The Council of Arches

**Hey, no recursing.**

## Synopsis

Juniper writes rules for a game of his own creation—*Arches*—and prepares a campaign for the Party to play. Solace provides the snacks.

Juniper explains the system to the party, and tells them they have to choose one of four decks of cards. The group fights over who gets to choose which, and Juniper calls out Fenn for intentionally being difficult just to create an authentic Tabletop Roleplaying experience.

Juniper explains the campaign will take place within a town by the name of Gramp's Hollow. The mayor has had the village's taxes stolen by a band of scurrilies—small, furry and treacherous creatures cursed with profound greed—and it'll be the party's objective to retrieve them from the run-down Cumplebottom Manor.

Juniper then tells them to create characters. Some drama ensues over which races to pick, but eventually Amaryllis decides to be an itinerant scholar. Grak gives an elaborate backstory for his fighter. Fenn decides to play as Amaryllis' character's twin, a slink-thief, simply to piss her off. Finally, Juniper lets Solace play a scurrily trying to be free of its greed.

The party "rolls" for stats by drawing cards, Fenn's elf luck giving some problems. Amaryllis decides to be a salver, a type of wizard with trees on their heads only they can see, with little fairies living in the tree and doing the wizard's bidding.
Juniper describes a tavern where their characters meet. Solace-as-Case approaches Grak-as-Bachewin, and they decide to team up. Amaryllis-as-Miranda and Fenn-as-Adnarim come in through the door, scuffling and almost instantly getting kicked out of the tavern. Miranda offers to fix the damage they've caused, and does so using her fairies. Bachewin offers Miranda and Adnarim a chance to join him and Case in their mission to recover the taxes. Bachewin defends Case from the questionably bigoted accusations that ensue.

The party's party approaches Crumplebottom Manor. Miranda fails to make her fairies do some recon, which she hides from the others to save face as a mysterious wizard. Bachewin kicks in the manor door, and they're instantly attacked by scurrilies, triggering a fight. It takes the party twenty in-game seconds to win—about one hour and a half in real life.

Fenn, Amaryllis and Grak get distracted by a sudden out-of-character conversation on their races' views on processes and finished products. Juniper tries to get the game back on track and calls it a night when he fails. The others demand angrily to keep the game going, since they're still having fun, and Juniper concedes.

The party finds some loot and trinkets, but the treasure isn't among them. Fenn decides to take the trinkets regardless, as well as the scurrilies' ears. Amaryllis gets distracted by the concept of an afterlife in the game world, and cards are flipped to find out, a conversation about each character's views arising.

After a few traps and another round of combat—and another hour of real time—the party's party's health is slowly whittled down. They're approaching the final fight, and Fenn decides to make Adnarim abscond from the fight, since she thinks her remaining cards are awful.

The party's flips aren't any good, and Bachewin nearly dies. A very lucky flip by Amaryllis saves the day, Miranda drawing her pocket knife and desperately stabbing the last scurrily through the eye. She finishes it off and heals Bachewin with the help of another favorable flip.

Adnarim rejoins the group and they loot the bodies, finding out the town's tax is actually vials of liquid mana collected from the surrounding land. Miranda decides to take the tax back to the mayor, and the group decide to help Case on its quest to speak with its god afterwards. Juniper finally ends the game for the night, everyone mentioning how much they enjoyed it, but Grak and Fenn complaining about the lack of rules getting in the way.

The day after, Solace and Juniper talk about fireside storytelling, her mentioning it was much like their roleplaying and sharing a story about a man that flirted with her during the process. Juniper wonders about the man's ultimate fate, but decides to let Solace focus on the happier times.

## Featured characters

* Juniper Smith as the Dungeon Master
* Amaryllis Penndraig as 'Miranda'
* Fenn Greenglass as 'Adnarim'
* Grakhuil Leadbraids as 'Bachewin'
* Oorang Solace as 'Case'

## Quotes

“You said that this was how it goes with a gaming group. I just wanted the experience to be authentic. Should I have waited to get distracted on side topics until we’re roleplaying?”
“I fear for my sanity.”

—**Fenn** tries her best to annoy **Juniper**.
“There are cleavages. Cracks. In reality. Visible to only a few bloodlines. I can see the edges of her crystals.”

—**Grak** improvises some good roleplaying.
“I have a bad feeling.”
“I have a bad feeling too,” said Grak. “As I have been stabbed and am dying.”

—**Fenn** sets up some of **Grak'**s famous dwarf humor.
“Alright. I’m going to run.”
“The fuck you are.”
“No, I am. It’s been real, but I’m not dying down here. Joon, I run.”
“Joon, I use the leash.”

—**Fenn** and **Amaryllis** display their bond of sisterhood.
“The God’s Tongue,” she said in a solemn whisper.
“How much do you know about what it does?”
“I’ve heard only whispers. But those whispers seem to indicate that it allows a discussion with the gods, so long as you stand within their place of power. I snatch up the orb from the pile and place it into a pouch I had kept empty for it.”

—**Solace** improvises an objective for their next game, with a little prompting from **Juniper**.
## Notes

* Most of *The Council of Arches* was written concurrently with chapter 56, "Vacations Vocations" - this side-story takes place during the events of that chapter, and is best read before it. It was completed and released once the $300 goal on Alexander Wales' Patreon was reached.
* The rules for *Arches* are available in the story's second chapter.
* Alexander Wales had three main reasons for including discard piles, rather than just shuffling the cards each time:
	+ Streaks of bad luck are balanced by streaks of good luck.
	+ Shuffling is a lot of work.
	+ The discard piles open design space for magic items, abilities and the likes.
* While writing this story, Alexander Wales actually flipped cards in real life - though he didn't feel beholden to the results, and he only flipped cards twice during the story itself.
* Alexander Wales has jokingly noted that he'd try to avoid ever writing another story where each character is using two names at once - he kept mixing them up, and a few of those errors slipped through into the story's initial release.
* He's also suggested that - in an alternate universe where *Worth the Candle* is wildly popular - a physical version of *Arches* would be released, consisting of a deck of 60 cards, a single folded page of rules, and some simple playing-card-sized character sheets. The arche cards themselves might have portraits from the characters of the story. The best way to make that universe this universe is, of course, to tell all your friends about the story.

