Dwelling Solo RPG Session and Review: My Ghost Story So Far

This is excerpted from the script of “Episode 93: Dwelling Solo Journaling RPG aka The Human Heart is Spooky AF” if you’d rather hear this than read it.

I have to tell you about a dream I had.

My lifelong heartache and love — to the degree which I ever experienced love — was in an out of my life for 20 years. Nobody else has been in my life that long or in so many forms: high school prom date and heartbreak, occasional lover and then girlfriend again (and heartbreak again) and a few sad richochets of each other in our in 30s.

In the dream, I was in one of those very bright corporate office building lobbies, overbright really, that also housed an art gallery. I saw her crossing it 20 feet from me. I knew she wouldn’t turn her head unless I hailed her. The sighting brought the same where-did-she-go-and-why-doesn’t-she-want-me-anymore ache.

In the next scene we were at a small, circular table in the lobby. We had already talked for a time. I was entreating her. It became clear that the only love I would be getting was a universal one — one of her best qualities was a general deep tenderness and empathy for others — not the kind I wanted.

The explanation didn’t gel into words or none I can remember; I only remember the knock-you-over sun of her smile, her dimples forming…and becoming aware of a document on the table before me, upon which sat one of those crappy Bics with a blue cap.

I knew at once that I was to sign this document, which would not only surrender the addictive, selfish, and transactional “love” I demanded, but release me from everything I’ve hauled around over the decades. All of it, down to the clutching at life itself. 

I did not sign. I slammed the pen on the table, raised my voice.

I don’t remember her at the end because I’d attracted the attention of a security guard, a husky dude with a mustache, a shoulder-length haircut that suggested he was in a band that played taverns on the unfashionable strip of South Broadway in Denver, white shirt and gray slacks, explaining that I would indeed have to go, gracefully or not, ready or not.

It was the kind of dream to which you want to remain in service for the entirety of the day after it occurs. She had appeared to me as a psychopomp, a figure that offers a mortal soul transport to the afterlife, and she had tried to be nice about it, transcending my wants and becoming a passing teacher, a door to something else. It riveted me for days.

I was sad, but also felt like I my time in the country had given me a signpost in the gallery of lost faces that I recall and query too often. There’s so many of them, they blot out the stars.

I also felt like it’s been too long since Breakup Gaming Society featured an indie creation. The past year has featured mostly popular titles from widely known publishers. So when I stumbled across Tabletop Tokki — check her out on YouTube, she’s an underrated creator, IMO — talking about Dwelling, a solo game for ghosts, created by Seb Pines and published by Good Luck Press, I ordered a copy immediately. I was overdue for this.

What follows is the the first few rooms of my encounters from Dwelling’s prompts. The backstory: Your character in this solo journaling RPG is somebody who has just inherited a house from an uncle.

Unsettled, you move room to room on a restless night and are fed prompts to describe the nature of the many spirits you find there as you track down sounds or oblique forms in shadow: What they look like, even. You can draw them in the book if you want, but I skipped that part because I wanted to focus on the writing. What memories do they dredge up? What marks do their appearance leave on you?

What follows is my ghost story so far. I’ve had an encounters in the bedroom, the guest room, the staircase to downstairs, and the living room. For each room I’m going to set you up with a bit of the prompt for book, then what I wrote for the encounter. 

Dwelling Solo Journaling Game: The first prompt happens in a nearly bare bedroom in a house recently acquired by the narrator from an uncle.

BEDROOM

The first spectral appearance is cued up like this: “I let my eyes languidly take in the walls and make sense of the still-unfamiliar shadows, tracing the shapes with my unfocused eyes and still hazy from sleep. In my sleep-addled imagination, my mind conjures a shape in the shadows, the way the darkness piles at the end of my bed, making the dark shapes against the wall look as if something is peering over the edge of my bed, looking up at me.”

