sphere of the sacred worm

The description of the series, while accurate, is so funny

• Steph spent book 1 on a silver/emptiness arc until she was finally discovered, and then started a purple/shepherd arc
• Aaron's been on a green/otherworldly arc this whole time babeyyyy. Love to wrestle with and dissolve an identity before becoming something new
• Christine is on red/storyteller; she's dealing with trauma and whatnot but really the key thing of her life seems to be how Everything Happens So Much and falling deeper and deeper into various secrets and conspiracies
• Valérie is on a blue/bindings arc on account of working with the forbidden powers of her captors to engage in a daring scheme
• Melissa was hardcore silver/emptiness as well as a youth, but moved to purple/shepherd now that she sorta has things under control, much like Steph
  Hard to assign silver arcs given the base level of trauma everyone has is weapons grade stuff

Campaign Conventions

• If it's not one thing, it's another
• Gender is more mutable and messier than you expect
• Healing is a group effort
• Trauma reverberates through your life

Dorley Hall

• Leftovers must be plentiful
• Mugs must be tasteless
• Your Sisters share your traumas
• Your Sisters need your loyalty and secrecy
• To descend is to be unmade
• To ascend is to be reborn
• You can always become a girl

h/t to @figura and @veryroundbird for their assistance in writing these

• (Suffer) Transformation/Metamorphosis
• Wicked Action
• Shared Reaction
• (Be In) Trouble
• Sympathetic Action/Nudge

Chapters often run over the course of a day or so, but can be more or less arbitrary; the pace is really about how often interesting incidents and developments are occurring. ¹

So, when establishing a genre, one of the first questions is fairly straightforward- what are the sorts of major beats this piece of media cares about? Dorley obviously has loads of people feeling or experiencing trauma in various ways. There's a lot of bonding over emotional conversations, and lots of people making decisions of varying amounts of wisdom. People get force fem'd a bunch. Girls support and sometimes undermine each other. Resistance and secrets are all turned inwards.

Anyways-

Let's talk about the trauma

Chuubo's has a lot of ways to characterize suffering- four, in fact. (Suffer) Adversity, (Suffer) Corruption, (Suffer) Trauma, and (Suffer) Transformation/Metamorphosis. A straightforward read ('all these girls have sooooo much trauma') suggests that (Suffer) Trauma would be the easy pick

(Suffer) Trauma
Condition: You’ve just failed to completely defend against something really traumatic. This could be anything from “seeing something horrifying” to “the psychic attack of an
elder god.” Or, something’s just triggered/reminded you of an ongoing trauma.
Action: Experience surreal effects; then, your psychological wounds deepen.
Special Consequence: If you don’t already have one, you’ll pick up a “trigger”— Something that can happen to reawaken the trauma, even if you get away from whatever is causing it right now. For instance, if you’re traumatized by seeing bugs eating a dead animal, then seeing similar bugs or food with a similar consistency might trigger a resurgence of this trauma and a new Trauma action, later on

And to be clear, it's not a bad pick. It captures the general gist of things! It's probably a common out-of-genre XP action to take! But Chuubo's genres can only have 3-5 total in-genre actions, and I think there's a better choice for emphasizing the trauma.

And that's because Dorley Hall has a fundamental thesis about your suffering. It believes that your suffering can be given the meaning it desires it to have. Before you came, that's the (Suffer) Trauma) or (Suffer) Adversity or whatever, but after- all your sufferings are for the fundamental purpose and goal of transformation.

(Suffer) Transformation/Metamorphosis
Condition: You’ve just failed to completely defend against a transformational influence; or, something’s just triggered/ awakened an ongoing metamorphosis
Action: Experience surreal effects; then, the corruption/transformation gets stronger.
Special Consequence: If you don’t already have one, you’ll pick up a “trigger”— Something that can happen to encourage or reignite the metamorphosis, even if you get away from whatever is causing it right now. For instance, some characters will have their
transformation advance further every time they sleep. Other characters will just be triggered randomly by the distant actions of some god-monster NPC.

