Tuatara Deliquescence

If you were around the tabletop games hobby 20 years ago, you probably remember the infamous game-that-never-was, Tuatara Deliquescence. A product of early forays into crowdfunding, production flared out after developer Laura Khang vanished in mysterious circumstances.

The project was abandoned, and every part of it was thought lost.

But I have stumbled upon a staggering 63 pages of lost Tuatara Deliquescence development material, from character power cards to magazine covers! I have cleaned it up and digitised it so that you can currently get it for free, with my commentary:

What was Tuatara Deliquescence?

Laura Khang intertwined physics and metaphysics in a game that was deeply concerned with questions like "how we know things", "what it means to be perfect", and "what is the nature of infinity".

The game was philosophically transgressive, railing against the inevitable formation of a cosmos-wide sapience. Per Khang:

It is the fate of all things to become an interconnected consciousness of impossible scope. Your role as malefactors is to assail this destiny with every weapon you can find.

Tuatara Deliquescence was completely unlike Khang's previous game, 15 Hours In The Oort Cloud With Ferdinand Magellan. The new project was inscrutable, complicated, and incredibly broad in scope.

With this new trove of information, we know that Tuatara Deliquescence was going to have twelve stats: Antagonism, Congruence, Curiosity, Enormity, Extensity, Imaginability, Incipience, Inevitability, Precedence, Selfhood, Standard Model Complexity, and Understanding.

(Standard Model Complexity's substats included the speed of light, the Planck constant, lepton flavour, and stringiness)

Characters had powers like "Nihilogony", "Reverse Entropy", "Demystify", and "Become Imperfect".

The scope, metatextual nature, and dubious heroism of Tuatara Deliquescence is said to have inspired a laundry list of modern TTRPGs: Everything from The House Of Leaves RPG to Wallace Wunkle's Tragedy Factory to Triangle Agency, to say nothing of that weird subset of Homestuck fan games focused on travelling through time to kill frogs. (It has long been a widespread and completely unsupported theory of the fan community that Tuatara Deliquescence was somehow "about time travel".)

 

We finally have more information about this lost classic

Now, with this rediscovery of a trove of early Tuatara Deliquescence work, we can get some insight into:

• Laura Khang's favourite gameplay structure, the "Floorcrawl", which was used to model something called Single Planar Travel and depended on game / real-world values like Carpet Friction and Tile Hardness
• What it means if "the cosmos has devoured its progeny", and exactly how inevitable that is
• Things that could happen in the game, like "drinking the quantum foam" or accidentally "breaking euphonia"
• Character powers that let you Understand The Scope Of Infinity, Reopen Loopholes, Diffract Reality, or Gain Omnipotence
• Character creation mechanics like entrenchment and immurement
• The community's fixation on things like the 1970s children's boardgame Hunt the Quark, Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and the Tumblr joke about "Two-atara Deliquescence"

Regarding the game's curious title, the rumour that it comes from Dorothy Parker’s list of the English language’s most phonaesthetic short phrases (fourth after ‘halcyon jonquil’, ‘darling syllabub’, and ‘mellifluous hush’) is not true. Nor did Welsh prog rock duo Two Atari Delinquents sue Laura Khang. The old image macro featuring a puzzled Patrick Troughton tipping out a grey liquid from a metallic prop mug, titled ‘Reconstituted Dalek Essence’, is almost certainly unrelated.

 

An interesting read whether or not you've heard of Tuatara Deliquescence

This is a weird game that has left a weird legacy. You can get the Tuatara Deliquescence ephemera on itch.io,

https://periapt-games.itch.io/tuatara-deliquescence

RPG trader, 

https://rpg-trader.com/products/5322/tuatara-deliquescence

or DriveThruRPG,

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/572441/tuatara-deliquescence

 

Disclaimer: This is an experimental art project made for the You Cannot Play This TTRPG Jam. In the space of all possible worlds, Tuatara Deliquescence surely existed and you could play it. In this world, it did not. You cannot play it.