(Bonus Chapter the First, continued)
Picking up with a doozy:
Inside the Shack (Daniel Ravipinto)
>xyzzy
Voices echo out of the ether in response to your Call…“Receiving Lon-4-G-C…”
“…earing you - identify Xerxes Yellow Zebra Zebra Yellow…”
“…well enough to…”
“…lear, CQ…go ahead…”
That’s also the XYZZY response in Slouching Towards Bedlam, as it turns out.
>push button
(the walkie-talkie (smelling faintly of mildew))
You hold down the button. The speaker blares out: "-checking out the commentary for “Inside the Shack!” The central idea for this room showed up almost-fully-formed as soon as I read the basic description of the project. I knew I wanted to do something strange involving existential horror, but that wasn’t a puzzle. Instead, I wanted an experience where the player had access to a “toy” that they could manipulate until it reached a state that they found satisfactory. The result ended up being both Lovecraftian and something of a riff off the kinds of games I’ve written in the past (the Book functionally being a state-machine that you get to decide the final state of).The Prism sequence wasn’t part of my original vision, but instead grew out of a joke that Jenni Polodna made on the project Slack that ended up taking on a life of its own. There are over twenty strange visuals that can occur in the Prisms and it’s impossible for a player to see all of them on a single playthrough.
The Book is much the same. There are three pages with four possible settings, each of which can vary between two and four states. (It’s a lot.) In fact, there was originally a fourth page to the Book that was dropped due to time constraints. I took the ideas from that page and spread them through the other three and I think the Book sequence is better for it.
It’s my hope that you got to experiment with the Book and that you liked the photograph you ended up-"
You can’t take it anymore: You release the button, and relieve your aching thumb.
Ah yes, the Book that was the centerpiece of this room, where we experimented a bunch and wound up with the photo of our choice.
Wait, what? All I did here was turn pages and then pull the bookmark when I was done, and apparently that means I missed the entire point of the room and, it seems like, the majority of the work the author put in? Ooof, that’s too bad!
…in fact, this was a pivotal enough room that I’ll do some replaying to see what Dan’s talking about here.
Here are some of the views into other prisms that we get this time, which we didn’t see in our first go-round:
Your eyes randomly focus on one of the other chambers. Peter keeps trying to put
Naomi back together. But the pieces don’t fit. And there are too many fingers.
You glance up. Naomi and Peter are reading books back to back. The pages are
sticking to Peter’s fingers. Naomi seems to be melting into Peter’s back.
You look to your left. You see nothing but Naomis. There must be twenty stuffed in
there. They are all singing.
I like that one!
There’s another prism visible now. Naomi and Peter hold one another as blood and
laughter pour from their mouths in equal parts.
That one’s less fun.
Here’s a reminder of what the book looks like, once we get there:
The Book of All Your Days
Above the first of the Book’s pages float sigils in the Tongue which read WHEN WE
WERE NOT YET. The others await a mere turning away.A tableau of meeting is laid out across the Book’s scenery: a domicile of primitive
education. Tiny entities scurry in the background from gathering to gathering,
futilely attempting to expand their primitive minds. In the foreground is a
momentous meeting between two entities as small as the others that crowd the
scene. The Naomi-entity seems to be greeting the Peter-entity.The Four Fundamental Movements of the Utter North, South, East and West are still
available.
Do we just go a direction? Despite the very clear cueing, for some reason I never tried that first time through.
> e
The entities within the Page move about, believing themselves the masters of their
own fate. The Peter-entity advances to the front of the Page.
Now if we look, one detail has changed:
The Peter-entity seems to be greeting the Naomi-entity.
What if we go south?
> s
The spatial axis of the Book turns. The Book brightens as the space within warps
without touching the entities themselves. The real location has become a false one.
Now a different detail has shifted:
A tableau of meeting is laid out across the Book’s scenery: a false scene of lights and
two-dimensional scenery, seemingly for the purpose of entertainment. The
background is awash in activity - a swarm of entities at work.
Will north just reverse that?
> n
She Who Turns the Gyre begins her work and the gearwork of the universe spins
once more. The small entities shift about, growing larger.
Ah, OK – the directions don’t oppose each other, they each look like independent toggles. Here’s the change:
In the foreground is a momentous meeting between two adolescent entities.
Let’s try north again to age us up even more:
In the foreground is a momentous meeting between two adult entities.
And again:
In the foreground is a momentous meeting between two elderly entities.
(One more north resets us back to childhood).
