On Building Strange Story Systems

A couple months ago I was in Santa Fe with my very pregnant wife on our babymoon. We were walking slower than usual, talking about the future in a way that feels both abstract and extremely concrete when a child is on the way.

What kind of work do we want to be doing when we’re 45? 55? 155? (hey, I’m an optimist)

What kind of creative life feels sustainable?

What kind of projects are worth carrying for decades instead of just quarters?

We went to Meow Wolf while we were there. I had heard about it, obviously, but I wasn’t prepared for how it would hit. Not just the spectacle. Not just the scale. What stayed with me was the continuity. The drawers with internal documents. The corporate mythologies. The training manuals for fictional institutions. The way you could trace threads across rooms and feel like the world had existed before you walked into it. It wasn’t just immersive. It was systemic. It felt like infrastructure disguised as art.

I left thinking less about psychedelic art installations and more about story systems. What would it look like to build something like that slowly, from scratch, as a distributed narrative rather than a physical warehouse? Something that could live both across formats (radio broadcasts, physical flyers on telephone poles, archival PDFs, fake institutional memos, cryptic business cards, quiet websites) as well as wide stretches of time. Something that didn’t announce itself quickly/loudly as an experience but behaved like a slow leak in an existing system.

That’s where “The LOOP” (working title) began to take shape in a more serious way. I had already been orbiting some of the ideas, but Santa Fe made it cohere. I started writing obsessively. Not just scenes, but constraints. Institutional logic. Timelines. Failure tolerances. The canon spine eventually became a full narrative document, something between a short story and a dense synopsis.

The layered/gated narrative framework revealed itself; concentric rings of story, layered clearance levels only permeable through a gateway artifact. This became a meta consideration perfectly paralleling the themes of corporate bureaucracy, conspiracy, and confidentiality. It would adopt choose-your-own-adventure mechanics, but only in one ring of asynchronous story at a time. Players would not accidentally pop through to the center of the maze (the end of the story) and spoil the experience. They would bump around finding helpful clues, red herrings, and only osmose to the next narrative ring when the gateway artifact was revealed.

So far Phase One has been quiet. I built the canon and narrative framework privately. Designed the artifacts. Launched a small pirate radio broadcast. Printed bizarre flyers with dates, coordinates, and frequencies. Dropped them into the world. No campaign, no explanation, just signal. And to my surprise, people found it. Some were confused. Some were intrigued. A few found me directly, reached out and said, essentially, “What is this and can I help?”

That question is why I’m writing this now. I’m starting to feel interest forming around the edges, especially from people in the Dark Forest / Metalabel orbit, and before it becomes noisy I want to be intentional. Phase Two is about forming a small fabrication cell, a collective that helps build the world outward in a coherent way. Not a chaotic writers’ room and not a crowd-sourced lore explosion. The canon exists. The loop has rules. Within those constraints there’s room to fabricate.

I’m imagining using Metalabel / DFOS tools as infrastructure for this. A private continuity workshop. A place to coordinate artifact production for the physical documents, audio logs, institutional training materials, broadcast schedules, and physical drops. Some collaborators might help fabricate artifacts. Some might help place them in the world. Some might remain inside the fiction entirely. There’s something interesting about the tension between building the system and encountering it.

If revenue ever enters the picture, it would be structured transparently via Metalabel collective treasury tools. Attribution would matter and governance would be explicit.

On a more personal level, this project has started to feel tied to this next phase of life for me. Becoming a father has a way of sharpening the question of what’s worth building. Quick-turn content feels less interesting. Systems that could unfold over years feel more compelling. There’s something oddly fitting about building a story centered on continuity at the same moment I’m thinking about continuity in my own life.

So really this is one part update, one part humble invitation:

If you’re a designer who loves institutional aesthetics, an audio person who likes archival fiction, a systems thinker, a print nerd, a worldbuilder, a filmmaker, a radio experimenter, or just someone who feels pulled toward building strange, coherent systems…reach out!

Phase Two will start small. We’ll form a collective. We’ll use the tools thoughtfully. We’ll fabricate intentionally. And we’ll see what kind of distributed narrative infrastructure can emerge.

If you’re interested, send me a message and tell me what part of the system you’re drawn to.

Excited to see what grows in a dark forest ;-)