INTRO
SATAH: Welcome to Folio, an actual play podcast about solo and epistolary TTRPGs. I'm your host, Satah. My goal is to showcase multiple possible experiences of self-paced games by inviting guests to play them alongside me so I can compile our stories together. You can support the show financially at patreon.com/foliopod or join there as a free member to get access to the bonus podcast feed which will at some point include a campaign version of this very game that I recorded before I recorded the playthrough that you're gonna hear in this episode. Start hearing in this episode.
This is episode one of our games of The World We Left Behind, a game about exploring an alien planet and discovering what happened to the sapient species that once called it home by Samantha Leigh. The overarching plot of The World We Left Behind is a mystery that you build as you solve it: someone used to live on this planet. Now they're gone. What happened to them?
The other two astrotectives– maybe detectonauts?– sleuthing in the stars with me are Dorian and Nick Butler. I'll tell you a little bit more about them at the break. Let's make our way there by starting with a little bit of character, spaceship, and world creation.
GAME: SET-UP
DORIAN: Alright.
SATAH: Okay.
DORIAN: Hello.
NICK: Hey!
SATAH: Got a game PDF open on a decade-old tablet I inherited from one of my dead parents.
DORIAN: I've got my water; I've got my tea.
SATAH: I've got three to six mason jars of various liquids.
DORIAN: I've got my supplies for this game.
SATAH: I've got a deck of cards and a D6. What does that add up to? Folio recording time, baby.
DORIAN: I am ready to play The World We Left Behind.
NICK: Today we're going to be playing The World We Left Behind.
SATAH: So The World We Left Behind is a game for one to five players. Uh, obviously going to be focusing on the solo aspect for this particular podcast, but it is also something that you can do with a group of people; a GM-less game.
DORIAN: I have not played a solo game before, although god knows I love GMless world building games, so this is… squarely up my alley.
NICK: I am doing this completely blind. I only read the first couple of pages of the game and it said that while you're playing it, you pretty much just read the game as it goes through. And so you're going to be following me as I learn how to play this game and go through a quick solo experience with you guys.
SATAH: I… have played this. For this show, we are going to be doing the one-shot variant of it, which is provided in the game itself. But I originally, in a fit of hubris, um, was like, no, I can– we can do the full campaign style. And my recording ended up being, like, nearly seven hours long? [Laughs]
DORIAN: It says to play at your leisure. We are playing a slightly abbreviated version of the solo rules because it turns out this game, if you play it entirely at your leisure, takes a very long time.
SATAH: Having had that experience, there are parts of this game that definitely I think would shine brighter as a group experience. There are elements of drawing shapes and interpreting that I think are fun to do solo, but would definitely be like a much brighter highlight of the game in a group experience. However, the guidance for the symbols and the interpretation is still a useful and fun and interesting tool in the solo version of it, sort of leading you towards your discoveries and that kind of thing. Not all of this will make sense. We're not into the game yet. You don't have the context, but… I'm excited to try the– I'm excited to see how it plays in the one-shot version now that I've done the sort of, like, multi-session campaign style. And I very much would like to try this with a group of people at some point.
However, I do not make a group of people play a game podcast. Technically, I do– technically, I make a group of people play a game. But separately, discretely. Discretely like apart, not discreetly like subtly. Though also maybe?
DORIAN: So let's get into it.
NICK: So, uh, let's get started.
SATAH: What am I up to? What am I doing?
NICK: For materials, we need a standard deck of playing cards. I literally just came back from the store; bought myself a new pack of playing cards.
DORIAN: I've got my little deck of cards, a pen to write on them, a six-sided die.
NICK: Your boy's a little bit of a dice goblin, not gonna lie. Flat surface, I have a desk.
DORIAN: For me, it's this surface we call a table.
NICK: Uh, and we got time, baby, so let's do this!
DORIAN: And a little notebook so that if I am interrupted partway through, I remember what the hell I was doing.
SETTING UP THE STORY
NICK: "Setting up the story." This is the section I'm on now. "Setting up the story." So, "Before creating a character, answer the following questions as a group."
SATAH: There are a bunch of setup questions. A lot of these aren't strictly as relevant to a solo game.
NICK: Playing solo notes are going to appear through the book, and the note says "Throughout the game, any instructions completed as a group can instead be completed on my own."
SATAH: And some of them are things that I would struggle with, I think, anyway, in a group. For instance, the first question is, "What tone do you want to set with this story?" That's such a wide open question to me that I really struggle with it. But luckily, because it's me– it's just me, solo game, like, I'm pretty much in control of that at every moment.
NICK: So, "What tone do you want to set with this story? Examples: eerie, lighthearted, somber…"
DORIAN: I think I'm going for reflective.
NICK: I want badass!
DORIAN: A solo journey to me is kind of inherently a like, lonelier or, like, more somber one than if you've got a group who can kind of bounce off each other.
SATAH: It probably will be relatively lighthearted, occasionally dipping into melancholia because of who I am as a person…
DORIAN: And I think that sort of introspective mode is what I want to capture. I think this character– I am envisioning one character. I think there are rules for playing more than one character, even as a solo player, but I'm envisioning one person, so it's a bit of a lonely journey.
SATAH: I think it's going to have some cyberpunk-y elements, which means getting a little like edgy and weird corpo stuff at certain points. Especially because this is such an open game that can be so many things, I really want to fall back on my more familiar genre touchstones. I found in my other game of it, I really slid into that without totally meaning to, so I want to kind of set the intention from the beginning.
NICK: We're gonna do badass. "How grounded in science do you want this story?
SATAH: "Examples: hard sci-fi like The Martian or soft sci-fi like Star Trek."
NICK: I want it to basically be sci-fi-fantasy.
SATAH: My sci-fi is soft as fuck.
NICK: The hardest sci-fi I go into is Star Wars, to be honest.
SATAH: I love to pretend to scientifically justify things in, like, a very pseudoscientific way?