That leaves west:
> w
The Page flips entire and the basis of reality changes. Above the tableau a billion
billion stars bloom - the sprouting of the endless mindgates of the
Vaadignephod-entity, beginning the work of spreading its Aspects across the Page’s
possibilities
Umm, that doesn’t seem great!
The Peter-entity seems to be greeting the Naomi-entity. They are heedless of the danger of Vaadignephod’s spreading mindgates, the nearest one’s tentacles about to snatch up Peter.
Putting it all together, east shifts which of the characters is playing the more active role, south changes the backdrop, north shifts the time, and west invites our buddy Vaadignephod to play a more active role.
This pattern mostly holds in the other pages, too – on the second page, “WHEN WE BECAME”, east toggles the second character between being Peter and being some unknown, other person, while south turns the ritual backdrop from a green, druid-y one to one with a necromancer vibe and another that’s bibliomantic. North and west work basically work the same, except instead of Vaadignephod we can toggle the “Mourning Star” on and off – doesn’t seem great either! For the last page, “WHEN WE ARE NO LONGER”, north and east work the same as on page one, south toggles between a hospital, Naomi and Peter’s house, and what looks like a court, and west summons and dismisses the Legions of the Impious, who for some reason appear to have it in for Peter.
There’s obviously a lot of permutations here; I’ll drop the full transcript and a new save right before this sequence at the end of the update in case folks want to play around themselves. I mess around a bit to get an aesthetically-appealing arrangement – here’s what I wind up with:
Above the first of the Book’s pages float sigils in the Tongue which read WHEN WE
WERE NOT YET. The others await a mere turning away.A tableau of meeting is laid out across the Book’s scenery: a false scene of lights and
two-dimensional scenery, seemingly for the purpose of entertainment. The
background is awash in activity - a swarm of entities at work. In the foreground is a
momentous meeting between two adult entities. The Naomi-entity seems to be
greeting the Peter-entity. They are heedless of the danger of Vaadignephod’s
spreading mindgates, the nearest one’s tentacles about to snatch up Naomi.Above the second of the Book’s pages float sigils in the Tongue which read WHEN
WE BECAME. The others await a mere turning away.A tableau of a primitive binding ritual is laid out across the Book’s scenery: a single
overseer of the ritual dressed in black, standing in a very small space, surrounded
by the books that must contain the complex runes necessary for the ritual. In the
foreground stand those that must be bound. They are adolescent, younger than
those that surround them. One of the entities is the Naomi-entity. The other is not
known to the collective. Above the ritual stands the ultimate symbol of the
Weaver-collective’s triumph: the Mourning Star. Its rays reach to all corners of the
scene, preparing all entities to become part of a unified whole. It shines most
strongly upon the unknown entity.Above the third of the Book’s pages float sigils in the Tongue which read WHEN WE
WERE NO LONGER. The others await a mere turning away.A tableau of some sort of parting ritual is laid out across the Book’s scenery: a
servant of Law, sitting behind a desk, surrounded by books of ritual and protocol.
In the foreground stand those are to be parted. They are adolescent, barely sentient.
The Peter-entity has begun the ritual.Outside the scene, like a churning sea of locusts, stand the Legions of the Impious.
Each with a single, glowing gem of green crystal from Its forehead, each prepared toface the growing threat of Those from Without. The are caught mid-stride,
preparing to swarm towards the Peter-entity.
That gives us this photo:
It’s an old black and white photograph, with a silvery sheen that indicates that perhaps it was
taken in the the early 1900s. It depicts an office of some kind. In the back, before shelves of
books, sits a man in a suit. A lawyer? You and Peter are sitting on a sofa, as far from each other
as possible. You’re both so young - barely out of your teens. An impossibly tall man strides into
the room, brandishing a gem identical to the one that grows between the hollowed-out sockets
of his eyes.This is from the day of your divorce.
You begged him to reconsider when you met to sign the papers in Reno, but he wouldn’t hear a
word of it. He just didn’t care what it would do to you. Where it would leave you.But in the end, none of that really mattered, did it? They crashed through the office, having
overrun most of the block. The secretary you’d spoken to in the waiting room held you down
as the man pressed his gems first to the lawyer’s head, then Peter’s. They screamed and spit
and fought, but when it entered them, they went slack. Then they smiled. You remember
Peter’s smile was as empty as his eyes. And then they came for you, and the green pressed
against your temple until you could think of nothing else but the pain. And then you could
think of nothing else but the cause. And you and Peter and the lawyer followed the man out
into the street, there to stand and do what was needful and necessary. There to do what was
right.This is impossible. There’s no way this happened. There’s no way it could have happened. And
yet — you remember. You remember it as certainly as you remember anything else in your life.
