What is The King In Yellow? Is it a story by Robert Chambers? A play within that story’s fiction? A character - now two layers deep - within that fictional play?
It’s all of them at once. A symbol that exists on many layers of fiction and reality at once.
In Chambers’ story, performing the play somehow pulls the Yellow King into reality. Or merely distorts your perceptions so you think it’s happening. It’s hard to say where reality ends and fiction begins.
In this game, our fictional characters perform the play. The crucibles and the play itself alter reality, fictional elements affect their real world.
But, in our reality, we’re putting on a play of sorts, too, among ourselves. As we immerse ourselves in our characters, and experience their emotions bleeding into our own, the events of the game become real in some sense. Not physical, perhaps, but real enough to affect us emotionally.
This is a game about stories and performances, and what they mean to us.
The act of play blurs the boundaries between what’s real and what’s fictional, for a while. Suspending disbelief for a while, and letting imaginary things matter.
You, the players, are characters in this story too.
So am I.
From the back of the book