Exquisite Corpse Theme Poll 2025
It's time once again for our yearly round of Exquisite Corpse. But before we can get the writing kicked off, we need to know what we'll be writing about--and who's available to help guide that writing along!
If you've never participated in an Exquisite Corpse before, it's a collaborative storytelling exercise where a group of writers gets together to create a story--with the twist that each player only knows the last two sentences of the scene the person before them wrote! More details will be provided when the event begins, but for now, if you're curious, you can take a look at last year's version to get a sense of how things will work.
The first step in getting this year's game kicked off is deciding what we'll be writing about! This poll will decide which themes we'll use for the exquisite corpses this year. You can vote for up to three options, and the poll will remain open for a week. In the end I'll take the top 3-4 theme options to use this year, depending on how many people are able to help with the event. Any of the others could still appear in a future year! Some of this year's themes involve twists to the normal Exquisite Corpse formula, so check out the descriptions below when deciding which you'd like to write for.
We are also looking for volunteers to run exquisite corpses this year! The number of themes we're able to support is entirely dependent on the number of people able to help out by running a corpse. It's a straightforward process: I'll give you a list of writers, and you'll contact them one by one to write their scenes. Once everyone's written their scene for the corpse we'll have a final voice chat reading for our Discord members to enjoy the final product. If the voice chat is the only no-go for you, you're welcome to run a corpse; just let me know ahead of time that you don't want to VC, and I'll arrange for someone else to do that bit.
Please send me a DM or post in this thread if you'd like to run a corpse this year! Feel free to ask any questions you might have about running or participating in a corpse, too.
Theme Descriptions
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.
Grimdark Pokémon Pinball: In the grim darkness of Pokémon Pinball, there are only... drains? Outlanes? Who knows? In this corpse we'll reimagine a beloved spin-off game as an object of horror and despair!
Isekai Chain: What if you woke up in the Pokémon World one day... and then another person did... and another? In this corpse, each writer will isekai another character into the Pokémon World, until there's a whole horde of confused characters for each writer to play with!
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!
Romance: You've heard of "any two guys;" now experience "the two guys don't even stay the same from scene to scene!" How will a romance develop when the characters keep changing and the tone swings wildly from writer to writer?
Spaceworld '97: The demo of Pokémon Gold and Silver that debuted at Spaceworld 1997 is full of fascinating differences from the final games, including a number of pokémon species that never made it to the official pokédex. In this corpse we'd dive into this alternate Johto and discover what sort of wackiness it contains!
Time Travel: It's time to go back... to the future! Or perhaps the past. All we can say for sure about this corpse is that it's sure to seesaw wildly from one time period to another, no doubt to hilarious effect!
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!
Ultra Beasts: Terrifying aliens, portals to other worlds, and the government agents sent to stop them: Gen VII provided plenty of fodder for fun and zany storylines. We'll be putting our own spin on Ultra Space and its denizens in this corpse, and the results are sure to be out of this world!
Water Routes: What could be more peaceful than floating on the waves, exploring mysterious islands, and meeting 1,027 new tentacool friends? This corpse will explore everyone's favorite game feature, the water route; it's guaranteed to be a 7.8/10 experience!
