The Memory Cheats

This game was first played on Tuesday November the 15th 2005, with James Mullen in the GM's seat and Ashley, Neil, Noah, Robin & Steve being the poor sods who felt that "it sounds like an interesting game" and therefore volunteered to play it.

Very quickly, the game's mechanics see each player drawing cards from their own deck whenever a contentious or improbable statement is made and whoever plays the highest card wins and gets to decide how much of that statement is true; everyone begins by knowing nothing and, as play progresses, they use the narrative to fill out details about their own character, the story they are involved in and the setting where it takes place.

No transcript of the game is strictly possible, so what I present for you here is the edited highlights; if I forget anything, I apologise, but there is only so much the human mind can stand! Please, if you were a witness to what happened, add your statement here... and don't have nightmares!

• It started with Ashley driving a taxi on speed with a horn-wearing Noah in the back of the cab.
• The taxi collided with a car being driven by Robin, who then bumped into Steve's car.
• Ashley then had a flashback to a previous encounter with Steve, who was flying a messerschmit.
• It turned out that they were all the reincarnation of heroes who had chased Rommel through the Sahara in a hunt for Nazi Gold!
• Ashley had used his supernatural power to create snow to bring a blizzard down on the gold convoy, whilst hallucinating that he was Rasputin!
• However, in truth they were all elder beings from another plane of existence! It emreged that it was Neil's stag-do and that Steve had thought it would be a good lark to hop down to Earth; Noah, who was supposed to know better, got conked on the head by Ashley before he could stop Steve from doing anything so dumb!
• Robin then asserted that he was in fact Azathoth, that renowned party animal, and it became clear that the Great Old Ones were not sleeping, just very, very hung-over and unable to get back to their home dimension due to Ashley's continued sabotage!
• Neil then determined that he was Yog-Sothoth and that his 'bride-to-be' was actually himself, in a very non-euclidean ceremony (well, its so much cheaper than Church of England, isn't it?)
• As these higher beings met back up in the 21st century, Azathoth (Robin) decided that the party had hit a lull for the last 200 years and decided to get things swinging again with a trip to the South Pacific, so Ashley gave them all a lift in his Cab from Hell, pausing only for Noah to take a punch at Steve for all the grief he had caused, resulting in Noah only getting laid once in the last few thousand years on Earth, when that Mary Magdalene bird pulled him down off the cross...
• Cruising quickly past a whole kettle of theological fish, the party got kicked off its, presumably radioactive, atoll by a grumpy neighbour complaining about the noise... it was miserable old Cthulhu, and he was fed up with these young whippersnappers and their loud music!
• Steve suggested moving the party to Hell, which had frozen over, and as Lord of that realm, Ashley bundled them all into the back of the Cab from Hell... literally in Steve's case, since, as the mummified body of Lenin (!) he was in no position to complain... well, it was his own fault for posing as H. P. Lovecraft and writing all those stories about his mates!
• However, the gates of Hell needed to be guarded during the party, so Ashley volunteered... the fools! As soon as their backs were turned, Ashley opened the gates and let out the ultimate doom of mankind... literally, as it turns out, since the Apocalypse actually resembled a game of Doom and everybody only had the pistol: there was no BFG-9000 anywhere!
• With the Apocalypse brought forth, they got Lenin/ Lovecraft to have a look in the Necronomicon and find out what form the end of the world would take; it turned out that Lovecraft's darkest fear was... fairies! And rainbows! And My Little Ponies!! Carnivorous ones!
• It therefore turned out that all the players were on a space-station orbiting the Earth, where the Evil God-Emperor of Mattel Toys, Inc. watched gleefully as his minions took over the planet and completed his revenge against this group of extra-planar beings who had infringed his copyright and product identity with their cheap Taiwanese knock-offs!

If none of that has put you off, why not take a look at the current draft of the rules by visiting my Yahoo! group; the rules posted here may not be an accurate reflection of the game posted above, since the rules were modified as a result of that game!