Confessions of a World Building Junkie, Part 1.

I have been playing role-playing games since the age of 9 when my father, who co-authored a gaming system with his friend Derek called Infinity, ran a scenario in which my two older cousins, Shawn and Dawn, and myself played a squad of commandos directed to save a group of scientists held captive in a three-story home by a group of enemy combatants. We gathered in the early morning to surveil our guards and devise a plan. Then, under over of night, we began the assault. We scaled the stone wall that surrounded the property, but before we could manage to enter the house phosphorus grenades exploded all around. We perished on the lawn. At least I did. One of my cousins may have made it inside. I can’t quite recall. It was over 40 years ago. I was hooked.

I grew up in a home with framed illustrations of iconic moments from the Lord of the Rings series. My favorite: I gazed at a scene from the perspective of down the well in Moria as Peregrin Took leans over the edge with a pebble pinched between his fingers poised to drop it just to see how deep the well is. Remember this moment? In Peter Jackson’s movie rendition Peregrin knocks over a whole bucket and chain for more comic effect. Either way, the sounds bring disaster upon the Fellowship.

I grew up playing board games, mostly of the war variety.  I began with basic ones like Stratego, eventually learning more complicated systems like Wooden Ships and Iron Men, and finally graduating to the master class of Squad Leader, in which we replayed WWII battles that took hours upon hours to complete. Rooting out Bugs in Starship Troopers was always a good evening. Dungeon, the gateway board game of Dungeons and Dragons, became very popular. As was Survive!, in which you started at the top of a volcano on a jungle island and raced to find a boat and escape before being obliterated by the inevitable eruption. The list goes on and on.

You get the point. I was raised in an atmosphere that primed me to become a role-playing addict. I probably had no choice. That was me in Stranger Things, 11 years old in 1983, riding my bike with a gaggle of friends in a small town, mine was Holland, Michigan not Hawkins, Indiana,  playing Dungeons and Dragons and wishing to God that we could find a demagorgon or mad scientist.

I drew maps of fantasy worlds regularly, complete with misty mountain ranges and lost islands at sea. I created NPCs (non-player characters) to populate these worlds such as Gustav, the gruff and condescending gnome detective decked out with useful and at times faulty contraptions who always had a nefarious job for the characters to complete. I built theological empires that crushed the will of its citizens (this one is not so fantastical). I spent as much time as I could imagining these other worlds.

 Anyone remember Mazes and Monsters the made for TV movie starring Tom Hanks in which he plays a young man who loses his grasp on reality and eventually stabs someone thinking that person was a monster? My mother was concerned I might do that.

(If you’re lost at all by the titles or jargon, don’t worry, you certainly know someone who plays role-playing games either openly or secretly. Ask around, they can walk you through this blog post.)

It was early high school when I found myself going to the mall and visiting the bookstore beside the video arcade to obsess over the different gaming systems. If I couldn’t afford them I simply opened them and read the rule books of different gaming systems in the bookstore, and yes, store managers do not like you cutting the plastic, opening the boxes and sitting on the aisle floor for an afternoon read. I got busted for that. But, I digested so many systems: GURPs, Bushido, Vampire: The Masquerade, Pirates and Plunder, Rune Quest, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu. Some my friends and I played regularly, like Chill, Shadowrun, and Warhammer, but most I just read by myself. I loved the rules of combat, the method in which characters were created, but most importantly, I loved devouring the descriptions of the different worlds that these games lived in. You see, I was addicted to World Building.

Yes, I love role-playing games, but in my 20’s, I stopped playing them so much. Not sure why. Maybe because it was tougher then to find a group of like-minded nerds. It’s not like today when they’re everywhere. Also, drinking and role-playing games tend to collide in a mess of futility, and drinking had become quite popular. And I had discovered writing, and the art world.

So, the games slipped away, but what I never lost a passion for is the world building. Creating political systems, economic systems, river docks, bar names, poisonous mushrooms, disgusting regional recipes. The task of creating a fully realized fictional world is just simply a never-ending joy.

Terry’s set for Onērus at Nordo in 2017

I could go on and on about world building. I could talk about how writing and truly any art springs from a fictional world that bubbles in the mind. I could, and probably did in this blog already, talk about how the magic of world building for fantasy and science fiction novels gave birth to role-playing games, and how those games in turn have laid the foundation for the immersive arts that are exploding today!

Read more of Terry’s reviews on immersive games here, and here.

At Nordo, we are not only writing business plans and looking for buildings to house the next iteration. We are also constructing the infrastructure for the next world of stories. It’s already begun in daydreams using flights of fancy. Beakers bubble. Characters talk. Tales weave. And in fact, in case you missed it, you can help guide the story through our Portal Polls.

