Hoop Snake - Tumblr Posts
HOOP SNAKE
Day 9: Nest
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The Hoop Snake is a cryptid first reported in 1784 in Stoke County, North Carolina. The creature rolls after its prey before straightening out at the last second, skewering its victim with its venomous tail.
The Far Roofs: the Rats' Books of Names
cover art by Isip Xin
Hi!
Today I’m going to talk a little bit more about my forthcoming RPG, the Far Roofs. I’ve previously talked about
general principles,
the rats,
the campaign,
the Mysteries, and
my favorite Mystery.
Today, I want to talk about a key setting element:
The rats' "books of names."
So, the high concept here is pretty simple. The rats of this game are pretty cool, but not cool enough to deal with god-monsters on any kind of equal basis. The Mysteries aren't like Goliath to their David, at least not usually; they're more like Scylla and Charybdis to their Odysseus. Sometimes it's possible to negotiate. Sometimes it's possible to fight back. But a lot of the time, "winning" a confrontation with a Mystery is more about surviving. Making it through.
Except ...
Just like it was for human mariners, a situation where the whole environment they travel through is full of impossible horrors one just can't do anything about ... that's kind of untenable. Humans never made the sea safe, but they did learn to navigate it. They figured out how to sail, how to chart, how to not get constant scurvy, how to knot rigging, all that stuff.
In like fashion, the rats have this multi-generational project to, basically, nibble away at the "Mystery" part of the Mysteries. To not just survive their encounters, but to come away with a bit more information every time.
To learn, eventually, how to handle all of this stuff, all these monstrous divinities that haunt the Far Roofs.
The Books of Names, in short, are a sacred tradition of the rats and pretty much a defining feature of their interactions with the Mysteries. Most families of rats keep their own set. The shelves of the rats' great libraries overflow with huge and magnificently illuminated Books of Names—dozens or hundreds for any given Name. Over the generations, at a grievous cost, the rats are grinding down the impossible magic of the roofs into something comprehensible, something they can grapple with. To record truth, and insightful commentary, and eventually learn to live with even the greatest and most awful Mysteries.
What this all means to the rats is a little tangled. They worship the Mysteries, I think, and hunt them; they are hunted by the Mysteries in turn. They dream of one day defeating or destroying them, but I don’t think they’d like the world where they’d been destroyed. They are hammered into shape, both as individuals and a people, by the Mysteries, and I don’t think I can ever really fully express what these books, or the Mysteries themselves, mean to them.
They are rich, like cake, like wine, like a well-loved and annotated cookbook. They are generations of wisdom, bound in form.
To the rats, they are, I think, life itself.
Let me show you what an example is like! Like, what you might see opening up some rat family's Book on the Mystery Hoop Snake.
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Quick Hoop Snake sketches, by Jenna
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So your typical Book of Names is going to start with a couple of introductory pages, maybe some sketches or whatever, and then move on to what the rats call a Mystery's "heralds," the ... ways you know that the Mystery is near. The things that you see when it's interested in you, when it's considering haunting you, or just passing by. The things that it emerges from, in the world.
It'll usually start with a list, with lots of room left to go, like:
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Heralds of Hoop Snake ...
* blurred vision * getting turned about * sudden light or sudden darkness * the sudden realization that something is, and has been, very wrong * * * * * ...
and then, like, a couple pages set aside to go into each of those more, with a mix of personal statements (often newsletter clippings, because the rats send these comments around) and summarized opinions or facts.
Like:
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Blurred Vision
“I saw it on the road. Down the alley, past the milk crate, in front of that old cabinet someone left out on the street. I was rubbing my eyes, and they were a little blurry, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure I’d seen it, or what I’d seen. It was just this blur of colors rushing by, all these colors. And I thought, a flag? A mural? Someone’s shopping bag, caught by the wind? It wasn’t until I’d had that happen like three more times, these half-caught glimpses of color, in the rain, when I didn’t have my glasses on, from the corner of my eye, that I actually saw Hoop Snake direct.” — Alyona Waynwright, 2018
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NOTES
Gavrilo writes that Hoop Snake lives in the confused sensorium. The world jumbles up, and Hoop Snake comes out.