What's the difference here? For starters, it supposes that in general, your suffering at Dorley Hall is being put to use to change you into the shape it desires. (Suffer) Transformation/Metamorphosis is taken from the Fairy Tales genre which describes itself as such:

A fairy tale adds an element of destiny or transformation to the road of trials—
You still struggle, and ultimately you’re still the pawn of forces beyond yourself, but much of it is neutral, bearable, or kind.

And this is the XP action it adds to capture how the act of transformation can hurt, but isn't inherently negative to you. Here, it's to capture how there's a literal, central transformation occurring, as well as an opportunity to let you spiral about it and the past harms that hook into it. You're always allowed to have a complex about it, as a treat.

No ethical forcefem under late stage capitalism

A big deal is made about choice in Dorley- lots of people make decisions they can't turn back on like visiting their family, making family where they can find it, or even the fundamental one where they give in and eventually consent to what Dorley Hall is doing to them. Decisive Action looks like an easy fit.

Decisive Action
Condition: You’ve been narrating or explaining your hopes, dreams, plans, actions, or thoughts. Or, someone/something else has been doing that for you!
Action: Take an action that you can’t retreat from—something decisive or definitive!

It even already has a clause about someone else making these decisions for you! Open and shut, right?

Well, no. You saw the head of the post and you know I don't have Decisive Action in my in-genre XP action list. And that's because there's more than one way to make an action that's decisive! Decisive Action carries with it a sort of neutrality- you've committed to something, but there's no comment on whether that was a good idea or not. It also presumes that, to some extent, the matter is settled. You've made up your mind, and you can't walk that back.

However, decisions made at Dorley Hall are not made out of a pure and genuine desire, but born from a quality of moral compromise. To be a Sister to is to lie, to benefit from generations of horrors, often to directly have a hand in maintaining the engine of human suffering that is the Hall. Yes, it may consider itself theraputic in the end; and yes, it is kinder and gentler than its previous incarnation- but you're still running a torture basement that kidnaps men, tortures them, and carries out forcible medical and surgical procedures on their bodies. Even if you aren't a Sister and have just been read into the secret, the nature of the place is to grab a hold of you, to tie you to that secrecy with love and threats and the danger to those people who have made themselves vulnerable to you would be in if the secret ever came out. This is the action of someone who's been #dorleypilled even as they hold that in tension with the torture basement.

So in the spirit of coercion, as the person writing this, I'm not giving you an easy out. Committing to decisions is still important, but most of those decisions are about protecting this horrible thing that made you into something you yet love. About continuing to choose to live like this. And sometimes, that's fine. Often, your life will be better for it! But also, you're still taking a Wicked Action.

Wicked Action
Condition: You’re doing something that you know IC that you shouldn’t.
It’s just not healthy!
Or, it’s wrong!
Action: Fall into a delirious abyss of self-indulgence.

A fun little bonus that comes with Wicked Actions is that you're allowed and encouraged to spiral a bit about it, or even let it go to your head sometimes.

And if you don't want to have to keep making this choice, well, maybe you should leave the Hall behind?

On intimacy

As you've seen on the previous posts, I think a major through-line in Dorley is that the connections of shared experiences and trauma are fundamental to healing and getting through the process; it is in fact a key aspect of the Dorley program itself that subjects form deep bonds with small social subunits, be it their sponsors or one or more of the other people from the same intake. Given the aforementioned 3-5 in-genre XP action limit, it mostly comes down to which of the assorted options I think vibe best. Dorley puts a lot of emphasis on talking and heartfelt conversations as the way to do this, so I went with Shared Reaction

Shared Reactions
Condition: You’re having a relatively open discussion with someone—something that touches on stuff that matters to you, and isn’t just formalities and etiquette.
Action: Reach out to them. Try to connect.

You open up to someone in a genuine way, and you connect. Shared Action was another strong contender, but its focus on shared activities felt less right.

Everything happens so much

Sure, yes, everyone here is experiencing absolutely tremendous amounts of mental health, but sometimes you have problems that come from outside the program, or as consequences for breaching the secrecy you're entrusted with, or sometimes somebody simply makes a connection they shouldn't have and makes it your problem. (Be In) Trouble is what happens when danger keeps appearing and making you feel overwhelmed and outmatched. It's one of Christine's basic emotional conditions these days.

