Broken

I do various arts and mostly the vector is a fungus like urge to destroy my environment and convert it to something that is an extension of me. Or to create some other form of noise and then convert that into a coherency that somehow is me extending my psychic domain.

People talk about art and the expression of feelings, especially those weird nameless feelings that dislocate and wrench. Actually I don't know if they do , I think they talk about art and its dialogues and its ideas  and not feelings at all. Possibly because they are over-specialized cockroach people?

Anyway they should because I believe that sometimes people make art so they have this feeling that had no name and now it still does not have a name (as names are useless unless there is a close enough reference point for both communicators) but the artist can know that , somehow , the feeling has happened is represented outside their own head.
Which is somehow quite important for people.

I have pretty much never attempt this , once, here, with op-shop tapes and samples from past giants

ANyway, rpgs, and the perverse urge to use the creation of them to express some inchoate* mewling thing.

This is possible a terrible idea as intentions vs results go, as you are involving other people , which is always a terrible idea , and every session is its own beast.

People do do the hyper focused I-want-this-to-be-about-this game design and I like this in theory even though I don't think I have seen something that I would actually want to play and it seems the roll of mechanics vs expectation preloading is sometimes overstated in favour of mechanics and farce is always ready to take the wheel.

(I used the AW 2d6 system variant World of Dungeons a way back and the thing about anything you can roll for has  a pretty much 50% chance of working (though often with a draw back or cost) means mayhem and putting players putting each others  souls in bugs bodies and no one had a clear idea of how dangerous anything was and dunno skeletons and a guy fell in a hole and didn't run into the gas spores or spotlight dogs)

also this

*I just discover inchoate also means "(of an offence, such as incitement or conspiracy) anticipating or preparatory to a further criminal act." so I am even more hilarious than I thought

BUt what was my point? Oh yeah sometimes I have an itch to express something and its describe a setting or a game or something.\
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Breaking:

That thing where the real world has a secret world sliding on beneath and behind, going back stage to reality and its all empty and discarded props. The secret world is tawdry and sniggering and our heroes chase things and become things themselves and they are looking just as much they are running and it's pick two run, hide or just might find. No-one wants to be left behind.

SO like any urban fantasy horror like X-files or Supernatural or Buffy but shittier. Way shitty*. There is no budget, no overarching mythology , and the characters are fucking losers who go into the dark secret places in order to get a taste of some sublimation and the real world is leaving them behind or they have already fallen off or they just never got along/on anyway.
Like Neverwhere but instead of a fantastic underground market happening right in front of the norms , it's a guy in a foreclosed shop smelling like sick dog going "oh you just missed them"

It's the cast from the goonies 10 years on breaking into places looking for tunnels and starting fires

*well not shittyier in the way that it has even more cliches, and obvious plot twists , and conventionally narrative arcs and plot protection and all that garbage that I hear makes a good story and I laugh and laugh and laugh.


And like , the shadow world has a budget of fucking zero , so they can't live there.

And things keep going back and forth from obviously fake and nonsensical (why do all these people wear wigs over their faces and eat people from their caravan and not get caught) to real and internal sensical (there is a very large bug and it ate a lot people) and evidence just vanishes and reality actively rewrites itself infront of your eyes to a default boring.

So a lot like scooby doo.


The players solve mysterys for loose change , get into fights with the worst dogs, try to keep their shit together enough to not lose it, not show up in real world enough to get arrested or get locked out of the shadow world and gradually get swallowed whole by their protective self mythology.


SO

contents:

Real World

Shadow World: not actually a place , more the bits that happen when the real world is not paying attention. Anything brought in the real world will be converted into the real world.

Some kind of dynamic where the less you have your shit together the easier you can access the shadow world but the hard it is not go crazy. Being crazy can dump you back in the real world. Too much access to the real world means consequences are more likely to find you , like being arrested or locked out. You could get lost to the shadow world in which incase you have become a urban myth and a crude caricature of person.

Some vague ass system so you can get set fire to things and get shot reliably.  CoC, unknown armys ,etc. Monster of week is the opposite of this so it might work by going too far the other way.
A 2d6 partial success system could possibly be fun so people try anything and then it prob happens with crap consequences.  And if everything gets too fantastical well then wallpaper over it afterwards. "Wait I thought this was necromancer's lair, now it's a P-lab? What about that golem made from people? It was children standing on each other in costume?"
Any explanation that creates even more questions is a good one.

Characters: like depressed saleswoman, valium addicted househusband, talentless teenager, runaway.
They should have a reason they prefer trying to find grout gnomes than facing their real life

Maybe somekind of way of developing the characters explanation for all this as a personaly mythology that makes them slightly more powerful , everything slightly more deranged and there is still a chance they will realize that this baseball is not Excalibur and they can't deflect bullets