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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 7403096" data-attributes="member: 21169">Yes, the mystery was entirely written by the GM. The players did a lot of writing but this was mostly theories. Paul, the GM, also developed a lot of theories in his role as the Professor. He told me recently that producing those theories was a lot more work than creating what was actually going on, which I found quite surprising.Yes we were making moves to try to get the GM to reveal information though we thought of it in game world terms. One such move occurred in the very first DGC dream intrusion when the players' dream personae discovered the 'dream enemy' of an External and were able to question it. There would sometimes be joking about getting Paul drunk and trying to persuade him to reveal the game's secrets but he always, even after the first phase of the DGC ended, kept them well hidden.It always felt like a sandbox game where we had a great deal of freedom, which I think is what it was. Towards the end of the first phase of the DGC our available moves were severely reduced as the Professor was hospitalised, we were under attack in the physical world, we'd burned our bridges with the Brotherhood (a secretive NPC organisation that seemed to possess psychic talents), and as the example of play in the previous post shows had even become reluctant to dream intrude. As that was happening, Pix's character's own clairvoyant abilities were developing and these became our main source of information. There was a noticeable difference in the gameplay when this happened as the visions Pix received were entirely dependent on the GM. Pix had no power to trigger them. For all we know he may have been able to develop that capability but by that time we were gunshy when it came to such things. Rereading the old journals, at that point the game starts to feel a bit more like the GM telling the players a story.Things had taken a very downward turn by the end of the first phase of the DGC. The Professor and the in-game version of Paul were dead. The Brotherhood had been decimated. Mark had become alienated from most of the rest of the group and, infected by an External, was then sectioned at our behest. The DGC had clearly reached an ending, an extremely downbeat one, where the surviving characters could barely function as they had in the past. The very last paragraph in the journals (written by Pix) reads:But such patients, such successes, belong to the past. The only good thing we can do now is retreat before the onslaught. I very much hope that if we stop pushing, then whatever is on the other side will stop pushing back. Whatever it is, it's too strong for us.</blockquote>

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