I just watched an episode of Fringe where the mystery was solved– it's the second ever episode of Fringe– they're like, "Hey, you know that one Jules Verne story where the eye gets an imprint of the last thing that a person sees before they die? Well, that's not real. EXCEPT that this person was killed after having a, like, muscle paralytic put in them, so actually, their optic nerve is frozen in the exact configuration of the signals of the last thing they saw when they died. So actually it is real, and that's science." which is my favorite shit in the whole world. Don't think about it too hard, too too hard of sci-fi.
DORIAN: "How grounded in science do you want the story?" That is going to be a play to find out question. I'm not a scientist. I am going to probably incorporate the little bits of scientific knowledge I've hoarded over the years when they come up and when they seem interesting. But I'm not going to interrupt play to research things… probably. And I don't want to ever feel like I can't pursue a cool idea because it wouldn't be scientific.
NICK: I like lasers and laser swords and basically space magic. I want to play space wizards. That's kind of what I am. Space wizard, space samurai.
SATAH: "What do you not want in this story? Examples, eyeball gore, genocide, spider-like creatures." Again, lines and veils type thing, not quite as important when it comes to playing solo, but I will discuss, as always, why I am leaning into the things I am leaning into and why I am leaning away from the things I am leaning away from as I go.
DORIAN: I'm not sure. Most of the things that I would normally put on a lines and veils or other safety list are not things I think will come up. I'll probably just shy away from things as they arise if I feel myself heading in a direction that I am not prepared for.
NICK: "What are you excited to explore in this story? Examples: strange alien planets, themes of environmentalism, character development." Honestly, I like character development. I like a little bit of mystery, but I don't like puzzles. So I'm really going to focus on character development and try to establish a little bit with action.
SATAH: "What are you excited to explore in this story?" I will say… again, having now played this game once: at the very end, I've found that– this game, you're solving a mystery, right? That's sort of the broad strokes of it. You are investigating what happened to the sapient species, the people who people said broadly who lived on this planet and have now disappeared or are gone in some way. And almost every single thing that I found was very directly tied to that.
And then when I came to the ending, some of the questions it was asking seemed to very much imply, like, that shouldn't necessarily be the case. That unless a mechanic is specifically tied to the mystery, this game should be much more vibey, explorey. It's hard to say, like, how effectively I'll do that because I do– I get drawn into the narrative. But that is something I want to try to prioritise in this playthrough: exploring the planet and finding clues when I'm asked to rather than turning everything into a clue.
DORIAN: I'm excited to explore, uh, playing a solo game. But in terms of actual story themes, I think the… engaging with the alienness and unfamiliarity of the landscape and figuring out, as well, what I want this past sapient civilisation to have been like and how I want to connect it to my own character's circumstances or outlook is something that I think is interesting to me.
On that note, I should figure out what my character's circumstances and outlook are because we are at the character creation section.
CHARACTER CREATION
NICK: Character creation!
SATAH: Character creation.
DORIAN: "Answer the following questions individually." Easy. "Share your answers with the group." Easy.
NICK: "Each player starts by creating one character. These characters will be traveling to the planet together." The playing solo note says, "You can choose to play one character traveling alone or multiple characters traveling as a crew. If playing as only one character, skip the group questions." I'm going to be playing as one guy.
SATAH: I think that one of the reasons my playthrough ended up so long is that I did have a full crew. Not like a huge one, but a three-person crew. And so there was a lot more, especially sort of, like– some of the flying times like the leaving the planet, you have to check in with all of the crew members and it just took a lot longer.
I am not sure if I want to do a s– a loner, like, a– only one person or if I want to have them have a companion that is… fairly uninvolved. I think what I'm gonna do is have it be, like, one character. They are part of a group, but that group isn't necessarily with them. Maybe they're sending messages back to their crew or Dale Cooper style recording messages to Diane throughout it. So I still have, like, some of the potential for that interaction if that's what would be most interesting to me, but the story will be a little bit more focused on just the one person.
DORIAN: "Is your character a human or an alien? What do they look like?" Less easy. I don't think I have a super clear visual in mind for this person. I think they are probably… at least humanoid or human-like, because I don't want to get too bogged down in figuring out like how my character's differences in physiology from my baseline would alter their experience of something, and I want to be able to contrast them with any alien-ness on the part of the civilisation whose traces I am exploring.
SATAH: Alien and human as a divide is very funny in space exploration games. Even if I am a human, I am an alien on the planet that I am on. But I understand the point of the question and I think I'm gonna go with, uh, like an augmented human? Very much, like, a bunch of cybernetics– maybe even at this point a little bit more cybernetic than flesh? I'm not 100% sure yet. But very much a human, just living in a world where it is not unusual for humans to get a bunch of chrome stuffed into them for various reasons.
NICK: My character is going to be human because I have no imagination. I'm going to say they look like, um… oh, what's his name? Pedro Pascal. Yeah. But not– no, not Pedro Pascal because then I'd just be basically playing Boba Fett and that's not cool. Um… bollocks. [Laughs] I'm on the spot! I didn't prepare for this at all! Uh, but I am decent at improv so what they're gonna look like is they're gonna be tall, they're gonna be dark and they're not gonna be– not so handsome. They're gonna be a grizzled, like, 50 something year old veteran. Big full beard. Not– more more full than mine, for sure. Definitely gonna have more of a lumberjack kind of vibe. They've been– they've been hardened by war and exploration. They're the kind of guy that gets sent out to, um, clean up other people's mess. I imagine the world is very much, like, a cyberpunk dystopia, sort of, but the cyberpunk took the space and made it everybody's problem, if you catch my drift.
So, yeah, this guy, he's wearing armor. The armor looks like it's beat up. It's been well used. Well maintained, but it's also been well used. There's going to be a lot of dings, a lot of dents, a lot of scratches, a lot of patchwork. It's been, um, hit with the blowtorch a couple of times and a couple of pieces– it looks like he scrapped up some stuff while he's been on planet a few times.
