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I struggled with this concept, to be honest. For a long time last night and this morning, I wasn't convinced it was going anywhere useful.

It's not exactly prolix, but I think the main logic is there and a couple of subtleties have come through.

edit: Start Anywhere now up at , additional materials, starting with a character sheet available from:

It's been suggested that a character sheet might make the game easier to understand. My first thought was "well, that'll be pretty easy", but there are a few points of design that might be clearer visually. It's uploaded to the link above.

Required for play: Two six-sided dice for each player, pen, paper
Optional: Several newspapers or a broad selection of magazines, a whiteboard

At some point a "Suggested whiteboard layout" might help as well.

(Lost a post. That's very annoying.

The previous post is mine. Did you intend anonymous posting?)

Conceptual influences: The remarkable Joe in Ten Persons, Breaking the Ice, TORG, "Godwar"
Michael Moorcock in general, Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber, The Ship of the Law
Jose Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths"
edit: I knew I'd forgotten something: Greg Bear's City at the End of Time
William Burroughs, just a little
The Many Worlds Interpretation, particularly its implications for conservation of energy
By reversal: AD&D

Premises and plot intentions: I wanted the end of the game to feel very different from the beginning. Perhaps "Revenge is hollow" is a theme. If the Philosophers ever reach the perfect world at the end of their quest, will they exact justice? Will they dwell there in peace? With all the worlds and lives they've abandoned, are they much different than Keeton and his cohorts?
The identity test plays into this: Why not give up your obsession? What do you owe to the bitter refugee whose memories of another world colour your own?

System: I wanted to refer to classic games, particularly backgammon and Snakes and Ladders, to a lesser extent Monopoly and the like, as well as studies of probability and game theory. Jumanji, too.

(Thanks for the update on guest posting - you're not supposed to, I'll check now)

I've posted a slightly revised version (Decoherence 1) to my website at the link above. I won't promise it's more comprehensible, but it does include the character sheet.

Great! I am glad you're still tweaking and improving, Starglim.

What's next for the game?

Testing, no doubt, ought to shake out more clarifications and corrections to the system.

What do you write for a parallel-worlds game, that isn't covered in more depth and with greater interest in an encyclopedia? Where there's some known structure to the multiverse, that could suggest a supplement detailing special locations or world-crossing organisations, at the risk of distorting the original concept of the game - in this case, a description, or, more likely, a variety of possibilities and evocative fragments of setting detail, for green January. Maybe some in-depth GM advice on particular phases of play (constructing parallels, devising encounters) would be valuable.