spiritualists in the archive
This is likely too complicated and out of scope but I will edit it later. I'll make what I can manage, players can fill in the gaps with their own interpretations. I will find out what they see in exit surveys. That just proves part of my hypothesis.
A society of spiritualists, mostly dilettantes and armature theologians with too much time and money on their hands. This allows me to set the story in Ontario, whose history I somewhat know and love, and since Northern Ontario is very, very poorly documented online I can plausibly invent towns and universities there. It can also justify them shopping for artifacts all over the world. I will stop worrying about it being too hokey - if I can make it very specific to my strange tastes it shouldn't be too Halloweeny, it will be fresh.
Much of the archive is this societies materials painstakingly collected over the course of a few decades, their community squabbles and power struggles, their fascinations with doctrine and celebrity (celebrity being the dead researchers they thought were reaching out through their collections, or people who become too powerful in the organization and fall from grace.) It dips into near cultishness at times, but I want it firmly grounded in the pettiness disguised as moral justice and bogged down bureaucracy I've had in my own experience with community organizations and what I've seen of my mothers. Having the society last so long allows me to include what I've seen of her organizations aging out and being annoyed with how younger generations are "doing it wrong."
The consider themselves a revival of an earlier faith the insist is ancient, and have collected (pretty thin) evidence of this sect, in addition to trying to make their own devices to contact this other world.
How can I make the spiritualist reflect metalepsis or bleed? I think they need to be convinced they can enter a different world. That they can make a portal. But they must think that they can use technology to hear echos, and if they can just translate those echos they will understand how to follow it back.
Is it the mediation of their own instruments that is causing the leak in the first place, that allow the entities to gain access. Organizing these artifacts into database allows them to form shapes that become portals, like drawing a pentagram on the floor to summon a demon. The entities are leading you through the database for this purpose - you become the salt that draws the symbol through your intention. Like I am providing mechanics to allow players to enter my world and carve paths the paths I have set up for them.
The society falls into obscurity in the 40s, is researched by a historian in the 70s, is absorbed by a punk band in the 90s, and an artist who absolutely annotated the crap out of the archive, including connecting with one of the early spiritualists, but this is retroactively applied later in the game, and breaks the timeline.
What sort of a community wants you to migrate this database now? It should feel remote but not corporate. Maybe the fun is you never learn - but it should feel plausible because it is introduced at the very beginning. Maybe I need to do more research into this sort of volunteer work. I am thinking of Ubisoft soliciting communities to translate hieroglyphics, or manga scan communities online? I don't want to make a discord or anything that requires my active participation, but I could make a crapy website like people do for open source software, or even transpose my research participant website to have the community be me, a graduate student who needs volunteers to migrate this database as part of my research? I wonder if a lie this big would get REB approval?
Idea - Make an email address that just gives a screwed up bounce back. Probably definitely not OK for REB ha ha. Maybe I can claim I am working with this organization as part of the study, so I can answer questions for real but contacting them directly goes nowhere.
Sequence
The spiritualist society is the one that begins very earnest but disintegrates into organizational infighting.
University acquires these papers. Someone in the 70s is writing a book about the society? They never finish, they disappear mysteriously before publishing - but their obtuse annotations are in the archive. The collection ends up in one of the departments, and a programmer is hired to digitize their files so they can clear out storage, and becomes obsessed with these ones. The 70s researcher is the one he's mad at, who doesn't seem to see, but is found trapped in the machine and you watch them talk to each other. Instead of destroying them, he steals them. These objects become mystic relics. What happened to him? Who has this stuff now?
At some point this collection falls into the hands music/art/zine movement, who absorb the symbology in the collection into their aesthetic without knowing what it means. But eventually they also get too invested (there is a term for this in bleed from LARP) and start designing their own spirituality around it's meaning, distorted again. Artifacts from this time are their zines and posters, very poorly documented, the physical versions very damaged. (How can I lock these away in the exhibition? Can I do something as hokey escape room as a padlock combination on a safe? How can 0 dimensional entities move physical objects when the whole motivation in the game is trying to get into yours? They must have manipulated someone to do it at some point - I wonder if I can make people think this happened while they were playing the game.)
Part of this documentation is early fansites from the 90s and 2000s - you at some point realize this content was not in the database you're migrating, some entity is providing it to you and the previous researchers are commenting on it post-humously. I don't want to deal with buying hosting for fake websites, so I'll make one or two static html files you can open and upload screenshots to existing database entries, which will populate subentries.
Here are some Character outlines for this storyline. I will begin working with this for vingette1.
Artifacts:
- minutes from meetings of the spiritualists, with the same characters butting heads over doctrine and layout
- punk bands recontextualizing stuff from the archive in their posts, songs and zines, eventually getting weird and intense about talking to spirits and ascending
- objects that may of talked to spirits or that were made in an attempt to do so
- Scrolls, books and art of ancient and 13th century-ish weirdos documenting their attempts and experiences
- Geological and deep history data about breaches, found to "verify" ancient claims
- Static html fansites, maybe in a password protected zip file
- Hide messages that have been typed over in typewritten documents. Entities insert new info in later stages of the game?
Some spiritualist machines
A religious societies brief history of attempts to talk to ghosts.
