The announcement of Sin Eater coming out means that it’s time for me to start actually talking about the game in earnest, not wrapped in the irony-poisoned glib bullshit that makes existing on the internet a lot easier. With my only past experience with creative endeavors being a decade of standup, I have no idea how the fuck to do that, so a preemptive apology as I stumble through this to the best of my abilities.
Anyway, all that to say: let’s talk about bleed.
Veterans of the tabletop gaming, acting, and LARP communities already know about character bleed, but in case you’re not one of those people, bleed is broadly the blurring of lines between your real world self and your character self. People generally associate that with emotions, but it can also include things like interpersonal relationships, physiological feelings, and thoughts/thought processes. If you’re playing a character that’s super pissed off, once the cameras stop or the game ends, it’s very easy for that anger to hang around for a bit. On a purely chemical level, the human body and brain don’t really have any mechanisms for determining the authenticity of an emotion–it’s mostly going to be like “oh we’re mad now? You got it, boss!” without a second thought. Same goes for feelings of sadness, or love, or any other emotion. Woe, frolic, malice, dread, etc.
That’s not to say that bleed is inherently bad, or that there’s nothing to be done about it. Bleed can be joyous, or cathartic; and when bleed isn’t desired, tools and safety measures can be used to mitigate bleed. For a good primer on bleed, as well as strategies to help control it, check out this really fantastic article by Sarah Lynne Bowman titled Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character.
Mostly, though, I’m not here to just regurgitate discussions of bleed from people who are vastly more competent on the subject than I am. With that intro out of the way, I want to talk about bleed and Sin Eater, because hot damn, is this game designed to proc bleed.
Remember when I said that bleed is not inherently bad? Good, keep that in mind.
When I first set out to design Sin Eater, I viewed it as a profoundly therapeutic experience. I wanted to create a game that let me explore forgiveness or condemnation in effigy, answering the question of “what if my adjudication of a person’s cosmic value actually mattered?” I’m not actually sure this is a healthy mindset, and I don’t know if I can recommend bringing that same energy to the table when you play. Conversely, I also can’t really say it’s not a healthy mindset, so do with that what you will.
I do, however, think it would have been moderately irresponsible and extremely corny if I’d included anything from the above paragraph in the actual game text. I am not making Bleed: The Game. Instead, I wanted to accomplish this through a very specific part of the ritual segment of the game: The Items Extrinstic.
The Items Extrinstic requires that you get up and find items around your house based on vague prompts such as:
A sign of divinity, set at the crown
A fragment of fear, in the pit of the belly
A symbol of penitence, set at the knee
And then place them on the Ritual Mat that is included with the game box (pictured below)
Depending on the corpse’s background, the sin you’re dealing with, and whether you’re looking to absolve or condemn them, the items you’ll grab will vary with each play session (as well as with the Epithet-specific Items Extrinsic that are going to be included with one of our Stretch Goals for the Kickstarter). By having to incorporate real items, ones that may hold significant feelings and memories to the player, bleed becomes almost inevitable as you journal.
Remember when I said that bleed is not inherently bad? That’s still true, but I also want to talk about some ways to help put a nice bow on it and shove that shit in a box if you need to.
To wrap up any play session, you are asked to fold your paper inwards towards the spine of your journal in three different permutations, one for each outcome of the balancing of the humors. This serves as the first step in severing that connection and reducing bleed. By having a physical aspect to the game, especially one that requires physically creasing your words back in on themselves, the player is given a tactile action to signal to themselves that it’s time to let go of the thoughts and feelings that arose during your session.
Immediately following that, the player is told to blow out the candle they lit at the beginning of their session and knock three times around it. This serves a similar purpose as the folding; the finality of the candle being extinguished and the knocking to confine it are two more physical actions to help signal to your brain that she can go ahead and take her union mandated 5. By enlisting a different type of physical activity than the writing that you’ve been doing for the last 45-60 minutes, you’re giving yourself a physiological disruptor to help pull you out of any patterns of thought that may have arisen during play. Finally, at the end, there is a quick reminder to breathe, chill out, and remember that you are not your sin-eater.
All that to say, those rituals and processes should not be the only tool in your arsenal when it comes to taking care of bleed. Check out the article I linked earlier in this post for some really useful tips and tricks for how to preemptively prepare for bleed before you even crack open Sin Eater, and, above all, don’t be afraid to take breaks or tap out as needed. Your meal will not spoil and it’s not like the corpse you’re sin-eating is going to get any deader.
Follow the Kickstarter and smash that “Notify me on launch” button.