I’m not new to the idea of revisiting old characters and reconsidering what I was doing. Hell, my current group revels in the nostalgia of our long gaming track record; when we were down in Delaware for our annual gaming weekend one of my friends noted quite poignantly that there’s something really special about sharing all these stories that no one else can possibly understand. That said, the context of my gaming group is one that I not only understand well, it’s one I literally helped build, and I think I can say without irony or self-aggrandizement that I’m one of the core people who keeps the group going and keeps its culture alive, both as being the keeper of the in-person gathering for the last five years and one of the lead schedulers. Characters discussed within the group are discussed within the totality of context in which they were written.

Recently, I’ve seen one of my characters being written about in a completely different context. To be clear, this was something I gave permission for: Many years ago (eight or nine I believe) my then-landlord ran a mini-campaign of Interface Zero that adapted the game’s module Phoenix: The Terrible Valley of Static into a similar adventure set in Dubai. My landlord’s partner at the time was taken with the characters and the stories and asked us all if we’d be okay with her continuing the story with our characters in a novel format. We said yes and mostly just moved on with our lives; I was not as taken with the campaign in part because it was fairly linear and in part because Interface Zero seemed to align better with my online group’s playstyle better than my household (when we’d play games later we’d gravitate to systems like Monsterhearts, which was responsible for our next longest house game). Anyways, I completely forgot about the game for years until I started seeing excerpts of the novel pop up on Facebook and I once again was thinking about Cid the cyborg taxi driver.

Cid’s character concept was simple, punchy, and evocative, thanks in part to the Interface Zero setting and in part due to handing some of the story over to the GM. Cid was a part of an experimental cyberweapons program, a man who at one point agreed to be uploaded into a full-conversion cyborg as part of his military service. He returned home with his memories wiped and most functionality disabled. He worked as a taxi driver, going home to recharge in a shipping container each night. Cid was, at least at first, a fairly credulous person, this being implied by his willingness to be convinced to sign up for a black ops cybernetics program, but also manifested through an Interface Zero character flaw which was quite literally just an immense amount of adware. Mechanically, this let the GM compel the flaw at basically any time by saying another ad pop-up was interfering with Cid’s cyborg functionality.

Cid’s credulousness was slowly but surely replaced by a drive to recover his memories and figure out something of the identity he had before being uploaded. He didn’t even know his real name, Cid being a corruption of his program number, C1D. This led him and the other edgerunners (for lack of a better term) to Dubai where meeting an ultra-powerful AI held the potential to teach Cid what he wanted to know. What they actually found in Dubai was something else, and Cid (and somewhat me as a player) left disappointed.

Now, Cid is being written by someone else entirely, with the mission to Dubai as the prologue to a whole other story. It’s fascinating and unsettling to see this play out because, to be completely honest, Cid isn’t my character anymore. I built up the blocks, between literally creating the character in Fate and playing out those sessions to make him a consistent, realized individual…but those half a dozen sessions pale in comparison to a 150,000 word novel, building and expanding on the framework I and the other players built running through a kitbashed module.

I spoke briefly to my former roommate who was also a player in that game and she used a similar phrase that I had previously: “I don’t know what to think.” This is perhaps the easy synopsis of seeing your roleplaying in a bit of a funhouse mirror, seeing someone you created reinterpreted by someone else. And to be clear, this has nothing to do with the quality of the writing, it’s just that playing a character in a game has a certain level of intimacy that you don’t even think about…at least until you hear someone else tell you about that character.

This line of thought is perhaps also why I’ve always found in-game romance profoundly affecting. You are playing a character, you are putting forth…someone. Of course my performances vary game by game but even considering that it’s hard to summarize what a character is supposed to be. A version of yourself? An idea of a person stretched out and filled in? Whatever it is, you’ve put it forth to the group. One of your fellow players comes to you (maybe not literally, but you know what I mean), and says, in essence, “I see what you’re doing with this character, who you want them to be. As a result, I’ve determined that my character has a blistering crush on your character. We should be sure to play this accordingly.” I’m sure I have an entire other post in me reflecting on why Seamus and I have now done this to each other 2-3 times (it might be the next meeting with my metatextual drinking buddy), but the point is that it makes you feel seen. And being perceived is both validating and terrifying, always.

Beyond all the self-awareness and weirdness of it all, there’s also just the strangeness of reflecting on your gaming from eight years ago. To say I’ve grown as a GM and player in that time is an understatement, though in this case I don’t have much bad to say about the character I created. I also can’t help but note the irony that this game will live on as a novel, because I told the GM in no uncertain terms at the end of it that the way he ran it may have implied a novel was what it should have been all along. If I recall correctly I didn’t receive much pushback from anyone about my critiques, even the GM confessed he was a bit too in love with his own ideas for the Dubai part of the game. And I can’t say those ideas weren’t evocative…I think that’s one of the reasons this story was created.

It’s always a little wild to me the things that will push someone to write. Where I am now, push ends up being an operative word as I try my damndest to move out of the world of the first draft and actually edit something I’ve written, getting it to complete. I owe my work that, especially as I’ve been significantly more successful in writing in volume and writing consistently over the last five years. The next step is to move my big projects towards actually done, to really spend time on the process and the craft and not just the steady drumbeat word count of first drafts. And that of course brings out the other reactions to seeing a novel like this, 150,000 words over eight years since we ran that campaign: Jealousy and Hope. Jealousy because I have not turned my own draft into something publishable yet, but also Hope that I can, that it’s okay that a process can take eight years and you can still keep hammering at it even as the original source material grows dimmer and more disconnected from your daily life and close social connections than it was.

Anyways. I don’t intend my rumination or mild discomfort to take away from the fact that something real was created. Kamela is sharing excerpts of the novel on her Patreon, you can check out the prologue here. If this cyberpunk story intrigues you, and I think it probably should, considering signing up for her Patreon and reading what’s been shared so far. It’s not quite my Cid in there…but, and maybe this is part of my discomfort, perhaps that’s for the better.