Um, it's got some wires and circuits, um, that look like they're pulsing fluid through it. And the fluid goes into the back of his neck. And I will go on about that later. Because I have some ideas now.
DORIAN: As far as what they look like, I don't think it is super relevant because, uh, no one's going to be looking at them. But for the sake of referring to them, I will say that they use they pronouns because that's what I'm gravitating to anyway. That's not a look. If I think of anything about their look in play, I'll mention it.
SATAH: What do they look like? I'm not really a visual person. I'm terrible at this unless I sort of like make a picrew and get inspired. But if that ends up being relevant, I will– I will figure it out. But yeah, they're heavily augmented human. That's all I know.
DORIAN: "Two words that describe my character." I'm going to go with curious. I like that as a word because it means both that they are curious about things and they want to explore, but that there also might be something a bit curious about them. Something a little, like, strange or different from their peers.
SATAH: "What are two words that describe your character?" I'm going to look up a random adjective generator.
DORIAN: And I think the other word that describes my character is driven. I think this is someone who, when there's something they want to know… their curiosity isn't an idle curiosity. They want to, like, push forward towards an answer. They want to resolve the questions they have about the world and the universe. They don't want to just like idly let those questions arise and then let go of them.
SATAH: Brawny was the first suggestion. That's funny. Trite, hurried, attractive, greasy, impartial, soft. Yeah, I'm not sure. I may come back to this if I get inspired, but I think it doesn't feel like it's super generative for me, not knowing other stuff yet. So I think I'm just going to skip it for now.
NICK: "What are two words that describe your character?" He's grumpy and dependable.
SATAH: "What is your character's name or title?" Yeah.
DORIAN: I am going to go to the best website on the internet, which is fantasynamegenerators.com– which I think is, like, really just run by one person and is– she is just astoundingly prolific in these things.
SATAH: Just switching my word type… random noun generator.
DORIAN: Do I want a Grootslang name? No, I don't think so.
SATAH: So I was playing with the word– with the name Entry Outcome and then the idea that they're called EO. And then it made me think of, like, a serial number and I leapt to the idea that this person is a clone. Maybe that's their group– that they're… [Laughs] a group of clones. And they have sort of their like production numbers and names and they've all adopted different… they've named themselves in different ways and I think that one of the things is that all of them have a short letter sequence in their production number, their serial number, whatever. And the tradition is that they come up with a name that starts with those letters.
So this is somebody who had a serial number that included the letters EO. And then they decided their name was… is it Entry Outcome? Or is it something else?
DORIAN: Oh my god, there's a Canadian names one. I have to check. I live in Canada, for those of you who don't know me. Caleb Brown. Yeah, that's a pretty Canadian name. Maximus Grant. I know a lot of Canadians named Maximus. Undeniably true.
SATAH: Entry… Operative. Egregious… Outcome. Yeah, their name is Egregious Outcome, and people often call them Eggo.
DORIAN: Let's just call this character Gwyn. G-W-Y-N. Why? Because I like it.
SATAH: As if I need some sort of backstory, like, lore reasons to name my characters random nouns. This is, I think, the first time I've ever actually justified it. Normally I would just be like, yeah, fuck you, their name is Egregious Outcome. But in this, it's because they're naming themselves to fit those things and– some of them, I think, probably go for your more standard names, but I like the idea that they specifically, this group of clones, is like, "Why do you get to decide what names can be?"
NICK: His name is Eugene Wallace.
SATAH: Do they have a title? No, I don't think so.
DORIAN: Gwyn, I don't think has a title yet.
NICK: "Why does your character want to travel to the planet?
SATAH: "Are you a galactic cartographer mapping the planet? Did you pick up an ancient looping distress signal from the planet? Were your ancestors from the planet?"
NICK: I'm on this planet because they paid me.
DORIAN: I envision this– and we're segueing into why your character wants to travel to the planet– I'm envisioning this character as from one of those cultures… there's some real world examples of this. It's also a little bit of a fantasy trope, although specific examples are escaping me.
But one of those cultures where as part of kind of a coming of age thing, you have to go on some kind of journey. You know, you set out away from your family or cultural group and you are trying to find something or learn something or do something, and coming back sort of shows that you are– you know, it's a mark of adulthood. It might not be like literally moving from  adolescence into adulthood; I think this character is a little older than that. But it's a mark of a new phase of adulthood is to like go out and do something and bring something from that experience back to your community.
One thing I wanted to be really cognizant of is like– I feel like with these "exploring a currently uninhabited place narratives" you can really fall into kind of a colonial, like, expansion kind of mindset, you know? Like, oh they're– they're the vanguard who, like, is exploring this place to to see if their people can move there and, like, take it over. And I don't want that. I'm indigenous myself, so I'm wary of these kind of like manifest destiny– or, uh, terra nullius, that's the one I mean– narratives. So we're staying away from that.
NICK: They paid me to go find a lost signal for a very important document. Some data for, like, mining minerals or something. And he doesn't know. He just needs to see if the people there are dead and if they are, get back whatever that they found on the planet.
SATAH: Ancestor with a group of clones is fun, right? Like the original is from here. And I might end up playing with that but I really think…
I had a lot of fun in my other playthrough doing a sort of like space pirate thing, and I'm just very endeared by the idea that… this is a group of clones who maybe were sort of scattered across the universe, doing whatever their intended purpose was as clones, and then found each other and are doing a little bit of a life of crime to support each other as they keep trying to save the other clones.
And I don't want to focus too much on, like… [Laughs] servitude and personhood, so I'm leaning more into like an Orphan Black style, where like the clones are just sort of like put out into the world because of mystery science reasons. And there are, like, weird experiments and there's stuff, um… they're- they're forming a little crew to to bond together and take care of each other and find the rest of the clones, uh, and in the meantime while they're doing that they also have to make a living and they're a little bit on the run… what's the word I'm thinking of? Macguffin. Not a- not a- not a– for an emotional macguffin. [Laughing] If that makes any sense.
