“Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.“ -Ursula K. LeGuin
Welcome to Restitution, an invite only GPSL about going to work after the worst day of your life. Or maybe it’s a game about figuring out how much you’ve really changed in a year. Or perhaps it’s a game about how even discovering proof of the paranormal can be ground down into mundanity by capitalism.
In this game, the characters will wake up in Wendling, Oregon, a town run by and populated by employees of the Restitution Agency. A private company with a shadowy background and a government contract for containing and dealing with paranormal activity out in the world. The characters are employees, who’ve agreed to help with the research, investigation, cover up, and conflict with these ‘anomalies’. During the game they will have to keep up with their jobs while attempting to discover what exactly happened during the missing year and why the building they all work in has been locked down. They’ll open and investigate the various sectors of the Control and Management building while also completing investigations and dangerous missions for the Restitution Agency.
This game will take place over 5 months. Each month a new sector will open and a new series of case files will become available.
The point of the game is to play to find out, this means by playing together we will build out the answers to the questions the characters have. There will be elements prewritten and elements randomly generated to keep things flowing, but the point of the game is to build a narrative collaboratively. Alongside that, the more important goal of the characters, despite their desire for the truth is what will they do now? What will they do with a blank slate and a community they built but only now have control of? Don’t think of the game as a puzzle box, think of it as a box of legos, we’ve got all the legos those will be provided and added to, but what will be built from it?
Some of the themes of this game are: