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TRANSCRIPT
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Solipsist
David Donachie
“To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.”
Plato, The Republic (Book VII)
© 2008 David Donachie
Published by BoxNinja, Edinburgh, UK.
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CreditsConcept, Writing and Art: David Donachie Editing, Book Design and Art: Gregor Hutton Art: Kurt Taylor (www.kurtataylor.com), Frieda Van Raevels Proof Reading: Roderick Easton Dedication To Gregor Hutton, for suggesting this book; To Victoria, for putting up with it; And to my Dad, for giving me the gift of imagination. Thanks, Feedback and Playtesting: Victoria Lawford, John Wilson, Per Fischer, Justin Matters, Ruth Durie, Mike Holmes, Alexander Cherry, Carl Congdon, Adrienne Congdon, David Chase, Sarah Martinez, the “No Guts No Glory!“ playtesters (Sean Connor, Steve Pitson, Nick Hodges, Chris Pitson, Steven Cook), Matt Machell (realms.co.uk), Rich Stokes, Joe Murphy ([email protected]), Ashok Desai, Bard Bloom (www.world-tree-rpg.com), Tim Boser, Graham Walmsley, Pooka, Damian Fraustro, Collective Endeavour, Story Games, The Forge and Iain McAllister’s new website for playtesters: playtesting.co.uk. Website: http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/E-mail: [email protected]
Typeset in Adobe® InDesign® CS on a 1.5-GHz Apple PowerBook G4 15-inch, using the fonts Opium (www.pizzadude.dk) and Adobe® Myriad® Pro.First Edition – March 2008. First Printing Text © 2008 David Donachie. Art © 2008 The Artists (David Donachie, Gregor Hutton, Kurt Taylor and Frieda Van Raevels). Book Design © 2008 Gregor Hutton. All Rights Reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Copyright Law and by reviewers for the public press), without prior written permission from the publisher. Permission is granted to copy the Play Sheets for personal use only.
BoxNinja, Edinburgh, UK boxninja.com
BOX0011
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contentsText Introduction .................................................................................................. 4–11
Playing The Game ................................................................................... 12–15
Glossary ........................................................................................................ 16–19
Character Creation ...............................................................................20–26
Character Sheet .............................................................................................. 27
Rules ...............................................................................................................28–41
Play ................................................................................................................. 42–54
Summary of Play Sheet ................................................................................55
Example of Play ....................................................................................... 56–65
Shadows .....................................................................................................66–78
Appendices ................................................................................................ 79–91
Index ..............................................................................................................92–93
Character Sheet ..............................................................................................94
Adverts .........................................................................................................95–96
Illustrations
Solipsist, by David Donachie ..................................................................... 4
Infestation, by David Donachie ..............................................................12
The Vitruvian Bird, by David Donachie ..............................................20
Firemen and Snails, by Frieda Van Raevels ......................................28
The Blue Parrot, by Kurt Taylor ................................................................. 42
Church and Tentacles, by Kurt Taylor .................................................. 56
The Shadows, by Gregor Hutton .......................................................... 66
Throughout this book you will find quotes and comments in this footer. We hope they are entertaining and useful.
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DD “There are in the world some people who think so strongly and individually that the animacules flock to them and respond to their desires individually. Such people can literally change their own reality…”
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IntroductionThe great Greek philosopher Plato once asked whether all the world, everything we saw and took as real, was in fact no more than shadows cast on the wall of a cave from some more real thing we could not see. Whether, indeed, if there was such a thing as concrete reality at all. Later philosophers had more belief in the solid, and proposed the theory that all things were composed of an essential smallest component, the atom. When the original microbiologist, Van Leeuwenhoek, first looked down his microscope and saw the things that swarmed and multiplied in a drop of water, he had no way of knowing that these creatures, these animacules, were not the philosopher’s atoms, the smallest building blocks of matter. Later scientists classified these animacules as animals instead, and delved down to still smaller scales to find their atoms until at last, with the quarks and strings of modern physics, they conceived of particles so small that even a thought might disturb and change them.
What none of these great minds suspected was that Plato was more right than even he knew. Everything that we see around us, the Sun, the stars, the places and people, even the physicists’ atoms, are no more than phantoms produced by those smallest elements of reality: the animacules.
DD“Perception is reality.”
Immanuel Kant
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