wry.

“what? no?” he says, at least having the decency to sound offended at the implication. “you think i’d call you from–”

“i mean, you posted you showing off a guy’s severed head to tiktok.”

his laugh crackles down the line. “okay, point, but nah. i’m just trespassing.”

“where?” steph asks, before she can help herself. it’s not like she’s gonna publish anything about this–but still. sue her for being a little curious about what the mysterious phantasm gets up to when he’s not jumping mobsters on their home turf.

“guess,” the phantasm says; she can hear him grinning around the word.

“um,” she says, caught on the back foot, “wayne tower.”

“nope.”

“amusement mile.”

“nah.”

“arkham?”

she asks it as a joke. he doesn’t answer.

“you’re shitting me,” steph hisses. she’s home alone, but still feels a pathological need to lower her voice like she’s been brought in on a conspiracy. “what are you doing breaking into arkham?”

“long story,” the phantasm says, and she can almost hear the shrug in it.

she rolls her eyes. “fucking try me. you clearly wanna brag about being there.”

“i’m not in the actual–i’m not in the fuckin’ asylum,” the phantasm says. he hasn’t lowered his own voice whatsoever; he must not be worried about getting caught. “just on the, uh, the grounds.”

“why?”

“look, this ain’t exactly why i called–”

“okay, well, too bad,” steph says, finding a ballpoint pen amidst the mess on her bed and toying with its clip. “s’what we’re talking about now. you got a name, by the way, or are we sticking with phantasm?”

he’s quiet again–and when he does speak, it’s weirdly serious. “you can’t tell.”

“oh–hey, i won’t,” she says, thrown by the sudden sincerity. maybe she overstepped. it’s not like she knows robin’s real name–or anyone else on the stupid frog app. “and you don’t have to tell me, if it’s too–”

“jason.” he says it fast and uncertain, like a grenade he’s afraid of throwing. steph’s not sure what it’s supposed to mean. she knows, like, three jasons at her school, and she’s pretty sure none of them are this guy.

“okay, jason,” she says, making the snap decision to reciprocate. kind of the least she can do, really. “i’m steph. why are you trespassing at arkham?”

“i am–” he cuts himself off with a grunt and a thud, like he had to jump over something. “lookin’ for a body.”

steph can feel her eyebrows climbing up her face. “dead body?”

“only kinda body worth lookin’ for.”

“anyone you know personally?” from the way he’s talking about it, she’d guess not, but it can’t hurt to ask. and the nosiness is kind of second nature at this point.

“takeout place near me missed a protection payment to the triad,” jason says. he sounds vaguely breathless with exertion. “owner got taken to the woods out here an’ shot. i think they’re payin’ off the guards so they can bury shit out where nobody’ll find it.”

“jesus,” steph says. she’s still flicking the pen clip with her thumbnail, bending it back as far as it goes. “and you think you can find it, because–”

“because i’ve got the dead guy tellin’ me where to look,” jason says, with such confidence that he must be telling the absolute truth.

“huh,” steph says. she’d add something else, but she’s coming up short. not every day a guy tells you he can hear dead people.

then again, she accidentally participated in a ritual to open a gate to hell two months ago. maybe her definition of what counts as an everyday occurrence in gotham needs to take a walk off the trigate bridge.

she can hear jason crashing through underbrush on the other line, leaves crunching under his bootheels. there’s a dull sound, some kind of sudden impact, and he swears somewhere distant from the receiver.

“shit, sorry–one sec. i dropped you.” the mutter is accompanied by a shuffling noise that steph assumes is him feeling around in the dirt. “knew i shoulda brought a flashlight–”

“you don’t have a flashlight!?” the question comes out of her louder than she means for it to; she feels her cheeks starting to burn with embarrassment in its wake.

“oh, there you are. thanks for yellin’.” jason’s voice is much closer again–and a lot wryer. “yeah, my eyes glow when i got a ghost with me. it’s like havin’ headlights. but the mask ain’t got, like, a lot of peripheral–”

“your phone doesn’t have one?” she asks, cutting him off.

“this piece of shit? i got it for like twelve dollars. it doesn’t even have a keyboard.”

“okay,” steph says, evenly. “so how are you gonna get back out?”

he makes a soft, winded whuh noise, then chases it with, “sorry, what?”

“of the woods, genius. how are you gonna get back out in the dark? once you find the ghost, isn’t that, like, unfinished business settled? ghost’s gonna leave. no more headlights.”

jason is silent for a long time. steph can only tell he hasn’t hung up on her because she can still hear the sounds of his clothes rustling as he walks.

“i,” he says, finally, “did not consider havin’ to leave.”

“yeah, i kinda got that,” steph says. she’s already on her feet, one foot nudging the storage cube that holds her spoiler costume out from under the bed. with the moped, she can get to arkham in–what, twenty-five minutes, tops? and mom’s working a shift until six in the morning, so nobody’ll know she even left the house.

“look,” she says, cradling her phone between ear and shoulder as she starts to change. “i’ll come get you.” 

