Reverie Cycle
A downloadable play-by-poem game
Reverie Cycle is about a group of isolated individuals, each shunning their own troubles and trials. They record their waking thoughts in their journals, reflecting on the world around them. But at night, their dreams — poetic, sensory, abstract — blur and blend with each other, creating a shifting, liminal state of overlapping worlds. The poetry of these dreams cascades and reappears, and eventually tumbles into their waking world as well...
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Reverie Cycle is a play-by-poem roleplaying game — it uses poetry as a form of play, and play as a form of poetry. You don't need to consider yourself a poet to play, but by the end of the game, you will be.
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Reverie Cycle was created by Eaves Mendes and Caro Asercion. Both of them designed and wrote the game; Eaves did the layout, and Caro did the graphics. It was written for use on digital chat platforms, like Discord and Slack. Play is structured for four to seven players, with a game lasting four to six weeks.
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This is a transcript of a twitter thread I wrote about how much I enjoy this game.
Reverie Cycle is a PLAY BY POEM game where you EMBODY DREAMERS and that is designed specifically to be played on Discord or something similar. It's by @seaexcursion and @abemendes.
Your character is defined by their relationships with their dreams, and by the repeated images in them. This concept is divine, and gives you SO MUCH ethereal characterisation to work with, it should be part of all character creation, even when you're not writing poetry..
Players write together, and apart. The reverie is the collaborative dream-poem, and the routine is effectively a journal entry reflecting on the developing reverie. In this way, you write the dream, and then fill in their end of the day thoughts about the world.
This repeats over days or weeks or months, until you collaboratively end the poem, by mixing your journals and your reverie, breaking down the walls between reality and dream.
Safety! I have been writing a play by post game and it's really hard to get safety right, and Reverie Cycle innovates in two ways.
1. It uses an entire channel in the chat to keep safety conversation present throughout the gameand using specific and 2. It uses safety emoji is a genius way of being safe in chatrooms. Safety emoji by themselves make this a worthwhile game to read.
I haven't the coterie of dreamers to play this game, but when I have four poets to play with, I will have a Reverie Cycle discord channel. If you enjoy poetry, dream-logic, and the concept of creating a world based as if your poetry were it's dreams, this game is for you.