#faye post

So we just finished a session of our PF2e campaign and we tried something out we've been dying to do.

So we streamed the table in case anyone was having any computer issues, and thought "why not look into this vtuber stuff".

Oh mah gawd! It was so affirming having my face on screen responding to my movements!

It's gonna be so awesome when we get everyone else set up so that when we switch our players can see who they're talking to. And it's gonna be so fucking nifty to have models set up for the various NPCs.

But what if you're neither? What if you don't have origins? What if you abjectly refuse the narrative that there was cause or purpose to your system's formation? What if the mythology you build for your system's formation bucks at these labels? What if you find the question faulty?

Idk, this is more or less a vent at the centrality of origin in system spaces I guess. Makes us feel out of place. It almost feels like asking us the origins of our genders or orientations. Or to put a -genic label on our spiritual beliefs. It's either an irrelevant question to us or one that's so complex as to be unanswerable with a couple of labels.

All week we've been making maps and setting them up all cool af like. The map making software we got (Dungeondraft) sorta integrates with the virtual table top we're using (Foundry) to make the whole thing really immersive. Like, Foundry let's you place walls and lights so the players can't see what their characters can't see. Or we can have roof tiles set up to appear above them and fade out when they go underneath. And with a new feature (that we very much wish had more documentation 😑) we can automatically move the characters from one map to another when they step on the stairs tile. Some places it's seamless enough to look a lot like they just walked around a corner and the map was already there.

We were so nervous leading up to it. We got tons of prep work done before hand, so the few hours before were that sort of "hurry up and wait" anxiety. We were ready to run, so there was nothing we could do to settle ourselves while the clock ticked closer to game.

It was great! Well, rocky and awkward as any roleplay heavy session 1 should be expected. Maybe less so. Technical difficulties from playing with some features for the first time popped up. A couple of blind spots in our prep shook our confidence. But in the end, we were more prepared than we weren't.

Speaking of prep, we had a bunch of maps! There were 5 separate scene locations (plus the starting city itself). Foundry VTT added a feature recently where you can set up regions that trigger automatic stuff in them (usually when a character's token walks into them). So we had all of these maps set up to have exits that teleport a character to the city map (and spots on the city map that teleports them to those individual scenes). It was all very slick! The PCs could move from their starting scene into someone else's smooth and organically.

We also made a few handouts. The built in journal is frustrating to work with, but we eventually figured out how to properly make a document that had the NPCs picture on one side, and information about them on the other, without the formatting going wonky. We also used a meme maker to make parchment scroll notice thing (an advertisement one of the characters posted to get the other PCs to join their adventure). We spent a few hours yesterday morning futzing around in GIMP trying to figure out how to remove the white background. Lol it felt silly spending hours trying to turn the background transparent, when a white background would be fine. But! Now we know, and that upgrade is going to be applicable to so many documents we make in the future!

We also had a cool quest tracker mod installed (Simple Quest), but sadly we were too busy to use it how we intended. We wrote up some quests for the individual PCs that were partially complete. It was a cool bit of story telling having stuff like having "Hire the eccentric wizard" marked as complete, followed by "Don't let the eccentric wizard distract you with info dumping about extradimensional spaces" marked as failed. We had planned to reveal more quest items, and check items off as the scenes progressed, but we were too busy with all of the NPCs to remember!

Which fried our brain! Most of the time, when we run games in Cellaphage (the setting for this game, that Ny, Ahri, Aros, and Kelspur also come from) we don't so much roleplay the NPCs as we channel them. It's not like our normal switches, but "possession" is a pretty close description. We hand the character our voice and they just do their own thing. So part of our exhaustion was from all that switching.

Speaking of voices, omg we got to do so many voices! We use accents as an auditory shorthand for the different regions/languages of Cellaphage (e.g. giving a French accent to the vampires). We surprised some of the players by springing on them that the country they start in uses an Australian accent. That was super fun doing 4 separate character voices, but applying the same accent to them. Idk how well others could hear it, but we could tell the difference! I think by the end of session we had voiced like 11 NPCs? Again, brain fried by all this switching 😆

We like the suspense of doing cliffhangers, but we don't like how cliffhangers means that the game is in stasis between sessions (we like when our players roleplay outside of session). We found a really cool best of both worlds though! At the end of the session, I narrated a scene taking place from the villains' perspective, that sets up the encounter the party is going to face. It did the dramatic set up of "Oh no how does this turn out" but leaves the players able to think, plan, and roleplay what their characters are doing between sessions. Also I got to make it nice and creepy to fit the "haunted woods full of vampires" they're going to.

