Exquisite Corpse 2025
It's that time once again--Exquisite Corpse time! An Exquisite Corpse is a frankenfic created by a group of authors working together... without getting the full story of what's going on! Anything can happen as the story passes from one writer to the next, changing dramatically with each scene.
Once it's your turn to write for a particular corpse you'll receive a message from the organizer with the last two sentences of the previous writer's scene. (Or, if you're the first writer for a story, you'll get a simple go-ahead instead; you start with a blank slate!) At that point you will have one week to write a scene of 250-1000 words to continue the story. Once you're done, send your scene back to the organizer and wait to see how it fits into the final story.
After the last writer in a corpse has sent in their segment, the organizer will arrange a Discord voice chat where volunteers will collaborate to read the entire corpse. For extra fun, the organizer won't reveal who wrote each segment right away--we'll see if we can guess who wrote what first! If you can't make it to the voice chat or don't have Discord at all, don't worry; the full corpse will be posted here on the forums for everyone to view and come back to as often as they'd like.
Check out last year's thread for an example of how this all works in practice! Feel free to ask any questions you might have in this thread, too.
We'll be running corpses with three different themes this year:
Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA): An exquisite corpse with a twist! Each writer will write their scene, then provide a pair of choices at the end; for example, if their scene ends with an encounter with a mysterious locked door, the choices might be to pick the lock or to run away. Then two new writers would receive both the final lines of the scene and one of the two choices as a prompt for their own writing. Then each of them would provide two choices for the next writers... and so on and so on in an intricate web of alternate universes! For more details about how this corpse would work, see the original theme proposal.
Mystery: A normal mystery is an intricate web of clues leading up to a final reveal--of course! It was the butler all along! An exquisite corpse mystery is all your favorite sleuthing tropes rolled up into a huge ball of nonsense and chaos. The game is afoot!
Tournament Arc: Settle the question of whether Silver could beat Cheren, Kukui could beat Iris, or any other face-off you could think of, once and for all! Or try to, anyway, when the battlers keep changing and the tournament devolves into chaos!
Sound like fun? To sign up, just post in this thread stating:
a) which corpse(s) you'd like to participate in; you can join all three if you like
b) if there are any weeks where you won't be available to write
c) whether or not you're okay with being the first writer for any of the corpse(s) you're signing up for
Signups close Sunday, September 7th! After a bit of behind-the-scenes wizardry, you can expect initial writing assignments to go out a couple days after that.
Huge thanks to icomeanon6 and The Walrein for volunteering to run corpses this year! We could definitely use some additional help with the event, so if you have any interest in running a corpse, please mention as much in your sign-up, and I'll be happy to add you to the team!