(Be in) Trouble
Condition: A threat approaches!
Action: Be overwhelmed and overmatched

A key thing to understand with (Be In) Trouble is that it's not about a problem being actually too much for you to handle, but more about how you as a player are agreeing to sell it as a big deal, or how the problem is something that feels immense to you.

Your choices have already been made for you

Now, this list could easily have ended on (Be In) Trouble, but there's one other thing I wanna emphasize. You're making a lot of decisions down in that basement, or up above in the Hall, or out in the wide world, but ultimately- the road you must take has been prepared for you. You have to make answer to your suffering, but there are right and wrong answers and there is a test at the end. The Hall, ultimately, wishes you to assume a specific shape, a particular way of being.

But I also just find this a handy tool to have in your pocket as fellow players or the HG.

Chuubo's calls it a Sympathetic Action/Shock, but I'm going to cheat a bit because that action in Chuubo's is kinda weird and complicated.

Instead I'm gonna suggest the action is Nudge

Nudge (Spotlighting Someone Who’s Stuck)
Condition: You notice that someone’s frozen up. They’re stuck. They can’t move forward from here. Maybe emotion is overwhelming them. Maybe they’ve locked themselves into an idea or pattern that they can’t easily snap out of. Maybe they’re even physically paralyzed, blocked, or trapped. Whatever. The point is, they’re stuck.
Action: Declare a Nudge, intervening ic if you can think of a suitable way.

This is an evolution on the Sympathetic Action/Shock from the later game Glitch. The basic operation is that when you see a character or player is frozen up or has some kind of roadblock, or is stuck in some kind of holding pattern, you as a player or as a character can reach out and suggest what they should do next.

This is the sort of thing sponsors do- they trap you in a basement and break you down so that there's only one real choice to be made; they see you hesitating and they provide you the answer they want you to make, and sometimes, often, your character makes it of their own free will.

Or something like it, anyways. That's what you'll probably say, in the end.

This is also what friends do, to be clear. They offer paths out! But we're talking about Dorley Hall, so we have to acknowledge that this can and will be used as part of the necessary coercion of the program and how its nature is to corrupt and coerce you so you are of use to it or no longer a threat.

1. Past incarnations of Dorley as well as whatever's up with Val these days are likely instead played in the Road of Trials, if you're curious.

Some things to keep in mind out the gate: first, nobody here has Superior or Magical skills going because the default setting is just the real world. Second, an important thing to keep in mind about regular skills is that their rating doesn't inherently reflect how good or bad you are at the skill, but rather how likely the skill is to be productive, impressive, and efficacious to use in your life, or otherwise make you happy. Finally, it is common and natural for the remit of a skill to expand along the lines of how you choose to use it; pushing the boundaries I'm sketching out here is normal and expected.

Skill: Dorley Girl

You're a graduate of the Dorley program, or near enough, and are equipped with all the life skills, ideology, and neuroses that come with it.
This skill is near ubiquitous among the Sisters and has two basic functions:

• In addition to the brainwashing and feminization, the program does in fact teach graduates a number of life and other skills. This skill can always be used to, essentially, pass as a girl or otherwise draw on the various lessons and skills they were taught at the Hall.
• This skill also functions as a Connection skill for other graduates of the Hall. This represents the rapport you develop from shared trauma and experience, as well as how easy it is to fall in with your Sisters- after all, they understand you in a way most people can never be allowed to know.

There are certain notable things I think this skill explicitly doesn't cover by default, though many Dorley girls probably develop the faculty for using some or all of them over time when using this skill regardless. This is because these uses, while deeply related, are fundamentally unproductive or liable to backfire if they aren't willing to invest Willpower or other resources into their success

• Rationalization- lots of people do this, but it takes practice to make it more than a temporary stop-gap or active defense meant to defer the tension of the problem
• Lying to Loved Ones- Dorley girls aren't inherently better at lying to people, but you do have to do it an awful lot to the people who matter, and so have ample opportunity to practice.
• Dorleypilled- there's an amount of this that does come with the basic skill, but this is a sort of refinement on that and Rationalization- essentially, how ambiently dorleypilled a Dorley girl is is reflective of how well you've synthesized the ideology you were given with your responses to the trauma of the program, and how you can deploy it with greater faculty against yourself and others

Skill: Sponsor

The lab mice have taken over the maze, and you're one of the mice who keeps it all running.

