A toy game from the 2016 game design advent calendar.

---

This is a game about shells, in that it has nothing to do with shells. In my defense this was a very difficult prompt. After a long and laborious inspiration-finding process, I decided I liked the idea of carrying your home around with you. More specifically, this is a game about carrying your baggage around with you.

Requires:

• A number of knick-knacks; you could just do tokens, but this is way cooler and totes "evocative"
• GM + players

Rules:

Every player begins with 3 Mementos, represented by knick-knacks.

When you are challenged, and doubt enters your mind, recall a memory that made you. This memory should be the source of your doubt, inform the challenge, or relate to the situation; run through a Haiku scene to explore the memory. When you return to the moment, choose:

• If you follow in the spirit of the memory, resolving the challenge as the memory demands, hold another Memento.
• If you rebel against the spirit of the memory, resolving the challenge in spite of its influence, give up a Memento.

A Haiku scene is a very short scene with two participants: the character remembering, and a person, idea, or anything played by anyone else at the table. There are only three lines of dialogue in a Haiku scene. One player speaks first, the other second, and the scene is finished by the first player. They should be short; each turn to speak is not an excuse to monologue. Speak, let your voice be heard, and move on.

The rememberer always chooses which other player will participate. They rememberer has two options when starting a Haiku scene:

• Decide who the other player will play, and speak the first and third lines.
• Set the scene, and speak the second line.

Whichever is chosen, the other participant will take the other.

GM:

The GM is only responsible for playing the world and NPCs -- though not those a rememberer chooses for someone else. Their goal is to ask questions and find doubt. "Ranger, who taught you to shoot? And how did he die?" Leading questions work well here, and the player can always choose to reject any details you add this way.

If you give players an opportunity to have lived a troubled life, they will. That'll tell you where doubt is, and thus where you need to suggest Haiku scenes.

Notes:

This game is kind of interesting. It doesn't resolve action with random dice, but by responding to micro-scenes created collaboratively with another. Appearances aside, the Mementos are not a currency for mediating success; they're there to mediate character change. Rejecting your doubt maybe be coincident with success in the present moment, but it mostly means you change as a character. You get to do so whenever you please, so long as you've given in to doubt previously (and thus reinforced the identity held in your memories).

The idea is to create a balance between the self that could be, and the self that was. We're playing to observe this balance and find out what this means for the characters and players.

--Karaktakus the One Who is as He Was Not

Prompt/cover photo: Wikimedia Commons