Here’s how I managed that prompt: Just off my left foot, something with eyes on stalks, a repulsive density in the folds of the summer-weight comforter that carries over from the dream. Its unverifiable teeth and opacity of intent…was it jostling for its corner of the bed or working its way up my leg? I was unable to move in the dream, but I manage a kick. The dune-folds of the comforter returned now, innocuous.

Throwing the comforter off me, there’s the high contrast of cooling moisture on my left pec. I test it with my fingers — it’s a small puddle — then my armpits with my other hand and find them more or less dry. 

I lay there with my forearms pointed up for the better part of a minute, rubbing either thumb against index and middle, in the wonder of a backslide. TDF would not permit herself to fall asleep on me because she was mortified at the thought of being observed while drooling.

Such was my wonder on the day she did, I stayed awake to bear witness as she slipped into her noiseless slumber, black hair splayed out, for a full hour, drooling slightly.

It felt like the most important thing she’d ever told me, but I’ve always had a bad habit of assuming that more was exchanged in shared silence than had actually changed hands.

GUEST ROOM

The story next takes our narrator back off the lip of sleep to investigate a sound in the hallway. We locate the guest room as the source, which was the primary bedroom of the uncle who left you the house.

It is still furnished with many of his things, and the book feeds us another encounter with this cue: “Uneasy in this space so personal to someone else, I find myself tiptoeing through the room. Moving through the room slowly, it feels like my stomach could drop. Then—I hear a sound: A small, startled inhale.

This sets up the following encounter as the being who made it forms in sight and action:

Tsk-huhhhh

I am seized with fear and shame.

Tsk-huhhhh

A diminutive form regards me, glaring.

Tsk-huhhhh

The sudden need to placate it trumps the fear of its wrong-presence; I release the muscles in my clenched feet and wamble forward. It vibrates with impatience.

I peer at it, trying to find some outline at the edge of the simmering seven-shades-of-dark that ought to be its center. I test the air between us with a slowly raised hand. My heartbeat feels like a finger being drawn around in circles on the skin of a snare drum.

I rummage for mollifying words. It will not wait for the words. A hand reaches out, grabs my wrist loosely, thumb playing along my radius with a tentative, imploring pressure, then darts straight for the left pocket of my sweats, digging for something. I am rapt with its anger.

Tsk-huhhhh

The hand darts away, and with it the thonk of whatever it was fishing for. The noise preempts the hiss of the snare drum’s skin; I find a lamp, turn it on and see my Motorola on the floor, screen spiderwebbed from edge to edge. 

I did not. I did not carry that in here, I can never relax with that in my pockets. I wouldn’t do that any more than I would wear plate armor to bed.

I did not. I know it.

Only the phone’s date and time display clearly now. I am able to unlock it, my skin dismayed at the new microcontinent of jagged fissures on its face. Key app icons occluded by milky cloud of errant pixels, like a mind trying to gnrrr out its last few sentences in the middle of a grand mal seizure. Half-digested juices of 10 years of sudden-onset arguments, resolved by fatigue and breakage, if not reason.

I cannot afford to replace the phone nor think too long about replacing the phone. I place it on Uncle Jay’s dresser, my eyes fixing on the top leftmost drawer. That’s where I found as a boy what I would later learn is called a Moleskine notebook.

Was I five, six, seven? On visits here to see Jay and Beverly with my parents: I was better than average at verbal stuff for my age, but unable to penetrate the atmosphere they generated around themselves in the evenings, when Facts in Five would come out and they would play far into the night, smoking joints and drinking red wine and bantering in a tongue I badly wanted to acquire.

Sometimes I would try to yip out things that sounded like they belonged in the category they were working on, but I would usually be left to entertain myself after tiring of staring at the box cover on the floor and failing to puzzle out how I could gain entry into a world where Abraham Lincoln, some kind of Asian princess, and a rushing football player all waited for you in a city of skyscrapers and old temples. 

