Fiction Impossible: The Game of Literary Chaos is another one of my game designs in process. In Fiction Impossible, players assume the roles as assistants to the Cosmic Librarian, the being responsible for maintaining the stability of the Realms of Literature. Unfortunately, the Cosmic Librarian has been murdered and the Realms of Literature have been thrown into chaos. Characters are all mixed up (for example, imagine The Three Musketeers featuring the Jabberwock, Jayne Eyre, and Victor Frankenstein) and it’s up to the Librarian’s assistants to set things right. The one who does the best job wins and becomes the new Cosmic Librarian. I have some basic mechanics in mind right now, but I’ll discuss those in a later post.
I should point out that the inspiration for Fiction Impossible came from my days at the University of Waterloo, where I was writer and actor with the FASS (Faculty, Aumni, Staff, and Students) theatre company. Every year, FASS wrote and performed a musical-comedy show. In 1983 (a show entitled FASS or Fiction), the theme of the show was “the library after dark.” In that show, the Great Librarian invited all the characters from literature to a party. Unfortunately, the party was disrupted; literature was scrambled; and the Great Librarian was murdered. Eventually, the heroes found someone who who pulled the cosmic bookmark from the stone and set everything straight.