Inscrutable Cities by Julian K. Jarboe is a choose-your-own-adventure style journaling game. There are no dice or cards; you simply advance through the prompts by selecting words or phrases from a series of lists, or, in one section, by matching the current time to a set of numbered options.
Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the game is meant to generate a character and a lot of setting-specific details. In the spirit of Calvino, the game makes playful suggestions all the while pushing the writer toward a meditation on human experience, place, travel, etc. And like Calvino’s narrators, your character can move from one city to another for whatever reason you decide for as long as you want to play the game.
The game was less focused on plot progression (which suits me) and was overall a useful bank of ideas for brainstorming a story.
My character: A diplomat named Horatio who seeks status and is constrained by obligation. He carries a wax seal with the crest of a great house. He is irreverent and quarrelsome.
~
My illuminated Lady,
I have to abrupt and leave the city I just wrote you about. I burned my books and will depart through the southern gate. Those damned elders don’t know what they’re talking about, saying my influence is unwanted. Pardon my tone, dear Lady. I can bear an insult to my person; but the elders came far too close to insulting your great name, and I was duty bound to uphold my honorable office, as you would want me to.
The joke’s on them because those books contained recipes to cure the influenza and curtail the city’s rat infestation. Why should I care about any of that now? There’s always a new town to the south. Forever and again the road leads somewhere. Hopefully this road leads to a town with fewer rates.
Yours in service, and etc. etc.,
Horatio
~
My illustrious Lady,
I journey south again. I hired a push-pedal dirigible just outside the city walls, and we have been traveling for some endless number of days now. The damned device can’t maintain altitude and catch a favorable wind as the rats have eaten through some aluminum cabling or some such excuse the navigator–a sickly man of middling age and lesser intellect–informed me.
Now I am hostage in this derelict dirigible because the roads below are infested with sink-hole moles and cannot be traversed on foot. I would have offered the good navigator a remedy to his rat problem–offered in your ageless name, of course–but he is a bore. Indeed I am doing him a favor by providing him my business, and that is as far as my generosity extends under these abysmal conditions.
Nevil, as the navigator calls himself, tries to make me comfortable, but neither of us sleep for fear the rats will make a feast of some other important wire. To keep himself awake, Nevil blathers on about the city we travel toward. He claims the inhabitants revere the great tortoise whose nests were excavated below the city. But that must have been an eon ago because we are nowhere near the sea.
Knowing your honorable disdain for religiosity of any kind, I paid no heed to Nevil’s ramblings. As I always do, I will find the learned ones of this city and present to them your name and office.
Yours in service, and etc. etc.,
Horatio
~
My immortal Lady,
After penning my last report, Nevil and I began our descent. From our limited aerial view, I could perceive that the city is laid out in the shape of a tortoise shell. The largest walled district sits at the top of a wide sloping hill, and its ramparts form the shape of a hexagon. As we approached the city, I asked Nevil for directions to the magistrate’s quarters, but he knew nothing about the leaders here.
Instead of heading straight away to make my introductions, I am now stuck in some kind of customs barracks beyond the city’s outer perimeter where I am kept outside on a hard stone bench. The earth is dry and dark. The people around me smell worse than rats.
I spoke with another traveler, an aged merchant by the look of her luggage and entourage. She is deaf, so by way of her page, I learned that I must visit a bathhouse to wash off the stench, as she not-so-gently put it, before I can even entertain the thought of attending the magistrate.
Yours in service, and etc. etc.,
Horatio
~
My distinguished Lady,
I write to you now from the bathhouse where I surrendered my cloak and traveling clothes in exchange for a loincloth. I was also handed a bronze oil lamp as these baths are subterranean. I kept my writing case so I could pen you this letter while I sit by the steaming pools.
It is the most sumptuous bathhouse, with pitch-colored lava rocks that exquisitely exfoliate my wind-worn skin. Narrow halls lead from one cavern to another with pools of various temperatures that are fragranced with perfumes as different as lime and sandalwood. Bathers gather in larger pools, their status’ erased for a time. Their skin like ripe fruit is supple and shining from the heat and the bath oils.
Mind you, it is nothing so spectacular as your ladyship’s garden pools when the sun kisses the water lillies and the mythos birds skip through the grape arbors. I only want for a pot of Goody Pearl’s prized rosehip balm.
I am told that this is the premier bathhouse in the city, and that the nobles visit daily. So, of course, I mean to stay through the afternoon.
Yours in service, and etc. etc.,
Horatio
P.s. You will be glad to know I have seen no rodents of any kind in this city.
~
My estimable Lady,
You must understand that the only light I could avail myself of was the bronze oil lamp I was given on entering the bathhouse. It cast a hazy amber light and was filled with a pungent medicinal oil–the smell of which must have distracted me from paying heed to my surroundings.
I barely noticed the man before he was upon me. He brushed past me in the narrow halfway and blocked my exit. We stood there, face to face, our bodies’ heat commingling.
Your ladyship surely knows the intimacies of a bathhouse.
When we parted, he tucked a note into my right hand that I could only read clearly once I left the bathhouse and was comfortably lodged in a nearby inn. Sitting with a better lamp and unfolding the note, I read: “We have awaited your arrival in Palyrma. Your trade in Sim has caught our attention.”
I only tell you this so you will not be surprised when rumors about me reach your ears. Whatever is said, know that I am a true servant and all my actions are taken for your honor.
It is all for the better that I leave this city with haste, remembering your precise instructions to me, “Horatio, you must see the whole world and then report back to me.”
Yours in service, and etc. etc.,
Horatio
P.s. The letter bore the stamp of an orange poppy.
Featured image: “Globo dirigible de M. Giffard,” 1882. Wikimedia Commons via a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Sara Gabler 
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