Glitch Quotes

In the cattails is the world forgiven; in the running waters; in the sound of larks.

Glitch: A Story of the Not
(marginalia)

rule zero:
you are not playing Glitch

… it was a surface cleaning, a faulty cleaning, a pointless effort, for I could not scrub away the fundamental wrongness of all things.

Glitch: A Story of the Not
(marginalia)

“I have to apologize,” he told me. “Re: the llamas.”
“Pardon?”
“I mean,” he said. “For killing them all.”
They’re still alive, I thought, but what I said was, “That’s all right, then?”
“I mean, not the llamas,” he said. “There isn’t a word any more for the thing I actually got rid of. But, the thing, an awful lot like the llamas, that I backslid a bit and destroyed.”

Glitch: A Story of the Not
(marginalia)

When you have been on fire for long enough it becomes very difficult to disentangle it from yourself. You lurch from place to place screaming and flailing, but you do not think, “There is an underlying self here that would not be lurching from place to place screaming and flailing, were they only not on fire.” You try to concentrate on your work but every time you try to type something your keyboard melts and every time you try to concentrate you get distracted by the awful pain. This, you inevitably take to be evidence of your own poor character.
I am clumsy, you think. I am slow. I am always melting keyboards when I type on them. I am probably just imagining most of this pain.
 Where would you be, if you were not on fire? What would you be doing? Are you even really capable of not being on fire? You have long since forgotten such concerns as these, recalibrating your expectations of yourself to match a brand … imposed from the outside in.

Glitch: A Story of the Not
(marginalia)

rule one:
the world is beautiful

“This machine,” he said, setting it down firmly on the table between them, “right here, is a fucker eliminator.”
“What the hell, J—”
He held up a finger. “Ah-ah-ah.” he said, and pushed the button with a great and ominous clunk. “You want to bet, you want to seriously bet, here, that you aren’t a fucker, Dennis? That you aren’t teetering on the very precipice of elimination, [even now?”]

Glitch: A Story of the Not
(marginalia)

“I can do anything,” she pointed out.
“Have you eaten?”
“I can do … most things,” she said, with a half-suppressed laugh.
“When was the last time you slept?”
“Like,” she said, a hint of desperation slipping into her voice, “I can, like, blow up the moon.”
He just looked at her, blankly confused. “… wait, would that help?”

Glitch: A Story of the Not
(marginalia)

retired world-killing void gods solve mysteries

Glitch:
A Story of the Not:
a game about how
to go on living
in a
broken world.

the front cover of Glitch, showing cattails by a misty river

Glitch is a game of recreational philosophy. It’s a game for people who like thinking about how their fundamental experience of the world works. It’s built from the ground up to mix that in seamlessly with the usual dorky goofiness of tabletop RPG play.

It’s a game about people living in a broken world. People who’ve found mistakes in the way that world is put together, seen that the world itself is wrong … and, therefore, of course, developed eldritch powers, gotten inducted into a mystical society, acquired a passel of enemies, frenemies, and dubious allies, and picked up a tragic backstory. Maybe even a horse or a crown.

But they’re not going to let that be all there is to them. They’re not going to let the wrongness be all there is to the story of the world. They’re going to be something else. Do something else. Probably.

… they don’t, though, generally know quite what.

A game of hope and struggle

the front cover of Glitch, showing cattails by a misty river

As part of writing Glitch, I put together a neat little dithematic naming system where each part of a character’s name comes with a scrap of poetry attached. It was pretty optional, to the point where I had to cut it down to near-nothing for release, but at some point when Nobilis and the Far Roofs are out there’ll be a physical supplement covering all of this, as well as … probably a few more things, and possibly some Nobilis stuff as well!

Accordingly, the above is a working title.

At the time of this writing, you can find much of this content on my tumblr; I don’t intend to take it down, though it’s missing a bunch of utility stuff and name elements I wound up having or choosing to work up later on.

Glitch:
Unspoken Words