Huh, that seems like it’s just riffing on the last page? What if we go back and turn to the first page before pulling the bookmark:
It’s a color photograph, taken with a Polaroid, given the distinctive frame. It depicts a stage
crowded with scenery and equipment. In the foreground are you and Peter. You’re wearing
that awful grass green skirt your friend Muriel convinced you to buy. Peter’s in slacks and a
black shirt. He looks nervous, and his smile is distinctly awkward. You’re leaning in, your head
against his shoulder. Neither of you seem to notice the horrible black blot that fills the
upper-right portion of the photograph, nor the inky tentacles that are reaching for you.This was taken backstage at the tryouts you met Peter at. You’d done some theater in college
and it’d been awhile since you’d done anything that felt really creative and when Muriel
brought you the poster about the play, you decided to give it a try. Given that you hadn’t done
anything like this in years, you didn’t know a single soul. Neither, apparently, did Peter. But he
warmed to you immediately. You chatted and there were obviously sparks between you from
the beginning. Doubly so when you ended up reading for the parts together. You had a really
good feeling when the director asked to take a snapshot of the two of you together. A really
good feeling about more than just the play.Of course, those good feelings went away the instant the screams started. You watched as the
tendrils snatched Peter up and away from you, disappearing into the darkness. You couldn’t
move, you couldn’t react. This couldn’t be happening. And then there were tendrils around you
and the black came and smothered the world until nothing was left.
Okay, it’s just the state of whichever page you pull the bookmark on that seems to matter – phew, I thought the combination of all the variables across all three pages was being factored in, which was making my head spin. Here’s the last photo of the set, corresponding to the WHEN WE BECAME I laid out above:
It’s an old black and white photograph, with a silvery sheen that indicates that perhaps it was
taken in the the early 1900s. It depicts an office of some kind. In the back, before shelves of
books, stands a judge in black robes. You and a man you remember as Frank stand in the
foreground. He’s in a tuxedo, you’re in a lovely floor-length dress. You’re both so young -
barely out of your teens. From a window to one side, a strange and powerful light floods the
room.This is from the day you were married! You remember it like it was yesterday. It was so awful.
Papa had never approved of you and Frank. That was why you’d always met in secret. But then Mama had found out you were… in the family way. All of a sudden, any talk of separating the
two of you stopped and they and Frank’s family demanded that you and Frank tie the knot
immediately. But you’d never listened to your parents. First chance you got, you ran off to the
courthouse to elope.But in the end, all the planning didn’t mean anything. For through the window a new sun
exploded, eating away the walls of the courthouse. The judge melted into his robes and the
blackened creature he became began to eat the books, growing like a fattened worm. Frank
clawed at his face until his hands melted through his skull. And you remember dissolving into
the floor, becoming part of every person, plant and stone that melted with you.
I think the ones with less overt supernatural presence would wind up more effective for me – these are all fun, but the one we got in the main playthrough seemed way creepier.
Anyway, another fun diversion but let’s get back to what we’re here to do:
Outside the Library (Gavin Inglis)
>push button
(the walkie-talkie (smelling faintly of mildew))
You hold down the button. The speaker blares out: “-room nearly had a tiny free library on a stand, inspired by the Little Free Library on Exchange Terrace, Providence, RI. But it seemed like a waste to put it outside a full-sized library. I love-”
Too bad we didn’t get that – those little free libraries are cool, and plus, if I have one critique of Cragne Manor, it’s that there aren’t enough libraries.
Speaking of:
Backwater Public Library (Carl Muckenhoupt)
A detail has changed here:
The librarian’s dress is lying in a deflated heap on the floor. A trail of slime connects it to a vent in the wall.
You can also see a gray wig and a wax mask here.
Umm, what?
>x dress
It’s a plain dark floor-length thing with long sleeves and a high collar, like something an antagonistic Victorian governess would wear.>take it
Taken.>wear it
You put on the librarian’s dress.
I’m sure this is slimy AF, but how can we not?
>x wig
Gray acrylic hair bound up in a tight bun.>take it
Taken.>wear it
You put on the gray wig.
This is getting fun!
>x wax
A perfect replica of the librarian’s face, molded in wax.>take it
Taken.>wear it
You put on the wax mask.>x me
Disheveled. Exhausted. Disguised as a librarian. Not crying yet. Glad to be in from the cold, if only for a little while.
…you’re telling me I could have rescued Peter while dressed up as librarian, down to a creepy wax life-mask? Aww man.
