Shining Moon Episode 39: Writing Games III, Cerebos the Crystal City

Zach Welhouse is a librarian and game designer who lives in the Pacific Northwest. He enjoys hot drinks and meeting dogs who look like goblins. His work has appeared in the Costume Fairy Adventures and Deadlands RPGs, and Strange Beast: A Tarot Zine. Cerebos: The Crystal City, a game about crossing a surreal desert by train, is available through Penguin King Games on itch.io and Drivethru RPG

 Amelia Gorman lives in Eureka where she spends her free time exploring tidepools and redwoods with her dogs and foster dogs. Her fiction has appeared in Nightscript 6 and Cellar Door from Dark Peninsula Press. You can read some of her poetry in Vastarien, Utopia Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons. Her first chapbook, the Elgin-winning Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota, is available from Interstellar Flight Press. Her microchapbook, The Worm Sonnets, is available from The Quarter Press.

Cerberos is a fascinating game. The premise is simple; the execution is complex. The premise? That you’ve boarded a train for the Crystal City of Cerebos. But you can choose your journey’s tone right from the start—it might be a folk horror setting, it might be fairy tale, it might be science fiction. . . and then you’re rolling on tables for cards that detail the complications that ensue on the train, the strangeness of the stops along the route, and so on. Halfway through your journey, the game changes; one of the characters becomes the Protagonist, and the other characters become advisors who encourage them to either put aside the past and embrace the future, or embrace the past more fully. There’s a huge psychological element to play—if you want there to be, anyway. Some people might play it solely as an adventure, and that’s another entirely correct way to play.

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

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