Peyote Solidarities
Eight ish months ago I was struck by the need to make a game. I mean, I sat down with a pencil and paper for what was either a few hours or a few days, trying to figure out how to replicate the feeling that Disco Elysium gave me. How I could apply everything I knew to engaging players with the sensation of being lost and confused in your own head. A fledgling attempt at the aesthetic that friends would later end up calling “Psychogothica”; the experience of internal extremity.
Other people had approached the same idea, and usually come to two conclusions:
- “Everyone is John”
- “Everyone is a detective”
And I considered these, but knew they wouldn't achieve what I wanted to do. The vibes were off. Investigation was the means to express Harry DuBois’ wrecked fuselage of a life as something he has to meticulously piece together in a way that will never make him whole. Trying to replicate that was just going to turn into a stage for producing live action reruns of Duckman.
The “everyone is john” angle was one I had thought of right at the start, but I’d already committed to the expressionist approach, so something as literal as asking players to do their actions in a silly voice, as if representing their balkanised inner monologue, wasn’t going to add anything.
What I decided to do was fall back on the knowledge that if you make something act enough like a person, people will treat it like one. So the systems I designed were all about negotiating an internal economy of metacurrency to be constantly shuffling around like a ponzi scheme of one.
I guess that’s why I ended up writing the prose the way I did… like Hubert Selby Jr’s 12 Rules For Life. To make it feel like the book was also a character, with its own wants and fears and problems. And to invite groups into interpreting its message, like divining the notes of a raving drunk.
What I had, eventually, was the first draft of Peyote Solidarities - cribbed from a line in Ginsberg’s Howl since DE was waxing poetic on RS Thomas - a game that I tested pretty fast and which people thought was fun.
The first session involved a bodybuilder and a truck driver trying to get nowhere in particular with an antique statue so the truck driver could sell it for money to feed his drug habit. It was hilarious, and everyone was into it for the two and a half hours we were running it.
There were things which didn’t work, of course.
Nobody was sure about what they were supposed to be working towards,
regular items seemed as useless as they were prevalent,
the system for rolls just not feeling as good as it could have been.
But at the time, the system seemed so tightly bound together that I didn’t have the confidence to take it apart and replace the inferior parts.
So that was another month of tweaking and playtesting, actually doing game design and talking to other people who were doing it to get their opinions. It’s where I got the first reviews, like “a game of abject godlessness”, and other glowing praise.
At one point I had a group of five other people, and we would come together just to see how the latest whatever the fuck rule I had put in played.
I even wrote a “supplement” for it, a miracle I’ve never been able to repeat yet.
And then I’d added what felt like the last thing a couple of months ago, the revised rules for the Hangup system. I’d always had trouble pitching the game, since most people didn’t get the reference. Now, the game had its own properties which could define it.
Peyote Solidarities is a game about gambling with yourself.
Here’s the final draft version. In the future I’ll probably rewrite the whole thing and put it on Itch.io.