When I finally caught the spirit to even attempt learning more about designing roleplaying games, part of me was already enamoured of the idea that some of those games would be poetic. 

I actually think saying so aloud is kind of pretentious - that most of the roleplaying games I enjoy, especially recently, are quite poetic in how they articulate their moves and method of play, how they translate move-language into symbolism and action into theme, and how they shift worldbuilding into players' assessments of the real world and their place in it. 

But in particular, I wanted to test out more games where writing and reading poetry was play. I am a poet, after all, and I cared about that exercise not just because it was a cool characterisation and embodiment exercise for a game, but because I liked the idea of writing as the primary access to the game - where instead of simply improvising, one was given space to linger, to contemplate, to play with language and intention for as long as necessary, and then come back into the play space with others who had also lingered and share in the same way. 

Hopefully, The Refraction is a valuable attempt at such an experiment. 

As a performance poet, I spent a lot of my youth in writing groups where all we were asked to do was consider the world we lived in with remarkable critical depth, write what came out of our conversation and introspection, and share what we wrote without fear or shame. That experience was very formative for me not as a poet, but as a young person. It told me, among many other things, that what I thought about the world mattered, that I should equally listen and consider what other people thought, and that I had to pay careful attention to how I shared those thoughts with others because in that conversation and contemplation was a wealth of narrative all on its own, especially in art, where I knew I had this invisible power to shape how people felt and engage with what people thought they knew. 

Hopefully this gives at least a sliver of that experience to those who choose to play it. I will either be taking a lot of notes on how to expand on the idea as it's executed in this game, or The Refraction will be a kind of proving ground for a far more complicated attempt at the same exercise. In either case, I hope you and your playgroups enjoy it, and I encourage you to take your time and play with all manner of processes - with form or with freewriting, with writing in isolation with long periods of reflection or in your groups with short bursts of scribbling. 

I also encourage you to take as many moments as possible to write between the Acts of the game, to discover more about how the world works and how you work within it, outside of the strictures of its few poems, and hopefully find some joy in writing speculative poetry as its own exercise through this. 

Thank you, 
Brandon