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Marginalia - margin notes - are a time honoured way of getting up to some bullshit. Whether you're a monk complaining about the drudgery of writing or Mark Twain giving himself a giggle, we've been writing on the edge of writing for centuries.

Marginalia is also a game about doing just that. Players take turns reading a book and adding margin notes from the perspective of their given character. In doing so they're given the opportunity to come up with a shared story and eventual end, all told in the margins of another's. What a rad concept, written and designed by Maxwell Lander or, locally, @snaxwell.

The cost of the game is the best cost of all which is FREE. That being said, you should absolutely donate to their ko-fi. Support creators.

Check Marginalia and Maxwell's other games out for yourself!

I will be getting up to this bullshit with none other than @claireg.

The book we'll be reading is The Murders of Molly Southbridge, by Tade Thompson. It's a horror novel ostensibly about a girl whose blood manifests into clones of herself intent on murdering her.

I will be playing Maulie - introspective, soft, and ruthless. She will be playing Molli - cute and absolutely furious. We've settled on no other characteristics.

We've decided on a peri-apocalyptic setting where survivors have stabilized and started to reforge human connections, but the situation is untenable and things are - or will be - on the decline.

In other words, a very cheerful romp awaits us.

This autumn closed out a two year Vampire: The Masquerade campaign taking place in the Big Apple. We laughed, we cried, it's time to move on.

And so we look to Appalachia in 2023.

For this campaign - or chronicle, if you prefer the World of Darkness parlance - I've introduced an idea of 'Sightings'. Each player is being given a short experience their character had prior to game start that is completely independent of their backstory or character.

These experiences have a material, mechanical, or narrative implication, depending on which re refer to. I've made some effort to balance them, but as each is wildly different, there's no guarantee. For the most part, I allocated them to players as they made an off-the-cuff remarks that was related to a given Sighting.

But why have I gone and done this?

I wanted to give each player/character a unique experience that they could build on and/or play with that embeds them more directly in the setting. This has only ever been good for a player and their engagement. It also paves a foundation for more compelling narratives than bolting characters onto a story.

I also wanted this to come from the DM as something imposed on the character, for several reasons.

Firstly, I wanted to retain a sense of mystery about each one that would be a lot harder to achieve if each player came up with their own pitch. This way I ultimately control the pieces of the Sighting, which gives players reason to play with it instead of with themselves.

Secondly, with the campaign taking place in West Virginia, I didn't want five Mothman Sightings and I'm convinced I would have gotten three or four. As a table, we did play with the idea of each player blindly writing a Sighting for another, but that got deep six'd very quickly. The enthusiasm for the concept was there but the willingness to commit to writing one was inconsistent. I didn't want to overburden players or have people get Sightings with variable effort put in. Writing the Sightings myself makes sure we get a variety of experiences, outcomes, and potential plot points authored to a similar level of impact.

Third and finally, it just feels nice to have something made for you by a DM that you can use to flesh out a character. Whether it's a hand-picked magic item, an NPC curated from your backstory, whatever, it's nice to have a thing.

I'm sure there are other systems that bake this sort of imposition into character creation and there are definitely other DMs who have done something like this before, one way or another. I'd love to learn some examples of other systems that do and how they approach it.

The process was fun and so far the players have loved it - highly recommended!

Without further ado, here are the six little sightings for my six little players. Where appropriate, I've added the mechanical implication of a given consequence. You even get additional visibility that the player's don't - source inspo for each Sighting.

The one-or-two of you playing in the campaign who may see this, no you didn't.