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I totally forgot to mention this … anywhere … at all.

I October there was a contest over at the RPGGeek for 24-hour RPGs. I decided to accept the challenge and in turn produced my second contest RPG ever.

This is its name:

Us, our settlement, the AI and the quantum information field, here, at the end of the world

(Postrocky, I know.)

For reference purposes, I submitted it as "Quantum Settle End" which destills the most prominent information.

I have to admit that I am not very proud of what I submitted. Much rather, I am proud of what the game has become in the meantime. However, I cannot show you this before voting has finished. Voting is open till Wednesday, November 21st.

Now the reasons for me to link to this game are twofold:

1. If you are interested in what kind of game I come up with in four working hours, if you care about what (mad?) thoughts cross my mind, then this could be interesting for you. The PDF is hosted on the RPGGeek site.
2. In any case, I want to encourage all of you loitering game designers to take your chance in one of those 24-hour contests. Because you only have (at most) 24 hours to lose. Working in this fixed time span is very graceful to your spare time.

So, feel free to poke around in my work and the work of dozens other game designers. Here's the intro text to mine (which promises more than this first draft can deliver):

This game is a roleplaying game about a weird place at the end of the world, the settlement, and its inhabitants.

The players take the role of both a focus character in the settlement as well as an autonomous applet of the artificial intelligence controlling the omnipresent quantum information field. The focus characters are people, or anything that seems to have a free will and is able to act, who know that the end of the world is coming and they need to prepare for that. How that is done, everybody needs to decide for himself. They can be humans, fantastic characters, mutant animals, robots, ethereal creatures or anything in between.

The artificial intelligence controls the quantum information field and alters it to better represent its vision of the world and to provide interesting twists on the fates of the settlement's inhabitants. It also awards achievements to the inhabitants for doing particularly grand, interesting, clever or stupid things.

In their quest to prepare, a lot of threats and complications will come the characters' ways and they will have to struggle to achieve their goals. However, the ways of the quantum field are tricky and the truth will most likely not be obvious. Things can be retroactively different than thought of before, people and threats can appear out of nowhere, sudden links can tie objects far apart together. It's a mysterious world.

Also, the settlement itself is a weird place. Of course, the inhabitants don't think that but when compared to the players' world, it shows some peculiarities. It literally resides on the edge of the world. The sun is about to set, maybe forever. In this very last stage of the world, the light always comes from the sides, producing harsh shadows and golden glitter. The structure of the settlement seems to be more vertical than horizontal, leading to steep falls, wooden ladders, glass elevators and some vertigo. Everything appears a bit softer than it should, even the harsh bits.

Of course, the settlement, the characters, the artificial intelligence (AI) and all the rest have more curiosities to offer, which are for you to find out about.

Will your characters save their souls, will they find peace and fight for what is worth it? Will the sun set forever? What are the hiccups of the quantum information field and what role does the AI play in all this? What is this place?

Only you can know.