• Being a sponsor means you're deeply familiar with Dorley's ideology and techniques, and likely functions like Dorleypilled if you don't instead become deeply disillusioned with the program.
• This covers the ways sponsors present themselves to intakes throughout the program, both deceptively and not. It does not function as a Connection skill with intake subjects.
• Fundamentally, this is a skill for manipulating and exploiting people who are under your power or otherwise vulnerable so that they become something you want them to be. Normally this is put to the end of feminizing kidnapped and vulnerable young men, but you've got options if ethics aren't a concern. A bigger concern, anyways.
• Being a sponsor functions as a social lever against Dorley girls and functionaries of the Hall- this skill is appropriate to use to flex that social standing, but similarly makes you extra vulnerable to being given responsibilities in exchange.

Skill: Dorleypilled (x%)

You've bought in to the merits and beliefs of the Dorley program.
Dorley graduates often work this into their Dorley Girl or Sponsor skill, but they're not the only ones who can develop and use this.

• This skill represents that you've not only bought into the ideology of the Dorley program, but have become effective at leveraging that ideology against your own questions and doubts and those of others. I suspect it's actually kind of an uncommon skill to take, since being Dorleypilled is often a value-neutral to negative proposition in your day to day life, but the possibility remains that being a true believer is productive for you.
• This skill also functions to smooth out interactions with other people who are are Dorleypilled to varying degrees. Notably, people who aren't at least notionally on board with this will probably make it really weird once they know you're Like This.

Putting it All Together

An intentional feature of these skills is that they encourage the formation of ingroups and outgroups between the Hall and the outside world; taking more than one also can start eating into your 8 skill point budget very fast, suggesting a degree of difficulty you have in operating outside the paradigm that made you

• Steph spent book 1 on a silver/emptiness arc until she was finally discovered, and then started a purple/shepherd arc
• Aaron's been on a green/otherworldly arc this whole time babeyyyy. Love to wrestle with and dissolve an identity before becoming something new
• Christine is on red/storyteller; she's dealing with trauma and whatnot but really the key thing of her life seems to be how Everything Happens So Much and falling deeper and deeper into various secrets and conspiracies
• Valérie is on a blue/bindings arc on account of working with the forbidden powers of her captors to engage in a daring scheme
• Melissa was hardcore silver/emptiness as well as a youth, but moved to purple/shepherd now that she sorta has things under control, much like Steph
  Hard to assign silver arcs given the base level of trauma everyone has is weapons grade stuff

Campaign Conventions

• If it's not one thing, it's another
• Gender is more mutable and messier than you expect
• Healing is a group effort
• Trauma reverberates through your life

Dorley Hall

• Leftovers must be plentiful
• Mugs must be tasteless
• Your Sisters share your traumas
• Your Sisters need your loyalty and secrecy
• To descend is to be unmade
• To ascend is to be reborn
• You can always become a girl

h/t to @figura and @veryroundbird for their assistance in writing these

• (Suffer) Transformation/Metamorphosis
• Wicked Action
• Shared Reaction
• (Be In) Trouble
• Sympathetic Action/Nudge

Chapters often run over the course of a day or so, but can be more or less arbitrary; the pace is really about how often interesting incidents and developments are occurring. ¹

So, when establishing a genre, one of the first questions is fairly straightforward- what are the sorts of major beats this piece of media cares about? Dorley obviously has loads of people feeling or experiencing trauma in various ways. There's a lot of bonding over emotional conversations, and lots of people making decisions of varying amounts of wisdom. People get force fem'd a bunch. Girls support and sometimes undermine each other. Resistance and secrets are all turned inwards.

