This night, when you have tasted bitterness, you go out onto the hill. Dark scrubgrowth checks your movement. Below march the suburban street lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, are shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. At the edge of the horizon, the light of a city pulses. Overhead, obscurity.

You distinguish your own home. Your little islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. Perhaps an islet shared with others, an intricate symbioses built of daily oddities, vexations, and nourishments. Perhaps an islet for only yourself, a delicate biosphere created through happenstance, patience, and cultivation.

All this, surely, is good. Yet there is bitterness. And not only bitterness invading from the world, it wells up also within your own magic circle. For horror at your own futility, your own unreality, and not only the world’s delirium, have driven you out onto the hill.

You can no longer deceive yourself that the obscurity above cares of your existence.

If only one could know whether among the glittering stars beyond the sky there were, here and there, other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and water. Whether your species blundering search for wisdom and for love is a sole and insignificant tremor, or part of a universal movement!

This game requires two standard decks of playing cards, excepting jokers. It is advised that these decks are different colours, but that is not necessary. The first deck will become the World stacks. The second will become the Challenge stacks, and the Draw stack.

Shuffle the first deck. Now, create five stacks, each with ten cards. These are the World stacks, which represent the worlds you will discover. The two remaining cards represent the journeys that others are taking.

From the second deck, remove the 🂸🂲🂱 🃈🃂🃁 🃘🃑 🂨🂡 and shuffle them. This is the Draw stack, which you will add to over time, building a deck for yourself.

Now, shuffle the remaining cards from the second deck. Create two stacks, each with 10 cards. These are the Challenge stacks, which represent the challenges you will face on each world. Set aside a final card, this is the Final Challenge. The remaining cards represent challenges faced by others on other worlds.

In each section, cards will be revealed from the World stacks, which help you to know the world you are visiting. At the end of the section, there will be questions to ponder. For each question answered, you will draw a card from the Draw stack.

Then a card from the top of each of the Challenge stacks will be revealed. The first card represents a Crisis, and the second card represents a Companion. Over the course of the game, you must win at least 6 Crisis cards, and at least 6 Companion cards.

To win a Challenge card, you must spend cards in your Hand that add up to the value of that card. Challenge cards always have a positive value.

For cards in your Hand, red cards have a positive value, and black cards have a negative value. A card may also be treated as any of its factors, excepting ±1. For example, 🂸 may act as +8, +4, or +2. 🂱 and 🃁 act as +1, and 🃑 and 🂡 act as -1.

When you spend a card in your Hand to win a Challenge card, add the spent card to a Discard stack, and add the won card to your Hand. When you are done with the Challenges, add any unspent cards in your Hand to the Discard stack as well. If at any time the Draw stack has less than five cards, shuffle the Discard stack and place it at the bottom of the Draw stack.

For any Challenge cards that you did not win, flip them over face-down, keeping the types of challenges separate, so that you can track how many have been won.

When the Challenge stacks are exhausted, if you have won at least 6 Crisis cards, and at least 6 Companion cards, you will face the Final Challenge. Otherwise, continue to The End.

As you gaze up toward the heavens, obscurity unveils a single star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected how many thousands of years ago, now stings your nerves with vision. As you stare, slowly the sky parts, and you cannot help but search for those familiar patterns. Orion’s four-square shoulders and feet, his belt and sword, the Plough, the zigzag of Cassiopeia.

Looking down, you see not your feet, but through them. You seem to see through a transparent planet, through scrubgrowth and solid rock, through the buried graveyards of vanished species, and on into the Earth’s molten core; then on again, through the southern strata, to the southern ocean and lands, and out into the eternal night, where lay the nether constellations. In this strange vertigo, you look back for reassurance at the glowing windows of your home. It is still there, but the stars show through all. It is as though all terrestrial things are made of glass, or of some more limpid, more ethereal vitreosity.