They're on the run. They have to support themselves and they have to do so illegally because they're on the run.
So. Why does your character want to travel to this planet? Something to do with foraging, either for food or for things to sell on the gray and black markets. Maybe I'll say, like, foraging and salvaging. They have all those cybernetics, maybe they need to pick up spare parts so that they can keep each other running. I don't know if all of them are heavily augmented, but at least a few of them are.
And yeah, so they're just they're foraging, they're salvaging, they're trying to find stuff to help them stay independent and keep- keep living.
DORIAN: I think I'm out on this, like, sort of transition into a new phase of adulthood. And the goal for my people is not material gain, and is not, like, a show of strength, but is knowledge. I think that when you do this sort of adulthood ritual or like, practice, this journey is to go out and learn something and bring that knowledge back to your people. I think my society or my culture are people who are lore keepers. We are- we are interstellar– or interplanetary lore keepers to some extent. 
So I think in this case what I have chosen to do is go to this other planet and I am trying to learn something about the people there. And I'm trying to bring it back to my home to share with them.
NICK: Eugene is not a guy that asks questions. He is a guy that solves problems.
CREW QUESTIONS
DORIAN: Alright, then there's some questions to answer as a group, which I still will answer as a group of one.
NICK: Skip the group questions because I'm by myself.
SATAH: Even though I don't have a group, I want to slightly narrow this down because I am picturing this person as part of a whole, right? As- as part of a group.
DORIAN: "What role does each character take as part of the crew?" I am the only major character we'll see. But I think, like, these journeys aren't entirely solo. I think I'm the only one on the planet, but I do think there's a home base, of sorts, that is off the planet– of a crew of people who like are supporting this journey. It's not entirely, like, throwing someone out of the nest. You can bring supports as long as your actual discovery is yours. So these are people who, you know, have already had their own knowledge journeys.
I think they're on the moon of this planet, and they're sort of monitoring so that if something were to happen to me, they could come in, they could rescue me. In a pinch, they could retrieve my body.
SATAH: So why is it that they are sent on this mission? They I think… sort of in their old life, they worked on a farm. They were a farm mechanic. So they were mostly– they sort of both, like– they know some basic stuff about food and agriculture, and they know some slightly more advanced stuff about mechanics and- and fixing machines and that sort of thing. And so if you're just sending one person, they are someone who it makes sense to send.
DORIAN: Overall, I am, you know– I'm the leader of this expedition. I am the only person actually expediting. That's not it. Exploring. And so I am kind of doing it all.
SATAH: "Why are your characters traveling together? How do they know each other?" They aren't strictly traveling together. They know each other because they are all [Sing-song] clones of the same person. [Laughs]
And more specifically, why aren't they traveling together?
Efficiency is one thing. Sometimes they just need to send people off to do jobs, like to do stuff at the same time. They got a lot of irons in the fire. Sometimes they send people off to do things to serve as distractions for their investigative work.
Sometimes somebody just needs some space. I think that's a thing for Eggo. They're like, "I'm so grateful for all of you. I do in fact love you. And also, I grew up mostly being alone on a farm. And it's really overwhelming to suddenly live in a big clone-filled spaceship with all of you, and so please send me on solo missions sometimes. Thank you."
DORIAN: "Why are the characters traveling together?" I sort of answered this. The other characters who we may or may not see or hear anything about are not traveling with me. They are traveling to… follow me and to make sure there is accountability and closure should something happen to me, but otherwise they are not interfering. It is sort of part of this process, part of this ritual, is for someone to try and do it on their own and to show that they can do it on their own.
SATAH: "How do your characters feel about their traveling companions?" Eggo cares very much about the other clones. A little reluctantly. It took them some time, but… they're a… they're a weird… family.
DORIAN: I think I don't think about the people watching over me too much, or I think I am specifically trying not to think about them. Like– I want to treat this as a genuinely independent venture. Like, I have the safety net, but I think that, like, thinking about the safety net too much kind of, like, undermines the experience and, like, the legitimacy of it. Like, if I'm not trying my best because I know that someone will bail me out if something really bad happens, then I'm not experiencing the journey as I'm meant to, is my personal feeling. So as much as possible, I'm trying to behave as though I am truly on my own.
SPACESHIP CREATION
NICK: Spaceship creation.
DORIAN: Spaceship creation.
SATAH: Spaceship creation.
NICK: "Answer the following questions as a group. Who owns the spaceship?" I do.
SATAH: "Who owns the spaceship?" Oh, interesting.
I don't think that Eggo is a pilot. They definitely can keep the engine running, but there's probably a, like– a general intelligence of some kind doing sort of autopilot, and I think that they're specifically generally sent on like, quite short runs. Like, they're not going halfway across the galaxy or whatever to do their things. It's like, the whole clone ship moves into a sector and Eggo is sent off in, like, a ship that can pretty much propel itself over to a planet or a moon that's like just a couple hours away. Which is, like, pretty safe, all things considered.
So for who owns it… I'm trying to decide whether it's more interesting to have this be a ship that is, like, sort of communal, or if this was a ship that that somebody joined the crew with. I think it's both. It's like, they rescued one of the– one of the- one of the clones was, like, in this ship and was, like, fleeing from them because it was like, "I don't trust you. You're part of an evil science group that created a bunch of clones."
And we were like, "No, we're not. We were also created," and they were on the run and their ship broke down and we, like, caught them and we were like, "Hey, we're not going to hurt you. Come hang out with us. We'll fix your ship. And then… you decide what to do with it, okay? If you still want to go by the time we fix it, you can just go." And they ended up not wanting to. And they have now, you know, over the course of our beautiful off-screen found family journey, gotten comfortable with allowing other people to use the ship.
DORIAN: I think the spaceship is a community vessel. I think my people are pretty communal. And I think especially– like, we probably do have private property to some extent. Personal property. Let's be a little bit Marxist about it and, like, clearly draw the line between personal and private property.
