Islands had a fairly long gestation process which gave me plenty of ideas to work from but despite the abundance of ideas, I was not able to pull a game together. When the ISS people began to solicit games to Playstorm, I threw this idea into their laps.

We met a week before the actual Playstorm to discuss a system since I was at a complete loss. The first thing we tackled was the problem of the mystery - how do you construct a game around a mystery, with a system tied to the solving of that mystery, without having the players dismantle the mystery ad-hoc?

Jason suggested that rather than have the mystery spelled out before hand, have the players add facts about the mystery as the game goes on. It tied in very nicely with my desire to give players as much narrative power as I could. They would be creating the island along with the GM so it seemed natural that they would also be writing the mystery along with the GM.

We also talked about having a central Trait - Addiction - that the game would revolve around, and having all the characters belong to an addiction support group or have them all in group therapy as a way to start off on a common ground. From there, we began to talk about how a game session might go - How to start? As the world reached the point of disintegration, what happens? And just how important would the real world be to the game?

Incorporating the bag and tokens idea was easy. I knew I had to do something with the central trait of the island that would descend as the players acted against it, and when it hit zero, the whole space would fall apart. The tokens would be an easy way to track that descent and different colors would add in some randomness. What then?

We began to discuss the idea of what the players could take out of this, and since they were competing to get these tokens in game, how would they effect the end game? This was when the session really jelled and the idea of taking away something from this island began to take focus. In this stage of the game, we saw the possibility of taking some small part of the island with us, learning something about the character or the character’s addiction, that the dream world exposed and writing it down on the sheet as a permanent way of marking the encounter.

We knew the structure of the game, we had a rough system, and we set a date a week later to run an actual Playstorm(tm). In the week’s time, I wrote up some notes and added a second central trait to the system (the first being Addiction, the second being its inverse, Resonance.) I began to play with the idea of these two traits being a sum of ten, and whenever one goes up, the other goes down.

Addiction in general is a bad thing, and Resonance in general is a good thing. In some way, Addiction is the character’s connection to the dream world and Resonance the connection to the real world. For a resolution system, I decided to go with some very basic, general traits (positive or negative) that could be stretched to fit the situation and have a point value. The player would roll the number of dice assigned to the trait against the target number of the dream world’s Resonance rating. A high enough roll would let the player reach into the bag for tokens and when one red or a multiple of five white tokens were on the table, the resonance would drop by one.

It seemed enough to go on, and I was ready to run the Playstorm!

One sunny afternoon last summer, I cornered Mr. Epidiah Ravachol, (designer of ENnie award winning horror game Dread) and told him about an idea for a game that was rattling around in my head. It was going to be about people who go exploring in strange dream worlds. The twist was that the players make up these strange dream worlds as a group with the GM. I wanted the game to have a Lovecraftian feel, but instead of exploring cosmic horror through monsters, I wanted to emulate stories like The Silver Key and the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, where the dream worlds are reflections of the characters and there’s a meaningful but horrific connection between them. Eppy gave me some sober advice, “I think there’s a game there, but you need to figure out what this game plays out like, and while you can get the story game people with the player investment, you have to make sure you like it.” He also gave me some practical advice I could follow-up on, right away. “Try writing a story about it.”

So I went away, and wrote a story fairly quickly. It was about two friends who used to dream walk their way into a rainy and swampy island where a sleeping and forgotten city holds some malevolent secret at its heart, where a third friend had gone missing. While I liked the story, I wasn’t sure how I could possibly contort its moody and dreamy atmosphere into a set of rules to fit the game, or how to make it compelling enough, that people would want to play it.

I spent some time making mad scribbles about what the game might be. I wrote about the dream worlds as corrupt ideas, I wrote about the flash of inspiration that makes these dream worlds exist, about selfish secrets that wants to protect themselves by trying to absorb the explorers, by infecting them with their own corruption. The game would be a struggle between the explorers and the dream worlds, and just when the mystery is finally resolved, when the secret is revealed, the dream world is robbed of all meaning and starts to disintegrate, but not without leaving a mark on the explorers. This was exciting stuff!

But, for some reason, it stalled there. The idea just did not boil down to an abstract. I couldn’t make any more progress, no matter how much I tried. The more I looked at the structure the more messy it seemed and eventually, it started to look like a mistake and other projects took my attention away. The game stayed in the back of my mind, and I found myself returning to it now and again, and talking about it with people.

At some point (I don’t remember when or how) it moved from being a game about Lovecraftian horror to a game about addiction. People addicted to these dream states, these out of this world experiences, and the game became about a struggle to resist being sucked into their dream lives while falling headlong into them.

I had some further ideas for system inspired by an old Dragonlance book which had a basic system in it for alignment shifts, where you selected your alignment on a horizontal scale and depending on the actions taken in game would move one slot to the left or right. Somehow, I managed to recall that bit of information a decade after I last saw it, and wanted to incorporate something like that as a way of tracking the character getting closer to the dream world, being influenced and absorbed by it. This began to change the way I saw the dream world and I began to realize I would need to pay attention to the dream world as I would a character, with a character sheet and all the trappings that went with that.

The last idea to became a firm element that I wanted to integrate was from a friend of mine who’s not a gamer, but is very interested in Lovecraft. When I mentioned the game to him in its early state, he suggested something about a black bag filled with tokens that the players had to reach into for a pull rather than (or perhaps in addition to) rolling dice. It seemed very moody and appropriate to the game at the time, and I kept that idea as something valuable.

My biggest issue at this point was this mystery that the players would be exploring. I wanted it to be resolved with dice, but I didn’t want the GM to have to come up with an actual mystery for each session - it seemed like a monumental task to create meaningful mysteries that connected to the characters and were surreal and dream like in their logic for every single session. It also seemed very important to avoid the issue of either having a player guess the ending in an anticlimactic way, or having the game drag forever because the players couldn’t get the clues.

By this time, I had run out of steam and ideas. Maybe this was a flawed concept to start with, or perhaps it was a book or a story rather than a game. I didn’t know what to do with it and was loathe to turn my back on it entirely after spending half a year on it.

That was when I heard about the Imagination Sweat Shop.