This concludes Confessions of.a World Building Junkie Part 1. Keep following for Part 2, in which I delve into my current obsession, The Laboratory of Stories.

Join in and become the first to peak into our latest world: The  Laboratory of Stories. More prizes await for those who play. You can do this by logging on to Instagram and finding @CafeNordo on Tuesday, October 24th . You’ll play a series of polls and your answers will help us visit the next star in our creative universe.

While exploring the Library stumbled upon a string of discoveries. First, we found the Book of Findings. Questions had been written in the margins, and as we answered them aloud “blue vials, crystal bottles, hollow trees” stories scrolled out on the page. Second, we found a Spyglass made of brass and walnut hidden behind a collection of dusty maps. It doesn’t magnify the world like an ordinary telescope, but instead jumbles the world like an erratic kaleidoscope. But today, under a soft full moon, we looked at the night sky and saw threads like fissures. We focused on one of them.

The Spyglass

 A young woman with an unusual grasp of composition and color began sketching a pattern in her notebook that she could not see in her head, but could feel in her hand, and if she had been asked to describe it she would have been unable to find the words.

The colors of the sketch bled seamlessly between one another and subtle vibrations of sensation could be recognized in the weight of the lines.  Anyone who saw the page in her notebook could never recall it well enough to describe it much less copy it.

In time, after many twists and configurations in the story, it would become known as the first diagram for measuring imagination. 

Photo Credit: Terry Podgorski

It is bright here in LA. And the streets and sidewalks are harsh. I am standing on a corner, at a bus stop, steps from yet another fantastic taco truck. It’s a perfect place for a spell of vertigo.

 The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, Los Angeles.

Reality and dreams dance in a mesmerizing exhibition. Photo taken illicitly by Terry Podgorski.

 The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, Los Angeles is subtle. One might say shy or well disguised, able to stand on the street corner and pass as “normal” in the light of day, at least in comparison to its Chelsea cousin, Sleep No More (read my review here). The Museum is another type of dream in which you are not quite sure if you are dreaming but you’re pretty damn sure you are dreaming because it all feels just a bit off but yet it’s just as normal as standing in your kitchen with a cup of coffee in hand except, now that you think of it, it’s not your kitchen but your grandmother’s kitchen, and she’s been gone for some time, and it’s all in a green palette that she would have never used and she’s talking to you and telling you it’s time to get to school. It’s definitely a dream.

But you’re struck by the cup. It’s such a normal cup. White. Heavy. With a graceful loop for your finger. It fits in the palm assuredly. Maybe it is real after all.

There is no kitchen in the Museum or white archetype of a coffee cup, but there is a bona fide fissure in understanding. And you are asked to stare at it.

You’re always staring at something intently at the museum. Peering at diagrams and dioramas and dialectic arguments. Sometimes, it’s through a microscope at the carving of a golfer on a needle. Sometimes, a hazy piece of glass hiding the x-ray of a lily. Or a spyglass with an owl inside perched on a branch. The mission seems plain enough. You’re being asked to look at the world, and find the truth in it, but regardless how hard you try it is not there. Unless the truth is; there isn’t any.

You must understand that at this museum something else is on display besides history or fact. The inspiration for the exhibits comes from the wild possibilities of the world and humans. It’s that thing that artists through the centuries have tried to touch, describe, put on a pedestal and reveal.

Actually, imagination is on exhibit here. Or is that wonder? Perhaps it’s possibility we are looking at. Can we tell the difference?

What is real and what is on display? That’s the crack in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.  In Sleep No More the crack is a story broken into pieces and scattered across a hotel. In each, reality and expectations are broken, a portal opened, a world reveled, and a promise made.

Photo Credit Stephanie Diani for the New York Times. Pictures the “Wundertrailer” in the Garden of Eden exhibit.

Imagine a crack.

A carefully scratched jagged line in polished stone.

A peeled and stained curl in a formica desktop.

A crumbling split in dusty concrete at your feet.

It’s the promise of walking dreams while awake, of escape, of breaking the confines of what people tell you reality is.

Smash the mirror. Or step through it like Alice.

Portals and the Other Worlds in Between

Now, we’re going there. “There” being the “great beyond”. We’ve talked spaces. Real brick and mortar buildings in Seattle. (Read about our search here). We’ve talked places. Inspirational attractions from East Coast (here) to West (here). We’ve talked games. Cracking puzzles that change the narrative. Now, let’s talk alternate realities.

“Imagine a crack.

A carefully scratched jagged line in polished stone.

A peeled and stained curl in a formica desktop.

A crumbling split in dusty concrete at your feet.”