So we have personal property, but this spaceship isn't that. These ships are something that is shared by the community and are used for people who are going on these journeys. There are probably other types of spaceship that are used for other purposes, but this is specifically the kind of like–
I need a name for what this journey is. I want to stay far away from pilgrimage. Walkabout is what it's called in certain Australian First Nations traditions, but I'm not Australian, as you can probably tell. And so I want to avoid that.
Let's go a little sci-fi, and let's call it a vectorage. You know, I'm striking out on a vector, an unexplored vector, and I'm supposed to bring something back. So this is my vectorage, and these are ships that are used for vectorages.
They probably are very simple. There's, like, the larger ship, which is a sort of portable floating base. And that has been set up on the moon, as I said, with my supporters. And then there's the small solo craft, which the actual vectorite takes for their personal exploration.
SATAH: What's that clone's name? I think same batch as Eggo, but they went with a slightly more standard name of, like… Emmeline… Emmeline O- Ol- Olsen. So, same initials, EO. Emmeline… Emmeline Orion. Yeah. This is another clone who I think is friends with the general AI sort of autopilot who hangs out with us now. [Laughs] Maybe. I don't know. It doesn't matter.
NICK: "What do the interior and exterior of the ship look like? Cramped and homey? Sleek and cold?"
It looks sleek. And phallic. It's a very long needle nose ship with like, almost, like, pincers at the end of it with two really big turbine style engines on the sides of it.
SATAH: This is a super functional little moon hopper. It's small. It's purposely painted to be pretty nondescript. It pretty much just fits one person. And I think even needs– like, when we're foraging, I have like a– there's, like, a- a- a container that gets attached to it to hold more cargo. But it's very much just like one person doing short trips.
Maybe Emmeline was a courier. This is a courier ship that has had the logo and any other identifying information very carefully removed from it.
NICK: It's big and he's compensating for something. Uh, Eugene is– as good as he is at his job, internally, he's not the most confident guy. He is the kind of dude that when he's not working, he fumbles everything. [Laughs]
DORIAN: And this particular Vectorage ship is called the, um… Sojourner's Companion. I think that's actually the name of a Magic card, but it's a good one, and it's appropriate to the vibe that I'm trying to conjure. So I'm taking it.
SATAH: "What is the name of the spaceship?" Oh…
NICK: The name of the spaceship is Gargantuan. It's the SS Gargantuan.
SATAH: I want like a silly, vaguely science clone word, like… the DNA, the double helix.
Oh, okay. I'm on one of my beloved websites, relatedwords.org. Dead Ringer is a great ship name. I think that should be the name of our big ship. Dead Ringer as a clone thing is great.
Hectograph… "a duplicator consisting of a gelatin plate from which ink can be taken to make a copy." Yes, absolutely. So this little courier ship is the Hectograph. I think frequently just referred to as Heck. "I'm taking the Heck."
PLANET CREATION
DORIAN: Planet creation.
NICK: Planet creation!
SATAH: Planet creation!
DORIAN: "How long did you travel to arrive at the planet?" I think at least a little while. Because, you know, my culture has been doing this kind of stuff for a long time, so there's a lot of stuff that's been explored. But at the same time, it's not like there's a lot of stuff to learn on a planet. So it's not like every single vectorite goes to a completely different planet to try and learn what they're going to learn.
I think we're probably part of a star system that has, like, a few things that are reasonably close to each other with whatever technology we're using, so I'm going to say… it took, uh, it took a few days. I think it took under a week to get to this planet. But I'm exploring a part of it that, you know, previous vectorites have not explored to the same extent. Like, I'm taking a new sort of section of it. Planets are big.
SATAH: "How long did you travel to arrive at the planet? From the ship? Not long at all. I'm like four hours from the Dead Ringer. How far did we travel to this system? I think that we're on the move a lot. And so it's kind of like travel from where, you know? It's just- we're constantly moving. But I'm about four hours from home base.
NICK: Eugene was in the same star system, but the star systems are pretty fucking big, and his ship is old and the hyperdrive is faulty. So he had to raw dog the trip here and it took him about two weeks.
SATAH: Writing down "four hours travel from the DR" made me realise that Dead Ringer acronyms to doctor, which is fun and silly. For like, you know… because… medical… related.
NICK: "What does your character first notice about the planet as you approach? Is the world one large ocean dotted with islands? Is the surface completely made of chrome?"
SATAH: Yeah, what is– what– why am I here, specifically?
Is this too gross? Is it– I'm- I'm… like, a bio waste, uh, dump planet? Because I'm looking in part for, like, cybernetic stuff? That definitely probably wouldn't– I mean, food is relevant, but um…
It is gross. And also I like it. And I think that it could lead to a bunch of weird shit to find. So yep, this is a planet that some med tech company turned into just a bio waste dumpster. And then that company got acquired by a company that got acquired by a company that merged with a company that got acquired that went bankrupt. And somewhere along the line, they lost track of this place. Or they were like, "That'll be a whole thing to deal with. Let's try and keep shunting the responsibility to other people," and it just got lost in the shuffle.
So it's like, technically, it belongs to somebody. We're not likely to get in trouble from it because nobody wants to take responsibility for it. But technically, you know, some enterprising bureaucrat or bounty hunter could get us in trouble. But that's a gamble you have to take sometimes.
DORIAN: "What does each character–" me– "first notice about the planet as you approach?"
I think this planet is Earth-like, or like the planet that we come from, which I'm going to say is Earth-like for my own visualisation.
I think the colours are different. You know, I think it's got, like, stuff that is recognisably plant matter, but it's differently coloured. I think the plants are sort of like a reddish burgundy kind of colour instead of green. Whatever sort of chlorophyll type thing they have just comes out as a different colour.
