A story game loosely based on an old parlour game (as described here
on The Other Wiki) played by The Lyniezian and his family. The main difference between the original game being, instead of simply writing words and folding the paper over in a set manner (boy meets girl at place, he said this, she said that, and the consequence was...), each player simply contributes a line or short paragraph to the story, and the next player has to carry it on (like the original game, the paper is folded over to obscure what players have written on previous turns, except the one immediately before).
Although The Lyniezian was not the originator of the game, he ended up being responsible for most of the cliched elements in it, the most infamous being a hand-grenade-wielding mass murderer known only as "Mary". Whose inclusion was, despite the implications, often Played for Laughs, much like everything else in the stories.
Most actual examples of stories were later regarded as Old Shame by The Lyniezian and got chucked out, though at least one got posted to AlternateHistory.com (in the off-topic section, not the writing section, tho') somewhere, sometime. The beginnings of a Novelization even got written by him (entitled "The Consequences of Generally Mucking Stuff Up") but was soon abandoned, as was a Spin-Off starring Mary and girlfriend Marcia, in which poor unfortunate TV sets note and poor unfortunate TV license enforcement officers suffer Mary's wrath. Another Spin-Off was this Christmas special, originally intended as a way of letting everyone else off having to play the game, which morphed into a writing project of sorts...
How to play:
- You need at least three willing vict- erm, players. The more the merrier. All should sit in a circle, or round a table.
- Each player requires a sheet of A4 paper and a suitable writing implement.
- The players all write a line or short paragraph of story, whatever comes into their heads.
- Players then pass their pieces of paper to the player adjacent to them, taking care not to reveal what they've written to any other player. (Clockwise or anti-clockwise passing is permitted, as long as it's consistent throughout the game.)
- The next player continues the story with another line/short paragraph.
- Then they fold over the previous player's contribution and pass it on.
- Rinse and repeat, until the bottom of the page is reached, or the players run out of ideas. Then the story ends.
- The players then unfold the piece of paper they finish with, and read out the stories in turn. Ideally, this should result in fits of laughter all round.
The game itself provides examples of the following tropes:
- In Name Only: by comparison to the original parlour game.
- Depending on the Writer: the game basically works on this trope. The interpretation of what the previous player wrote, and the direction of the story, depended upon how the next player decides to take it.
-
Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: you need to be able to think and write on the fly in this game, and be able to respond to whatever the previous player has written. Often this results in frequent Ass Pull-ing.
The stories that resulted provide examples of:
- Action Girl: Mary, Jane, Wendy the Monster Slayer...
- Alliterative Name: At least two characters' names:
- Maurice the Megalomaniac Moggy from Manchester.
- Shaun the Shivering Sheep from Shepperton?
- All Just a Dream: Girl walks across sodden wind-swept radioactive moors After the End. Wakes up to find she's back before World War III (n)ever happened... she just ate too much cheese the night before.
- The Alleged Car: according to at least one story we will all drive souped-up Schizo Tech Sinclair C5s in The Future in order to be more environmentally-friendly, and in one eerily Consequences-like collaborative story game on AlternateHistory.com, The Lyniezian had Mary show up driving a Trabant of all things as a getaway car. (Presumably as the clouds of fumes it emits would confuse the pursuer...)
- Author Appeal: found its way in a little too many times from certain persons... particularly the one writing this entry.
- Back from the Dead: the character Mary was becoming so cliched there were many attempts to "kill her off"- only for her to come back in later stories. In one instance, she had simply faked her own death. In another case of deliberate Self-Parody, she is even resurrected by magic by a couple of characters (named Mike and Janice) who need her for some mission or other they want her to perform.
- Brain Food: The presumed fate of any hapless Knight Errant who happens to fall foul of the witch Lucinda'snote charms- she pickles their brains.
- Bears Are Bad News: as commonly found in...
- Canon Foreigner: the two female FBI agents in the aborted Novelization, as well as indignant Damsel in Distress Martha Washington (no, not George's wife or that comic book character).
- Christmas Episode: quite frequent, seeing as the game ended up being mostly played at Christmas and so stories ended up having a vaguely seasonal theme.
-
Cliché Storm: So much so, it even spawned its own cliches. Mostly The Lyniezian's fault. - Comedic Sociopathy: Mary runs on this trope.
- Crack Fic: where fanfic elements appeared in the stories, they often produced this. Who'd have thought the eponymous tree from The Singing Ringing Tree could absorb (and feed on) nuclear blasts, for example?
