Played by: Fred, Johnzo, Cheryl

We played three teenage pilgrims sent to rescue a world that found itself tethered to a voracious behemoth that ate via digestive pores in its skin.

Among Pilgrim Leaping Horn’s jumping to conclusions, Pilgrim Flighty Stream’s gullibility, and Pilgrim Angry Hiss’s refusal to take half-measures, the pilgrims found themselves nearly devoured, happily hallucinating on extra-potent herb, riding a tiger chased by a mob, and finally, piercing the veil between universes.

This instance of the game gave me fresh appreciation for how the choices for “you’re in trouble and…” are structured. We repeatedly found ourselves accepting going deeper into trouble because that was the only way we were going to get to use a goal word. (that was, we drew three stones of the same color, and put them all back.) I’d not noticed previously, but if you start your turn in trouble, you have a choice: You can end your turn out of trouble, or you can have a goal word used on your turn (by the troublemakers), but never both.

So, each of us got to experience the “gets deeper into trouble” case: Pilgrim Leaping Horn compounded her error of accidentally feeding her ferrets to the behemoth by leaping in after them and getting herself nearly-devoured, too. Pilgrim Angry Hiss, knocked unconscious, was not rescued but instead was shackled to the behemoth as its next meal … and then was nearly torn apart by pointy things on his way in (that’s trouble getting deeper, twice in a row). And Pilgrim Flighty Stream tried to sleep off his intoxication, but chose a digestive pore for a bed.

And then came trying to figure out how to translate all that into success, when we managed to use the last goal word on the last turn of the last round despite all being in trouble …

(I’ll type up the story itself & post a link to it here when I’m done; it’s inevitably over the length-limit for the forums, all the moreso this time due to Johnzo's luxuriant clauses. And I protest accusations of min-maxing this game just because I'm fond of semicolons! Though I think we did manage to avoid using any, much less abusing them.)

and the raw story, edited only to expand abbreviations. Not actually as long as I'd expected.

This was fun! Thanks for facilitating, Cheryl.

I appreciated how you firmly judged whether a proposed trouble was troubling enough. :)

I was mostly aiming for, was the trouble personal enough? I think with this particular game, a minor trouble that's squarely targeting the Pilgrim ends up more interesting than worldshaking troubles the Pilgrim caused, but isn't sufficiently swept up in -- in the latter case, all that troubles the Pilgrim is guilt.

Yeah, and I think mortal peril is not a good trouble either, since mortal trouble will never pay off in the game.

I wasn't too worried when my guy when into that digestive pore because I knew he was going to make it out alive, and so the choice between marking off a goal word and getting out of trouble was never really hard to make.