>x vent
Just an ordinary heating vent, a few inches across, high on the back wall. A trail of slime connects it to the spot on the floor where you found the dress.>open vent
There’s no vent cover.>enter vent
That’s not something you can enter.
Too bad, though as this isn’t a Deus Ex game I suppose it’s fine that the vents are off-limits.
Anyway, this isn’t what we’re here for!
>xyzzy
Huh, that’s a bug (blank output). This is another room with publicly-available source code, so hopefully we can see what’s up – clearly XYZZY is meant to do something here.
>push button
(the walkie-talkie (smelling faintly of mildew))
You hold down the button. The speaker blares out: "-library is the endpoint of one of Cragne Manor’s major puzzle tracks, so its main puzzle was laid out in advance by the project’s organizers. Beyond that, the specifics of the room largely flow from my laziness. I didn’t want to bother implementing dialogue, so I made a librarian who insists on silence. That’s a pretty unrealistic stereotype in my experience, so I decided the librarian isn’t real. That reminded me of the mute man from Lovecraft’s The Festival, so it’s possible to find a minor call-out to that here. I’m not entirely sure what she really is. Possibly some kind of octopus. Definitely not a librarian, anyway.And what sort of library does a fake librarian tend? Not a good one. I’ve tried to make an extreme contrast to the temple-of-knowledge atmosphere of the university library in Anchorhead, and I’m a little worried that actual librarians will take offense at the result. Even the grimoire, the one useful book in the entire place, is the work of a crackpot.
The title of the grimoire, De Vermibus Laceris, literally “of cut worms”, is based on the name “Verlac” from Anchorhead, by way of De Vermis Mysteriis from Cthulhu Mythos lore. Thanks to Emily Short for help with the Latin.
Yes, there really was a major earthquake in New Hampshire, estimated magnitude 6.5-7.0, the same year that the Massachusetts Bay Colony got its first printing press. This is the sort of coincidence that isn’t even really a coincidence; it’s just two completely unrelated facts, and I’m engaging in a sort of sleight of hand when I imply a connection.
Room tested by Chris Conley, Michael Fessler, Jeremy Freese, Josh Giesbrecht, Lucian, Daniel Ravipinto, Ivan Roth, Andrew Schultz, Sean M. Shore, @ToffleToft, and Greg Travis.
Players will also be interested to learn that-"
Hopefully the source code will similarly tell us what we might also be interested to learn!
Looks like @Draconis gets full marks for his Latin work here, down to spotting the Verlac connection. Nicely done!
>push button
You hold down the button. The speaker blares out: "?testing, one two three. Hi there! I’m Jenni Polodna. Cragne Manor was originally my idea, then Ryan Veeder created the Google forms and blog announcements required to make it a Thing We Were Actually Doing For Real, which either makes him the Romy to my Michelle (as in, he invented Post-Its and I made them yellow) or the other way around. (We’ve discussed this but nothing was ever solidified.)My room is loosely based on the time I went to the eastern shore of Maryland with my ex over Christmas and his family told me stories about everything that had happened to everyone on the eastern shore of Maryland, which mostly ended with “And then it burned down.”
“You mean the gas station over by the bike shop, the one that burned down?” someone would ask. “No, I mean the gas station that was over by Linda’s diner before THAT burned down,” someone else would respond. “Oh, how’s Linda doing?” “She burned down.” I swear I’m only exaggerating a little bit. (Linda is fine.)
Very much thanks to my beta testers: Andrew Schultz, Buster Hudson, Chris Jones, Hanon Ondricek, Jeremy Freese, Katherine Morayati, Lucian Smith, Q. Pheevr; and to my weiner-tester, Matt Weiner. “Paradoxically nearby to everything” line stolen from Carl Muckenhoupt. “Squahonomie” is pronounced “sk’-NOH-mee.” Thanks a bunch, and enjoy your stay in Cragne?"
I like that in this thread, we were only four years late to the party with our weiner-jokes. Also, I have relatives who live in Maryland, and based on conversation with them what Jenni says of the Eastern Shore is if anything understated (they live in Annapolis and have experienced very little in the way of arson, thankfully).
Town square, Backwater, VT (Marco Innocenti)
>push button
(the walkie-talkie (smelling faintly of mildew))
You hold down the button. The speaker blares out: "?the billboard (“Anchorhead tribute band looking for a singer!”), something popped in me.Anchorhead is, by far, my preferred Interactive Fiction game of all times: Photopia made me cry; Spider and Web had the best A-HA! moment; One Eye Open made me become an IF writer, somehow; and all those pre-Infocom era games – The Questprobes, The Hobbit; the lovely Gruds in Space – clung to my soul in a way only the things you happen to witness when you’re pre-teen succeed in doing… still, not a single one of those I loved the way I loved the masterpiece by Mike Gentry.
