THE GAME

A company called Renshaw Film Service made films. Features, television pilots, commercials for car dealerships, training films, filler for the cable access channel. Then it stopped existing.

What it made is still out there, in box lots and back rooms and boxes at the tip, and nobody in the trade can tell you a thing about who they were. The address on the paperwork is a car park.

Watch one all the way through and you're in the credits.

The book never explains the company and neither will your GM. There's no answer at the end of this and no campaign is about finding one. You already know how the film ends. It's printed on the front.

You can't stop a film being made. You can make it a worse film.

Take away the girl it wanted and it settles for somebody duller. Burn the house it needed and it shoots in a garage. Deny it enough and it wraps before it's ready — and a film that wraps early doesn't deliver what the title promised. It gets shelved. Nobody rents it. That's how this ends well.

Everybody who helps you ends up in it. The neighbour who lets you in. The deputy who looks the other way. You don't choose who gets cast — you cast them by involving them, and you find out afterwards, when their name is on the back of the box.

By the third session you'll be picking people nobody will miss. That's the game.

Five people in a car on a road they've driven twice this week, arguing about whether to ask the librarian to open up after six.

They know what it costs. They've watched it cost them before. They're going to ask her anyway, because the microfilm is the only place the second week of September still exists.

Somebody picks up the biro and writes her name on the back of the box, in front of everyone, and nobody says anything about it.

Then it's somebody's turn to drive.