So when we approach the planet, the whole thing looks kind of like… or at least the section we're approaching, you know, it's in full flower of spring– or… yeah, planets would all have spring. That has to do with the way the sun works.
So it's in full flower of spring. The plants are all growing, but it's this sort of, like, dark, like burgundy or oxblood colour. And so– and maybe the oceans are different too. I think the oceans are like a really bright sort of like tealy blue. Like it looks almost like you'd see with like an algal bloom. But like– so like the colour palette as we approach is really visibly different from an Earth-like world.
SATAH: As I approach… I think it's- it's a bunch of like… at first I think that I'm seeing, like, a little city. And then I realise it's a bunch of, like, shipping containers of garbage, just all very neatly in a row, that were delivered here. Probably supposed to be processed at some point, right? But they got abandoned. And the closer you get, it's like, oh, they're in various states. Some of them have exploded or or fallen apart or whatever.
But the- the illusion of like buildings is what first catches me, and then realising, oh, no, they're, like, shipping containers.
And they are big. I think they're– these are containers that would have been hauled by a BIG ship, so they're- they're bigger than sort of– like, you know, something on a transport truck. And even a little bigger than your sort of– [Laughing] the only other shipping– like something that would be on a boat, but the only reference I have for the size of those, really is I'm thinking of like scenes in usually, like, procedurals where inevitably the detective ends up trying to find the criminal in, like, a shipping yard and running around… inside… of them.
So, you know, yeah, a little bit bigger than that. A whole person could certainly no problem walk inside. And looks like a city, but it isn't.
NICK: It looks like it's been inhabited. Like, he can see lights coming from the top. Like, it looks strangely, like, populated. Like, it looks like going over the surface of New York City on an airplane, but from space.
And this bothers him a little bit, because if it's supposed to be an unexplored planet, what happened here to have that much civilisation?
SATAH: The other detail I think is, like, interesting there is that, like, one of the reasons they stand out also is that they look untouched. Like, it's possible that no-one has come here or they've just kind of gone for the easy pickings of the other stuff. But yeah, just a little detail. Neatly arranged, untouched question mark, shipping containers.
NICK: "What do you call the planet? Where does this name come from?
SATAH: "Is it from the native tongue of the people who used to live here? Is it a cataloging number for scientific reference?" Oh.
DORIAN: The planets my people have charted, I think we have sort of like nicknames or like monikers for them for being able to talk about them at all. So I think this planet is the Harvest Jewel because of the strange and striking colour of its foliage.
SATAH: I'm not sure yet if this was a, like… so I know on a meta level, essentially, that, yeah, people have lived here. I don't know if they lived here before and then their planet was turned into a dump? I don't know if that's the exact type of bummer that I want to explore. Not sure.
But I think that it's the kind of thing that didn't have a name in a database and now just, yeah, has like a corporate name and number and you have to, like, dig. Like, it's basically been redacted because the ownership structure of it is, like, so unclear and strange and hard to follow. And I'm not, like, a hacker, so I'm sure that one of my crewmates, fellow clones, has the ability to really dig and find out what names it's had.
I'm not super focused on that, so I just call the planet the dump.
NICK: I really like the kind of naming conventions that are more like, um, like, nods to mythology. So, like… this- this planet's called Eureka.
SATAH: There's probably almost a Jane Doe type thing that planets get named when that sort of corporate restructuring leaves them a little– their ownership a little ambiguous. It's like… PX-RED-1107. PX for planet, I guess? RED for redacted, as in some– the records of this have been expunged or purposefully obscured and 1107 just being the number of planets that this has happened to. At least that many other planets that has happened to.
BREAK
SATAH: Due to various circumstances and situations, this is the latest before an episode goes out that I am recording the interstitials, the intro and the outro and the break, and I can tell how fuckin' boring I've gotten because it's the biggest thrill I've had in ages.
Dorian is a dear friend of mine. Something like 15 years ago, we met on Tumblr and quickly found opportunities to start going on walks when we were in the same city complaining about whatever was going on in the feminist blogosphere and, uh, poptimism industrial complex at the time. He was the one to suggest this game, and I'm so glad that he did, and I'm so, so glad that he's on the show. You can find him on Bluesky at michifott. He'd like to remind you to support your local library, and so the fuck would I.
Nick Butler is a game designer who saved my ass by responding to a desperate cry I made on Bluesky about a week ago to find another guest for this episode. You can follow him on Bluesky at fallonmyblade, and check out his games at fallonmyblade.itch.io. Physical copies of his cinematic TTRPG Tidebreaker are currently on sale for half-price. Head to TidebreakerRPG.com to snag your copy.
As for me, you're currently listening to my show. Thank you. My name is Satah. I'm a TTRPG editor and designer, podcast wrangler, and musician. My singer-songwriter or acoustic goth Broadway bedroom doom-pop feelings project, people you meet outside of bars, released an EP at the end of last year and a full-length album at the end of February for record production month. You can find those on Bandcamp or wherever you rent your music. Check out my work at gaygothvibes.online and follow me on Bluesky at posatahchips.gaygothvibes.online. Yes, it's long! So are my band names! This is what I'm like! One time– [Dissolving into laughter] one time– this is a true story– one time somebody said to me after a show that they'd never seen me live before because they'd seen my posters around town but they thought that it was an improv group. [Chair creaking and laughter quieting as they evidently fall backwards in hysterics]
Here's a quick rundown of the basics of The World We Left Behind. We're doing the one-shot version, which uses a single 5x5 grid of playing cards, purposefully built to ensure all four aces are included, but otherwise completely random. Your goal is to traverse that grid and discover all four aces, which will give you enough information to figure out what happened here. When you flip a card, you draw a symbol on it as guided by its value, then interpret that symbol alongside the suit's associated trait– creature, plant, landscape, or vestige– to determine what you discovered. Details about your discoveries also get written directly on the card. You start each leg of the journey with six energy, spending one per turn, and camp when it runs out. That's pretty much the broad strokes of it. You know enough to get started… so let's.
