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The good folks at the Australian Pinball Museum let me dig through their archives of manuals and I turned up something that isn't conclusive but is definitely suggestive of the machine! It's just a partial schematic, looks like it's mainly about diagnostic indicator lights rather than something more complete. I spent quite a bit of time and this was the only one I could find that seemed useful. The date seems about right and but the title of the doc is the most interesting part. So who knows?

Glad you were able to connect :) Thanks so much for playing and your comments! We also narrate much more like for many story games. With limited space in the document, I could only give notes on a play example, not the whole thing, so it's great to hear you were able to make the dream more substantial!

Thanks! I’m really glad you enjoyed reading it even if you didn’t play it. But if you do play, let me know!

Thanks so much for your comments, Côme! I have a bunch of your games I have been promoting to people because they’re doing interesting things with form, although I still have some to play. 

Thanks! It's always nice to hear how people respond to my weird little creations. I love giving people the chance to experience art in some different ways, and games can be a good way to do that I think.

Thanks for such detailed and thoughtful comments! I certainly think there is lots of room for further development of the questions.

You make a very good point about genre knowledge and I agree that For the Queen does presuppose a shared genre context even if it's not a specific fantasy-world context. (i.e. it might not have to come from a particular lore, such as from a series of novels, a shared understanding of actual history, or an evolved understanding based on playing a fantasy RPG).

How we get to new forms of living is so broad, of course, that I enjoyed thinking about it specifically from a solarpunk perspective, combined with a posthuman position from my own art practice and research program. Each of these has had some exploration, as you note, but it feels like there is still so much more room to explore.

I quite like how games like Dialect are able to explore new forms of living, although with some fairly strong contraints. In that case, the settlement is doomed to disappear and characters are generally positioned as fighting back against a hostile environment whether physical or social environment, so very much at odds with a solarpunk perspective.

Decision-making is absolutely key to a posthuman position, I think. Your suggestion of exploring that further is an excellent one. My first thoughts though aren't to code democracy into as an essential. After all, does non-human nature even want democracy? Does that actually help in the long term? What does democracy mean when members of the society can't vote in the way that humans do? We also have to be careful not to humanise the non-human participants too much, as that defeats the purpose of a posthuman position. How to do that is tricky!

But an exploration of the within-human-group decision making is a good place to begin the discussion. Perhaps that would be a great thing to include in earlier phases of the game, and then subvert it later as the game explores a more explicit integration with the natural world and breaks down the human perspective. Fundamentally, what does a social structure look like when the members are not only the humans, and can/how does it incorporate e.g. plants? There are some really interesting hints from researchers like Monica Gagliano about directions with plants specifically, but I definitely want to think more about it.

The prompts probably do seem to project that we should be reverent of the natural world more than is really ideal. I think that I probably arrived at that point because that is a step that is often taken along the way. But a more critical perspective on that relationship is necessary to make real progress. That's a topic an artist/scientist collective that I am a core member of (The Algae Society) is exploring as we make various kinds of transdisciplinary work.

Thanks again for such insightful and valuable comments. They are helping me think more deeply about what is contained in the game and how it could evolve.

Thanks!

I don’t know For the Drama! I’ll look it up!

The world is always more interesting than we think, and I love how this little card can also change our sense of scale for looking at the world.

It would be interesting to see how KonMari-following players who believe that kept objects should spark joy would tell the stories of the objects.

Love the reflective nature of this.

My wanderer is indeed tiny. And they make me happy.

Tim, not sure if you're aware but the DTRPG POD version has an extra page inserted at the front so all the pages are shifted by one so left is on the right and vice versa. Bit of a shame because part of having the print version is all about the beauty of the design! I can see the POD has been pulled for now, but I ordered it 6 weeks ago when it was still available. (Just arrived today in Australia.)

Thanks! Looks great! A little feedback: I like the pacing aspect your encourage of once per day play, particularly because it makes so much thematic sense. It's something I've been thinking a lot about and have built into a game I'm developing for similar reasons.

Love this and will start playing soon. A question though: you refer to a set of tables to use when you draw a minor arcana card. Are those tables available?

Thank you! It was great fun making it and I hope you have fun playing it!

Back for me too. Some of the ones I'd attempted appeared but others didn't.