OK, first, if you haven’t read the Seattle Appendix in Demon: The Descent, go read that first, because I’m not going to explain splintered timelines and so on.

We good? OK, then. I’m developing Splintered City: Seattle right now. (Like, right now. I just switched over from doing that to do this, then I’m going back so I can get it done today and print it so Michelle can take it with her to edit on her trip tomorrow.) I figured you all might like a teaser, but I wanted to talk a little bit about city books first.

They’re kind of hit-and-miss, right? I used to buy them because I bought everything, but they didn’t always do it for me. Some of them did, and some of them present options for chronicles that made me want to play in that sandbox, like, right now. Boston Unveiled (for Mage: The Awakening) was like that for me. I’m not gonna name names of books that didn’t work, because I don’t want to crap on anyone else’s work and it’s a matter of taste and anyway, but for me, a successful city book is one that makes me want to run a game set there.

Now, I’ve never lived in Seattle, but I’ve visited, and my wife lived there for years, and she worked on the book (and also wrote the Seattle setting in Demon). The other two authors are Peter Schaefer, who’s a native of the city, and Mark Stone, who isn’t, but at least lives on the west coast. I think they captured the feeling of the city, from the rain to the politics to the Seattle Freeze, but more to the point, as I’m reading this book again, I keep finding myself thinking, after the Pirates game is over, maybe I should run Demon so I can use this plotline, because it’d be really cool.

One of the aforementioned plotlines that got me thinking that is below. Enjoy!

Murder at the Expo

On August 17, 1962, Jack Sellers dies at the Century 21 Exposition. Each time the splinter resets, he’s once more alive and ready to explore the fair. Unlike most other people, he isn’t excited for the fair to come to his town. He dreads it, because he knows he’s going to die.

It was a surprise the first time. Walking down the Boulevards of the World, someone thrust a knife into his chest in passing. He died on his way to the hospital. When the world reset, he had a vague sense of unease about the fair but went anyway. A split second before the knife entered him, he felt he’d known it was coming.

Awareness dawned slowly. After an unknowable number of iterations, he started avoiding the Boulevards of the World. Death followed him. He was shot by a stranger in the World of Entertainment. An elderly gentleman dropped a brick on him while riding the Bubbleator up in the World of Tomorrow. His date inexplicably threw him off the Monorail platform. Jack tried staying at home, and burglars broke in and beat him to death. No matter how things change, Jack always dies.

At this point, Jack is aware of the cyclic nature of his world, even if he doesn’t understand it. He’s been most everywhere in the almost four months from the start of the loop to his inevitable death. He knows what happens every go-round, and what stands out. He wishes that he could escape his cycle, but he doesn’t know how.

Comrade West has some ideas about how Jack could escape his repeating doom, first among them taking the young man out through the fracture into the dominant timeline. He hasn’t done so, or even brought it up to Jack, because for now, Jack is the best resource West has on the mundane and the strange of the 1962 splinter. On top of that, West doesn’t know what Jack is, as he’s curiously not stigmatic, and West is reluctant to mess with something he doesn’t yet understand.

Here are some possibilities for Jack’s nature:

Jack is a Trap: Jack Sellers is aware of the loop, and doomed to die each time, for the very reason that some demon is going to take pity on the man and take him out of the splinter timeline, springing the trap. Setting the trap off reveals that Jack is secretly an angel, a beacon to angels, an occult bomb, or something else altogether.

Jack is a Side Effect: Some of the still-functioning Infrastructure at the World’s Fair creates a death as a byproduct, intended or unintended, and for whatever reason, that death falls on Jack. Perhaps his brother helped assemble part of the Expo Infrastructure and this was a bit of backlash, or his yet-unborn children participated in a dominant-timeline Infrastructure that had this strange effect.

Jack is Infrastructure: An angel is murdering Jack. Becoming aware of the loop was a known possibility, hence sending an angel to do the job rather than a simple cultist. The angel leaps bodies and manipulates the inanimate world to ensure that Jack dies, and as a result… something happens. Is this murder sustaining the splinter, loop after loop?

Something Else: A murderous ghost at the fair takes its joy from the repeated murder of the same person. Jack is delusional, and rather than being killed, he is committing suicide over and over but imagining others doing it to him. Jack’s murders are actually forecasts of murders in the dominant timeline, and studying them and his location in the World’s Fair can reveal something to come in the next few days or weeks in the now.