In 2016 I started putting together some ideas on a Pinterest board around an idea I'd had for a game setting—a small Midwestern town with a lot of economic instability and a hidden supernatural layer. One thing led to another, and several of my friends expressed interest in turning it into an actual game.

Ask Again Later was an attempt to make a game that dug into life in small towns both with sympathy and a critical eye—in a way that turned out to be much more relevant than we expected when we started planning. In the late fall of that year, the United States Presidential election turned out much differently than we thought it would, with many people claiming that it was the will of the average small-town American being done.

The Storyteller System and our hacks

During the game development process, we were looking for a couple particular attributes in a system: support for conflict (including combat) between characters, and a known chance of failure for any given action. We wanted to create an atmosphere of tension in the world, in everything characters would be doing. However, we created our own versions of monsters, using the Hunter the Vigil antagonist creation kit since we wanted the supernatural to feel fresh and unpredictable.

We reorganized the skills into two categories: Skills and Special Training, the latter category being skills comparatively rarer in the setting we'd created. The intent was to create a sense of atmosphere starting from the mechanics to help get people in the right frame of mind—an ethos we tried to hew to through all our work on the system.

"Challenges" were something we added. Functionally, we wanted players to be able to control their level of engagement with some of the difficult aspects of the setting for comfort. For example, someone might want to play a gay character, but not have facing homophobia be front and center in their character's story; in that case, they wouldn't take the "Queer" challenge, and while it would still remain true that other characters would view their sexuality as odd and not fit to talk about in polite conversation, it wouldn't be the main part of their struggle. Conversely, a character who does take that challenge might be overtly struggling with their sexuality, or facing an unaccepting family.

—of course, we hoped a lot of people would take Challenges for various marginalizations, and they did.

A game where most people are normal

When we set out to run this as a LARP, our intention was to have maybe a third of the game be weird supernatural things, and the rest be just your average mortal humans (with some strange things going on around them and sometimes threatening them). I think if someone were to run this as a tabletop game, I'd nix that entirely, but in a LARP I think it was a good decision.

Firstly, it felt important to keep the characters with PC-level agency feeling like they were surrounded by people who were "normal," whether that was true or not—and no matter how serious of secrets they were hiding. Secondly, when you have that many PCs, keeping the setting norms in force is a lot more effective if part of that force comes from the PCs, since then you don't end up with a divide between The Good PCs and the Bad NPCs. Thirdly, we wanted to… not discount how interesting of stories you can tell about normal people in stange circumstances.

Ask Again Later was digging into something that was kind of distant from our own circumstances—the experience of rural poverty and isolation. We wanted the stories about fighting for the title of Miss Oshtigwanegon, fixing or failing your marriage, trying to preserve town history, or struggling with your sexuality to be treated with just as much care.

Beauty in struggle, contradiction, and uncertainty

The setting of Oshtigwanegon is intended to be kind of a study in contrasts. A lot of the forces in the background are designed as oppositional: the wild change and annihilation wrought by nature versus the stifling preservation of the historical society; the Pit, born of repressed emotion, versus the Devil, who wants you to let it all out; the town itself and its simple ways versus Dynamo Deliverables, a future moving on without you.

Oshtigwanegon is at the center of a push-and-pull in several directions at once, and part of what makes the game work is convincing players to see something beautiful in it—even if that beauty must eventually fade or give way to something new. It's far from perfect, but it's yours, if you live there, and you'll learn to love the fields in summer or finding a perfect fishing spot on the river or gossiping with the elderly church ladies at the diner. It may also cause you pain, but that's the way of things closest to your heart, isn't it?

One thing that I was always very firm on in designing the game is that while the Devil is a real and palpable presence in town, we would never confirm or deny the presence of the divine. The feeling of faith in this setting is something that's hard won, and in a way fighting against a world that is trying to prove it wrong in every way, and something that matters because you make it matter rather than an unimpeachable fact of the universe.

That, and also if we had any angels appear to give Real True Facts that might put a kibosh on infighting between all the Christian denominations in town, and we couldn't have that.

Final Notes

Thank you for reading, and for being interested. I'd be incredibly flattered if someone else wanted to run games using this system, and/or set in Oshtigwanegon, which is why I revamped the website. If you do and have good stories, please tell me! My email is carly@carly.website.

— Carly, Head Storyteller

The Original Team

The original Ask Again Later team was:

  • Carly H. (Lead Storyteller)
  • Degen G.
  • Fen S.
  • Adira S.
  • Isa J.
  • Korey E.

Website Credits

Site generated with Jekyll; custom theme by Carly Ho; typeset in Monaco.

Image Credits

All via Unsplash.