Lost Girls is a campaign setting I like writing about, with some associated rules. Although everything related to it is tagged, and I have a great memory for what I wrote about it, I want to add an index to facilitate my own referencing and if potential players ever need to read it. This will include some blogposts that predate the setting but were already my attempts at thinking through ideas that are now part of it.
Finally, this will include some stuff friends have written for the setting.
“Is there a perfect place to start reading?” No, and that’s why I like it as a blog setting. Start wherever and deal with it.
Using this art by Morg again because I loved it so much.
FKR (Free Kriegsspiel Revival/Renaissance, unless I’m not up to par with current nomenclature) has featured here a couple times. FKR is still having a moment, I’m somewhat associated with it, and I thought having an extra post people can point towards to newbies as an explanation would be at least an interesting contribution to do over half an hour. However, my interest is also doing an analysis of FKR as a concept, which problematic of play it’s meant to address, if any, and how it gets tangled up in perception with different objects like freeform.
A new day breached into the reef, even if the light does not reach there the same way as the fabled dry land. Magnifico, the crab, organized an expedition after the last one went well. Going southwest, we came across three large creatures in the sand field, three times our size in fact, moving slowly towards the reef. Spiky starfishes. Blubbub, who can communicate with starfishes, moved his arms incredibly slow and moved his skin to create texture that the starfishes could understand. “We are moving. We are moving to feeeed…”. On the reef.
Any love that lets go is stained. Through it runs the mark of a cowardly blade. True love burns all in its path because to not have its object casts upon the land an unbearable coldness.
True love cannot be masked, but from the pained and joyful expression cast upon the loved figure, one can make a mask. A family that does not accept the loss of their kin, a companion who takes to the utmost consequences the promise of forever, the devout who will sacrifice their body for a higher saint. All of these might forge or wear masks inspired by their obsession. Such an act of theater, the art of turning a nothing space into a graveyard, calls ghosts.
Any character who wears such a mask absorbs the traits of the deceased. In a D&D-like game, this may replace Raise Dead (use AD&D price for reference in creating a mask, if you don’t quest for it) or funeral rules (the money invested in a mask is equal to the XP the new character will start with, as the party will desperately force the new PC to be the replacement of their lost companion, and mistreat them from straining that path).
This morbid culture of romance has its price. Whenever the character tries to act against the deceased’s personality traits, roll 2d6; the GM will roll 2d6 plus their current value of will, and whoever wins gets final say on how the character acts. If the GM wins, mark a +1 for the deceased’s will. Decrease that value if the character wins. Whenever the character acts according to the wishes of the deceased, however, you can use the deceased’s will as a bonus.
Part of the mask relay. I was marked by Louis, and now mark semiurge.
When is home most like a tenebrous cavern? On the days that my steps press the marks of yesterday’s shoes much like an inscription left long ago by another inhabitant, or perhaps an explorer. Has past me, in her way to breakfast or work or aimless cleaning, found her way out of these rooms, or will I lay tired in a corner and find, hidden from sunlight, a skeleton much like my own, marked with a solitary madness that knew of damp rock as architecture and the echoes of her screams as essential to all companionship?
There’s no windows here that I can make comfortable to the sensitive light in your eyes. Tell me that they won’t shut in horror, because there is nothing to fear. Understand: I worry that the sun will rise yet again and your presence will vanish as a malignant ghost that only tempts me in the small hours when I review your letter, and the words are familiar but never said quite so, or are said much like they were last time yet I can see that the ink is fresh. What should I write back? How I’m terrified of another letter? What do I give you that will give myself, if I don’t quite know what I am?
I want to give you things that I would find too minor to handle to anyone else. Too prosaic, beneath my own notice. Chained to what I know, all of it becomes mysterious again, a captor out of sight. I must delve to rescue the lost minutes of time here spent, wasted, to give those with a bow to the wide world you call from. How much mystery between us would be so clear to others. I shared first that which others can’t see, that which I was told belongs not only locked but then forgotten not in a great hideout that will be remembered, but in the corner of a closet with clothes no longer worn nor donated. Now I must talk of a loose fabric that I don’t even realize covers me every day.
I do not know if your own house feels as crooked – despondent from center – as a single room where the sun fades from just after lunch. Perhaps it does and you expect me to share my letters so you can cover your exhausted feet with them and walk your rooms undaunted by the memory of having done so tomorrow.
“if someone wanted to play a lost boy spellcaster, is the answer to that ‘you can’t’ or ‘sure you can be a spell caster who is a boy, but everyone will assume you’re either a lost girl or a wizard apprentice’?” <- question in the GLoG server from Garinia.
From the beginning: a spellcaster lost boy is an impossibility. But at your door there is a boy, and he can cast spells.
He is most certainly a boy, he will tell you. What reason he identifies as a boy is unimportant here. But he is a boy. And he wants to join a lost girl gang. Why? Because lost boy spellcasters don’t exist, and anyway, they aren’t his people, the noise is too much, the beer too stale. He could be a wizard’s apprentice, and perhaps by that path be an ally to lost boys but he won’t. He feels a kinship, due to temperament or terrible circumstances he keeps trying to convince himself are reasonable, to lost girls.
That boy is, in St. Tenebrae, a lost girl. He can be similar to any type of spellcaster girl. He will participate in the gang and work for it and put his funds.
He is not invisible. His sisters sometimes whisper about him. “Sissy”, “grungler”, “weirdo”. They aren’t beyond respecting him as a fellow member, but they will be puzzled as to why. They will inquire if he’s really a boy, and he will calmly affirm positively every time, and they do believe him but can’t make the final leap. Other gangs will look on in bafflement and mockery, and perhaps his sisters must defend his presence from others more than they believe it themselves. Wizards will pay attention to him in sheer confusion. Is he sure? Doubly so if he’s a spellcaster. Creeps will find it amusing. Ladies of Sorrow will not care.
Lost boys will. What’s wrong with him? Does he think he’s better than us? He doesn’t. He’s just a lost girl.
Everyone who reads the Lost Girls posts and hates wizards are in luck, because wizards are the most common first contact a gang has. They act as the perfect patrons. They have social standing within the supernatural world, have a long list of grudges and plans that they can’t bother themselves to act on with most resources, need agents that they can plausibly deny knowing, and you don’t want them to get obsessed over a girl.
Roll to Doubt 