Your imagination now stimulates a new, strange mode of perception. Looking from star to star, you see the heaven no longer as a jewelled ceiling and floor, but as depth beyond flashing depth of suns. The universe in which fate has set you is no spangled chamber, but a perceived vortex of star-streams, overwhelming. But now, once more shunning these immensities, you look again for the windows of your home.

But your home has vanished.

You find yourself seemingly disembodied, for you can neither see nor touch nor move your own flesh. For a moment, you wonder if you have died, and the violence of your distress shocks you. For you would not be able to return to your prized, concrete atom of home. However, after a moment you realise you are probably not dead, but in some sort of trance, from which you might wake at any moment. You resolve to observe with scientific interest all that happens to you.

Nothing now is visible but the glittering sky. The sun but one among the other bright stars. If you place your mental focus and imagination on one of these stars intently enough, you begin to perceive a shift in this glittering vortex. Their light stretches into reds behind you, and into icy blues before you. You must be travelling, and at so fast a pace that the light itself is not wholly indifferent to your passage.

Very soon the heavens present an extraordinary appearance, a planet not altogether unlike your own. At first you find comfort in the seeming familiarity, but the subtle differences nag at you. This is not the world from which your species sprung, and upon which your vanished home still rests.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the first World stack. This represents the most striking difference between this newfound world, and your native one. The value defines what is different, and the suit defines the surprising manner in which it differs. Take careful note that each suit has a myriad of interpretations. “More” could mean more in number, more in scale, more in importance, et cetera.

Cultivate a myriad of ideas, and discard none of them.

bookmark_border As you descend upon the planet, something in you searches for a land which promises to be like your own home. But you hasten to remind yourself that the conditions here are entirely different from terrestrial conditions, no matter their familiarity. So you glide aimlessly with wingless flight over the surface of the planet, until presently you come upon some element which it is impossible to imagine has not been intelligently planned. To your amazement, a human, or more truly, something very like a human, reveals itself.

Now reveal the next card from the crest of the second World stack. This represents the most striking physical difference between these people, and your native ones.

bookmark_border You spend some number of rotations or orbits among this strange species, observing with keen scientific interest. But overtime, you become strangely oppressed by their complete unawareness of yourself. With painful clarity you remember that the purpose of your pilgrimage is not merely scientific observation, but also the need to effect some kind of mental or spiritual traffic with other worlds. Eventually you span the distance, and begin to enter their minds, perceiving through their senses, and experiencing their world as they do.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the third World stack. This represents the most striking difference you discover through this mental communion with the species.

bookmark_border Through this deeper understanding of these people, you make a troubling and not altogether surprising discovery. It is bittersweet, for you find in them a spiritual yearning so painfully similar to your own. A wish for meaning in an indifferent universe. However, you also find them in the midst of a spiritual crisis, a conflict between two natures; different, but in the same shape as the one your own people are going through at this very moment.

Now reveal the next card at the crest of the fourth World stack. This represents the crisis of natures which is tormenting the species. The value defines the natures, and the suit defines the transition between natures that must be made to save the species from destroying itself, instead allowing it to enter into a higher mode of consciousness.

bookmark_border Immediately you go searching for the root of this conflict, this crisis of the spirit. Perhaps you wish to solve it, or perhaps you only wish to reassure yourself that your own species is free of this burden. You find that while there may be several flaws in this species, none of them is so deep as to cause a crisis on this planetary scale. Instead, you find them to be enhanced, irritated, by some catalyst outside of the spiritual, and much closer to the realm of the material.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fifth and final Word stack. This represents the trigger for the spiritual crisis. The newborn force which pushed the species to its current precipice. The value defines the form of the trigger, and the suit defines its sphere of influence.

bookmark_border You have no paper nor pen nor anything else with which to record your fleeting observations. However, you try persistently to fix them in your mind to bring them back to the people you hope to return to. This is your opportunity to do so, and to make this species concrete.

Attempt to answer the following questions, if only for yourself. For each question answered, draw a card from your Draw stack, and add it to your Hand.

How was this species shaped by their planet?