- Creator Backlash: it became too much of a Cliché Storm and everyone was running out of ideas... and with The Lyniezian going through a phase of being The Fundamentalist, stories of grenade-wielding lesbian mass murderers and the Earth getting blown up seemed less like a good idea, so he threw out many of the old stories. Most of the examples on this page are based entirely on memory.
- Creator In-Joke: as the authors were a pretty close-knit family group, the stories were littered with constant in-jokes and parodies of each other... and, more commonly, their cats. As well as stuff that had happened that day, etc. One pointed out to The Lyniezian that this is one good reason- aside from obvious privacy concerns- why not to post some of the stories on the internet, as no-one would get the in jokes.
- Crossover: often with whatever the authors happened to be watching on TV, including but not limited to:
- Doctor Who
- Star Wars (Mary and Darth Vader fell through a wormhole and end up at Woodstock, where suffice to say peace was not given a chance...)
- An East German children's film called The Singing Ringing Treenote (subjected to bizarre Memetic Mutation, in which the eponymous tree is revealed to feed off the energy of nuclear blasts!)
- Lyniezia, of course, ended up being a setting on several occasions...
- Dark Action Girl: Mary, of course...
- Death Is Cheap: Mary got killed off and brought back so many times it practically became a running joke.
- Disproportionate Retribution: annoy Mary slightly, you get fragged. Simple as.
- Does Not Like Men:
- Possibly a character called Helen Highwater.
- Subverted with Mary, who Hates Everyone Equally (except Marcia, her girlfriend... most of the time).
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: A stock ending whenever The Lyniezian was concerned. Usually at the hands of an alien race called the Zygonitarians.
- The End: When written by The Lyniezian, was often done in ridiculous fashion.
- Expy:
- The Zygonitarian captain, Zzlplwick Mlplenk was sometimes portrayed in a very similar manner to Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
- Despite what you may think, Wendy the Monster Slayer is not this for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except in name. (She's more of a trophy hunter.)
- Faking the Dead: Mary did this on at least one occasion as a means of explaining her "death" in a previous story. But then even being Killed Off for Real can't keep her from coming back again... and again... and again...
- Fantasy Kitchen Sink: alternate universes, time travel, wormholes, getting sucked inside the TV or your favourite videogame, Santa Claus, witches who live in a hut in the forest with hen's legsnote , resurrection spells, the netherworld, zombies...
- Fun with Acronyms: in one story, Maurice the Megalomaniac Moggy from Manchester threatens to call the RSPCA on his adversaries. Not the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as you might think... but the Richmond Society for the Proliferation of Corporate Arson. They start fires.
- Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death: alluded to with "the 50ft. lesbian vampire from the swamps of Planet X" in one story, referencing a fictitious horror movie.
- Harsher in Hindsight: in one story a Lyniezian terrorist movement (the Tirranian Liberation Front?) launched an attack by crashing a ship into a port. This being before 9/11 and weaponized planes...
- Heel–Face Turn: Attempted with Mary on one or more occasions. It never stuck.
- Home Base: Mary's (and Marcia's) is an abandoned Cold War nuclear bunker somewhere on the North York Moors.
- Jenny Everywhere: makes an appearance in one of the last stories.
- Literal Metaphor: the Millenium Bug is, in fact, the spider at the heart of the World Wide Web. When the year 2000 occurs, she takes over the world.
- Mad Bomber: Mary, whose weapons are hand grenades.
- Moose and Maple Syrup: as a cliche in the early stories, it seemed to consist solely of Torontonote and a huge bear-infested wilderness.
- Mundane Fantastic: in the Consequences-verse, terrorists allegedly blowing up Santa's sleigh (the police do not suspect Mary at this time) gets on the six-o'-clock news. Knocking up a time machine in your garage, following instructions from a "how to" book, is all in an afternoon's work. Everyone would probably prefer to forget the Great London Zombie Massacre of 1987, though.
- Naked on Revival: Mary, when resurrected by Mike and Janice (see Back from the Dead above). Possibly only in the aborted novelization.
- Never Mess with Granny: especially when she turns out to be Mary from the future, and pulls a grenade out of her handbag...
- Irrational Hatred: Mary towards Santa Claus, of all people. It might be related to her not liking kids much either.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot:
- "Mad" Max the vampire kitten. (Based on a real cat.)
- The zombie biker Metro Gangs.
- The aforementioned "50ft. lesbian vampire from the swamps of Planet X" is a parody.
- Offing the Annoyance: Mary does this frequently.
- Only a Flesh Wound / Major Injury Underreaction / Didn't Need Those Anyway!: Mary doesn't mind losing an arm. It wasn't her grenade-throwing arm, anyway...