I’m not going to write an essay on Anchorhead. Not here, not now… and probably I never will. Let it just be known that the atmosphere and the (incredibly convoluted, sometimes) puzzles – adding to the three-days/three-acts theatrical marvel – have been the peak of interactive storytelling I’m trying to replicate since forever. As Watchmen by Alan Moore sculpted my writing nerve, Anchorhead represented everything I wanted to see (and live) in a game.
So, I jumped on board.
Fortunately for you, the Player, I’m not ‘the’ singer, in this gig, but happen to be part of a family that counts more than 85 people. Because, you know, as usual: life kept getting in da way, and so did my family, coming back to town before I finished and requesting my time every other second. Also: I didn’t realize how much effort a single room can take when trying to be on par with the marvelous people I’m working with. My room is simple – and contains an incredibly convoluted puzzle (I’m more of a story-driven writer) – still, it is here. I dedicated all my guts to it and, although I know it deserves a large post-release remake, I’m happy with it. I hope you will be happy too.
Thanks to Jenni and Ryan for this thing, for accepting me on this trip, and for letting me make a game with?"
You let go of the button, ending the transmission, and you squeeze your long-suffering hand to alleviate a little bit of the pain. How much more of this can your poor muscles endure?
Aww, I really dig this enthusiastic ode to Marco’s inspirations (and at the same time, I also really enjoy the subtle shade that Jenni and/or Ryan is throwing on the folks who write really long commentary bits). This was another puzzle I liked quite a bit, actually – it seems really complicated at first, but snaps into place really nicely, with a cool aha moment.
Drinking Fountain (Lucian Smith)
>push button
(the walkie-talkie (smelling faintly of mildew))
You hold down the button. The speaker blares out: “-for this room was “public drinking fountain” and I knew I wanted to have stuff going on during the rest of the game, like I did in IF Whispers 3. So that’s where this started! I had a vague idea of “a ghost that follows you around”, and talking with the organizers, they liked that idea, so I went with that. They put me on the “library book” puzzle track, so connecting my ghost with library books seemed apropos. Then the “public drinking fountain” prompt made me think of the “whites only” and “colored” drinking fountains, and “racism” seemed a fitting theme for an “uncovering old horrors” type of game. I did a search for “the KKK in Vermont in the 20s”, and found that there were indeed a few years in there where the KKK managed to successfully establish themselves in some areas. I figured Backwater was the perfect place for that to happen, and from there, it was just a matter of getting everything lined up and telling a coherent story–and of writing some perky cluelessly-racist prose. Which was, with any luck, as uncomfortable to read as it was-”
Cool to see the development of the idea, here – I feel bad for caviling about the history behind the segregated drinking fountain when I first came across it, since Lucian clearly did the research! And yeah, unlike the original, Confederate-irredentist incarnation, the 20’s KKK was as much a Northern and Midwestern concern as it was a creature of the South, its re-founding largely sparked as I understand it by the nation-wide craze for Birth of a Nation.
Under the Bridge (Tenth)
>push button
(the walkie-talkie (smelling faintly of mildew))
You hold down the button. The speaker blares out: “-advertised, I am bad at managing time, over-ambitious with features. I also completely changed the direction and solution of my room during the final weekend, after not being satisfied with how the puzzle was going (or how it tied into the Venus track) - I won’t spoil anything, but you were originally going to have a conversation with an NPC using the payphone. The phone is still there (as it should be, after all the time I sunk into it), but it now combines with my original idea for the Venus track puzzle. Anyway, the intention is for the room to be evocative, creepy, and just interactive enough to “sell” you on the idea. It’s not really intended to be much of a puzzle (unless you didn’t live through the 80s and 90s - then you might need to google some stuff). Anyway, thanks to Ryan and Jenni for their infinite patience, everyone on the Cragne Manor slack for their help and support, especially MattW, and to EmilyGhost for helping me come up with even more 90s junk to write on the side of an imaginary payphone. I hope it’s not a total-”
This is another room I found evocative and fun to engage with – admittedly, I’m of exactly the right generation to appreciate the references – I definitely wouldn’t have guessed that it was such a late-in-the-day scramble to get it done!
(Stopping here, we’ll do tunnels plus the church in the next bit)