The Crossroads

Stories say that if you make your way to a certain crossroads on a specific evening at a precise time of night and choose your words very, very carefully that you can get anything you ever dreamed of, assuming you can stand to pay the price.

Stories, as usual, did not get it quite right.

A 2 hour magical realism game about people who have come to the Crossroads to sell their soul in order to solve their problems, but find that not everything is what they expected it to be (including, perhaps, themselves) and that not every cost is so easily paid.

Long Description

Stories say that if you make your way to a certain crossroads on a specific evening at a precise time of night and choose your words very, very carefully that you can get anything you ever dreamed of, assuming you can stand to pay the price.

Stories, as usual, did not get it quite right.

There is a Crossroads. And it is a place where you can go to, quite possibly, gain fame, or fortune, or astounding abilities, or maybe even change your destiny. That much is true. But there is no deal to be done, at least not the sort the stories talk about. There is no sinister figure waiting to promise you anything and everything you want, for the low low cost of your soul. No. Here you will find only options. Options and costs.

Crossroads are the physical representation of a choice. They can take you where you want to go, but they can’t take you everywhere. You can’t walk down one route without turning your back on at least one other. You wanted or felt you needed something badly enough to risk coming to this place, prepared to walk one of those new routes, but now you are left to wonder if it is worth the cost.

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The Crossroads is a mood-focused, 2 hour, mostly rulesless game about who people are, who they could be, what they want, and whether the cost of having their dreams come true is worth the price.

This is a game about making a decision. It is a game about desperate people who aren’t sure if this is a good idea or not. It is a game about examining your options and talking them through with strangers who are in the same boat. There is no plot aside from choosing whether you find the cost worthwhile.

In The Crossroads you play as someone who has come to this place in hopes of escaping their troubles and achieving or obtaining some slice of greatness, glory, or resolution. But the cost is high, maybe higher than you expected. Perhaps higher than you are willing to pay, which makes the choice suddenly much more daunting than it was when you set out to make your way here.

The Crossroads is a liminal space, not tied to a particular place or time, and the characters that have made their way there reflect that. Their memories have become more abstracted, their past beginning to be broken down into broad brush concepts and bite-sized chunks. Functionally, this means character sheets will be written to be intentionally vague in some ways referring to ‘the city’ or ‘the election’ for example, rather than specifics. This is intentional and part of the setting.

Character sheets will be 2-3 pages long, and may appear in a variety of forms, including some that are abstracted and dreamlike. After all, The Crossroads cares more about what bucket or trope you fit in, rather than the nitty gritty details of your life. Conveniently, this also minimizes the amount of memorization you need to do for a short game. Fancy! There will also be a 2 page Crossroads bluesheet, which includes parables and myths your character believes are true about the crossroads.

SOME OF THESE BELIEFS WILL BE INCORRECT

I say it again: characters will come into the game believing some things about the Crossroads that may not be how things work. The truths will be revealed early in game, and the purpose of this decision on a meta level is to serve to have the agony of the decision-making process be something that occurs during the course of the game, rather than charted out beforehand.

From a gameplay perspective, there is only one mechanic. The Crossroads contains possibilities, promises for the future. Characters will be composed of various facets. Your character sheet may hint at what facets you have, but until you arrive in game you will not know for certain which facets the Crossroads deems core to you and worth trading for. Characters will have 2 hours to discuss and decide if what the Crossroads offers is worth what the choice demands, or if returning to life as they knew it is perhaps not so bad. As this is a game about talking through options and making decisions and since it takes place in a dreamlike space that isn’t quite real, no mechanics exist for violence or hostile interaction between characters.

Again, there is no plot aside from the choice to be made about the prizes being offered and the cost being asked. This is a talky feelings game

In regards to content warnings, we can work with players to minimize exposure to certain elements by not casting them as the roles where they appear in a character sheet they would receive, but do ask people to understand that this is a small, heavily social game, and it is likely you may encounter things on this list at least in passing.

Dim lighting and hammering will also be present. As in actual physical hammering during the course of game (more itermittent tap tap roofing nails than construction nails, but still sharing for comfort levels)

A less specific warning, but an important thing to consider before playing is that almost all characters in this game are discontent at best and in actively terrible situations at worst. Happy, well-adjusted people do not come to The Crossroads looking to sell parts of themself off for a brighter future. Please be aware of that when determining if this game is right for you and your current mental state.