- Only One Name: Mary is the most prominent example, to the point where the in-universe news media only knows her as that.
- Our Wormholes Are Different: in this game, they're a convenient Ass Pull plot device to change stories when The Lyniezian didn't like the way the story was going. Also blatant Author Appeal.
- Played for Laughs: really, the whole point of the game is to make a story that turns out, often unintentionally, funny, as it never turns out remotely what you expected. Often, though, the authors did it deliberately...
- Psycho Lesbian: Mary, as part of character development, was outed as a lesbian. Unlike the way this trope was usually played, she's not a psycho because she's a lesbian, but a lesbian because she's a psycho- The Lyniezian for some reason assuming that her character didn't quite lend itself to traditional female gender norms.
- Her girlfriend Marcia (seemingly the femme to Mary's butch?) also is this Depending on the Writer. To one she was described as "doll-like", but in others she's a Mad Scientist who (when not custom-modifying some of Mary's odder grenades) out to Take Over the World with her super-duper Plasma Cannon... if only she can get it to work properly.
- Random Events Plot: Pretty much any Consequences story inevitably turns out like this given each player is kept deliberately in the dark about most of what has gone before in the narrative, to keep things confusing. Add to the fact it's difficult for some players to do what they want with the story, or they're forced to abruptly conclude it because they're reached the bottom of the page or run out of creative steam, and what results is plots that go off at entertainingly wild tangents with no rhyme or reason whatsover. And that's the whole point of the game.
- Referenced by...: The Genesis of Jenny Everywhere as a Creator In-Joke, in the title of a film for which the dreaded Mary is the title role.
- Refuge in Audacity: probably the only way of explaining/justifying Mary.
- Robot Girl: There was one that tap dances for no apparent reason.note
- Science Fantasy: A lot of the stories probably ended up thus, being as the authors included whatever they felt like at the time. So wormholes, time travel and aliens can sit quite happily with Santa Claus, TalkingAnimals, StockNessMonsters and a cannibalistic witch.
- Self-Parody: frequently.
- Shout-Out: quite frequent allusions to whatever events had transpired that day, references to other family members (and their cats), and stuff they liked.''
- One memorable example of this trope references a trailer for Gunsmith Cats, mentioning a "grenade with a lipstick mark" (referencing one of "Minnie" May Hopkins' home-made concussion grenades shown in the trailer- though Mary's version is much more lethal).
- Another reference to Mary's hideout claimed it was in "deepest, darkest Yorkshire"- the phrase had been jokingly used in a sermon preached by the vicar at the local church as part of an anecdotal story. Presumably the vicar never intended it to be recycled thus, one hopes...
- And when it was decided Mary was She Who Must Not Be Named due to her notoriety, she became TGTFKAM (The Grenade Thrower Formerly Known As Mary)- a reference to a certain musician...
- There was also some sort of allusion to "sword and sorcery" type fantasy once, in which the characters are bamboozled by this whole Christmas lark.
- A quote from a videogame (apparently part of the Ganbare Goemon series) screenshot seen in a magazine review: "Live your life the way YOU want it, that is the destiny for many" ends one story.
- A wooden duck (based on real wooden ducks decorating the authors' houses) which is made out of sapient pearwood...
- Spin-Off: the aborted novelization (The Consequences of Generally Mucking Stuff Up, weaving ideas inspired by the game stories into a single narrative) and an equally aborted series featuring the home life of Mary and Marcia. (A Dom Com with added grenades, machine guns and brutal murder.)
- Stock Ness Monster: According to the latest installments, every lake has one and they're all described in a pocket guide priced £2.99.note
- Take Over the World: Maurice the Megalomaniac Moggy from Manchester's quite obvious ambition, as well as Marcia's... if only she can get that darned Plasma Cannon to work and hopefully not kill Mary in the process. And if she does, it will not dent that ambiton.
- Throw Down the Bomblet: Mary's basic response, when confronted with enemies or even minor annoyances, is to toss a grenade its way.
- Trapped in TV Land: Some earlier stories had characters being trapped in TV shows or videogames.
- The Unpronouncable: the Zygonitarian captain, Zzlplwick Mlplenk. His name had been Anglicized to Zapzlewick or similar by another player during the course of one story.
- Tickle Torture: courtesy of the Michaelson and Johnson Tickle Tank(TM), available in various models.
- Villain Protagonist: Mary. Also Zzlplwick Mlplenk in one episode.
- Western Terrorists: assuming Lyniezia counts as the West, the Tirranian Liberation Front; parodied with the "Unreal IRA".
- World of Weirdness: the entire Consequences-verse.
tHe EnD!
