Folding the River, by Tory Root and Lily Benderskaya
Towering in the mountains over an endless desert, the last and greatest city on earth stands tall and proud. In the glittering heights, the rich and powerful hobnob and toast. Elizabeth Faulker II herself, C.E.O. of Faulker Power Limited, is hosting a small press conference and reception announcing a peacekeeping mission to the far southern reaches of the known world, led by the celebrated General Andreasson of her corporate army, who will be speaking tonight. And, of course, it is her dear son Cantwell's seventeenth birthday.
Below those towers, well...that's a different story. But who has time to worry about poverty, crime, and epidemics when they have a world to rule? Evenings like this have happened before, and the world has kept turning towards destruction. But perhaps not this time...
Folding the River is a post-apocalyptic science-fantasy game of power, passion, and desperation, which may or may not involve time travel. This game contains sexual content and lots of love plots, as well as war crimes and other dark subjects, and is recommended for mature players.
"Where's Spike? Where's Spike's shirt? Could the two be reunited and brought here, please?"
- a bureaucrat
While we will remain cryptic on the subject of time travel, you are free to draw your own conclusions. That aside, holy crap is this our densest and most complicated game to date, in terms of plot and mechanics. We kind of went nuts. But a lot of people like it, so hey. We turned towards more plot-heavy games after A Crown of Hearts, since we've come to the conclusion that while we love twisty characters a lot, character and plot are not mutually exclusive, and can in fact, on a good day, feed into each other rather nicely in a pleasant and vaguely filthy reciprocal relationship. Or maybe we just think everything's filthy after writing some of the character sheets in this game.
March 2, 2012, at Intercon L in Chelmsford, MA.
April 21, 2012, at the Brandeis Festival of the LARPs in Waltham, MA.
July 28, 2012, at Dia de los Sobres Dos in Worcester, MA.
April 25, 2014, at the Brandeis Festival of the LARPs in Waltham, MA.
Folding the River is a game for twenty-two players (characters have predefined genders) which runs for four hours, in three or four rooms, under the direction of three GMs. Average character sheet length is about fifty-five hundred words.
The game is benched pending Tory gutting every game mechanic it contains and replacing it with a system she likes better and that shouldn't suck nearly as many balls, because she is aware the original system did just that. We also need to rewrite one character. Will we ever actually do that work? Who knows, probably not. The game has a runtime GM bible, but no casting or stuffing information.