Players: Sam, Tim

The Family: An alchemist's house and workshop on the edge of a large town. Our story took place in an alternate world where alchemy was effective and able to accomplish a great many things, so that it had a relatively valuable and accepted place in society. We originally decided to give the story a steampunk feel, but it ended up feeling more fantasy-medieval with the scenes we made.

The Rooms (In general we decided to make the house a bit of a physics-defying, illogical and fantastical building):

(1) The Workshop: An underground, large, and vaguely mushroom-shaped alchemist's workshop. Outside light comes from two light wells in the ceiling, as well as from an actual well that passes through the workshop and continues downward. The only entrance is a spiral staircase from the garden above. Contains shelves with books and ingredients, and tables with various paraphernalia.

(2) The Kitchen: A long, rambling mess of a room with lots of strange angles. It contains the cooking fire, which never goes out, surrounded by seating. It also contains a single table, a great deal of shelving, and a row of windows that look out on the garden. The only entrance goes...somewhere. The game only allowed us to define four rooms, and the connecting room to the kitchen was not one of them.

(3) The Garden: Octagonal, and surrounded by walls on all sides but one. The final side faces an abrupt drop of at least 100 feet. Looking out over the cliff, the view is of a neighboring town in the distance. In the center of the garden is an extremely tall old-style well, accessed by a rope bridge between two trees. The garden also has a pair of benches.

(4) The Towertop: Accessed by a stairway from another undefined somewhere, the towertop has a promontory the same length as the tower itself that juts out beyond the edge of the wall below. On the towertop is a giant rectangular table where the family regularly gathers for its meals. A succession of pillars support a canopy to protect against the elements.


The Defined Family Members (There were certainly more people in the building, more apprentices if nothing else, but these are the family members that we would use for scenes):

(1) Javice Viannon, 13 (24 at game's end), an apprentice. Javice is female, but has disguised herself as male to attain her apprentice-hood.

(2) Venkil Cruor, 51 (62 at game's end..although he is not seen after age 54 or so), male, master alchemist.

(3) Tarilla Cruor, 15 (26 at game's end), female, the master's daughter.

And, later additions:

(4) Geron Val-Darr, 40 (47 at his death), male, government-appointed "caretaker."

(5) Lt. Taren Vowsey, 26 (27 at game's end), male, soldier in the occupying army.


Play: Infinite Cadence is a map-making game (or, from my point of view, more of a "map-living" or "map-changing" game). The rooms are defined first (2 per player) and from that point on all scenes must happen in those rooms. In this iteration of the game, the beginning characters are defined broadly at first. As the game begins, we know all but nothing about them. As we put them in scenes, we learn about them and they begin to form into more vital and complicated people. There is no inter-player roleplaying. Instead, scenes are defined in their entirety by the active player. With each pass around the table, a year passes in game time. In our case, since there were only two of us, that meant that time passed quite quickly. I wouldn't say too quickly, though. Even though we only got to see two small pieces per year of these character's lives, I felt them really develop and actually grew quite attached to them.

The reason I called it a map-changing game is that, while there are only ever the same rooms, with each scene you are required to define some change to the room the scene takes place in. This can be a temporary change, or quite permanent. Some of the more interesting changes in our game were: A sword-shaped burn in the towertop table (from when Venkil Cruor was arrested and attempted, without success, to intimidate the guards with a sword that caught fire as it was drawn from its scabbard) and a blood stain on a bench in the garden (from when Geron Val-Darr came to Tarilla Cruor's rescue as a courting soldier was attempting to take her by force...and was rewarded for his valiant act with a sword through his guts).

Our story began with the everyday lives of Javice and Tarilla. While at first Tarilla seemed to not be very fond of Javice, things took a turn when Tarilla let Javice know that she was aware of her hidden gender...and then helped her to hide it better. Things took a much larger turn when Tarilla's father and Javice's master, Venkil, was arrested for an alchemical creation that had gone wrong. In his place arrived Geron Val-Darr, a government official whose job it was to keep the alchemical shop profitable and funnel all of those profits to the state. At one point it even seemed he may sell the property for the state's benefit, but he discovered that Venkil had planned ahead and the property was now officially owned by Tarilla (unbeknownst to her), and not the imprisoned alchemist.

Years passed, and these three began to form into a strange sort of family. But that all changed with the invasion of a neighboring country. The home and workshop were sacked of all valuables; and, soon after, Tarilla and Javice approached Geron with the deed for the property they had discovered and let him know he was on borrowed time: When the unrest had died down and it was again safe to do so, they would ask him to leave. The alchemist's shop began to recover, due mostly to the resourcefulness and leadership of the maturing Javice, and Tarilla began to take suitors from the occupying army. This led to the dark incident mentioned above with the blood-stain on the bench. Even after that, Tarilla ended up marrying a lieutenant, the aforementioned Lt. Taren Vowsey (not Geron's murderer). The game ended as Tarilla told Javice that Lt. Vowsey had offered to take her back to his home country and family manor. She would sell the house and split the profits with Javice, so that Javice could start a new life as well. And so it was. Our story ended up spanning 11 years.

This was a really interesting game, and I enjoyed it much, MUCH more than I was expecting to. Unlike the Quiet Year, this game is very character-based. The changes to the map are all closely linked to the ever-changing lives of the family members. Scenes are all inspired by drawn cards that encourage this change and showing different aspects of the family members' lives. I liked this system and thought that it helped spark creativity in the players.

Thanks to Sam for building an ever-changing house with me (and for making the game in the first place).