I would like to work on a game inspired by the book The Path to the Nest of Spiders and the collection of short stories The Crow Comes Last.

The game is about children and teenagers who, for one reason or another, have joined the Italian partisans. The mechanics will mainly focus on the inability of the protagonists to “make war” with the spirit of the adults. Yet they will participate, often even at the cost of their own lives.

I haven’t decided anything yet about the narrative authorities (so I don’t know whether to use the GM figure or create a game without a game master), but I have in mind a division of the game in scenes with the protagonists interspersed with scenes that shed light on the adult world (the characters’ relationships).

Also, I know for sure that I want a prohibition (“don’t shoot”) whose violation leads to other paths, certainly more adult and mature than before.

My friend Alberto reminded me that another source of inspiration for this game could be the song Oltre il ponte (Beyond the Bridge), written by a young Calvino: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=en&id=771

We were twenty years old and past the bridge, / Beyond the bridge there held by the enemy. / We spied the other side, and all life held there, / All the good in the world, beyond the bridge. / All the evil we had standing before us, / And all the good that we held inside our hearts. / At twenty life lies beyond the shoreline, / Beyond the fire, where love begins.

That’s the quote that made me think of the game and its title:

Perhaps I may not accomplish great deeds but history is made up of little anonymous gestures; I may die tomorrow even before that German, but everything I do before dying and my death too will be little parts of history, and all the thoughts I’m having now will influence my history tomorrow, tomorrow’s history of the human race.

Everything I do before dying is a game set in Italy after September 8 1943, during the Resistance period. The player characters are children and teenagers who join the partisan struggle for one reason or another, but almost never for a choice or as the result of a deep conviction; in short, “without a clear why”. The game is above all a declaration of love for Italo Calvino’s neorealist production and a tribute to the people who lost their lives to give Italy back its freedom.

Excuse me, but I was wrapped up in procedures and mechanics and had a hard time getting out. So, as always happens, I said to myself “Turn to the characters, detail their structure and you can’t go wrong”.

Calvino talks about Resistance, but he’s very clever at it: what interests him is a bildungsroman set in the period of Resistance. It’s no coincidence that one of the inspirations is Treasure Island.

The funny thing is that all the events in which Pin is involved stem from the kid’s initial mischief: stealing a gun from a sailor and hiding it along the spider’s nest path. From there, except for some of the kid’s decisions, Pin actually reacts to the world he comes into contact with. It is a world of adults who do not consider him one of them: he is still in that phase where you are no longer a child but you are certainly not an adult. So I started thinking that probably, in addition to the classic information about the characters (name, battle name and age), it makes sense that they are marked by some reactions. I mean, the way they react to events and people around them.

In the beginning, each character has only three reactions:

• Belonging;
• Evasion;
• Mischief.

The first is what they aspire to: to be part of that handful of adults. The other two are the reactions they have always had: running away from things and problems or mocking them.

The other players throw balls at the main characters and they react. In doing so, the protagonist’s player outlines their character and carries the story forward. The other players use a superstructure for the management of secondary characters, divided into three parts: family, comrades and the Enemy.

In addition to the three basic reactions, there is Friendship (which is another aspiration of the protagonists). This reaction is difficult to use because it’s very rare (the player has few resources to react with friendship, ergo a small number of tokens) and costs a lot because it exposes to disappointment. For friendship, I want to make sure there’s a system of checks and balances. When you use it, it’s the others who react to you, but they do it according to certain balances in that superstructure system for handling secondary characters.

Other reactions are “purchasable” during the game (they come from the basic ones) but often at a high price (it means becoming an adult):

• Courage (derived from Mischief);
• Cruelty (derived from Mischief);
• Despair (derived from Evasion);
• Duty (derived from Belonging);
• Idealism (derived from Belonging);
• Loyalty (derived from Friendship);
• Pragmatism (derived from Evasion).

That’s all for now.