[Laughing] I'm a little punchy.
GAME: JOURNEY
SATAH: [Singsong] The one-shot version! What am I going to need to do? I'm going to need to take the aces out of the deck.
NICK: A joker, gone. A joker, gone. An ace, gone. I need three more aces.
SATAH: One of the other benefits of the one shot version is that because you're not shuffling cards back into the deck you can use white– uh, dry erase. Dry erase markers. I said white because I was thinking whiteboard. Whiteboard markers.
If I were to play this game as a group, I love the idea of getting a fresh deck of cards and permanently altering it and then having that as a token for all of us or returning to it multiple times to do an extended campaign or several chained sessions and that kind of thing, chained campaigns. But for just a solo game, I don't love the idea of doing that. But luckily, the one-shot version, do not have to! I'm going to use dry erase markers, which I have so many of because whiteboards run my life. I am no joke surrounded by three to five of them at all times.
DORIAN: So you create the map. For this version of the solo, we are using enough cards for a five by five grid. That's twenty-five. You start with twenty-one, you shuffle in the four aces so that you know that those four cards are here for sure.
SATAH: How the fuck did I end up with four extra cards? God damn it. I got to do it again. That's so funny. Actually, you know what? I looked at my four extra cards. None of them are aces. So all the aces are in there, which is really the most important thing.
NICK: [Humming] Building a map… is this that world building that you kids talk about?
Kind of more like a dad joke than anything, but you know. I'm in my uncle years, baby. I can make those jokes.
SATAH: [Far away] If I sound far away from the mic it's because I had to do physical logistics. I had to stand up for it. I couldn't do it sitting down. It was too much.
DORIAN: Even with a fairly standard size or a little smaller deck of cards, it turns out that they actually take up quite a bit of space when you fully deal them out. You don't realise.
NICK: You know what? I don't have space to do this right, so I'm just going to do it six by four and leave a card out.
DORIAN: These are the sorts of things that tabletop gaming will teach you.
SATAH: So.
NICK: "Navigating an alien planet is difficult and imprecise. Even a well-trained pilot might land in a different area than expected."
SATAH: And I am not well-trained.
DORIAN: I determine which character is piloting the ship. Me.
NICK: "Decide which character is piloting the ship." Oh, hey! It's going to be Eugene. Who figured? We did, right? Right, chat? Cool. Alright.
SATAH: "Decide which character is piloting the ship." That's me. "This player rolls a d6 onto the map to determine where the ship lands. If the die rolls off the map, roll it again until it lands on a card." Luckily, this takes up my whole surface, so it's pretty much gotta land on a card. [Die clattering]
DORIAN: I like this. It's very tactile. I like when components of a game like this are multifunctional. Like, the die is a tracker, which we'll see a little later– like, in terms of time. But it's also a physical tracker, which I think is cool.
[Die thunking] That was a terrible roll. Like physically. I'm going to do something that actually has a bit more movement. [Die rolling] There we go.
NICK: So we're going to take our lucky d6. We're going to roll it. And it rolled on the second row, fourth card.
DORIAN: Ooh, it's a six. That feels auspicious. It doesn't mean anything.
SATAH: The roll does not matter, but it was a three, just so everyone knows.
DORIAN: "Turn the die to six." Already there.
SATAH: "This die represents your character's energy and their location on the map. The die is reduced by one at the end of each turn."
DORIAN: "Decide which character is the first to step out of the ship." That's me.
SATAH: All me.
DORIAN: "This player takes the first turn.
SATAH: "During your turn, your character will move to a new card and learn more about a trait of the planet. You can either move to an adjacent card, either new or uncovered, but you can't move diagonally, or you can stay on the current card. You might prefer to stay put if you just landed your ship and want to uncover the card beneath it, or if you want to further examine an interesting trait your group saw last turn." So that is exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to investigate the tile we landed on.
DORIAN: Alright. So for my first turn, I am going to stay where I am because landing the ship doesn't uncover the spot by default. I've landed my little craft. I'm, you know, away from these people who've been overseeing me for the past week or so of this journey. And I want to… you know, I'm going to take a beat. I'm going to probably sleep. And then first thing the following morning, I'm going to explore where I landed before I go anywhere else.
NICK: Eugene has just landed the Gargantuan onto Eureka. Strangely enough, he's found a launch pad that is, um– it's the kind of landing pad that has a tracking system that will pull the ship and guide it safely onto the pad. He clearly was not expecting this at all. Eugene just kind of feels like…
NICK, AS EUGENE: Well, I mean, the lights are one thing, but this is advanced technology. We don't even have this on my own planet. Hmm. I wonder if I should be expecting company.
I'm going to open my scout's log. Scout's log, day one, landing on Eureka.
The lights– the lights were the first sign that this planet is actually inhabited. Base told me that I would be uncovering undiscovered planets. And undiscovered usually means unsettled. This feels very, very settled. And I find that… unsettling.
Yes, yes, base. The pun was intended. Also, I'm turning off the communication system for now. My contract doesn't say that you need to be listening in to my logs until after the job is done. Thank you.
Alright. Landing pad: weird. Not used to this.
So, routine checks. Scout log on. Base comms off. Hercules system active. There's no clogs in the tubes. Adrenal system level's normal. Cerebral gears are running. Cardiovascular modulation engine functional. Not at top prime, but it's good. Pulse knuckles good. Last time I was on Ares V, I had to resort to the illegal modification I put into these. Sometimes you're forced into things that you don't want to be.
My Hercules systems are functioning. The nanocomposite ironer works. [Heavy sigh] Let's get off the ship.
NICK: So, we're unturning card.
SATAH: Got the nine of hearts.
DORIAN: The ten of clubs.
NICK: This card is the three of hearts.
SATAH: "Encounters: when you spend your turn on a card, you encounter the card's trait and write what you learn in one of its margins. Each of the four margins near the edges of the card represents a different encounter with the trait."