How did they develop these opposing natures?

How did the trigger push them toward this crisis?

How does this species remind you of your own people?

How does this crisis remind you of your own life?

Now reveal the next card from the top of each Challenge stack. The card from the first Challenge stack represents transitioning the world through its spiritual Crisis, and bringing it into a higher mode of consciousness. The card from the second Challenge stack represents gaining a Companion from this world, to increase your imaginative insight, and to travel with you on your untethered pilgrimage.

Now, Determine the Fates of the world, and your journey.

If you gained the Crisis card, describe how the species transitions through its spiritual crisis, and enters a higher mode of consciousness. Otherwise, describe how it falls to this crisis, and either destroys itself, or devolves.

If you gained the Companion card, you are now able to imagine species more different from your own; move to the next section. Otherwise, your insight has not increased; return to the beginning of this section.

You and your companion now head once again into the great glittering expanse, stretching your imaginations toward another spirited species yearning in the darkness. Your insight reveals to you a new planet, less familiar than what you have seen before.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the first World stack. This represents the most striking feature of this new planet.

bookmark_border As you glide toward the planet, seeking something to commune with and to study, something human and familiar, you find not that but something else. Not a human-like species, yet a familiar species, which cannot help but remind you of the other creatures of your lost home world.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the second World stack. This represents the habitat where you discover this new species. The value determines the type of habitat, and the suit determines its status.

bookmark_border This species has, in itself, all of the characteristics one typically associates with civilization. The artistic pursuits, the political pursuits, the economic, the religious, community, strife and above all, a civility. However, the circumstances by which the species came to possess this civilization, the manner in which they relate to their environment, is different from what you expect.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the third World stack. This represents the relationship of the species to their habitat. The value determines the relationship, and the suit determines how it is perceived by members of the species.

bookmark_border Though this planet’s people are very different, you find them in the midst of a spiritual crisis, very much like those of the human worlds. A struggle between two natures, rooted in their deepest subconscious instinct, and their most distant savage past.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fourth World stack. This represents the crisis of natures which is tormenting the species.

bookmark_border Through your communion with the species, you have found that these natures are not ordinarily at conflict. For many millennia the species existed harmoniously, if not peacefully, and generally unperturbed. Something novel has tipped the balance, disrupted the homeostasis, and pushed them toward this struggle.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fifth and final World stack. This represents the trigger for the spiritual crisis.

bookmark_border Taking stock of the information you have gathered, you attempt to reconcile it into a coherent whole. Take a moment to fix this species in your mind, and to make it concrete.

Attempt to answer the following questions, if only for yourself. For each question answered, draw a card from your Draw stack, and add it to your Hand.

How was this species shaped by their planet?

How did they develop these opposing natures?

How did the trigger push them toward this crisis?

How does this species remind you of your own people?

How does this crisis remind you of your own life?

Now reveal the next card from the top of each Challenge stack. Determine the Fates of the world, and of your journey.

If you gained the Crisis card, describe how the species transitions through its spiritual crisis, and enters a higher mode of consciousness. Otherwise, describe how it falls to this crisis, and either destroys itself, or devolves.

If you gained the Companion card, you are now able to imagine species more different from your own; move to the next section. Otherwise, your insight has not increased; return to the beginning of this section.

You and your companions journey forward, straining your imaginative insights toward a world which is beyond what any of your small troupe has experienced. In time you come upon another spirited world deep in the heart of the galaxy.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the first World stack. This represents the most striking feature of this new planet.

bookmark_border As your group scratters across the surface of the planet, looking for the species whose struggle surely guided you here, you find not one species but two. They are interlinked, related in both subtle and overt ways, relying on the other’s strengths and countervailing their weaknesses. Only together do they form pockets of community, and further, a society.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the second World stack, and the next card from the crest of the third world stack as well. These represent the relationships of the species to their habitat, as well as to each other. The value determines the relationship to the habitat, and the suit determines how the species perceives its relationship to the other.