Glum with being excluded and tired of the box that suggested everything and told me nothing, I’d wander the house. That’s when I found the Moleskine and Jay’s block type and recognized some of the words: “savage,” “gray,” and “sicknesses,” but the sentences only resolved to the growing boredom weighing on me and the increasingly enchanted gulf between me — too tired to know I was past bedtime — and the laughter from downstairs. When the laughter tipped to fighting, Jay’s voice was always knifing over the top of everyone.

Something snags or tickles inside my sweats. I reach in and pull out a long, dark hair from the seam between my thigh and crotch. I whip it away backhanded.

I did not. I did not bring this in here with me.

Despite the displacement and anger, pure exhaustion, sweet and total, beckons me like a maritime wreck at peace in the silt.

And that’s the way the Guest Room encounter concludes. But no rest for our narrator, dear reader, because this long night is full of more sounds.

Ready to go downstairs? Me either, but fuck it, because we hear the loud creaking of a door hinge from down there.

Dwelling Solo RPG Prompts: Uh oh, we’re headed downstairs because there was a sound. There’s always a sound.

The next exercise is the descending staircase, where you’re invited to recount the scenes from the day that led to this moment in time. I count eight steps in the illustration on pages 24-25, so I do eight memories. But not before my character yells at the source of the noise.

STAIRCASE/DOWNSTAIRS

“For Godssakes can we please not have any more Krakatoas or Hindenburgs in the remaining seven minutes of this fucking day?” I shout back at the unmistakable long creak of a door from downstairs. I know the cadence of those lumbar pops by now. That was a door. Yelling back seems the strongest defensive spell I can cast. Good old annoyance, even as bravado, helps resituate me.

I wait for an answer, for it to duplicate itself, then head downstairs, policing slowness, ears on high alert:

A List of Happenings aka This Fucking Day

Step 1
I entered this house again from the dream of the debauch in the loft, steel and glass like I imagined I’d have one day, the city off its balcony a pile of fulvous jeweled yellow, friends and employers there. There was a curtain of force that kept me at 15’ remove from the faces. It would give at first when I moved near them, then swell and repulse me and I’d find myself in stairwells, pushed into the wrong clothes, trying to avert or start emergencies in fuseboxes, looking at drywall and olive drab diamond plate steel landings, talking to undercover cannibals full of ruses and sinister half-formed phonemes, sentences fused together and rolling, rolling. An enduring feeling of failure that kept me in bed long after I woke.

Step 2
Noticing the welts on the insides of both wrists like an allergic reaction, raised, red, like pollens went at me with claws.

Step 3
Washed my server uniform and jeans in Uncle Jay’s ancient Kenmore; it works fine, but I was so unsettled about taking ownership of this museum that I was still using laundromats a month after moving in. While doing this, I worked out a few more lines about the realtor bluegrass jingle where you get blown if you close on a house: Stomp your hands, clap and scream/It’s the #1 Dicksuckin’ Realty Team/Wrap your lips ‘round the ‘Murican Dream…

Step 4
I only have one freelance client left, so I should have done a better job. I used to crush stuff like that article in 45 minutes, now it takes 3 hours. The writing is easy. Caring about it is nearly impossible. 45 minutes of breaks in between every few paragraphs: Yahtzee on the phone, hunting for a pair of cufflinks — cufflinks! — in the living room’s unpacked boxes. I was seized with fear at the thought of not having those cufflinks anymore.

Step 5
Again I daydreamed until my body was past hungry and tipping into rage, shrugged at the kitchen — still the only fully unpacked and operational room after three months — then drove up and down Welty Boulevard., unable to make a decision about lunch as if if there were a firing squad waiting for me after the meal. Wound up at Sonic, four cars deep with four heads each and they all looked like bearded dads in UnderArmor hats with full vehicles modding every single thing in every single bag, can you fuckers die. Reminded me of that time Uncle Jay took me to Yosemite and we got caught behind some cross-country cyclists on a two-laner while trying to exit the park. After 15 minutes of glaring over the top of his steering wheel in silence, the exquisite groan: “Uuungh, can’t they just hop tree to tree and leave me alone?”