Anyways-

Let's talk about the trauma

Chuubo's has a lot of ways to characterize suffering- four, in fact. (Suffer) Adversity, (Suffer) Corruption, (Suffer) Trauma, and (Suffer) Transformation/Metamorphosis. A straightforward read ('all these girls have sooooo much trauma') suggests that (Suffer) Trauma would be the easy pick

(Suffer) Trauma
Condition: You’ve just failed to completely defend against something really traumatic. This could be anything from “seeing something horrifying” to “the psychic attack of an
elder god.” Or, something’s just triggered/reminded you of an ongoing trauma.
Action: Experience surreal effects; then, your psychological wounds deepen.
Special Consequence: If you don’t already have one, you’ll pick up a “trigger”— Something that can happen to reawaken the trauma, even if you get away from whatever is causing it right now. For instance, if you’re traumatized by seeing bugs eating a dead animal, then seeing similar bugs or food with a similar consistency might trigger a resurgence of this trauma and a new Trauma action, later on

And to be clear, it's not a bad pick. It captures the general gist of things! It's probably a common out-of-genre XP action to take! But Chuubo's genres can only have 3-5 total in-genre actions, and I think there's a better choice for emphasizing the trauma.

And that's because Dorley Hall has a fundamental thesis about your suffering. It believes that your suffering can be given the meaning it desires it to have. Before you came, that's the (Suffer) Trauma) or (Suffer) Adversity or whatever, but after- all your sufferings are for the fundamental purpose and goal of transformation.

(Suffer) Transformation/Metamorphosis
Condition: You’ve just failed to completely defend against a transformational influence; or, something’s just triggered/ awakened an ongoing metamorphosis
Action: Experience surreal effects; then, the corruption/transformation gets stronger.
Special Consequence: If you don’t already have one, you’ll pick up a “trigger”— Something that can happen to encourage or reignite the metamorphosis, even if you get away from whatever is causing it right now. For instance, some characters will have their
transformation advance further every time they sleep. Other characters will just be triggered randomly by the distant actions of some god-monster NPC.

What's the difference here? For starters, it supposes that in general, your suffering at Dorley Hall is being put to use to change you into the shape it desires. (Suffer) Transformation/Metamorphosis is taken from the Fairy Tales genre which describes itself as such:

A fairy tale adds an element of destiny or transformation to the road of trials—
You still struggle, and ultimately you’re still the pawn of forces beyond yourself, but much of it is neutral, bearable, or kind.

And this is the XP action it adds to capture how the act of transformation can hurt, but isn't inherently negative to you. Here, it's to capture how there's a literal, central transformation occurring, as well as an opportunity to let you spiral about it and the past harms that hook into it. You're always allowed to have a complex about it, as a treat.

No ethical forcefem under late stage capitalism

A big deal is made about choice in Dorley- lots of people make decisions they can't turn back on like visiting their family, making family where they can find it, or even the fundamental one where they give in and eventually consent to what Dorley Hall is doing to them. Decisive Action looks like an easy fit.

Decisive Action
Condition: You’ve been narrating or explaining your hopes, dreams, plans, actions, or thoughts. Or, someone/something else has been doing that for you!
Action: Take an action that you can’t retreat from—something decisive or definitive!

It even already has a clause about someone else making these decisions for you! Open and shut, right?

Well, no. You saw the head of the post and you know I don't have Decisive Action in my in-genre XP action list. And that's because there's more than one way to make an action that's decisive! Decisive Action carries with it a sort of neutrality- you've committed to something, but there's no comment on whether that was a good idea or not. It also presumes that, to some extent, the matter is settled. You've made up your mind, and you can't walk that back.

However, decisions made at Dorley Hall are not made out of a pure and genuine desire, but born from a quality of moral compromise. To be a Sister to is to lie, to benefit from generations of horrors, often to directly have a hand in maintaining the engine of human suffering that is the Hall. Yes, it may consider itself theraputic in the end; and yes, it is kinder and gentler than its previous incarnation- but you're still running a torture basement that kidnaps men, tortures them, and carries out forcible medical and surgical procedures on their bodies. Even if you aren't a Sister and have just been read into the secret, the nature of the place is to grab a hold of you, to tie you to that secrecy with love and threats and the danger to those people who have made themselves vulnerable to you would be in if the secret ever came out. This is the action of someone who's been #dorleypilled even as they hold that in tension with the torture basement.