bookmark_border Here again, you find a struggle between two natures. However this struggle does not occur within the species, but between them. Each species represents one half of the society’s two-part nature; both sides constantly at odds, but still tragically equally essential.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fourth World stack. This represents the opposing natures of the first and second species, and the transition that must be made in the relationship between them.

bookmark_border To reach such a spiritual crisis is no easy feat. The symbiotes have created technologies, arts, and philosophies rivalling that of your own species, and to attain this they have existed in balance for thousands of revolutions. Something recent, something novel, has sparked this struggle between them.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fifth and final World stack. This represents the trigger for the spiritual crisis.

bookmark_border Gathering your troupe together once again, you try to make sense of what you have discovered. Take a moment to fix these species in your mind, and to make them concrete.

Attempt to answer the following questions, if only for yourself. For each question answered, draw a card from your Draw stack, and add it to your Hand.

How were these species shaped by their planet?

How did they develop these opposing natures?

How did the trigger push them toward this crisis?

How do these species remind you of your own people?

How does this crisis remind you of your own life?

Now reveal the next card from the top of each Challenge stack. Determine the Fates of the world, and of your journey.

gained the Crisis card, describe how the species transition through their spiritual crisis, and enter a higher mode of consciousness. Otherwise, describe how they fall to this crisis, and either destroy themselves, or devolve.

If you gained the Companion card, continue reading. Otherwise, your insight has not increased; return to the beginning of this section.

You and your companions have now visited many a spirited world. Each entirely unique, and also, in some way, the same. From each planet, you have learned, increased your spirit, and expanded your imagination. Now you find yourselves different from those original travellers on your individual worlds.

Perhaps slowly, or perhaps suddenly, you find that you have awakened into the experiences of the others. You can participate in their adventures just as readily, and with as clear a perception as you can experience your own. You do not know whether you have become a single individual, experiencing a single, though multifaceted, stream of consciousness, or whether you remain many experiencing individuals, having numerically distinct, but exactly similar experiences. You know only that your consciousness has shifted, and that your imagination stretches much further than it did before.

You, the one, the many turn your collective thought to your next destination, and find yourself hovering at the edge of the atmosphere of another spirited world. It looks to all appearances as if it could not sustain the resources necessary for a community of spirited beings. Yet you feel instinctively that this planet has greater complexity than what one can perceive at first appearance.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the first World stack. This represents the most striking feature of this new planet.

bookmark_border The different aspects of you disperse across the planet, seaking the species that has brought you here, each aspect experiencing the fullness of each other, as well as the fullness of itself. In time, you discover the species, and in it you discover a reflection of your own communal self. For they also are formed of individuals come together to create a conscious metaorganism.

At times you find them bird-like, at other times insect-like, or fish-like, and at other times unanalogous in totality. Yet you feel a kinship with them, a reflection of your new mode of being.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the second World stack. This represents the relationship of the species to their habitat.

bookmark_border It may be easily imagined that the mental life of these composite beings was very different from anything which you had yet encountered. Different, and yet the same. Like each of the previous species, these metaorganisms were just as capable of anger and fear, hunger and sexual hunger, personal love and all the passions of the herd; but the medium of these experiences was so different from anything you had yet found.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the third World stack. The value represents the medium through which the individual creatures form their collective being, and the suit represents what is shared between the individuals.

bookmark_border Little by little you learned to understand something of the alien thought of these strange beings, which was in its detailed texture so different from your own, yet in general pattern and significance so similar. Through this understanding you came to find that, like all the others before, this species was at a crossroads; a crisis of natures.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fourth World stack. This represents the crisis of natures which is tormenting the species.

bookmark_border Though interpreting the inner lives of this strange networked species still presents difficulty, you slowly find that they did not always exist in this state of conflict. Only recently has some metaorganic mutation begun spreading through their communication networks; their webs of being.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fifth and final World stack. This represents the trigger for the spiritual crisis.

bookmark_border Coming together once again, the aspects of yourself attempt to reconcile all you have learned, and form a consistent imagining among you. In your own mind, make this interpretation concrete.