There are portals. They come in many forms. There are natural ones like harbors and caves and ones made by human hands like an arch or a tunnel. They can be unlocked and free to access or guarded and require a passport. Portals can charge a toll. That toll can be paid in money or in something more personal. They can be uplifting, transformational, and the means to a new beginning, but they can also be cloaked in shadows and marked with regret. These portals signify that something has gone forever.

 Artists have managed to open portals.  Once inside you become enveloped in another standard of rules and even though the outside world remains, just within the flip book of thoughts, “I need to call my mother”, “where did I leave that card”, “I need bananas for breakfast tomorrow”. The familiar fades and another sense of direction takes over. Then, we know we are somewhere else- an alternate reality.

Twice, lately, I’ve experienced this vertigo. The first...

Photo Credit: Yaniv Schulman

Sleep No More. Chelsea, NYC.

I’m wandering an abandoned asylum on the 4th floor of The McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, New York. The floor is complete with a turn of the century operating room, a collection of bloody bathtubs, and a maze of birch trees. I am standing in a small office flipping through a log book of patients looking for a clue to what happened in this place. I decide it’s time to leave and descend the stairs. But my path is blocked. A nurse in her white uniform with red piping ascends the stairs with a small crowd of masked ghosts following behind her. I stop, stand aside to let the gang pass, and do a 180 to join at the back. We crowd into the receptionist’s office where a cloud of loose pages hugs the ceiling like a cloud trying to escape. The nurse takes a seat at the desk. She opens the log book I had been pawing only a minute before, pauses over a name, makes a notation or two, and looks up with a red-lipped grin acknowledging us for only an instant as if we are only notions before closing the book, returning it the desk drawer, and heading on from the office to eventually meet another nurse in the maze of trees. They begin a silent argument of indignations and petulant gestures that turn into a dance until the nurse I followed from the office pirouettes to leave only to collapse backwards into the arms of the others and drapes to the ground. All the while we, the audience, hover on the edges staring through the branches, silenced.

Photo Credit: Yaniv Schulman

We, the audience, wander The McKittrick Hotel, the site of Sleep No More, in our white masks that turn each of us into a voyeuristic ghost in search of a story. They tell us it’s “Macbeth through a Hitchcock lens” whatever that is, though I guess in some way we do know what it is and like it. We believe we know the story of betrayal and murder and ultimate hubris, and we know that “something wicked this way comes” as we wander the halls, but we do not know what portion of the story we will stumble upon at one moment or when we may be implicated. We pass from one diorama to another searching for meaning, a clue to which way to wander, a direction from a performer or a written note that clearly tells what is happening, but we look in vain. We stand amongst dried herbs and moldering taxidermy, read case files and stare at photos of murder scenes looking for the thread of a story, feeling it press down all around, whispering in our ear, “I promise you’ll get it next time.”

And this is one type of Alternate Reality. A Liminal Space. Bold and dark and dripping with passion.

The second spell of vertigo is yet to come. Stay tuned…

Imagine a crack.

A carefully scratched jagged line in polished stone.

A peeled and stained curl in a formica desktop.

A crumbling split in dusty concrete at your feet.

For some people cracks cause anxiety. They are a blemish. Something to be filled and corrected. But for others they can be expressive, even artistic. A person might put gold foil in them to highlight their very nature and embrace the broken, transforming a flaw into an attraction.

Kintsugi Pottery

But a crack is a glimpse. It is not a full fissure. For that we need something else. A portal.

Imagine a blue door. Bright, luminescent, almost neon when you were near them, because of course they sense you and respond. They never touch the ground. They hover 16” in the air in the darkness between two houses, stuck in the shadows, glowing blue but never illuminating anything around them. The light is internal, drawing you in like a blue blackhole. It is obviously a portal. Why not go through? How could you refuse?

You find yourself in a gap of Liminal Space. You are in between. Liminal Spaces can be physical (like a doorway), emotional (like a divorce), or metaphorical (like a decision). This portal happens to be all three.

This can be unsettling for some people. They may feel a sense of disorientation or a loss of sense of place, as these spaces lack clear markers of identity or ownership.

 These are the cracks in the Layers, the Doors we pass through in life, the ones recorded in the Book of Findings visible through the Spyglass, and tread by Those Who Left. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves and for another time in the future. You don’t need to concern yourself with that right now.

All you need to know is that Portals lead to Liminal Spaces, and that is where Wonder hides, and Wonder is the seed of Imagination.

The beginning bar area at The Doors of Divergence. Image Credit Escape the Roomers.

Escape Room Field Report - East Coast

Location: New York City. Williamsburg, Brooklyn to be precise.

