MetaFiction (Playtest Edition)

MetaFiction is a Powered by the Apocalypse game, specifically a hack of Interstitial 2e by Riley Hopkins. It’s a game about being trapped in a death game, but also about being trapped inside a story. It’s about ignoring narrative conventions, wielding character archetypes like a gun, thinking too deeply about genre tropes, and most importantly, metagaming.

In MetaFiction, you will make a character who is either Fiction (a character within the story, who does not know their world is fictional), or Meta (characters who can perceive a layer of artifice to the world that others cannot). Each playbook has a unique and powerful Story Move that can be used once per session, and cannot be taken by any other playbook. Each player will also make a Celestial Patron, a secondary character overseeing the fictional universe who can provide mechanical and narrative boons to other player characters.

This is an initial 0.5 edition of the game, consisting of:

• A complete draft of the core rules, including a Setup and Storytelling guide
• Notes on backwards and forwards compatibility with Interstitial 2e
• 16 playbooks (8 Fiction, 8 Meta)
• One bonus [DATA EXPUNGED]
• A fillable online character keeper (you will need to make a copy)
• Access to the MetaFiction Playtest Discord server

MetaFiction is inspired by When They Cry games, Alan Wake 2, Princess Tutu, Surviving Romance, The Dark Tower, Dimension 20: Never Stop Blowing Up, Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, Generation Loss: The Social Experiments, Once & Future, Scoob and Shag, The Raven Cycle, God Game: Thrillhouse Edition, the work of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, and the Interstitial: Infinity season of the Riley Hopkins and Their Amazing Friends podcast.

MetaFiction is further inspired by all the other isekai that get weird with it, reboots/remakes that are actually about changing the narrative that came before, shows where a girl goes absolutely ripshit in a time loop, Fortnite: Battle Royale, fandom discourse about characters you’ve never heard of, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, reading too much TVTropes, hyper-violent death game stories, that thing people do online where they make up a fake media property to be superfans of, that part in As The Gods Will where the teens randomly get superpowers they never use again, and the time world-renowned writer Stephen King was once hit by a car.