🏁 How has your system changed over time, if it has? Such as a new influx of members, a change in headspace, or a new structure. (Feel free to be as vague or specific as you want, or skip this question.)

🔎 Is there any other trivia about your system you'd like to share?

⭐️ Yeah! So it's mostly this round black room. We have a staircase off on one side that leads up to some of our rooms, and a hallway on the other that leads to the rest of our rooms. In the main room, we have a sunken couch that we sit around to talk to each other. We have some hallways in the back that lead to our backrooms where [Esoteric] set up some fun spaces (bowling alley, water park, ball pit, etc).

🏁 It's changed in a few ways, mostly becoming more spiritual as we gat a better handle on our DID symptoms.

One of the big ones is in member count. While we've known us Fayes aren't one person, we got a specific count and found 7 of us.

We've also gotten all of our new headmates from this... place. It feels weird to call it fictional, what with the exomemories, but it's the place where all of the TTRPGs we run are set.

The crossover between these things has been an evolving thing too. [Esoteric] Faye told us she's from this place. Two of our headmates (Jack and Calamity) left our system to go live in there. Some of us will go on trips with Roki and [Esoteric] to do fun shit out there, and come back with exomemories. And overall just folks going "yeah sure, I'll incorporate this into my worldview" to it.

We always find it annoying at best, and downright dismissive or invalidating at worse, when we see folks talking about spiritual systems as being "completely different from" CDD systems.

They can be sure. Absolutely a CDD system can view themselves entirely as psychological, and spiritual systems can be wholly unrelated to disorder.

But they don't have to.

We're a spiritual system. We're supposedly "completely different from" people with DID. Apparently when one of our headmates takes over our body, that's something totally separate and distinct from a switch. When we hear our headmates talking to us, that's nothing like internal communication. When one of us has a lot of emotions about something that bleeds over to front, that's a phenomenon wholly unrelated to passive influence. And when one of us feels like something happened to another person piloting our body, well that's completely different from dissociation/emotional amnesia.

I bet you're going to tell us that when we forget things beyond the norm, that's nothing like amnesia too.

But here's the catch: we're diagnosed with DID.

So what? Are we wrong about our spiritual explanation? Well then that means all of those other spiritual systems could be just as wrong about their experiences. Which seems to kinda fly in the face of the hard line exclusion between the two. Is someone out here going to prove the existence of spirits to add to the diagnostic toolkit? Are there no such things and there's a psychological explanation that may or may not have some similarities to CDDs?

So are we wrong about the diagnosis? Idk what else really fits the cluster of symptoms involving distress and dysfunction around having multiple personality states and amnesia. Its definitely not a normal part of accepted cultural practice. Trauma fucked that right up. The DID therapy we're in seems to be tackling our trauma much better than any therapy we were in before the diagnosis. And at the end of the day, I trust our diagnostician much more than anyone on the internet about this. Again, that hard line doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. If we can't have a CDD because we believe many of our headmates are souls from another world, well shit did we find a cure for DID? Present them with the belief that got ghosts in their butt?

(Low key, that has been a helpful for our recovery, but that's more to do with acceptance and letting go.)

We're a system that's made up of spirits and traumatized girlies. And the lines between those two categories are blurry (heh) at best. Telling us that our experiences are completely separate from our experiences is silly.

Instead of saying that this category is completely separate from and has no overlap with this other category, can we all just allow for those blurry places to exist? I'm not saying to call every instance of spiritual plurality some form of CDD. I'm not saying that CDD spaces need to be flooded with spiritual plurals that have no disorder. Im not even saying that they're always or even often the same thing. CDD spaces should be talking about CDD stuff. But sometimes CDD stuff includes the experiences of spiritual systems.

We have heat intolerance issues. And it's been real hot. We usually end up tired, dissociated, and unable to focus. Which isn't so great for driving.

But Roki just pulled out another one of his classic "I got you kid" moves and spent the whole drive doing a bunch of grounding techniques. A few the rest of us have never thought of before.