The Return of the Current: A Storytelling Game Finds Its Shape
“You are not here to win. You are here to witness.”
When we first released fragments of The Current, it wasn't a system. It was a weather pattern. A fog-primer. A memory-shaped ritual. It lived in Arkham. It asked strange questions. It whispered rather than shouted.
What began as a playable poem paused—because other stories needed to be told.
While TiGGR mapped motion, while Stack & Spiral charted collapse, The Current waited. And then, like all currents, it returned.
What We Made, and Why Now
We’re proud to finally share The Current as a complete bundle—not just a rulebook, but a modular diorama of memory, myth, and motion:
- Core Rules — The full system, designed for emotional storytelling and metaphysical unraveling
- System Remembered (SRD v1.0) — A remixable backbone for fellow designers
- Entering the Drift — A companion guide for new players and facilitators
- Codex of the Fog — Arkham, 1880: A tide-haunted town that never forgets
- Codex of the Divide — Berlin, 1985: Memory loops, broken tapes, angels who cannot intervene
- Codex of the Isles — Albion & Britannia: Where bunting is containment, and red phone boxes double as ritual gates
Each Codex stands alone. Together, they form a thick archive of playable hauntings.
Why It Drifted
We paused work on The Current because it was never meant to be rushed. It required time—not just in hours, but in erosion. We needed to write other systems to understand how this one wanted to speak.
In returning to it, we found new rivers and streams:
- Wenders-inspired Berlin
- A Britain shaped by folk horror and ritual surveillance
- An Arkham where forgetting is a sacrament
Each Codex became not just an expansion, but a way to remember differently.
What’s Next
The Current is now live on itch.io.
The SRD is open. The Codices are thick. The ritual table is set.
We’ll continue expanding this setting—not as a single campaign world, but as a multi-location drift, always shifting, always echoing.
More guides, more rituals, more “AI as Helper Daemon” fragments are coming.
The fog listens.
And so do we.
“You cannot master the Current.
You can at best learn to drift with it.
Until it retrieves you wholly.”