Worldbuildify! Glitch

Welcome back to Worldbuildify!, the series where we examine a non-interactive property, like a book, a tv series, or even something more abstract like a concept album or a painting and discuss how we’d turn it into a ttrpg. Why? Because sometimes it’s fun to play in a world we’ve become immersed in, and sometimes the process of trying to adapt something gives us ideas for other projects. Such is the case here.

Today, we’re turning our gaze to the ABC TV series Glitch (2019) by Louise Fox and Tony Ayre. It follows six individuals who have been brought back from the dead (the Risen) through some sort of occult science, the human connections they left behind and are trying to reconnect with, and the implacable undead hunters that reality sends to put them back in the grave. 

Review

It’s a great show (for the first two seasons). It’s picked interesting characters, each defined by different periods in Australian history; you have “John Doe”, a British criminal and local highwayman*, Paddy Fitzgerald;  an Irish smuggler-turned-politician, Charlie Thompson, a WWI hero, one of very few that made it back to his hometown; Carlo Nico, an Italian WWII POW; Italian 60’s immigrant Maria Massola; 80’s teenager Kirstie Darrow, and Kate Willis, the recently deceased wife of the main living character, police sergeant James Hayes. Its third, and final, season, is rougher only because it was clearly truncated; the show scrambled to wrap up plots too fast, and wasn’t able to do that in a satisfying way. Honestly, the finale of the second season would be more than good enough as a conclusion for the series; on my inevitable rewatch, I think I’ll probably stop there.

Themes

Each of these characters have to grapple with their place in the modern day - and try and work out how they died through some combination of flashbacks and investigation; they all start with near-total amnesia; a few of the characters don’t even know their own names at the beginning, let alone any details of their lives.

The show builds in a nice “route in” for the characters, which I like - the reason why these characters came back is because someone living was thinking about them when the nebulous necromancy event (NNE)tm happened - and this gives them goals to aim for. Paddy learns that he became the first mayor of the town - so his goal #1 is to reclaim his family home. Along the way, he learns that the people who currently call themselves ‘Fitzgeralds’ aren’t actually his heirs, so he goes on a quest to return his legacy to his rightful heirs. Kirstie finds out that she was murdered, and so confronts the person convicted of her murder, only to find that they weren’t guilty, and so has to find the real murderer and make sure that they can’t get away with it.

Last time, we took the world as if the canon events were happening somewhere else in time - but they were still ‘canon’. Here, because the story is very self-contained, both in position (there’s literally an invisible kill field outside of the town), and in time (the NNEtm is a science experiment a doctor from evil pharma corp Noregard (pronounced Noor Guard, not No Regard) conducted for a particular purpose). Therefore, I think for both practical and logistical reasons, today we’re going to be looking at alternate versions; what if the NNEtm happened elsewhere, to a totally different group. In order to keep consistency and make our licensed dreams reality, we’re instead going to have to very closely cleave to the rules and themes that the show introduces:

• The Risen are drawn from specific eras, moments, or cultures in the country they’re in. Normal time travel rules seem to apply; all characters speak in the modern version of their language, save for a couple old-timey words here and there, and they are able to pick up modern technology fairly quickly if they are so inclined (phones especially).

• The Risen’s memories return slowly and patchily, but seeing significant objects from their life, or being in locations or with people from their life can force these memories to return - including the moment of their death. This is distressing, and takes them out of action for a noticeable period of time.

• The Risen are restricted to an area around where they were brought back. It is a soft barrier, but they cannot progress more than a few metres into it without bleeding from every orifice and eventually collapsing into dust.

• The Risen are aberrations in the skein of reality - a glitch (hey, title drop!). Reality wants to restore normal function, so it will send Matrix-style agents into the bodies of recently deceased friends and family of the Risen - and it’s not above contriving their deaths in order to make that happen.

• These agents can be killed, but more will come. At the same time, as long as the Risen are extant, reality starts to slowly fall apart; electric generators begin to fail randomly, swarms of animals arrange themselves in odd patterns, things seem to grow in reverse. Even the fundamental forces start to misbehave; gravity might reverse in a small local area, or magnets suddenly depolarise. Eventually, this culminates in extreme weather events; wildfires, swarms, earthquakes etc that build and build until the planet is destroyed.

• Fairness and justice are strong themes; each of the characters died ‘unfairly’ - whether that’s through accident, suicide, murder or otherwise - and their stories revolve around repudating that unfairness - “making things right”.

The mechanic I want to focus on is reality’s agents; I think we’ll represent them not necessarily as individual NPCs, but as a ticking clock that spawns NPCs or events as it goes down - a game of Glitch is effectively a race for the PCs to complete their individual goals before reality either implodes or removes them.

We want to limit the amount of actions that the players can take - but make it a soft limit. The simplest form of this clock could just be ‘every time the players do an action/roll a die, tick the clock’. This can and does work, but I’ve found it encourages decision paralysis; when every action taken directly ticks the clock, it becomes increasingly important to make sure that you’re doing the ‘right’ action, and that’s hard. We could do something a bit more nuanced; only certain actions tick the clock; that way we’re making sure that fictionally important actions - perhaps when they have more information about their lives, perhaps when they make it obvious that they’re Risen - have weight in the players’ minds. It does, however, tie game over to the progression of the game - it’s very predictable, promotes players to avoid those big actions when the time is low rather than desperately seizing on them, and I think makes games that stretch beyond their normal time limit.

I think a hybrid option works here - certain meaningful actions tick the clock, but all actions, even seemingly innocuous ones - have a chance to tick it. That way the players can’t just prevaricate, as they’ll tick the clock regardless.

What happens when the clock ticks? Does each tick cause something to happen - at which point it's less ‘ticking clock’ and more ‘cause -> effect’. Does nothing happen until the clock finishes? I think that takes away from the tension of the thing. I think we should treat it more like GM threshold levels; when the clock’s at a few ticks, the GM is allowed to spawn in one agent, then two, then at will. When it’s mostly full, the GM is allowed to begin the apocalypse, and when it totally fills up, the apocalypse begins in full. There’s very little overhead for the GM beyond what the players are also dealing with - the GM just gets more tools as things get more and more wrong; the deck starts to stack in their favour.

Does this mean that this is a game where the GM is meant to be antagonistic? I don’t think so; these extra cards in the GMs hand just represent additional obstacles, challenges, and complications for the player characters; the GM isn’t being vindictive about it; and I think we can build that into the fabric of the game; maybe an agent is a skill challenge the GM can invoke that the players must overcome to keep doing what they’re doing, or else lose the opportunity, etc.

To me, this is a perfect shortform game, and so we don’t actually want a particularly crunchy system backing it up - that’s a perfect example of ludonarrative dissonance. My vision is that you can set this game in your own town, utilising your own local and national history to build characters. The canon show sets it in a tiny backwater town - there’s like ten shops, one pub, two police officers and a single doctor at the clinic; I get the feeling the premise works better in smaller, tighter locations that you can track across and learn.

Bonus!

As the One-Page Jam is currently going on, I have a treat for you all - this game! Ordinarily, I wouldn’t make the full game we theory-craft here, but this seemed like a small enough game, and a simple enough concept, to go all the way through with it.

Check it out here: Unforgotten Memories - and why not take a look at the One Page Jam 2025 yourself? How well do you think I’ve executed my game, based on the principles we’ve discussed here? Alternatively, what other properties do you think deserve the Worldbuildify! Treatment?