Attempt to answer the following questions, if only for yourself. For each question answered, draw a card from your Draw stack, and add it to your Hand.

How was this species shaped by their planet?

How did they develop these opposing natures?

How did the trigger push them toward this crisis?

How does this species remind you of your own people?

How does this crisis remind you of your own life?

Now reveal the next card from the top of each Challenge stack. Determine the Fates of the world, and of your journey.

If you gained the Crisis card, describe how the species transitions through their spiritual crisis, and enter a higher mode of consciousness. Otherwise, describe how they fall to this crisis, and either destroy themselves, or devolve.

If you gained the Companion card, you are now able to imagine species more different from your own; move to the next section. Otherwise, your insight has not increased; return to the beginning of this section.

Your collective continues on toward a new world, searching for insight into this spiritual awakening that seems to be happening at a galactic scale. In opening your outward sight, you find yourself at an unassuming planet somewhere at the edge of the galaxy. You feel understanding hovering at the edges of your reach.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the first World stack. This represents the most striking feature of this new planet.

bookmark_border On this new planet, you find that evolution has taken a very different course from that with which you are familiar. Here the vegetable and animal functions have not separated into distinct organic types. Every organism is at once animal and vegetable.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the second World stack. The value represents the plant you perceive this species as most similar to, and the suit represents their most animal-like aspect.

bookmark_border You disperse across the planet, attempting to understand the thought and condition of a species whose evolution branched from the path yours took earlier than any you have yet encountered. You take comfort in the fact that while they are still very different, and you do not yet understand them, they relate to their environment in a way with which you are familiar.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the third World stack. This represents the relationship of the species to their habitat.

bookmark_border Slowly you come to grasp some of the texture and pattern of the inner lives of these beings; their concerns strangely mapped onto your human notions and perspectives. You find them, like the other species you have encountered, in the midst of a conflict, but one much stranger than what you have experienced thus far.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fourth World stack. This represents the crisis of natures which is tormenting the species.

bookmark_border In time, you find that here as elsewhere you have found a population of individuals deeply concerned with the task of keeping themselves and their society in being. Here you have found self-regard, hate, love, the passions of the mob, intellectual curiosity, and so on. And here, as in all the other worlds you have thus far visited, you find the great spiritual crisis troubling the species has been triggered and irritated by something outside it.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fifth and final World stack. This represents the trigger for the spiritual crisis.

bookmark_border Coming together once again, the aspects of yourself attempt to reconcile all you have learned, and form a consistent imagining among you. In your own mind, make this interpretation concrete.

Attempt to answer the following questions, if only for yourself. For each question answered, draw a card from your Draw stack, and add it to your Hand.

How was this species shaped by their planet?

How did they develop these opposing natures?

How did the trigger push them toward this crisis?

How does this species remind you of your own people?

How does this crisis remind you of your own life?

Now reveal the next card from the top of each Challenge stack. Determine the Fates of the world, and of your journey.

If you gained the Crisis card, describe how the species transitions through their spiritual crisis, and enter a higher mode of consciousness. Otherwise, describe how they fall to this crisis, and either destroy themselves, or devolve.

If you gained the Companion card, you are now able to imagine species more different from your own; move to the next section. Otherwise, your insight has not increased; return to the beginning of this section.

You continue forth. You can feel that you are nearing the end of your journey. You do not know what will happen after. But you also do not fear it.

You find yourself somewhere unexpected. Not at a planet, as you have found yourself so many times before, but at some place different.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the first world stack. The value represents the place where you find yourself, and the suit represents the feeling it gives you.

bookmark_border For a moment you wonder if there has been a mistake, some glitch in your imaginative insight that has left you stranded in a creatureless, spiritless place. But you call on your scientific nature, your hungerful curiosity, and choose to investigate in spite of any doubts you might harbour.

