A Stranger Worth Following
- story-driven
- Difficulty: beginner
- About 1800 min
- solo
- Coming October 30
- Game Systems: Transformation (New), Ambient Audio (Live), Dynamic Portraits (Live), Travel Hubs (Live), World Map (Live), Party Members (Live), Higher Beings (Live)
What you do
You arrive in Lasting Applause for its great season and accept a second form whose powers never fail. Talk your way toward the seats everyone wants, hand them to others, and take people's places in front of whoever is watching. In your second form you can compel, captivate, delude or frighten the people you meet, and bring some of them along with you. Every seat you give away was one somebody else wanted, and the city remembers who moved them. No fights and no clock.
You come to Lasting Applause in its great season, an adult of your own kindred, and in a quiet room someone who chose you offers a second form whose powers never fail. Make a host give your guest the Low Booth while the floor staff watch. Make someone want you enough to follow you up a stair, and when the wanting stops they are still beside you, working out why. Strike a name off the roll in front of its owner. Every seat you hand out was one somebody else wanted, and they were watching.
Coming October 30. Not playable yet. Subscribing does not unlock it.
Browse worlds you can play now
Plays in a web browser on a desktop or laptop computer.
Free to start, no card needed: 50 Embers on sign-up (approx 1 hour sample of standard play, estimate based on typical story play), then 15 a day.
Early Access
Lasting Applause, in its great season
A city that sells being noticed
Lasting Applause, on Widefeast, sells one thing above everything else: the chance that someone worth knowing will look at you. A board on the Promenade is chalked fresh each evening with what is on tonight and where. Canvases go up in the galleries with the paint still wet. Somewhere on the Night Streets a door-holder is telling a whole queue, to its face, why half of it is not getting in.
The season
It is the great season of art, spectacle and pleasure: a dancer the whole city is talking about, suppers in courtyards, lamps on the water. Nobody wins the season, and it has no closing night. When one story in it ends, the city is still open and somebody is still setting out chairs.
Who sits where
Everyone here wants a seat that somebody else is holding: the chair beside the host at the long tables by the water, the curtained booth at the best club on the Night Streets, the first line on the roll that is read out loud, a name cut into a plaque. People trade, beg and push for those seats, and whoever is pushed aside does not forget it.
You
You are new here: whoever you are, of whatever kindred, an adult under your own name, coming in on an ordinary car in the middle of the season. Nobody in this city has a part written for you. Somebody has been waiting all the same.
What Awaits
- A chair at a long supper table, and a quarrel over the cards left beside the bowls.
- A dancer the patrons are already pricing, whom nobody has asked what they want.
- A folded cream card whose conditions nobody would choose.
- A second body that is still yours, and people who will remember both.
The car is slowing at the edge of the city. Step off, and let it see you.
Content notes
Contains: manipulation and coercion by powers that always work, intimidation, public humiliation, cruelty, violence threatened or remembered but never shown, jealousy, and desire and romance.