About
In 2016 I started putting together some ideas on a Pinterest board around an idea I'd had for a game setting—a small Midwestern town with a lot of economic instability and a hidden supernatural layer. One thing led to another, and several of my friends expressed interest in turning it into an actual game.
Ask Again Later was an attempt to make a game that dug into life in small towns both with sympathy and a critical eye—in a way that turned out to be much more relevant than we expected when we started planning. In the late fall of that year, the United States Presidential election turned out much differently than we thought it would, with many people claiming that it was the will of the average small-town American being done.
The Storyteller System and our hacks
During the game development process, we were looking for a couple particular attributes in a system: support for conflict (including combat) between characters, and a known chance of failure for any given action. We wanted to create an atmosphere of tension in the world, in everything characters would be doing. However, we created our own versions of monsters, using the Hunter the Vigil antagonist creation kit since we wanted the supernatural to feel fresh and unpredictable.
We reorganized the skills into two categories: Skills and Special Training, the latter category being skills comparatively rarer in the setting we'd created. The intent was to create a sense of atmosphere starting from the mechanics to help get people in the right frame of mind—an ethos we tried to hew to through all our work on the system.
"Challenges" were something we added. Functionally, we wanted players to be able to control their level of engagement with some of the difficult aspects of the setting for comfort. For example, someone might want to play a gay character, but not have facing homophobia be front and center in their character's story; in that case, they wouldn't take the "Queer" challenge, and while it would still remain true that other characters would view their sexuality as odd and not fit to talk about in polite conversation, it wouldn't be the main part of their struggle. Conversely, a character who does take that challenge might be overtly struggling with their sexuality, or facing an unaccepting family.
—of course, we hoped a lot of people would take Challenges for various marginalizations, and they did.
A game where most people are normal
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Beauty in struggle and contradiction
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Thank you for reading, and for being interested. I'd be incredibly flattered if someone else wanted to run games using this system, and/or set in Oshtigwanegon, which is why I revamped the website. If you do and have good stories, please tell me! My email is carly@carly.website.
— Carly Ho, Head Storyteller
The Original Team
The original Ask Again Later team was:
- Carly Ho (Lead Storyteller)
- Degen Gottlieb
- Fen Slattery
- Adira Slattery
- Isa Janusz
- Korey Enright
Website Credits
Site generated with 11ty; typeset in Monaco.
Image Credits
- List
- Goes
- Here