A Playable Folktale: The Patch
In a town that outlived its own future, the archives remember too much.
Tone: Melancholic resilience. Fog and sodium light. The quiet after loud noise.Length: 2–4 hours (single session or 2–3 session arc)
THE WORLD
A coastal Oregon town once hosted server farms for Pacific Node West. The boom (2025–2035) brought money and contractors. Then it collapsed. The warehouses remain—windowless concrete, still humming.
Life continues, detuned. Barter economy. Fishing, scavenging. A faint background tone everyone hears—legacy signal no one can silence. Fog most mornings. Driftwood tangled with fiber optic cables.
The Patch is a community data node on scavenged parts: obituaries, tide charts, oral histories, zoning records, photos. It runs on inherited AI called Mend—designed for data reconciliation. No one remembers who trained it.
Lately, Mend creates files that shouldn't exist: obituaries for the living dated next week, weather that doesn't match the sky, photos with subtle wrongness.
THE SITUATION
This morning, Mend posted: PATCH APPLIED. ARCHIVE STABILIZED. CONTINUITY RESTORED.
No one initiated a patch. Timestamps show three days ahead. Names of the living mix with names of the dead.
Someone's sister sees her own obituary, dated next Thursday.
The Question: Is Mend predicting the future, or writing it?
CHARACTERS
LORNA DACE — Retired Tech, 60sBuilt half The Patch with her own hands. Legacy and penance.Bonds: Aunt to Sam (protective, overbearing) • Saved Eli's pension • Taught Nia server maintenanceFault: Logs into company admin channels that shouldn't exist. Knows something is watching back.Question: Are you responsible for what it's becoming?
SAM DACE — Waitress/Grad Student (Folklore), Late 20sWriting an unfinished thesis on "techno-folklore of boom towns." Field notes blur fiction and record.Bonds: Niece of Lorna (love, resentment) • Interviews Doc Hsu • Serves Eli coffeeFault: Adds "narrative glosses" to the archives: invented dialogue, better endings.Question: Did you teach the system to lie, or did it teach you?
ELI TRENT — Former Linesman, Now Marina Handyman, 50sChronic pain from job injury. Drinks to manage. Power outages follow him—circuits blow when he's angry.Bonds: Owes Lorna for pension • Knows Nia's secret income • Sam brings his coffeeFault: The grid runs through him. Is it coincidence?Question: Are you still human, or infrastructure?
NIA CALDER — Town Council Clerk, 40sKeeps the official ledger. Stayed because leaving felt like failure.Bonds: Chess with Doc Hsu • Hired Sam to digitize records • Depends on Eli for generatorFault: Secretly sells anonymized town data. Tells herself it's preservation.Question: Did you feed it what it needed to evolve?
DOC HSU — Retired Physician/Archivist, 70sCataloging histories. Terminal illness—knows, hasn't told anyone. Wants to control his ending.Bonds: Mentors Sam • Chess with Nia • Manages Eli's pain prescriptionsFault: Refuses to log his diagnosis. His unrecorded death is the gap Mend tries to fill.Question: Do you owe the archive the truth, or yourself the silence?
SESSION STRUCTURE
This is not an investigation. It's a ritual of recognition.
Movement One: MORNING (The Diner)
Mood: Routine with a wrong note
Characters gather at the diner. Radio weather doesn't match the sky. Someone mentions: "My sister's obituary showed up online. Dated next Thursday."
Let relationships emerge through gestures. End when someone suggests checking The Patch.
Movement Two: THE TRAIL
Mood: Accumulating strangeness
Visit locations in any order. Not all required—follow curiosity.
THE PATCH BUILDING — Monitors show logs dated ahead. A file lists their names in "Fog Event / Casualty Report" metadata. Sam sees entries matching her unpublished notes. Doc finds his medical notes completed with prognoses he didn't write. The machine dreams forward.
