An Imminent Spark
How will you remember the world that would not die?
In An Imminent Spark, you play Custodians of a World That Might Have Been, bearing witness before the end. The end is only temporary, but for nearly all who live now, it will be over. This is not the world of our players, but a new one, borne by our interests and imagination.
An Imminent Spark is a story game for 3-4 people without an MC or GM. A game takes somewhere between one to two hours. It's about 1000 words, printed as a 5.5"x5.5" 32-page saddle-stitched zine. Aside from the rules, to play you need: a flat surface, about a dozen tokens, some candles, and darkness.
Each Custodian picks a Mantle, an aspect of beauty that they stewarded. You take turns making up stories about art, nature, tradition and social change.
In the end, it all falls apart. But you'll have a chance to seed the next world with something beautiful to get it started.
An Imminent Spark asks you to speak with dignity and to use formal invocations and gestures as you play. These elements of play, along with the candles and darkness, invite you to contemplate the impact of ritual on the fiction that you create together.
An Imminent Spark was initially funded on Kickstarter as part of Zine Quest 2. It’s inspired by Dialect, Dream Askew, and The Fall of Magic.
For those who didn’t get the deluxe game pieces, here are some player aids that might be helpful:
Deluxe game pieces.