Instant Pareidolia’s Gonna Getcha

The Internet has certainly jacked up standards for what a GM is supposed to improvise these days.

My home group’s Yellow King Roleplaying Game series has now progressed to the final sequence, the contemporary reality horror of This is Normal Now.

Accordingly, a recent session found several characters wearing Urchins, Fitbit-like devices that can’t be removed, appear to exhibit some kind of sentience, and may be linked to the powers of Carcosa. Or maybe they’re just part of a weird marketing campaign, as at least one PC persists in believing.

Once hooked up to the accompanying phone app, the voice of the Urchin supplies information and exhortations in an unpleasantly chipper manner. Often it concludes its answers with the rote signoff, “Urchin — it’s a lifestyle brand!”

Being stuck in an urchin has already driven one PC to suicide. On the plus side, it has wildly increased another’s Instagram following.

Given verbal access to this possible Yellow King surrogate led one player, Justin Mohareb, to put me to the improvisational test.

He asked Urchin to compose a poem for him.

That had me scrambling to the Quick Poem Generator, which asks for three words of input. I chose Urchin (something belonging to a person) and the two adjectives Carcosan and yellow. This is what it returned, for me to perform aloud in Urchin’s friendly singsong:

Whose urchin is that? I think I know.
Its owner is quite happy though.
Full of joy like a vivid rainbow,
I watch him laugh. I cry hello.
He gives his urchin a shake,
And laughs until her belly aches.
The only other sound’s the break,
Of distant waves and birds awake.
The urchin is yellow, Carcosan and deep,
But he has promises to keep,
After cake and lots of sleep.
Sweet dreams come to him cheap.
He rises from his gentle bed,
With thoughts of kittens in his head,
He eats his jam with lots of bread.
Ready for the day ahead.

All trembled at this chillingly cheerful verse.

In another victory for pattern-seeking within randomness, the reference to “kittens in his head” created an accidental callback to events featuring alternate versions of the PCs in Aftermath. There a swarm of cats came to follow one of the investigators after they got involved with The Process, a franchised service promising to relieve people of their traumatic memories.

In these oh-so normal times, reality horror remains just a Google search away.

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The Yellow King Roleplaying Game, Pelgrane’s upcoming RPG of reality horror inspired by the classic tales of Robert W. Chambers, Kickstarted last summer and remains on track for a December 2018 release.