### Real-world references

* Juniper references the real-world concept of ludonarrative dissonance - the conflict between the narrative of a video game and the narrative of its gameplay.
* Oros Olympos - the high place where the gods of the game world live - is clearly inspired by Earth's Mount Olympus.
* The party grapples with the concept of paper beating rock in rock-paper-scissors.
* Juniper mentions the afterlife of the game world comes from an old campaign, itself adapted from a sitcom on NBC. He's referring to *The Good Place*, in which groups of dead people share big neighborhoods.
* Arches' action economy is based on *Dungeons & Dragons'* 5th edition standard.

## References

1. ↑ Much of this story was written when I was writing ch 56, but my $300 goal on Patreon was that I would finish it, which I did yesterday (and that actually worked as motivation a lot better than I thought it would). I don't consider it required reading for Worth the Candle, though it is suggested; maybe stay away if you don't like the tabletop parts of the story as much.

Thanks for reading, and if you're a patron, thanks for the support.
—cthulhuraejepsen on Reddit, 2018/05/28
2. ↑ When I reach $300 a month, a mostly-written side story, chronicling the group's first session of Arches (taking place around chapter 56 of Worth the Candle) will be completed and freely published, along with the notes for how to play the cobbled together tabletop game on your own. The story was written as an experiment in making a tabletop session readable, as well as working on large group interactions, and to a lesser extent, characterization.
—Alexander Wales on Patreon
3. ↑ There are three reasons for it.

1. It makes "luck" fairly even, so that a streak of bad luck will immediately be balanced out by a streak of "good luck".
2. Shuffling after every flip is a lot of busy work and overhead, especially if you're going to be calling for multiple flips in a row, which as the rules are now is a definite possibility.
3. Having a discard opens up a lot of design space for magic items, class abilities, enemy attacks, spells, etc. If you have a discard, you can have effects that put cards into it, pull cards from it, that shuffle it into your deck on certain triggers, activate when it's at a certain size, etc.

The rules do caution that card-counting might be a problem though. "Hidden" discard is the easiest but probably least effective option to deal with it. Shuffling after every flip removes a lot of design space and makes things more random, but probably doesn't hurt you that much unless you were actually using the design space. Alternately, if you really wanted, you could increase the size of the player's deck to make card counting much more difficult; it's at fifteen cards per player, which is pretty small and easy to track.
—cthulhuraejepsen on Reddit, 2018/05/30
4. ↑ I don't roll dice, no. I did flip cards for the Council of Arches side story, but I didn't feel beholden to them. I think that if I were rolling dice, I would state it outright, because "things can fail or succeed without the author intending it!" would be part of the draw. Doing the dice thing, then not telling anyone, would just be weird. (That said, I do think about success/failure probabilities, and sometimes try to skew things so they're a touch more game-like, if that makes sense.)
—Alexander Wales on Discord, 2019/01/11
5. ↑ I flipped for stats, built out the sub-characters as I thought the characters would build them, then played two combats solitaire to see what potential outcomes were like in terms of how the system actually worked and where the most interesting scenes might come from.

For the actual story, I think I made flips twice, then just faked everything else (but kept careful notes so that no one would flip a card that they logically couldn't have).

For the end of play, when Grak had to make a flip for survival and Amaryllis had to make two flips for revival, I actually wrote it a few different ways and then picked the one that I liked best, both as it sits within the story, and as it sits within the larger narrative (IMO, here it largely provides an up note and a counterpoint to down notes that happen a few chapters away from where this sits). I also think that's where fudging is most noticeable though, but it was a tradeoff I was willing to make.

I actually wrote an essay on Simulationism vs. Narrativism you might find interesting.
—cthulhuraejepsen on Reddit, 2018/05/31
6. ↑ No, not intentional, will fix. There were a few times writing this story that I thought I should probably not ever write another story where every character is using two names. (Edit: fixed)
—Alexander Wales on Discord, 2018/05/29
7. ↑ In some alternate universe where this series is way more popular, there would a physical version, which would basically just be a deck of 60 with the eight arches and four alternate suits, a single page of rules that folded up to be stored with the deck, and some simple, playing-card sized character sheets to go with it. And then the arche cards themselves could be character portraits, though I clearly wasn't thinking about branding much, because ideally there would be four "good" character that fit the archetypes of the on-arches, and four "bad" characters that fit the archetypes of the off-arches. (Alternately, it's implied that there will be one main character and seven companions, which gets you to eight, but doesn't fit the mold of good/bad, and they still wouldn't fit into the arches as presented.)

The game is totally playable with a deck of regular cards though, just not very playtested beyond what I've done solitaire.
—Alexander Wales on Discord, 2018/05/28
8. ↑ Yup, that's the one. (I recommend it.)
—Alexander Wales on Discord, 2018/05/29
9. ↑ No spoilers, but what I thought was most impressive about it was that the plot actually moves along really fast, given that it's a 22-minute sitcom. Even most dramas move along at a comparative crawl, The Good Place felt to me like it was blowing through seasons worth of ideas in short order (while still giving them enough time to breathe).
—Alexander Wales on Discord, 2018/05/29