We’ve run the simulation a million million times… and every time, the Dark Lord wins. So we’ll run it again.
APPRENTICE! The eldritch council invites you to specify the parameters for one (1) quest to defeat the Dark Lord. This quest will be simulated on a cosmic computer, and the resulting story (along with a map depicting areas of interest) will be delivered to you as a flimsy printout.
I’ve received every print offering Robin Sloan has offered so far this year. I absolutely adore them.
If you don’t know who Robin Sloan is, he is the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough, which I absolutely adored. He also writes the great Year of the Meteor newsletter (if you follow that link it will take you to this week’s issue with more information on this months print offering,) which shares the title of my favorite newsletter with Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations.
This is his fourth or fifth print offering, past ones were printed on a single sheet of nice paper, folded into thirds, although this one looks like it’ll be slightly different. They ranged from short stories, to a draft of a piece of fiction that led to Sourdough, but ultimately went in a different direction, and another was basically snippets of a tickler file.
This one has a little bit of mad libs mixed in with AI:
May’s print offering is an experiment in AI, collaboration, and fiction. You, an apprentice mage, will define the parameters of a quest against the Dark Lord. You’ll receive a map (A MAP!) and a short story narrating that quest and revealing its conclusion.
It’s only $1.89 if you are in the US, or $2.59 for the rest of the world. If you like weird experiments, I definitely recommend checking this out.