Ioanna comments: “Little incongruities become bigger ones.”
Constantinope Volkov accidentally summoned Hoop Snake through an abstract in-progress painting. He could not later replicate this feat.
Elsibet Križ proposes a mechanism similar to the way that new, unknown scents temporarily seem like improbable combinations of the known—how your first encounter with a cat does not produce the sensation, “Ah, this is the smell of cat” but “oh no, my parents are being ripped apart. The world is shaking. Why is there peppermint?” You mistake the world, and Hoop Snake is there.
Meredith McCawley (human) comments that when she is very sleepy a pile of colored yarn can look like a snake to her; the passing lights of the cars, like eyes.
Kesterley Novác pushed on her eyelids to watch shapes spin. They got more and more detailed until one day she saw Hoop Snake! Trying to chase Hoop Snake into her eyes she wound up headbutting the wall.
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Getting Turned Around
You are nodding along. You are small, they say. And meek. You are but a child. I will fix that for you, they say. You think, “Wait, what?” In that “Wait, what?” there is a snake. — Iodine Petrova, 2012
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NOTES
Maria Augustine, Leverage Jordan, and Daisuke Ozlov attest this experience of Hoop Snake: “we are confused, and then, we are not confused. A snake takes its tail into its mouth, and rolls.”
Kaeda Vanagir was noted as having frequently become lost in the weeks before her June 1993 disappearance chasing after Hoop Snake. (May she one day return.)
Jezdimir Czerny likened the moment of seeing Hoop Snake to becoming turned around, to feeling like you know where you are and where you’re going, and then you look up, and you’re actually somewhere else.
Violeta Schulz was flung from a spinning ferris wheel and, before she landed, a snake burst from the bushes to, as the witnesses described it, “drink her down like wine.”
I found a Hoop Snake scale in a little store that I’ve never seen again.
Hoop Snake Scale
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“I was literally just popping out to buy the news. Only, I hadn’t had my coffee yet, and somehow I wound up … I don’t even know where. It was a garden, up on the roofs, but it wasn’t a rat garden, and I don’t know where it is, and I can't find that place now. There was a colored banner, there, tied to a tree. It fluttered like a snake in the wind.” — Presley Weekes, 2014
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Sudden light, by Jenna Moran
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Sudden Light, or Sudden Darkness “There were noises in the dark. Thumping. Crashing. I thought it was the cats. My brain was so sleepy. I couldn’t put it together, except: oh, the cats got down here. We don’t even have cats. So I stagger out there. I’m not even dressed, just a long shirt on. I didn’t have my glasses on. Everything was just a blur. And I look at the cats, the thing I thought was cats, and like, for just a moment it was. For just a moment, it was cats, moving in the dark. Then it was ‘cats,’ like, one thing, one item, one animal, with two parts, that were shaped like cats. Like a dromedary, if cats were humps. It stuck its tail in its mouth. It began to roll away. ‘Like Hell,’ I said, but I didn’t give chase. I wasn’t dressed!” — Lucy Stokes (human), 2004
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NOTES
Valery Merlin experienced frequent incidents of his electric lantern coming on unexpectedly and blinding his eyes, sometimes accompanied by a fulgurative scent. This ended when the flare of the light revealed a snake like a coiled spring; he fell over, the lantern broke, and the incident thus resolved.
Priscilla Augustine reports a summer cold that stuffed up her nose to the point of intermittent blindness, during which intervals objects would fall of their shelves, slithering or rolling noises echo through the halls, and glittering snake scales appear in unlikely places. Later, Hoop Snake appeared; when she complained that she could not chase it owing to her cold, it leapt up her sinus passages, cleared them out ... and vanished.