“i’ve got other people i can call,” jason protests. if the phantasm is a whole crew, he probably does–but there’s a part of steph that hates to let him hang up and go back to his own little self-contained bubble of vigilantism. not when they could both make a new friend out of it.

“sure,” she says, “but i’m offering. and you gotta buy me a burger after. transportation fee.”

“are you kidding?” jason asks. “i’ll buy you three burgers.”

steph smiles to herself as she pulls her boots on. “burger, fries, and a milkshake, and we’re even.”

his laugh crackles down the line. “shit, yeah. deal.”

[charaznablescanontoyota]

RE: RE: is a collection of 3 all new modules for my musical time loop heist game Time To Drop!

Old Story is a module in which you play a close-knit crew with a long, messy history that keeps being twisted, revised, and rebooted. It introduces a Nemesis mechanic, in which you receive a permanent Complication in the form of a do-gooder trying to track the crew down.

 Weird Ending Explained is a module in which you play a group of teenagers with a shared secret, stuck in a time loop of the last big house party before graduation. It introduces The Incident, a shared Complication that affects how you interact with each other and clear other Complications.

Sideshow is a module in which you play as a secret government task force of criminals with bombs implanted in your heads. It introduces Severance, a unique, secret Complication every player receives and must complete without anyone else catching on.

They all assume you have read the base game (which is still pay-what-you-want), use different albums as their loop timer, and add additional character building questions on top of totally new game mechanics!

[charaznablescanontoyota]

i'll wait, i'll wait (for the moment to pass)

did you know there's a problem on mmolb dot com that keeps your fifth starting pitcher from actually pitching their games. anyway

----

twenty-six games as a starting pitcher and karina hasn’t been on the mound once; still, she hauls herself out of the house to sit on a shitty aluminum park bench and watch hewitt try for a shutout against the love letters. she knows for a fact they’re still sore about the way their last attempt went–they let in a single, errant home run in the bottom of the ninth, and were yanked humiliatingly out of the game for the last two at-bats. it was brutal. karina has thoughts about hewitt’s fastball–not to mention their conservation of stamina–that she’s been keeping to herself ever since, notes jotted in the margin of her scorebook that she’s sure no one wants to hear from the player who spends one hundred percent of her time warming the bench.

one of the love letters bats another home to whoops and cheers from the away benches. karina sucks her teeth, and fills in the diamond on her score sheet. she can see hewitt’s eyebrow twitch from yards away; they throw two sloppy balls, and wyatt mercifully ends the inning by diving after a ground ball. this, too, karina notes down.

“brutal,” arky says under his breath, on the other side of the bench. it’s the first real comment he’s made on the game, even after hewitt beaned a love letters batter. his scorebook is perched precariously on his knees, but he’s had the easier job so far–he scores for the circles, and they’ve barely managed to put anyone on base. 

karina always scores for the away team, a habit started out of both boredom and defiance. she has to show up to games, just in case the manager finally decides to start her, so she might as well take notes on everyone else’s earned run averages. arky only just took up the hobby with her a week ago after his tommy john. he should really be exempt from coming to games, his arm still in a sling and all, but the manager’s already started him once to the chagrin of the rest of the pitching staff.

they sit in companionable silence as the inning changes over; only once travis is in the batter’s box does karina say, quietly, “they keep throwing the same fastball, straight down the middle.”

“you think nelson is giving them bad signs?” arky asks.

karina shakes her head, ponytail flapping. “i don’t think they give a fuck about nelson’s signs.”

she’s not lying. nelson is too nice to get into it with hewitt–or with anyone, for that matter–but there’s something wounded in his eyes when he looks at them, something asking are you pretending not to see me or are you doing this on purpose.

“they’re psyched out,” she adds. then, “i don’t blame them. but they won’t get better if they keep playing like this.”

“sounds a little like you blame them,” arky says. it’s not a judgemental assessment at all, which makes it worse in some respects.

“okay, well.” karina stops herself, struggles to put the rest into words. because the animosity against hewitt is there, and she’d be lying if she said it wasn’t, but it’s not in the way arky seems to think. “sue me, or whatever. if they and cisco are gonna cover all my games, the least they can do is cover them well.”

it’s the most she’s let herself say to a teammate about the strange and uneven state of the pitching rotation, though she knows all of them have noticed by now. she prefers to save that vitriol for the managers–who continue reassuring her it’s a temporary hitch in the schedule, telling her to come to games just in case.

arky laughs deep in his chest, pen dancing over his scoresheet as the love letters scramble to handle a classic r. tang bunt. “i’m telling cisco you said that.”

“don’t you dare,” karina hisses. she could care less what hewitt thinks of her; earning the disappointment of even-keeled francisco quinn, even in hypothetical, makes her want to die.

“he’ll think it’s funny,” arky says. when karina glares at him, he catches her eyes with his own. he has the beginning of crow’s feet around them, creasing gently when he smiles. “you’ll get your chance, ‘rina. hell, you can have my next game, if you want.”

“what,” karina says, “and save you from doing more one-armed innings?”

arky grimaces, fingers fluttering inside his sling. “i wish someone would.”

“i’ll think about it,” she says, and bumps her knee against his in silent thanks.