In the end, I decided to play out the Aftermath as you would in a real game of Fiasco: each character gets one short moment for every die, the vibe of each coded after the color.

Bill

Dreadful. You are certainly dead, probably from a self-inflicted wound. People you care about are also probably dead, maybe through your own stupid, ugly failure. To say that you fucked up is an insult to fucked-upedness. You have redefined the term.

Bill only got two dice, a white and black. So he got survive being shot, only to see it all fall apart in the end. I think, in a way, this self-inflicted wound of his Aftermath isn’t just the physical pain, but the complete loss of self control and hope. After all, he made not a single good choice, and everything that has happened to him could have been avoided. Poor impulse control indeed. I added him to one of Jay’s moments, just to give him a bit more to do during the Aftermath.

Ash

Brutal. Wounds that will never heal, for starters: stuff sawed off, blown off, or burned off on your way to grand, ignominious failure. Kiss whatever you care about goodbye. You may die, but you may not.

Ash survived, even made something of herself. She started and ended the Aftermath with a white die, so everything in between had to feel terrible, or at the very least hollow and sad. It all caught up with her in the end in a brutal fashion, as her Aftermath result said it would, but it was a white die. She ended right where she started: in the middle of the night, inside the wreck of a car, giving up. At least to her, she found peace in finally stopping to run.

Jay

Weak. Hey, you’re busted, beat, and broken down, but at least you’ve learned a lesson about human greed and frailty, right? It’ll serve you well in prison, which is where you are probably headed.

Jay tried to make the best of things. Black start and end to his Aftermath, but it went pretty well for him in between. At the end, as his Aftermath suggested, he had nothing left but to reflect on everything that went wrong because of him.

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Writing’s always been a passion of mine. But, most days, I struggle to make it work for various reasons–work, other creative projects, migraines, to name a few. That was one of the reasons for this project the first time around. And it was it again for Rat Trap.

Using Fiasco and the Writer Emergency Pack is a wild ride, even the second time around. I think the story itself was a bit out there, mostly because I wanted to have the bomb and detonator (which was an important object) be front a center for part of it. But that’s the beauty of these sort of games: the story could go anywhere. From the very beginning, the dice set up the relationships and informed the story. Change any one detail, roll a different number, make a different choice, and everything would change.

And then there are the cards. The Writer Emergency Pack is just a fantastic tool to think about your story in new and exciting ways. Whether you actually use the results of the exercises on each card, or just feel inspired by the cards, you’ll come out the other end with new ideas and appreciation of your characters and their story.

The most influential card must have been “Hug The Crocodile.” It turned Jay from a career gangster butting heads with Ash into this sweet guy. A dreamer, a friend, wanting them all to succeed. And it also caused him to get burned the hardest in the end. Without that card, Jay would have been much more selfish, ready to climb over his friends to get that promotion (at least that’s my original vision for him). This card was probably the best demonstration of I think the Writer Emergency Fiasco can accomplish for your writing. It also highlights just the power of random, but contextual, prompts, whether it’s in writing or in playing RPGs.

In the end, it all led me to finish a thing: a novella called Rat Trap. It reached just around 24,000 words, which is a good chunk all things considered.

What’s Next

I’ll take a short break from this story. But I do intend on fixing it up, after that. Do some edits, rewrite some of the weaker parts, figure out the real story underneath this fiasco. Once that’s all done, I’ll probably publish it as an ebook somewhere, like I did with Honeymoon.

But that’s all far in the future, for now.

I hope anyone reading this had a good time with the project. I sure did.

Maybe, at some point in the future, I will do this again. Maybe with more characters, a different playset, or with some other tools in play. Who knows.

Until then, keep writing, keep playing.

Stefan