Reviewn June 5: Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist

Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. It’s a 100 page work, written by Jenna K. Moran, who you may know from things like Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. This breaks the pattern for Reviewn June, as it's something I’ve read parts of before. But this is the first time I'm reading it through on its own (supposed?) terms: as a (supposed?) role-playing game.

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (which can be abbreviated to WTF for reasons which aren’t accidental because nothing is ever an accident) bills itself in its subtitle as a story-telling game. Is it a story-telling game? Is it a game? Is it a series of sense-impressions? I’m unclear whether it’s a joke game, or at least, just a joke game. It’s a concept game, or it's the concept of a game, or at the very least it’s very interested in the concept of a game. It is, maybe, a partial exploration of games-space. It’s Buddhist philosophy and fake astrology, for some reason.

It might be in the twenty most entertaining things I’ve ever read, which is impressive for a set of rules and flavour text.

In case you're unfamiliar, let me quote the page 1 introduction in its entirety, just to set the tone.

Reality is an illusion.
Those who seek to understand it corrode their understanding of it. In naïveté, objects are solid, ideas are true or false, sensations are real, and communication conveys information. To the adept, these things are as fading dreams.
There is no object that is not also emptiness.
There is no arbiter of truth.
Sensations are the lies of Maya; they are the shifting of electrical patterns in the brain; they are signifiers without referent.
Communication is violence.
Reality is false.
It does not matter how many layers one peels back. It does not matter what revelations one has. This is because there is no truth.
We are things that we have dreamed, and there is no sense in it, and when the sleeper wakes we shall be washed away.

Really, this is a very hard work to review. I started writing this up from brief notes while I was partway through Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, but by the time I'd read to the end something rung false about my own words. They were somehow lacking in substance. I was writing phrases like “as in many story-games, the role of GM is optional”, things which just don’t seem to cleave reality at its joints when it comes to WTF.

So this is my second attempt. I've decided that to convey my helplessness as a reader, I'm going to forego sections and order and begin most of these paragraphs with "...So", the textual equivalent of the kind of shrug that's meant to indicate being overwhelmed.

...So there are places in the text where two different sentences reference the same footnote. It has rules for working out whether you are playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. And then rules about using those rules. It's all breathlessly earnest and obviously joking at the same time. I am deeply worried that I might be insufficiently enlightened to truly appreciate the idea of this game (as much as I do appreciate it).

...So the wisher/theurgist/fatalist character split is unlike anything I have read before or since, whether in story games or classic TTRPGs. Together, some of these characters must find the Jewel of All Desiring and make the universe they live in, and must make it well; or they fail and are forgotten in the great unravelling of what is. This, on top of the complexity and self-awareness and bizarre philosophy and astrology and player/character/god blurring and fourth-wall-breaking and layers of nuance, gives nothing so much as Homestuck vibes. But the one has has colossal toads fundamentally important to the quest-for-the-universe and the other frogs, so I guess the similarity is superficial.

I mentioned astrology. Page 6 introduces the first of several planet/star diagrams and tells you “Planets and stars help you play”, which is one of the text's many preposterous straight-faced half-truths. It adds that “You'll find more details on these planets — including two mystery planets seen only during eclipses — in the first supplement for WTF.” It sounds like a joke, but I did locate a three-page supplement the author released which introduces some new rules for the Weaver and a “competitive” WTF variant. They’re not presented in the form of planets, and I suspect the ‘supplement’ is basically patch notes (except maybe it was planned from the start). The supplement is called TLDR because of course it is.

The attributes/powers/skills/gifts system seems like it would be robust, and ties in very deeply with the lore that WTF is steeped in and emanates like a weird radiation. I’m not going to go into the mechanics even though I feel like I could write an essay on them. They seem good. Go read the thing.

...So I’ve skimmed this book before and everything about it still feels weird and surprising. On this full read-through I remembered with surprise that it has those hard mechanical underpinnings, and that feels weird. Discovering that it has an enormous pseudo-canonical world setting, not just implicit lore, feels odd and unexpected. (Each setting location includes both practical matters and ‘moral implications’.) The planets subsystem feels weird and I’m sure would surprise someone who didn’t go in forewarned. Don’t get me started on the ‘rules toys’ and ‘donuts’. When the book comes to an end, you blink, startled.

WTF

...So there’s the Weaver, or GM. At one point we are told that “If you are the Weaver, announce this to the group. Note that only one person is the Weaver. If you are the Weaver and someone else speaks up, it's up to you whether to denounce them now or let their heresy flourish.” This isn’t a joke. It can come into play. There are related rules. If a theurgist character becomes corrupted (it’s a whole thing), they can end up forcing the Weaver into the role of player, ‘immured in horrible durance within the world’, and the accursed theurgist takes on a correspondingly greater role in determining what is true. The dragons of the deeps, which are not bound by the rules of WTF, can “free” a weaver immured in the world. The rules note the possibility that you encounter the dragons of the deeps while you are not aware that you are playing WTF.

The rules are bizarre. I cannot begin to do either the base level or higher-order rules justice. Consider just one example. The author deftly calls the reader’s attention to an unlikely, yet possible, meta-rules interaction, neatly outlines the nature of the issue, and writes:

You might think that, having anticipated this problem, we’d have a solution.
Instead, we have a koan.

True to its word, the text presents its koan and continues with no solution offered.

...So there’s this incredible high-level meta stuff, juxtaposed with things like “The elemental basis of communication in WTF is sound and gesture---vibrations that you transmit through the air and gross physical motions that you use to adjust the pattern of light that you reflect.” This is part of a four-page section on talking/communication as a necessary component of “how to play WTF”.

Does the game book even give you enough to go on to play? I’ve read it and I couldn’t tell you, not without making a fool of myself by trying. Numerous places in the text discuss, either subtly or overtly, whether the game is playable or even designed to be played. One diagrammatical rules toy, if I read it right, has implications as to what ways the game might model fate entering into the equation as to whether WTF is being or will be played. A player’s “willful ego that does not want to play WTF” is a node that is lovingly described but never actually used.

What does Jenna Moran think about the actual process of playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist? Well, things like this:

The author has a strong sense of what you're supposed to be doing when you play WTF.

That said — you can't read her mind.

It’s protected by the fundamental isolation of personhood and the unbridgeable divide between soul and soul!

We are also offered hints like this:

The players' efforts to incarnate and instantiate a transcendent spirit of infinite universal love in the fabric of the game are the source of the meaning of the game. It is the contention of the author that players cannot help but catch fire with this burning spirit as soon as they attempt to play WTF, preventing any inappropriate uses of the mechanics below.

(I want to go out of my way to reassure you that all the quotes in this review are real.)

...So... Look, I don’t know. I kind of love it.

The game, as a story game, is divided into character creation and rules and then further organised by progression through a prologue and 5 books associated with realms or places. Each one has both practical threats and moral threats. The practical threats seem interesting but the moral threats feel more pressing.

Book 1 is set in the Civilized Lands, unless (except but also or even if) all the characters died in the prologue. In Raif, royalty have become vampires. “Setting forth to find the Jewel of All Desiring without their blessing would be unimaginably improper.” In Tin ’An, wishers are hunted by the Duke’s Axeman. “Also the characters do not know where to go next. That is why their mission must end in ignominy here.”

The game requires the players and/or their characters to at least consider a major problem of philosophy before they can move on to book 2.

Book 2 is travel through “the lands of the savage peoples” and then those of the fairies, whose lives are full of stories, and who, the book takes some pains to point out, do not exist.

Book 3 of the game is about the Dragons of the Deeps, unless of course it gets skipped, “although that means never knowing what happened in it or if the characters found the Jewel of All Desiring when you weren't looking.”

The Dragons of the Deeps present a moral threat “whether or not you skip” them.

Book 4 takes the characters under the world, to the realm of the ur-toads. Also, “If the characters have not yet visited the sun now might be a good time”. Did I mention that there are five cardinal directions and that blackguards live on the sun in palaces of ice?

Book 5 is the conclusion, wherein the characters (might) find the Jewel of All Desiring (depending on fate, maybe?). Just working out what it means that this has happened is what an enormous chunk of the book is about. I don’t have the answer. I will note that the game at this point more or less requires the players and/or their characters to solve that major problem of philosophy from the end of book 1.

By the way, somebody “is going to have to die to become the firmament of the world.” There are rules for this. WTF has an imposing spine of metaphysics beneath the dreamlike layers of cloud and poetry veiling it.

The example of play begins with the example character being “troubled by her destiny as an example player in a WTF game” before gathering some other players and discussing whether or not they are already playing Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. It proceeds into a fascinating exercise in creative writing which does not really clear things up all that much, but is written in compelling dialogue of the sort that seems unlikely to occur at a table not occupied by six Jenna Morans. By the time I finished WTF I was looking up all her past work to add to my neglected reading lists.

Minor text quibbles:

• The simple style and layout is actually quite nice. In any other work, I would be nitpicking things like the author’s use of three dashes instead of an em dash. But... I don’t know.
• This work is obviously unfinished from a presentational viewpoint. I don’t remember where or when I found it, but it’s just a word doc converted to PDF with some line diagrams. I don’t know what it could possibly look like, finished and cleaned up and published. If anything, WTF feels like it ought to be more cobbled-together than it. Handwritten in a fading ink, maybe. Or spiralling around like House of Leaves.
  

 

...So that’s it. 100 pages. Difficult to write about but a delight to read. I would be staggered if I read anything more steeped in interesting weirdness for Reviewn June.

I don't know if I'll ever try to play it. There were various little evocative details a person could lift and put in their own games, but that's not why I think you should read it. I don’t care if it counts as a game. It was a textual experience. If you're not in the market for those, leave it alone. What's my favourite bit? All of it.

Let me leave you with a word of warning from page 25 of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist:

Use caution when playing WTF while tired, drunk, or punchy, as it may increase the chance that the shadow lurking beyond the edge of the world shall immure you all in timeless misery.

Where to get it:

http://hitherby-dragons.wikidot.com/a-small-gift-to-my-readers