Events: Doors of Divergence

1)    Heresy 1897

2)    Madness 1917

Environmental conditions: Hot. Hot. Hot. Hazy with Canadian smoke. Pride Weekend in NYC brings a celebration of thongs.

Summary:

We do two narrative heavy escape rooms produced by Doors of Divergence. Escape rooms started out as simple puzzle rooms with a theme, short on the story with a ton of padlocks. But the genre has grown, so more and more have turned up the performative elements to create a world. The Ministry of Peculiarities has been doing this for some time. Doors of Divergence are new to scene (opening in 2022) and the word on the street is that they are full of characters and story. Also, the two rooms can operate as individual experiences, but they are parts of single narrative, and choices made in the first segment, Heresy 1897, will affect the situation in the second segment, Madness 1917. In this way, a patron can return and make different choices solving one of the issues with escape rooms, “repeatability” or the return customer.

In both experiences, you start off in a bar. Everything should start off in a bar. The bar patrons are used to seeing strangers pass through from one timeline to another, and they give you the lay of the land before you enter the timeline that awaits you.  

Stepping into Heresy 1897, heavy on Symbology. Photography is discouraged, this image is credit to Escape The Roomers.

1)    On the first adventure, Heresy 1897, we go in as a duo without a team hoping we meet some quality folks. And we do, but only 2, so there are only 4 of us to tackle this escape room. We could have used more.

The experience is dense in puzzles. There are twists and turns and tiny details to be noticed to move forward. This is when a larger team comes in handy. Our guide, a masked figure belonging to the Order of the Three Keys lays on a thick narrative and works hard to keep us moving along on the right track, but there is a lot to do here. We learn the symbology of gods, explore Egyptian maps, deduce life altering experiments, decode the carvings on an ancient obelisk, all leading up to an encounter with a demon yearning to enter our world and wreak some sort of havoc. And in that moment, you are given a choice…

Yes, we respect the rules. But rules are made to be broken. Personal info redacted during Madness 1917. Photo by Terry Podgorski.

2)    The next day we return for part 2. We only have 1 other person joining us so we persuaded the 2 lovelies from the first adventure to join us for the second portion. And they do. Thank goodness, because we needed them.

In segment two, Madness 1917, we enter Holy Grove Sanitarium catering to those shell shocked by the events of World War 1 which was probably instigated by the demon we helped in the previous story. But no worries, there’s always a chance at redemption. Here, we meet a doctor and nurse new to the job. After a brief introduction we are given a tour where to our surprise we end up in two adjoining cells, admitted to the asylum, the group split, but able to communicate.

Over the next hour we work as a team to discover who inhabited these cells before us, play with spooky dolls that correspond with local, macabre murders, deduce that the doctor wants to lobotomize us, deduce that the nurse is not who she seems to be, steal a key that leads to our escape, and once again a member of the team comes face to face with the demon and is given a choice…

Conclusions:

What we learned from our choices in these two segments: We like to help rampaging demons cross over to this world. We don’t know why. We’re not even sure we knew we were doing it when we did, but the choice of eternal life seemed just too damn tempting. So maybe we learned something about ourselves.

We also learned that some rooms are tough nuts to crack. In the first segment, we looked over some obvious clues, but again that’s what a large group is for in these trying times. 2, 3, or 4 people cannot see or do everything.

In both segments, the sets are well drawn populated with ancient maps, carved figurines, tubes of scientific goo, and a monolith with glowing runes needing to be activated. The props and puzzles fit well within the story. The dollhouse and doll situation, truly creepy. In the second segment (Madness 1917), the need to communicate between two cells turned up the excitement, and we required less help in general because it was more intuitive. The presence of the two actors playing the nurse and the doctor provides for more banter and easier storytelling. On the first adventure, I began to feel a bit sorry for the poor actor who had to prod us through the Heresy 1897 story. But in Madness 1917, the narrative flowed smoothly.

Recommendation:

It’s for those who like to escape more than they like immersive performance. We read that Doors of Divergence was heavy on the narrative, which they were, but we expected more in the way of performance and less in the way of escape room. That is not the case. These games are not for novices. Though again, the actors are helpful and no player will be locked away for life and called a loser. We survived. Everyone survives. In the end, it is fun.

The worlds are very well defined: the first a dungeon with hidden Egyptian secrets for eternal life, the second an asylum of murderers controlled by a demon. The puzzles and the tech high quality. Be prepared.

The East Coast tour to Doors of Divergence concludes our Field Reports from the Summer of 2023. We’ve been off investigating other suspects, but these belong to a different category of experiences, those of an Alternate Reality! Stay tuned…

Apologies, but another illicit puzzle photo of Madness 1917. Beginners, beware. Photo by Terry Podgorski.