Lacewraith
Follow the Reveal
The dead of Orlen Fenn are kept in lace. Someone pricked one pattern card wrong.
A gothic action RPG from Pricked Pattern Games, coming to PC and PlayStation 5.
Act one
The Pricking
In Orlen Fenn the Lace Guild takes the dead.
Every piece of lace made in the city holds one soul, whether it is a collar or the edge of a christening gown. The dead stay worked into the thread, and the streets stay quiet.
The pattern comes first. It is pricked into a leather card, and the pins standing in that card decide how many souls the lace will hold.
Maud Alderwick
- Age
- 52
- Work
- Pattern cards, thirty years, Sedge Row
- Build
- 160 cm, stooped toward whatever she is reading
- Carries
- A lens, a pricker, forty pins, ink to the second knuckle
- Wants
- To find out who moved the hole
- Fears
- That she moved it herself and can no longer see well enough to tell
Her eyes are going, so Maud checks every hole twice under the lens.
Her teacher's last card comes to her table the week after the funeral. Two hundred and six holes. One of them sits a hair off the ink.
That night the whole of Sedge Row sits up.
Act two
Bobbins
Maud goes through all seven lace houses with the card in her coat, counting pins against holes at every pillow.
Every house keeps its own count. None of them match the guild's register.
Dov Pell
- Age
- 23
- Work
- Pin runner between the seven houses
- Build
- 181 cm, all elbows, shoulders up around his ears
- Knows
- Which doors stick and which clerks look away
- Wants
- To keep running pins and never ask what they hold
Imogen Thirl
- Age
- 38
- Work
- Head of the Lace Guild
- Build
- 175 cm, very straight, gloves she does not take off
- Did
- Moved the hole
For eleven years Imogen has worked the souls of infants into wedding lace, a row of seed-sized holes along every border. A bride who wears it keeps fever out of her house. The fever rolls say it works.
She needed the old cards to come out short, so nobody would add up how many small souls had gone into the veils. Maud's teacher counted anyway.
If Maud stops her, the fevers come back. If she does not, Sedge Row is only the first district to wake.
The rule
Pull the Pin
Every pin you pull from a pattern card releases one wraith and one thread. The wraith fights for you until its thread runs out. Then it fights you.
Cobb house, the second night. A lace hare has torn out of a nursery border and is running for the street with a soul inside it. Maud has one card and twelve pins. Three wraiths can hold the hare down. The fourth pin loses her the first.
Drag a pin up off the card, or tap it. With a keyboard, move between pins with the arrow keys and press Enter.
Twelve pins in the card. The lace is whole.
Three pins out. Three wraiths hold the hare flat.
A fourth pin. The first thread runs out and that wraith turns on Maud. Pull them all and the card ends like this.
Twelve pins stand in the card. The hare pulls toward the street.
Holding the hare: 0. Turned on Maud: 0. Pins left: 12.
Act three
The Last Pin
Every thread Imogen has laid runs back to one pin in this room. It is the longest pin in the city. It holds her work in place, every veil and every small soul worked into one.
Pull it and they all come out at once. By the rule, each of them fights for Maud until its thread runs out.
Imogen is waiting at the pillow. She does not try to stop Maud. She asks her to count first.
Maud does not finish the last lace. She leaves it open, with the hole in the middle, and Orlen Fenn learns to live around it.
Follow the Reveal
We will show Lacewraith properly when it is ready: the first hour in Sedge Row and what happens when the threads run out. Leave an email and we will write once, on that day.
Papers
Four cards. Open one to read it.