What you find amazes you.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the second world stack. This value represents the form of the creature you discover, and the suit represents one law of nature which does not apply to them.

bookmark_border Your attempt to understand this species, if you can even call it that, does not go well. Every time you feel as if you are getting close to touching their inner life, you feel your comprehension slip from your grasp, your thoughts scatter, and your very essence of self begin to dissolve. But through it all, you persevere, and after the longest of times you find one thing, one almost human thing, you can latch on to.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the third world stack. This represents the most human thing about the species.

bookmark_border This insight represents a breakthrough. From this, you begin to build up an understanding of the inner lives of these creatures. Though their method of thought is beyond your ability to experience, you map pieces of what you gather to your own insufficient human ideas. As you take a moment to step back, and to ponder, you find that these creatures too must be in the midst of a spiritual conflict. though you can only grasp the barest, most muddled version of it.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fourth World stack. This represents the crisis of natures which is tormenting the creatures.

bookmark_border Though you can only grasp the edges of the conflict these creatures are facing, your scientific instincts and your depth of experience tell you there must be some source of this conflict. When you go looking, you find it.

Reveal the next card from the crest of the fifth and final World stack. This represents the trigger for the spiritual crisis.

bookmark_border You have struggled. All of you have stretched yourself as you have never done. As you coalesce, you find yourself wiser, broader, more than you have been before. Take a moment to reflect on your experience, and make these creatures concrete.

Attempt to answer the following questions, if only for yourself. For each question answered, draw a card from your Draw stack, and add it to your Hand.

How were these creatures shaped by their place?

How did they develop these opposing natures?

How did the trigger push them toward this crisis?

How do these creatures remind you of your own people?

How does this crisis remind you of your own life?

Now reveal the next card from the top of each Challenge stack. Determine the Fates of the world, and of your journey.

If you gained the Crisis card, describe how the creatures transition through their spiritual crisis, and enter a higher mode of consciousness. Otherwise, describe how they fall to this crisis, and either destroy themselves, or dissolve.

If the World stacks and the Challenge stacks have been emptied, continue reading. Otherwise, return to the beginning of this section.

If you have gained at least six Crisis cards, and at least six Companion cards, you may continue on to The Final Challenge. Otherwise continue to The End.

In this moment, you find yourself changed. You have broadened yourself, found companions who have become a part of you, and expanded your imaginative insight. You have seen and communed with creatures your original self could not comprehend. And you have struggled. You have struggled with the struggles of so many creatures, searching for meaning in the vastness of the void.

You find yourself to be one small part of a great cosmic awakening.

Glowing at the edges of what you can comprehend, you can feel all of the awakened words thinking, reaching, yearning, for the answer to the deepest question: why?

And you, with your collective consciousness, your depth of experience from all of these different worlds, for but a moment: you know.

Take the cards from your Discard stack, and shuffle them into your Draw stack. Now attempt to answer the following questions, if only for yourself. For each question answered, draw a card from your Draw stack, and add it to your Hand.

Why were these worlds and creatures shaped by the universe?

Why were they given these opposing natures?

Why did they have to struggle through these spiritual crises?

Why were you chosen to go on this journey?

What are you choosing to take back?

Now reveal the Final Challenge, and Determine the Fates of this ultimate moment.

If you did not gain the Final Challenge card, the details of your epiphany fade as quickly as they came to you. You know that you grasped this supreme moment, but you cannot recall the depth of what it was.

If you gained the Final Challenge card, you know that you have known the uncaused cause at the beginning of the universe, and you rest easy in your knowledge of why.

Many species have been elevated to a higher level of spiritual consciousness under your watchful eye. And you yourself have grown your imaginative insight beyond any human who came before you. Return home, to your little islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world, and rest. I hope that in your journey you have found the kind of truth that we sometimes find in myths.

This work is an adaptation of Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, published in 1937, ISBN 1-85798-807-8

This work’s deck-building mechanics were inspired by RPN by Fred Henle (fredhenle.net)