Step 6
I gorged at home and attempted a half page of the book about the Byzantines. It was chief in J’s collection and he’d package what he thought were the funny parts for me over the years. Sometimes when I’d get on his nerves he’d tell me to comply or get the Byzantine Retirement Plan, which by then I knew was having your eyes gouged out. I still can’t get through it; I’ll read a book a month sometimes then stick on one for a year even if it’s labor. The bare bedroom was getting too warm in September’s late heat. I am at ease when the weather is pleasant enough not to think about and beset the other 10 months of the year. I know I should read but all I could see was a shifting scribble of a brain trying to read.

Step 7
I tried to relax with a walk at dusk, tracing a halfhearted three-block rectangle, the horizon opening up briefly on the shortest leg of the rectangle, 23rd Street. I saw a disintegrating colossus of thunderheads in the west but drizzled with pink on the outer rinds, green on the bottom where the edge of the municipal golf course began blocks away. I passed the janitorial supply store and the bleached cutout of the woman and the mop; I’ve walked by that shop since I was a kid and I still can’t tell if it’s in business or not.

Step 8
I found A.B. on Instagram because cycling tabs for a dribble of likes starts crushing you after the sun goes down. It was the same smile from when she asked me in the HS library where the pencil sharpener was, she knew damn well where the pencil sharpener was. Still a lovely dresser, stylish without being trendy. When she asked me about the pencil sharpener I remember she had a turquoise bandana rolled into a perfect hairband and I didn’t understand in my panic what she was asking for at the time, but I did understand, or thought I did, that if you had a girlfriend with a turquoise bandana hairband and a smile like that, you were all right, you had a foothold on something.

Next comes the living room, where we see the first manifestation of A.B. I’ve got the living room scene written, but I’m going to pin this for now because I want to refine the scene a bit and talk about my impressions of the game so far.

As a writer, I’m a fountain of jokes, complaints, opinions and stories. That comes easy enough. I’m good at scenes, bits and fragments, but rarely attempt the discipline of longer stories. And when I do, it’s usually show-off observation and ideas and riffs without much shape.

Dwelling — and the way it nudges you to triangulate the book’s cues with things you remember and things you can embellish — has got me writing an actual goddamn story. Much more of one than I set out to do.

I had to quietly eat some crow about my contempt for people who workshop stuff, go to conferences and do guided exercises and the like. But what pure stories have I ever written with my big, manic imagination? Almost none. Yet here I am, several thousand words in to one. Turns out I needed a prod in my ass after all, just like all the earnest amateurs I mocked to my friends. So I’m walking that one back. QED. Score one for you, Seb Pines.

The fact that it’s a former uncle’s house is also rich ground. Because of the dream I had, I more or less know the outcome and the arc I want — the intoxication of attachment and desire, its awful fulfillment and the grace of letting go. But now I’ve got a subplot on my hands with the lingering presence of an uncle that has me thinking hard about the encounters as chapters and how Uncle Jay’s strand mirrors or diverges from the narrator’s wanderings. It’s almost overwhelming. This is turning into a workout.

This goes for the emotional processing, too. I’ve noticed something else cool happening in the past few weeks: I’m revisiting scenes of my old self with less recrimination, less shame, less bitterness. I don’t want to oversell this as some replacement for more formal means of care, but grinding through these scenes transmutes the poison tang of how I recall things, at least lately. I feel lighter. I can sift a bit more dispassionately. Not picture everything as evidence against myself or others.

So where does this sit in the tableau of experiences we would call games? I can’t tell you yet. It’s categorically different and I’m incredibly glad I sought it out. And I intend to stick with it.

If you like the story so far, keep up on the Breakup Gaming Society blog this summer as I add encounters and work through the book.