From the introduction:
The game is played in three acts. In the first act what's normal is established, as are the main characters and their issues. In the beginning of the second act disaster strikes, and in the course of the act the consequences escalate while most people carry on as if nothing had happened – the ship is crash free after all. In the third act it's obvious that the ship is going to crash, and that anyone who doesn't secure a place in the life balloons will die.
Language and aesthetics make up the point of departure, partly in the form of what images of the concepts ”elves” and ”goblins” we all have in our heads, partly in the form of concrete rules governing how the players can speak of elves and goblins. Elves are valued and goblins devalued – even though it's established from the beginning that they're really not that different. The language rules are the only ”hard” rules of the game, which focuses on dilemmas and relationships rather than mechanical/practical problem solving.
The story revolves around the dynamics of two couples of primary characters, each couple containing one elf and one goblin, and one person who has the material power while the other has power of a more psychological nature. The two couples have more or less parallel storylines that share the airship and the accident as setting and might cross each other, but won't necessarily be tightly interwoven. The players take part in the ”other” story through description and player controlled secondary characters. At first everyone pursues their own immediate goals, perhaps with help from their partners, perhaps secretly. When disaster strikes, it gradually pulls the rug out from under their individual narratives as they themselves see and act on them, eventually stripping away the complexity and individuality until only hard questions of power, life and death remain.
