This is a game of the body cosmic. It is a hack of John Harper’s Lasers & Feelings, with inspiration from Ben Roswell’s War in the Year 3000 and Sundae Month’s Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor.
Skin & Stars is a rules-lite adaptation of my own rules-free Glitchspiel, proposing one potential framework for the tactics included therein. As with Glitchspiel, this game would not exist without Legacy Russell’s manifesto, Glitch Feminism. All quotations in the game are from that text.
In Skin & Stars, you play as cosmorgs: future subjectivities existing beyond the old and forgotten forms of earth-bound humanity. You eat, you love, you die, just as the meat-beings did before you. But unlike the meat-beings, your existence is marked by vastness, diffusion, abstraction, a fulfillment of that which was once only a possibility.
Skin & Stars is laid out as a z-folding pamphlet, printable on letter-sized paper. The cover and background image is NASA’s XDF.