A Little Bit about Kayfabe

As this is a table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) campaign website, it is about a TTRPG campaign. And TTRPGs, being a collaborative story about a group of characters played by a group of players and narrated by their Game Auntie (that's me! Ya gal Chimmy!), there is always a necessary level of separation between knowledge-bases. Basically, players don't always know all the things their characters know and vice-versa.

Some of this is more practical, because we, the players are not thirsty sword lesbian animal-human hybrids on a distant planet orbiting Tau Ceti (sadly), but rather plain old human beings who live in the Seattle area. Like, our heroes are definitely not going to know how to write a website in Markdown, and we, as dumpy humans, are not going to know how to wield magical energies to win a battle of the Officers' Game. (Nah, we make that shit up; it's called role-playing.)

I am referring to this type of fictional world knowledge with a pro wrestling term, "kayfabe". In wrestling, kayfabe refers to facts about the fictional scripted reality portrayed during matches to distinguish it from actual reality reality of the various wrestlers and performers. (Sorry if you're learning pro wrestling is scripted for the first time.) I'm using it in a similar sense to refer to knowledge about the fictional world of Kujira rather than the real world of Earth. (I think it's real, at least.)

But in this case, there's an additional wrinkle, as I wanted to reveal some facts about the world of Kujira that the players are aware of but characters most definitely are not. In particular, the nature of Kujira as a colony of Terra (that's this planet that we're on when you're being a big nerd). And I decided (I was most definitely high) that a fun way to do that would be to have a character in the far post-revolutionary future of Kujira doing an essay about what the characters are going through. A future where this whole thing about being a Terran colony is this piece of long-assumed and recently confirmed theory about the rediscovered Forebear Ships.

Most of this website will be written from the perspective of Jan Bias-Daughter, a Kujiran essayist and huge sarcastic nerd from the year 243 PR (Post-Revolution), 286 years after the events of the campaign:

However, try as I might, I have had to write some pages (like this one) in my own boring human perspective because I can't exactly talk about myself and the players through Jan's voice because I'm already deep in one already serious fourth-wall breaking story and I don't wanna...

Even then, I know I'll find it useful to occasionally have a paragraph from myself in Jan's writing or a paragraph from Jan in mine, and when that occurs you'll see that written in a little collapsible aside like above (you can see what my asides look like further down this page).

Jan also will have some period documents from the time of the campaign, 140 AE (Apollan Era), as pages on this website and excerpts in her writing, and those are going to look like these (Jan would say this is from 30 BR (Before Revolution)):

These period documents may also have collapsible asides from Jan and me (I don't think I'll have any collapsible asides from the forties, though). Just ones like this from me:

Anyway, these different viewpoints have an additional goal: to make it clear what I, as Game Auntie, am considering character knowledge and what I am considering player knowledge. Anything Jan or I write is for sure player knowledge. Any period document is for sure character knowledge. Basic things Jan mentions about Kujira in the year 140 AE are obviously known to the characters too, but lots of future events and discoveries she talks about will not be. I hope it will be obvious.

Kujira (known to us as Tau Ceti f) is a real planet 12 light years away from a fictional future Earth, and I doubt those future earthlings bothered to put this website in the colony ship databases, so neither the campaign characters or Jan knows shit about me and the players. The campaign characters don't know anything about Terra at all, most likely, and for Jan this is all fresh new information that has only just become available with the recent decryption of the Terran Colony ships, and she's far more interested in bunch of thirsty sword lesbians to bother looking up much about that.

OK, that's enough justification of a silly writing decision I made on a whim. Go read something else on this website.