DORIAN: So the way this game works is you draw a symbol based on the symbol prompt and then you kind of add some details and then you interpret it. If it weren't just me, the player next to me would add the little things and then I would interpret it, but I've got to do… [Voice drops into exaggerated morosity] I've got to do everything myself around here.
SATAH: I like the guidance that these offer, even if there's a little bit less, obviously, like collaborative interpretation. I think that it's still good guidance.
NICK: Three means I have to draw a triangle. And we're going to put a little circle on the upper left of the triangle. I'm not a particularly artsy guy.
SATAH: Symbol prompt for a nine is a half circle. So I'm going to draw a half circle. Sort of looking like a sun peeking up over the horizon. You can draw anything that sort of incorporates the prompt, like you can add little decorations and whatever, but I am not super gifted visually, so keeping it pretty simple. I've drawn a little half circle. I'm going to add a couple little lines so that it could be… the sun peeking over a horizon. Could be a hat. Could be a tongue being stuck out of a very neutral mouth upside down.
DORIAN: So I'm going to draw my arrow and add a couple little details.
SATAH: Hearts are a creature. "Examples: a many-legged turtle, a broken statue of a bird, a fish-shaped lake." One of the things I really like about the traits in this game is that they, um, very explicitly tie in, like, being very broad with your interpretation of a category? Like, a creature doesn't literally have to be like, you see a living creature. It can also be a representation of that creature. And it really– it sort of opens up the field, I think, for a lot of creative interpretations and also lets you tell a lot of different types of stories. Like, you could totally do a planet that doesn't have any life on it at all but you keep seeing paintings of birds, right? I think it's really well done and it's done really simply with just, like, the examples that they give, which is incredibly efficient and I'm- I'm a big fan.
So. Looking at my little hat, sun, tongue symbol. I'm thinking about a creature. I'm gonna have to walk carefully here with my weird biomedical waste planet. Because I don't want to– animal gore is not a thing that I want to really linger on. I want to try and not be super gory generally, but we'll see. I will put content warnings in the description as always, depending on sort of where my whims take me there.
One thing I'm thinking is that this symbol kind of looks like it could just be… it looks like a car– it could be like a cartoon mouse hole. And so I wonder what this– if what this is, is like, I don't even see a creature. I don't know if there are animals here at all, but I see– I've landed, like, amongst some of these shipping containers and some of the ones that look pristine, I'm starting to notice have, something has burrowed into them. It doesn't look like necessarily a human or a humanoid presence has, like, opened these. It looks like something is just kind of gnawing its way in. And there's, like– quite a few of these different containers have the same little hole in them. And I don't know- I don't know who or what is making them, but there are a bunch of them.
And I think they do look old, you know? It– which doesn't mean they aren't here, but these clearly aren't fresh. They've been eroded a little bit. And that could just mean that they've moved on to another planet, or it could mean that they're still here, but they just made these burrows a little while ago. We will see.
NICK: It's hearts… alright, so this is a creature. It's a triangle with a circle on either left. So I'm thinking it is… it's a kind of hybrid avian, hybrid reptile kind of creature. Almost like a pterodactyl, but more vulture-like than fully reptilian. And it is hunting for carrion.
There's death here along the landing pad. Eugene gets off of the ship and immediately can smell, right through his environmental protection systems that the Heracles system offers him.
NICK, AS EUGEN: Looks like I've already made a discovery. I'm not exactly pleased with the results.
There's something above me. It reminds me of the Vultures back on Earth-5. I'm not sure if this is a genetically modified creature or if it's native to Eureka, but I'm going to proceed with caution.
NICK: Alright. And we're going to name this creature Pyramid Pecker.
DORIAN: Clubs is a landscape. So it's a rock formation and it's like… through some combination of erosion and whatever other forces, like– it's tall and it's narrow and the top is pointy. And I think there's actually a, like, group of these. I had to land very carefully. I didn't realise quite how carefully, because it was dark when I came in, but when I wake up and can see everything in the light, I can see there's a lot more of these than I realised. And any one of them looks like it could have kind of punctured my ship had I not been– had I not been careful.
So I am in this forest of needle-like rock spires. And it's not clear, you know, what sort of weather phenomenon or erosion phenomenon led to these, but they're very striking. And I think I like them. They're very immediately different from what we have on my home planet, and I think it drives home how big a change this journey is.
SATAH: In the top margin of the card, I wrote "burrows in containers." And with that, I will turn my energy die down to five and decide where to go next.
NICK: Eugene has noticed that immediately upon landing, there's life here. And there's also plenty of death, and there's… the ecosystem is doing what the ecosystem does. These corpses have been dead for quite some time. They, uh– they've decayed a bit.
With nothing more to uncover here, Eugene decides to head west.
OUTRO
SATAH: This has been Folio, an actual play podcast about solo and epistolary TTRPGs. To find where you can find the show, check out foliopod.carrd.co. Sign up as a paid member at patreon.com/foliopod to vote on games and have exclusive access to livestream VODs, or join for free to get access to the bonus feed with edited audio-only versions of the streams a while after they happen and occasional other stuff.
You can follow Dorian on Bluesky at michifott and honour him by supporting your local library.
You can follow Nick Butler on BlueSky at fallonmyblade and find his games at fallonmyblade.itch.io. Physical copies of his cinematic TTRPG Tidebreaker are deeply on sale right now at TidebreakerRPG.com.
You can follow Satah– that's me, on Bluesky at posatahchips.gaygothvibes.online and check out my work at gaygothvibes.online.
Next week, Dorian and Nick and I will continue our games of The World We Left Behind by Samantha Leigh. Everything I mentioned here is linked in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening, and take care out there.
POST CREDITS
NICK: [Singing through a beat] I restarted my 'puter, so I lost all my tabs so I gotta go back in Bluesky… while I rap. Yeah. Y'all didn't know I had bars. Y'all didn't know I had bars… [Talking normally] Anyway. Let's see.