Fantasy Opera: The Theater of Memory (Lamp Post Projects)
I love a game with stats and dice. Part of this is D&D withdrawal (I haven’t had a group for years at this point), but there’s an extra investment in a character: I made the choices that will shape (or at least texture) my experience, which lets me RP a little, makes the stakes of each roll or choice more personal. I think the dice and stats were very well done here. Simple, never overwhelming, breaking up the story-heavy passages with just enough gamey elements to maintain both the feeling that I was making choices without losing narrative momentum. I don’t think your dice rolls matter to the overall narrative, but it still feels good and adds a little personalized flair, and I had tons of fun, and I’ll be looking up the first trio of LPP games. I hope that Nell continues playing in this space.
The world is interesting, too. Post-medieval and pre-modern aesthetics are arguably under-utilized in fantasy, especially for the complex and diverse world that most D&D takes places in. I say D&D because that’s a conscious influence here and not because it’s set anywhere specific to D&D, as far as I know.
I do think there was an unevenness to the actual handling of the mystery. The player has probably already notice connections between dreams during day 1, but the intermezzo still asks us to perform a lengthy matching mini-game to further hone in on these parallels, “coding” the main themes or emotions that occur across all dreams. It is skippable, and I did skip it. On the other hand, I hadn’t realized the full significance of the painted emblems on the seats; the intermezzo makes that connection for you, no participation required. I’d have liked the dream matching minigame as an optional puzzle you could play if you needed a hint (I think this sort of participatory hint system would work well for a mystery game as something you have to seek out), and maybe a library visit or chat with a knowledgeable contact to get us more clues for the second half of the mystery. I wanted to feel like I did at least some of the work for that second piece of the puzzle.
My longest thoughts are about this story. This game made me think about justice, because as a mystery, it’s at least partly about what justice is, who seeks it and why[1] . We’re asked to decide the appropriate fate once the culprit is unmasked, and alarmingly this justice system has no set punishment for the crime. We need to carefully consider what the appropriate response is.
When I do, I find that something is rotten in Lyra. I don’t know if the story knows this, and I’m quite sure most of these characters don’t. These thoughts are longer, less about ToM as a game than as a narrative, and spoilery; it’s going under a readmore so it’s easier to skip.
An indulgent close reading
The dreams aren’t harmful, that’s clear to all, but one of the first things the director says to us emphasizes the gravity of the crime: “As you well know, unlicensed spellcasting is against the law. If someone has been dabbling in malevolent magic, we will see them brought to justice.” Unlicensed immediately grabbed me! By whom? The state, since it’s punishable by the state’s laws? Who can be licensed? For what purposes? Also, malevolent? More nuisance than malevolent, surely?
The real harm becomes clear as we talk to others. Alvisa the architect dismisses “these magic types” as liars, cons, exploitative hucksters. She says this while we’re standing in an enchanted opera house; there’s clearly some cognitive dissonance, some persistent socio-political narratives in play here. Later, we can choose to let Vitale off easy if he gives up info on a mage, and the game tells us our reasoning is that the mage is surely more dangerous than Vitale. If you leave the decision up to the opera troupe, they’ll vote to turn him in (even some of the ones who had good or sympathetic dreams about his life). The game shows us that the majority believe that unlicensed magic use must be punished, regardless of how harmful the effect is.
Why this impulse to punish regardless of (lack of) harm or danger? Let us use our leetle grey cells and sum up: Alvisa calls the tiefling mage a con. Vitale (whose motives I find stunningly unsympathetic, the sort of desire to be special and immortal held by tech bros and insecure tyrants) spent a lot of time and money (“I bribed the right people”) seeking out this mage, then paid her more money to perform complex but benign magic. If turned in, Vitale’s happy to rat for the cops indefinitely because he feels the mage “preyed on his weakness [by taking the money he offered], and he [is] as eager as anyone to see her magical practices put to an end.”
The only harm we’ve seen, the only danger that anyone has actually named, is economic. We can’t punish Vitale, he’s just a poor little guy, look, he’s crying! Vitale is the real victim, and the really dangerous criminal is this highly skilled mage who had the gall to take money for services. The harm, then, is not in the magic “these magic types” do, but the way they undercut the monopoly on magic (and, likely, the lucrative contracts that licensure can bring). The system has strong reasons to frame them as both unskilled but somehow still dangerous, to foster an attitude in its citizens that punishment is deserved but that the state is still ultimately in control. Whenever there’s a widely held attitude that a group is somehow both petty/lesser/weaker yet also dangerous, I get pretty suspicious, especially when the state hasn’t bothered to settle on consistent punishment for this group. Vitale gets off pretty easy; you get the sense that the mage, if ever caught, probably won’t.
There’s something to be said, too, about race. The mage who did this magic for Vitale is a tiefling. In the world of D&D tieflings are often regarded with suspicion and distrust as dangerous liars, thieves, cons whose magic comes from infernal ancestry. The mage’s bouncer was a kobold, another literal underclass (they live in tunnels under cities and make good thieves). We don’t see racism on page anywhere else, but this choice is interesting given the discourse about “these magic types.”
The story is overall pretty breezy, pleasant; a low-stakes mystery with very little opposition to your efforts to solve it, so the dissonance between the harm done and the eagerness to bring the mage to justice stuck out. This isn’t a criticism; it makes the story more complex to notice something the characters seem unaware of, and it gives greater weight to that final choice you make. I am on that mage’s side, though. Fuck the fantasy police and Vitale’s pathetic grasping for immortality; get ‘em, Lunetta, I hope you take all those old men’s money and never get caught. Magic for all!
Finally, a word about the art—it was great. It enhanced the design, was skillfully done, and matched the tone of the writing perfectly. There’s something quite special about a game by one person that does writing, art, and coding As an overall work, this is one to be proud of.
Footnote 1
As a fantasy mystery set in an opera house, it reminded me of Katherine Addison’s Cemeteries of Amalo fantasy novellas, the first of which is about murder in an opera house that features heavily in all three books. These books are similarly preoccupied with justice, personal and systemic, and this game strongly invited the comparison, apparently by accident. A fun coincidence! I love these novellas and the novel they spun off from, but because I love them I’m protectively hesitant to rec them. In addition to the opera house, they also feature a plot about illicit pornographers using recently invented photography to exploit underage orphans; the high stakes of the municipal cemetery’s dysfunction and politics in a world where the dead rise if their graves aren’t tended; plot-relevant systemic homophobia; radical political factions in the airship maker’s labor union; the racial politics of giving the big opera solo to a goblin performer rather than an elf; and a traumatized, anhedonic protagonist with a martyr complex. They’re something special (though I think the ending of the third and most recent is quite bad), and if this sounds like your thing you should read them.
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sounds~ (ASMR) (LOOPED)” soundtrack. Like its setting, the narrative has more branches than you’d think at first glance. I like how it gets a little freaky with it (I was erotically eaten by a spider, which isn’t My Thing in that way but is my thing as a player).