All That You Know

CW: Body horror, gross descriptions

All That You Know is an actual play podcast. Their second season ‘City of Glass’ uses the game Heart: The City Beneath (by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor) to write the story of four misfits forcing their way into the horror landscape of the eponymous City, driven by both personal obsession and coercion exerted by awful powers. It recently returned from hiatus, and I am delighted to have it back in my podcast feed.

As Sam Sorensen and Rowan Zeoli said in a recent episode of Dice Exploder, actual play is an inherently metafictional mode of storytelling. The audience of an actual play is at once following a consciously fictional story, and, experiencing a putatively nonfictional documentary¹ about both the making of that story, and, the people doing the making. One way to categorise actual play is by how much presence this documentary aspect has in the show, and applying that method to ATYK, I would describe the show as low-doc.

This trait matters because the documentary portions of actual play offer a rest from active listening. If I drift during a discussion of the players’ lives or interests, I do not risk losing plot info the way I do if I lose focus during the explicit fiction. The less doc in an actual play, the more consistent attention is required from the listener. Now, consistent attention is not, unfortunately, something I can give a podcast. Given this, what makes ATYK one of my favourite actual plays is that the show in general, and specifically the scene descriptions written and performed by GM Colin Crane, are great at folding me into their common understanding, despite my drifting ears.

…and then, after this small sleep, you awaken. You are all in a pile of melted corpses, sprawled out. The corpse pile is perhaps six feet tall and ten feet wide, a mound of mostly intact cadavers which seem to be fused together: cloth, metal, flesh and glass indiscriminately liquify and adhere the bodies as one. Sprinkled over the top, like a porcelain snow, are countless teeth. As you each separately get to your feet, there is a distinct sticky peeling sensation, parts of your clothing and exposed skin ever so slightly tearing as you start up from the corpses. As you get your bearings, you realise the mound is only the beginning of the corpses here. In fact the ground itself seems to be made of these bodies, a pitted tacky mass which you sink ever so slightly into. The flesh floor extends as far as you can see, which is to say about 20 feet, before a pink fog blocks your vision entirely. The stench here is strange: halfway between boiled meat and some harsh industrial chemical you might smell in the demon cities, and it is now, as you have taken in your surroundings, that you notice an additional concern. There are only three of you here. Halo is missing.

All That You Know ‘City of Glass’. Episode 11 “Belly Ache”

The above is a section of Crane’s opening narration for Episode 11 of ‘City of Glass’. I listened to it twice, once through normally, then again for transcription, and it was only when trying to catch every word that I noticed Crane’s descriptions of the precise dimensions of the corpse-pile, and the pink fog. On my first listen, my mind had skipped over those details. What I had kept though, or indeed, what Crane inserted into my brain was the description of the floor sinking slightly beneath one’s foot, because it is made of corpses.

In Games are made of speech, I, accepting the assertion that spoken and written language are totally different modes of expression, asked “what is it then that makes them so different?” ATYK’s descriptions gives me an answer. Written down, I see every part of the description Crane wrote. Listening, I retain only fragments. But the loss is not random. Descriptions of what is seen are forgotten. Descriptions of touch remain.

This is not the first time this has happened. In the first episode of ‘City of Glass’, Crane narrates the party’s encounter with the driver of the train they are riding on. Once again transcribing the encounter revealed parts I had missed or forgotten, but I recalled very well the last few sentences:

From his mouth and from each of his eyes jut three sharp metal rods, terminating in a crowned spike, which occasionally recedes into his skull with a wet “shwch” and then emerges later wet and glistening.²

Here, the seizing detail is not the PC’s sensory experience, but a tactile experience the monster is having. Tell me about rods protruding from mouth and eyes, and I feel a chill against the bone of my eye sockets, and the shadow of gag reflex. From that feeling, a vision of the creature emerges, clearer and sharper because it was not conjured by visual depiction alone.

This tactile language made ATYK notable to me. However, the success of Crane’s description is not that it is well-designed for me, but that it works hard to find a way into the listener’s brain, by targeting every sense it can. In the examples I’ve referred to, we get sights and smells and sometimes foley sounds, all in addition to touch. The delight of ATYK then is not that it is specific. It’s that Crane in his description has fashioned so many different spikes to thrust into our ears, that our brains will snag on at least one.