coffee

the first is that there is no feasible way for you to ever end the game without breaking it. its simply impossible. the game works like this:

1. you have an item called an "arm" which defines everything about you. it is like every other item. you have a rating of how good you are at your job, which is defined by the "arm." you roll a d6 to either obey or disobey the purpose of the "arm."
2. you gain items, which you can use to increase your dicepool when rolling. if you fuck up, you lose a number of items rounded down (2 items = 1 lost, 3 items = 1 lost, etcetera). an arm is like any other item, except if you lose it you die
3. theoretically, a player character should never be able to die, because if they fuck up while rolling only with their arm - they do not lose anything except progress in tracking the love omega (more on that in a second).

the only way to leave the game is by rolling exactly your job rating, in which case the game breaks in a special way (download the game to see what that looks like). otherwise, you are stuck forever on this quest to find the Love Omega. do I tell you this? fuck no. that would break the punchline.

now, what is the Love Omega? well...

the second big joke is that I formatted the game terribly. just completely whiffed it. the setting explainer (which normally tells you what kind of narrative space you're engaging with) is obscured by the meta-textual rules. what is the Love Omega? what is the Space? who are You? why are you on this quest? simply put - go fuck yourself. fun fact - I did actually write a setting explainer! there is a text you can read on the original design doc! you can't ever see it and no one will tell you what it says, especially not me.

what does this have to do with Negative Space? well, two things - I think settings guides are a bit silly. every time I see one of those DnD-ass "Adventurer's Guide to Havenscrest" where the majority of the book is taken up by long paragraphs explaining who lives where with what and why, I'm confused as to why those details do not live in the actual mechanics of the book. I know why - everyone wants to be Tolkien and write the Silmarillion with all of those family charts. they adopt the voice of a sociologist because that's what Tolkien did when writing everything past the Hobbit. but the setting exists in play, paragraphs of flavor text.

the second reason I did this was because of Dark Souls. I've been trying to write "the Dark Souls lasers/feelings hack" since I first started writing games - see the kinda OK but not really imaginative Sable Spirits for what that looks like. its got all of the trappings of dark souls, with little paragraph settings you and your friends can explore. but its not new in this field - there are a lot of people trying to write "dark souls in (x system)," including Dark Souls.

however, I think everyone puts too much emphasis on place when adapting Dark Souls - including myself! I can admit it! they want to put in Lordran and Vendrick and the nameless King and here are their little connections - to me, the quintessential Dark Souls experience is dropping your ass in the middle of a weird location with strange visuals and little to no understanding of the actual history of the world. "why are you here? what is your purpose?" I don't know buddy, the lady in green told me to go fight a giant guy with a mirror shield and I wound up in the middle of the ocean tripping huge dudes to fall off a cliff. what that has to do with purpose is beyond me (can you tell DS2 is my favorite?)

hence, the obliteration of the setting guide. my desired experience of Dark Souls: The Game cannot be found in the million lore videos on YouTube, nor can it be found in the item descriptions on Fextralife (though I do both because I find it relaxing). I feel most engaged when I wander through an abandoned tower and find myself fighting a gigantic bug to steal his clothes. why am I here? who knows. I only know that I must link the flame.

the effect is a Beckett-esque obliteration of narrative continuity and fictional space. you wander from set-piece to set-piece collecting strange crap for no reason other than you want to feel the LOVE OMEGA. I think this can be read as a cheap-shot at OSR games - the mindless drudgery of doing the same two types of roll over and over again with no other change than which shield, sword, or carapace you're working with. its not. OSR games have tremendous potential to build out a truly unique sense of space and historicity through their repeated rolls. exploration is the key term.

though, we always find the impression to prove that exist, no?