My game Million Dollar Soulmate is a roleplaying opportunity for two people to explore themes of romantic ambiguity. The premise is, a lonesome millionaire has spent part of their vast wealth to find the person who can finally complete them.
The catch for the characters is, while the system works and definitely finds a person who makes the millionaire intensely more themself, there’s no way of telling if it’s their better, wiser and kinder side being nourished… or if they’re only being encouraged to be more selfish, manipulative and callous.
The catch for the players of the game is, it’s not even determined, until the very end, whether the relationship is and always was good and wholesome, or toxic and terrible. The fun of it lies in building out the characters and focusing every scene on being ambiguous. You should always be able to say how this could show true love, or could demonstrate sick codependency.
As part of the funding for it, I got paid to make podcasts of me playing the game with a group of lovely people. You can now* listen to those podcasts here.
In this episode, I got to play with Alasdair Stuart, one of the founding fathers of Escape Artists and (often) the voice of Pseudopod. She’s a wealthy espionage asset, he’s a failing stage magician, and they’re both a little bit unpredictably violent! Is their love true, or do they fall prey to the machinations of the vile Todd Rumslow?
Cover art is courtesy of Bogdan Glisik via Unsplash, and the music is from Musopen.
In this episode, I got to play with Ben Meredith, from The Magnus Archives. Hilarious hijinks ensue as a stuffy literature critic dates a a no-talent millionaire club DJ!
Cover art is courtesy of Anthony Delanoix via Unsplash, and the music is from Musopen.
In this episode, I got to play with Karen Bovenmeyer. Can a plainspoken software engineer find love with a virginal parkour enthusiast? It starts out like a rom-com movie and ends more like a somber literary novel.
Cover art is courtesy of William Daigneault via Unsplash, and the music is from Musopen.
In this episode, I got to play with Sharang Biswas. In this session, the allegedly infallible algorithm fails to compensate for heterosexuality. Or… does it?
Cover art is courtesy of Cristina Gottardi via Unsplash, and the music is from Musopen.
In this episode, it’s me and Rabbit Stoddard. A millionaire ex-biathalon competitor seeks love in the arms of a flighty gay bar owner. As one does.
Cover art is courtesy of Farrel Nobel via Unsplash, and the music is from Musopen.
In this episode, it’s me and Mike LeBeau from Rusty Quill. It’s a long episode ’cause it has EVERYTHING–legerdemain, Turkish espionage, glitter, corgis and film noir. Also a digression about the proper pronunciation of “aluminum.”
Cover art is courtesy of Ospan Ali via Unsplash, and the music is from Musopen.
Monica Valentinelli joins Greg Stolze to play MILLION DOLLAR SOULMATE. Can a wealthy former pop star find love with a guy who loves Fred Zeppelin, the premiere 70s one-man-cover-band? Does he really look like Batman with a bad mustache? What does the phrase “the aardvark’s hammer pants” mean? And what about Grover? WHAT ABOUT GROVER?!?
Cover art is courtesy of Cristian Newman via Unsplash, and the music is from Musopen.
*If you’ve scrolled all the way down here to see why I moved off Soundcloud, the answer is, of course, AI training. The public facing protestations of Soundcloud were that they would never use our work to train LLMs and that they went out of their way to protect us. Meanwhile, their revised terms of service required me to permit all my work on their platform to be used for training unless I got a special exemption, which they were not offering. I chose to believe the legally enforceable language.