Playing the World you know

19 Jul, 2026

Yesterday I ran an almost zero prep game with no module or plan except a very basic, admittedly wild, pitch. I wouldn't call it an improvisational game though, well at least not a game of improv.

It was more oracular.

Idraluna wrote a post on oracular adventures here. I have experimented with giving primacy to the world before and it is something that continues to intrigue me about these games. Playing oracularly seems like a good way to play the world. As Idraluna phrases it:

"Playing the world" taken seriously means allowing the parts of you that have lots of world in them to speak. This is what oracles are for. This is (perhaps?) what games are for.

Oldhawkeyes who was a player in said game has expanded on Idraluna's musings, giving us a good description:

Oracular Play is when all players in a game have High Trust in the material being presented to allow parts of their lives and imaginings to speak where the game does not. It is not about having a game where future consequences can be predicted with ease or knowing where/how the game will end: Oracular Play is having enough trust in the images and moments presented by Play to give and take with the game about what it's presenting. (full post here)

"Allowing parts of yourself to speak that have world in them" is different from improv. It's not about saying "yes, and" which owl has a good post on that is in dialogue with this post by havoc on permissiveness. Oracular Play is not about making up the world as we go. Yes, there are always moments of improvisation but wherever possible we aim to make explicit what is already there within us. The world we play in is a reflection of our shared and unshared understandings, experiences, images, associations; the latent life in our concepts is turned into a forcefield of fiction. At least that is my understanding of it. Or better, this is what I want to push the concept towards.

As oldhawkeyes points out oracular play doesn't necessarily mean low or zero prep:

Prepare what is needed to accommodate for the lack in your experiences but trust the process and what generates from your mind to keep the adventure going.

The game I ran however was almost zero prep which worked out because the there was no need to accommodate a lack of experiences for this specific setting. Inspired by Sheepdogs within the Earth, Wolves upon the Coast but with Delta Green, I thought it would be fun to run a kind of reverse called "Sea-Wolves upon the Spukland" where a band of raiders arrives in contemporary Switzerland:

Your history is gone. You followed your master through the portal, now he lies dead. You stand atop a mountain. A flag as red as blood with a cross as white as snow flutters above an alien cottage. Metal carriages fly out of it and descend the mountain along metal ropes. "There is a dragon‘s hoard of gold in Beorne!" were the last words your lord spoke. You are free.

I chose the setting not only because I thought it would be funny to have vikings run around in the modern day alps but because I am very familiar with Switzerland having lived there for a long time. So I knew I had an understanding of it within me and could just rely on it in order to run the world for the players. The only thing I actually prepared was chosing a starting location and giving the players a loose hook with the line about "gold in Beorne".

And then we just started. I described how they arrived next to the famous Piz Gloria on the Schilthorn¹ and they went wild. They burnt the "sorcerous fortress", skied down the mountain, abducted a police man, robbed and recruited a cheese maker named Chäs Fritz, ran over skin heads at a train station and smoked their crack, threw cheese wheel at the police, got off at Wankdorf stadium where the BSC Young Boys play soccer, recruited swiss army defectors as well as local radical leftists and stormed the Federal Palace of Switzerland to overthrow the government. They ended up being recruited by the staybehind operation P-26 as they "saved the country from socialism". It's impossible to recount the madness that this game was in full.

While it was chaotic and I struggled to stay on top of the game sometimes just due to having 8 players driving it like it was stolen I did at no point feel like I was improvising a narrative or world for them. I just used my familiarity with the "fictional" world. I know what a mountain village in the alps looks and feels like. I know what a typical Swiss home in that region would be like. When they drive their stolen Volkswagen California to the train station in Thun I know what the skin heads there do and carry with them (beer and crack). When they drive to the loacal leftist cultural center in Bern on a saturday evening I know how the youth will react to them.

But it was in no way all me. The players carried it by trusting my vision and supplementing it with their own. The fact that we all share an experience with the contemporary world and its cultural spheres made things quick and easy. It did help tremendously that BUE was playing who knows the land just as well as me. Not only because he got the extra level of references but because he would continually deliver wikipedia entries to the group via the side chat providing helpful, disturbing, or funny context.

Now this post isn't about claiming a new style. I don't think it's in any way new or particularly different from how many people play already. I think there is an affinity here to the idea of the umpire of the Kriegspiel being an expert in the material they are arbitrating so that they don't need to rely on more rules or procedures than they decide to.

Also, the opposition of improv and oracular play I claimed above might be a false dichotomy. After all when we do improv we usually resort to that which we carry within us too. The difference is a question of framing. Because we do not aim to entertain or perform when playing games ², the act of letting our interiority speak changes.

And in a strange twist two hours of pretending to be murderous vikings become a ritual of connection.