In 2007, Tsubasa Kysely reported such high levels of paparazzi harassment that “I can hardly see from all the flashing.” He would ultimately disappear in what is believed to be a Hoop Snake incident; may he one day return.
When our senses become unreliable, Eureka writes, the world becomes the inexplicable.
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The Sudden Realization that Something Is, or Has Been, Very Wrong
“The funny thing was, that wasn’t the first time I saw the snake. It had already been there. It was in that picture frame, hanging over my bed: this picture of a snake. Sometimes it moved. It was in the background on this show I watched. I would go outside, and sit on the edge of the roof, and there’d be a snake there, all curled up with its tail in its mouth, and I’d say to it ‘hey.’ I had to keep moving it out of the sink. One time, I think, I walked into my house, but it wasn’t my house. It was the snake. And I still didn’t realize. I still wasn’t able to really process, here is something inexplicable. It was just part of the world I thought I knew, until one day, I looked at it with fresh eyes and went ‘oh my freaking saints, that is a snake.’ It was like it was laughing at me, when it stuck its tail in its mouth. Like it was making fun of me. I took a step towards it, and it rolled away. Another step. Another. But there wasn’t roof underneath me any more, so I fell.” — Mikhael Bygones, 2015
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NOTES
Gavrilo writes that we often fail to recognize the presence of Hoop Snake in our lives until it has already been present for some time.
Meriadoc Ozoles was famous as “the Chasing Mayor” because she kept running after bits of colored string floating by in the breeze. It wasn’t until she caught one and it turned out to be Hoop Snake that people remembered that colored string doesn’t normally just float by all the time.
Maglev Brunsinick grew up in a burrow that turned out not to be real: he wandered out one day, and looked back, and there was only a snake. "I should have known," he says, "looking back, what with the way Mom and Dad were just internal organs. But, like, I was a kit?"
Torrin kept tripping over her grandmother's tail everywhere in the house. One day, she spilled hot oatmeal all over her grandmother's tail. "Oh no!" she said, and tried to clean it off, but her grandmother wasn't in the room. The tail wasn't reacting to the heat. Also, it was a snake tail. She dashed in to confront Hoop Snake; startled, it threw aside her grandmother's shawl, looked every which way in a panic, and then flung itself away down the drain.
Vasilisa writes: "What is reality but a snake we won't see?"
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“At some point I realized that I did not work at the company. I think it was the looks people were giving me. Steve. Like, there was Steve, and he had this look in his eye like, ‘why is there a rat here. Why is the rat wearing a suit. Why is the rat carrying a folder with our third quarter projections.’ I was just strolling along, on top of my game and on top of the world, but I couldn’t help shriveling a little at all the looks. At this growing disorientation, like: Why is this place? What is it for? Why was I heading to my cubicle to spin around and around and around on my swivel chair when the skies were so blue; when the roofs were so high? Who even hired me? Who decided that this was the way life would be? Why do people who don’t do any work get paid so much more than us rats down here in the trenches who do? And the more I tried to just cope and keep moving, the louder the questions got inside my heart, until I spun around and I pointed and I said, ‘because I’m damn good at this, STEVE.’ He was so gentle. I was … I wasn’t expecting that he’d be so gentle. ‘If only,’ he said. ‘If only that was why anyone found their way here.’” — Rufica du Lac, 2016
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Jenna Talking Again
It's basically that kind of thing! Plus a lot of blank room left for more.
After that section on the Heralds, it'd move on to the "weapons" of the Mystery, the way it hurts you, the way it messes around with your life; like, for Hoop Snake ...
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The Weapons of Hoop Snake ...
* ridicule * confusion * anything you don't expect them to be * * * * ...
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... but, I think I'll stop there for now.
I hope you enjoyed this glimpse at the rats' Books of Names! Don't forget to check the kickstarter out!
