THIS WAR

IS

FUCKING NONSENSE

a game designed to reanimate Dr. Seuss’ skeletal remains and give them a wraith boner so that he looks like erotic Undertale fan art

made for CORRESPONDENCE JAM

One player is General Who, Grand Muff of the Yertlian People’s Militia.  General Who is relaying orders via field radio to her soldiers, grunts on the battlefields of The War That’s Not Quite Endless But Might as Well Be.  All other players are the Yertlian grunts in charge of executing the order. The grunts are all participating in the same mission, though each of their military units are spread out across the area.  

Each player will need a smartphone with Google Docs and GBoard (google voice recognition) installed, and a six-sided dice.  Players should be far, far away from each other (definitely not in the same room; different houses at least … different provinces, continents or realities works best).    

To play, all players should open a shared blank Google Document on their phone, tap it to start writing, and enable GBoard’s speech recognition.  All players roll once on the Dialect table to select a speech mannerism that will guide (and haunt) them in play.  They must try—to the best of their ability—to follow this speech mannerism at all times during play.  

Grunts should roll once on the Grunt Callsign table.  Grunt Callsigns must be unique, so reroll if there are duplicates.    

The general rolls three times—once on the Commander Callsign table to establish their callsign, then once on the Order table and once more on the Objective table.  They must form the results into a short sentence to make an order, which the grunts will be executing in the field. 

When the general is ready, they should speak their order into the phone and let GBoard transcribe it into the document.  Whatever is transcribed is what the order is, and the grunts should take turns responding to it by dictating how they reply into the Google Document (if there is more than one grunt, establish an arbitrary speaking order and follow it for the rest of the game).  Players should always speak as if they were their characters.   

Each player must respond to previous messages pretending that everything said (no matter how horribly the speech recognition tool butchers the dictation) is actually in-universe military jargon that has some meaning.  Imagine that you know exactly what is being said and reply to it with more jargon.  With each new communication, roll twice on the Jargon chart and use three words from the resulting rows in your response (use at least one from each row).  

Begin all communications by stating your Callsign.  You must address at least one other player by their Callsign each time you speak (or at least reference their Callsign).  End all communications by saying “copy?” or “over”/”out” so that the other players know when you’ve finished.  

Continue the conversation organically until any word on the Forbidden Words  table emerges in the document.  They’re homophones of other common words, so this can happen by accident.  Highlight the word when it appears. Forbidden Words change the fictional situation in some way—be mindful of their narrative effect (the Situational Modification), and try to integrate it into subsequent responses.  If your SitMod is “a firefight,” for example, the next reply you give should be about how you’re pinned down under heavy enemy fire, or something else related to a gun battle.

When the third Forbidden Word shows up in the document, the game is over.  All players speak their characters’ fates into the document, then give it a jaunty name like “Operation Who Dis” or “The Battle of Turtle Stack Hill.”  Share it on twitter, too! #NonsenseWar2k19

DIALECT TABLE

CALLSIGNS AND ORDERS TABLE

“[GRUNT CALLSIGN], this is [COMMANDER CALLSIGN].

Your orders are to …”

Example:  “MUDDER, this is DR. SEUSS.  Your orders are to contain non-combatants.  Over.”

JARGON

FORBIDDEN WORDS

A printable, more pretty PDF of the game can be found here on our itch.io.