The Best Game I’ve Never Played – Lacuna Part I 2nd Attempt

Sinister secret agents with shadowy employers and mysterious pasts. A bizarre landscape built from six- billion human minds. Arachnid-headed beings that guard a war-torn borderzone. And all the worst that Mankind has to offer, stalking the alleys and crumbling buildings of a place called Blue City.

Is it a dream? Is it a nightmare? Or is it just a game? And are you already playing?

It’s probably no secret I like weird stuff that delves into the subconscious. That’s why I think JAGS Wonderland is pretty phenomenal. I also really like noir atmosphere and style – at least in part what initially drew me to the Grand Commodore blog. Some years back I came across a game called Lacuna Part I 2nd Attempt and it is noir the way Slayer is metal and just bizarre. I fucking love it. I have never heard it discussed, and I have never played it, and kind of doubt I will have a chance to do so. But: if anyone out there is interested, let me know.

Lacuna has its start in a ‘zine called Daedalus, in the winter 2004 issue (I found a PDF copy – it was difficult, owing mostly to the MIT publication of the same name, but I was determined). It was written by a guy named Jared Sorensen. Here’s how the article starts:

“The first thing, the very first thing you have to understand about this entire blessed situation is that of the nature of the Mystery. Without this knowledge, you might as well be pissing into a bottomless bucket. Without this knowledge, nothing else is going to make any sense. The Mystery is the key.”

Sorensen means it. One of the things I love about this is how he uses a kind of adversarial ambiguity in telling you about the game (a bit more on this later). Take these lines:

“….there’s a great deal in this game that I simply do not wish to share with you.”

And:

“It is not necessary to understand the game in order to play it. There is an answer, but there’s a chance that it’s not the one you want.”

I fucking love shit like this. If David Lynch made a game, I think this would probably be pretty close. The gift of mystery is something I think is almost criminally underrated. People seem to like their narratives wrapped up with everything resolved and all questions answered, but I think the real magic is when there is room to wonder and theorize and think about something and not be certain.

Adventures are set in Blue City, for the most part, a kind of dream-city described as being “beautiful the way a sad girl can be beautiful – grey and lonely and lovely” – you can see the stylistic noir elements pretty clearly here I’m sure. I eat stuff like this up for breakfast. To elucidate the setting a bit further I’ll snip a bit from the game text here:

The term “Mnemonic Topography” was coined by the head of research at the Institute. Evidence pointed to several discrete levels of the subconscious. And much like the depths of the ocean hold startlingly different species of life, each mnemonic level carried its own unique “ecosystem.” On the “green” or topmost surface, short-term memory and emotions were the waves on the surface of the ocean. Easily seen, they were signifiers of currents and turbulence far below. Memories could be “skimmed” by a trained professional; much like a meteorologist can gauge weather patterns by studying cloud formations. Down below the surface, the “blue” level seemed to capture the majority of the research team’s interest. This unconscious realm of dreams and desires seemed to exist on the periphery of an entire world. One in which the dreams of one person were like dense fogbanks hiding a rocky coastline. The Map began to take shape. Deep within Blue City, places inaccessible to inexperienced travelers, were the levels classified as “deep blue.” When some subjects were brought back from parts of deep-blue with severe psychological problems, these areas were designated “black” and further exploration was prohibited except in specially monitored sessions. Black-level seemed to have some relation to nightmares and night terrors, an inhospitable environment with (psychically) crushing depths and hostile life forms. While charting out this dangerous area, a kind of trench was discovered…a fissure running along the “floor” of the mnemonic topography like a rift in the seabed resulting from seismic activity. This seemingly bottomless pit was called the Lacuna.

Basically, the players are Mystery Agents working for the Nasrudin Institute (government? maybe – maybe not, but I feel there is almost certainly a connection to this guy) attempting to investigate Blue City and the Lacuna, which is accessible in dreams. Blue City is inhabited by “personalities” and no one is really sure if these are people, or people’s dreams, or what exactly. So the players’ characters are asleep almost the entire time they are adventuring. This was written well before Inception, note. In some cases the characters might run into what’s called a “hostile personality”- a monster, which might be someone’s psychological demons – perhaps a real-life serial killer or school shooter, or maybe it is someone’s subconscious or unconscious desire to kill that is being enacted in a kind of grand drama in the collective unconsciousness. Who knows? We aren’t really sure what Blue City is.

The mechanics are really interesting; two in particular deserve special mention: Static and Heart Rate. Since the Agents are engaging in a kind of lucid dreaming, not actually engaging in physical activity, Heart Rate is how “health” is measured – if Heart Rate gets high enough, your agent can die in his dreams. But it’s vastly different than the “Hit Point” mechanic, as the exertions of the agents within Blue City will drive Heart Rate up as well, and you have different levels of Heart Rate – Resting, Target, and Max.

Another really clever mechanic called is called Static – this represents a number of things and is applied to the team as a whole. At its most basic, it’s the friction the mission encounters – if there are mistakes, egos get in the way etc, this can drive Static up. But it’s not always so mundane – other things can drive Static up as well, and it is used to represent the interference between Control (the folks back at the Institute who have organized the mission, represented by the Gamemaster) and the Agents (the players). Static can get so bad that Control becomes actively hostile to the agents. I think that at least some of Sorensen’s writing as well as the layout of the book is intended to give you a taste of Static – I mentioned the adversarial nature of some of the writing already. Something I have not talked about is the layout and art - spiders begin showing up with increasing frequency in the book – this starts subtly with perhaps just a long leg across a page, but as you progress through the different chapters (named after security clearances and also to some extent the parts of the mnemonic topography) there are more and more of them. I’m a bit of an arachnophobe (the giant spiders in Mirkwood in the Hobbit as a kid were woooooooo) so this may have been particularly effective for me, but I think it's nonetheless a little piece of genius.

Again, I love shit like this. The potential for the Gamemaster to be actually antagonistic towards the players reminds me a little of early editions of Paranoia (which I had a lot of fun with back in the day). It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but every once in a while as a DM, I get tired of being neutral and relish the opportunity to wade in a bit.  It's one thing to do it when you are role-playing a villain, but I always really liked the stuff in Paranoia about rolling dice and studiously not looking at them while telling the player what happens, etc.

Static can also trigger events – the gamemaster is encouraged to have a list of certain events relevant to the scenario they are running that happen when static hits certain levels (for example, one of the personalities the players know goes missing, or terrorists bomb part of the city, or it snows for the first time ever in Blue City, etc.)

There are also spidermen, and there is a Girl.

The spidermen wear vaguely eastern bloc uniforms and they are fuckin’ freaky. They have tiny guns that pulp people and sometimes they will try to capture an agent. No one knows why. They show up in response to Static but also: their appearance drives Static up.

We won’t talk about the Girl. It isn’t time yet.

I do not think Lacuna Part I is widely played. I have never heard anyone else mention it, and that is a shame. It is available for ten bucks at Memento Mori Theatricks.