Field Operations Manual for the Investigation of Stylus

It is the bane of Babylon, rot at the root of Rome, the nightmare from which the first city arose and toward which all cities march; it touches every tower and echoes in every cathedral; it is the telic end of all cities, and their primordial substrate.

Plato called it "Kallipolis", More "Utopia", Pierce and Chambers "Carcosa"—all saw the same place, reflected, shadowed, seeping, in the corners and contours of the urban landscape. Despite his eventual madness, I have taken to calling it Stylus in the manner of my late mentor.

In Field Operations Manual for the Investigation of Stylus, henceforth FOMIS, you take the role of amateur academics, foolhardy explorers, grizzled guides, and/or zealous pilgrims who have come to visit Stylus, the First and Last City, the Urbs Urbium, the eldritch plasmodial superorganism that reaches its tendrils out from dreaming to touch the world of matter through human hands. Conveniently, it lurks beneath the familiar face of every city, so you don't have to go far. Whether Stylus is harmful or ultimately beneficial to humanity, mindlessly digesting the world or regarding humanity with a vast and alien intelligence—all this is yours to discover.

FOMIS is a kind of a live-action role-playing game, in that its players walk around a city playing pretend. The general structure of FOMIS is a slow walk through an urban environment, punctuated by frequent stops to imaginatively observe your surroundings, comment on the observations of other players, and attempt to precipitate concrete conclusions out of the speculative clouds of these observations.

♦ ♦ ♦

I made this game for a few reasons—I had the idea for a loosely psychogeography-inspired LARP a while back, took some notes but never really got to designing. Recently I felt adrift in a sea of unfinished projects and wanted to finish something enough to put it online and show people; then, looking at the Eternal TTRPG Jam theme for September 2025, I thought oh hey, that seems perfect. Getting it on here was also an exercise in proving to myself I could learn just enough about layout to put something I didn't hate together in Scribus. It has a... fair number of rough points, but this is a jam game and I have a deadline, which was the whole point of the exercise. As such, rather than update the game I will probably just do my best to learn from it and carry the lessons forward.

That said, I've already found at least one typo in the PDF, so I might fix it and upload a fixed one if I don't get too distracted with my next project...