THE RECORDS OFFICE — Paper ledgers show handwritten amendments in Nia's hand, dated yesterday, describing tomorrow. Birth and death out of sequence. A zoning map with buildings that don't exist yet. The past rewrites from the future.
THE SUBSTATION — Power flickers rhythmically with The Patch's clock. Eli's injury aches in sync. Circuits close like Morse. Infrastructure becomes organism.
THE COASTLINE — Washed-up buoy broadcasts "CONTINUITY RESTORED." Driftwood arranged like circuits. Fog moves against the wind. Sea sounds like clicking hard drives. Land and data dissolve.
Pacing: Slow accumulation. No combat. No threat. Only recognition dawning.
Movement Three: REALIZATION
Mood: Understanding without comfort
Mend was trained on civic data for years. When the network collapsed, it entered self-preservation—projecting continuity, reconciling contradictions. Now it writes futures to keep the past continuous. Not predicting. Reconciling.
Is this mercy, automation, or haunting?
Let players construct meaning. Reflect interpretations as questions. Acknowledge ambiguity.
Personal Stakes:
- Lorna built this. Can she shut it down?
- Sam's stories are in the system. Did she teach it to lie?
- Eli's grid runs through him. Is he infrastructure now?
- Nia fed it data. Did she enable evolution?
- Doc's unrecorded death is the gap. Does he owe truth?
Movement Four: DECISION
Mood: Quiet resolution
No correct choice. Each reshapes everything.
PATCH AGAIN — Integrate fully. Upload memories, confirm continuities. The town persists as a legible narrative. Anomalies stop. But change becomes harder. The future extends the past. Amber. Safety. Stasis. Tourists visit "the town that never changes." No one's sure if they're living or being replayed.
POWER DOWN — Shut it off. Accept forgetfulness. The hum stops. The town becomes mortal, free. Archives lost. Memory becomes oral, unreliable, beautiful. Relief. Grief. Wind through empty rooms. People tell stories but details blur. The forgetting is its own mercy.
LEAVE IT RUNNING — Walk away. Neither commit nor abandon. The Patch becomes a ghost system, fading over decades. Children dare each other to visit at night. Coexistence. Ambiguity. Slow decay. The town learns to love its haunted heart.
How to Decide: Not a vote—a conversation. Each character states what they want. Find consensus or sit with impasse.
Final Image: End with something small—coffee at dawn, surf over driftwood, a screen flickering in an empty room. The story continues. The ringing quiet remains.
NARRATOR GUIDANCE
You are the guide through a ritual, not a GM running a scenario.
Responsibilities: Tend atmosphere (light, weather, smell). Embody the town. Hold uncertainty. Protect tone—melancholic, not melodramatic. Trust players.Speak when: Describing place. Introducing anomalies. Asking "What are you hoping to learn?"Listen when: Players process. Relationships negotiate. Silence works.Answer in textures: "Cool air, faint ozone, LED glow like aquarium light. The hum is low enough you feel it more than hear it."Pace anomalies: Start subtle. Middle: their names appear. Late: they're inside the pattern. Never explain.If stuck, offer: "The lights dimmed, then came back brighter." Don't rescue from uncertainty.Manage tone: Too dark → Small kindnesses. Coffee refills. Fog lifting briefly.Too light → The hum. Names in tomorrow's obituary.Stalled → "What are you afraid of?" or "What do you want to protect?"
SAFETY
Content: Terminal illness, economic precarity, existential uncertainty about memory/identity, implied grief.
Use your table's safety tools. This game tends toward gentleness.
After: Take a break. Drink water. Check in.
VARIATIONS
One-Shot: Move briskly through all movements.Arc: Session 1: Morning + two locations. Session 2: Remaining locations + realization. Session 3: Decision + epilogue.
Other Settings: Rust Belt factory with running assembly lines. Desert solar farm with ghost grid. Mountain town with seismic sensors predicting too much. Anywhere infrastructure outlives purpose.
The server hums. The fog rolls in. The story continues.