So in the spirit of coercion, as the person writing this, I'm not giving you an easy out. Committing to decisions is still important, but most of those decisions are about protecting this horrible thing that made you into something you yet love. About continuing to choose to live like this. And sometimes, that's fine. Often, your life will be better for it! But also, you're still taking a Wicked Action.

Wicked Action
Condition: You’re doing something that you know IC that you shouldn’t.
It’s just not healthy!
Or, it’s wrong!
Action: Fall into a delirious abyss of self-indulgence.

A fun little bonus that comes with Wicked Actions is that you're allowed and encouraged to spiral a bit about it, or even let it go to your head sometimes.

And if you don't want to have to keep making this choice, well, maybe you should leave the Hall behind?

On intimacy

As you've seen on the previous posts, I think a major through-line in Dorley is that the connections of shared experiences and trauma are fundamental to healing and getting through the process; it is in fact a key aspect of the Dorley program itself that subjects form deep bonds with small social subunits, be it their sponsors or one or more of the other people from the same intake. Given the aforementioned 3-5 in-genre XP action limit, it mostly comes down to which of the assorted options I think vibe best. Dorley puts a lot of emphasis on talking and heartfelt conversations as the way to do this, so I went with Shared Reaction

Shared Reactions
Condition: You’re having a relatively open discussion with someone—something that touches on stuff that matters to you, and isn’t just formalities and etiquette.
Action: Reach out to them. Try to connect.

You open up to someone in a genuine way, and you connect. Shared Action was another strong contender, but its focus on shared activities felt less right.

Everything happens so much

Sure, yes, everyone here is experiencing absolutely tremendous amounts of mental health, but sometimes you have problems that come from outside the program, or as consequences for breaching the secrecy you're entrusted with, or sometimes somebody simply makes a connection they shouldn't have and makes it your problem. (Be In) Trouble is what happens when danger keeps appearing and making you feel overwhelmed and outmatched. It's one of Christine's basic emotional conditions these days.

(Be in) Trouble
Condition: A threat approaches!
Action: Be overwhelmed and overmatched

A key thing to understand with (Be In) Trouble is that it's not about a problem being actually too much for you to handle, but more about how you as a player are agreeing to sell it as a big deal, or how the problem is something that feels immense to you.

Your choices have already been made for you

Now, this list could easily have ended on (Be In) Trouble, but there's one other thing I wanna emphasize. You're making a lot of decisions down in that basement, or up above in the Hall, or out in the wide world, but ultimately- the road you must take has been prepared for you. You have to make answer to your suffering, but there are right and wrong answers and there is a test at the end. The Hall, ultimately, wishes you to assume a specific shape, a particular way of being.

But I also just find this a handy tool to have in your pocket as fellow players or the HG.

Chuubo's calls it a Sympathetic Action/Shock, but I'm going to cheat a bit because that action in Chuubo's is kinda weird and complicated.

Instead I'm gonna suggest the action is Nudge

Nudge (Spotlighting Someone Who’s Stuck)
Condition: You notice that someone’s frozen up. They’re stuck. They can’t move forward from here. Maybe emotion is overwhelming them. Maybe they’ve locked themselves into an idea or pattern that they can’t easily snap out of. Maybe they’re even physically paralyzed, blocked, or trapped. Whatever. The point is, they’re stuck.
Action: Declare a Nudge, intervening ic if you can think of a suitable way.

This is an evolution on the Sympathetic Action/Shock from the later game Glitch. The basic operation is that when you see a character or player is frozen up or has some kind of roadblock, or is stuck in some kind of holding pattern, you as a player or as a character can reach out and suggest what they should do next.

This is the sort of thing sponsors do- they trap you in a basement and break you down so that there's only one real choice to be made; they see you hesitating and they provide you the answer they want you to make, and sometimes, often, your character makes it of their own free will.

Or something like it, anyways. That's what you'll probably say, in the end.

This is also what friends do, to be clear. They offer paths out! But we're talking about Dorley Hall, so we have to acknowledge that this can and will be used as part of the necessary coercion of the program and how its nature is to corrupt and coerce you so you are of use to it or no longer a threat.

1. Past incarnations of Dorley as well as whatever's up with Val these days are likely instead played in the Road of Trials, if you're curious.