A few readers came up with a long list of possible ideas to play with in the Thousand Tales setting. This fragment draws on several of them, with a virtual Wild West with magic.

The idea is that this character has read the player community's chatter and learned that if you want to get involved in life-changing events with the Game, you should befriend the resident AIs. This guy also knows they don't like cynical, manipulative people. But he mistakenly thinks that meeting just any AI will propel him to importance.

This piece was written using a version of the "Ironsworn" RPG rule system to decide what happens. That variant is "Solar Crown Online", designed to represent game worlds. https://umbralaeronaut.itch.io/solar-crown-online . I'm kind of interested in running/playing an RPG specifically set in Thousand Tales the story setting, but many of the candidate rule systems make my eyes glaze over with their complexity. The "Hearth and Hall" scenario seen in the recent story "The One-Shot Session" interests me too.

Oh, and go check out this fantasy novel by a fellow indie writer, involving a village of were-creatures in post-WWI Scotland. https://www.amazon.com/Heiress-Shep.....dp/B08W23DL3C/