Delivery Teaser: Soul Scarring (Patreon)

Delivery's concept of “soul scarring” comes from my own experience with a deceased parent. When a child grows up with death, it can shape their perspectives for the rest of their life. My father died when I was eleven months old. To me, a car has never just been a car; it’s That Place Where My Father Died. A crush was never just exciting belly-butterflies; when I reached puberty, I viewed love only as the prelude to being a widow.

I still hate driving.

This isn’t to claim that every kid who loses a parent young has hang-ups, but it did make me wonder what a similar experience would be like in the world of Delivery for the Damned. Because there, magic is powered by certainty. If any of you have seen the stage version of Peter Pan, it’s similar to the idea that if children in the audience clap long and hard enough while proclaiming “I do believe in fairies!”, then Tinkerbell will get better.

Golightly (the default last name of Delivery’s protagonist) has been through a lot. They were orphaned at a very young age, with parents who died under mysterious circumstances. For plot reasons, they also have no recollection of their family. (Yes, I’m going with that trope . . . sort of.)

The Satanic nuns that raised Golightly were not the most maternal of individuals. One nun was particularly vicious, concocting horrific stories of how children’s parents died in order to get them to behave. The tales which Golightly was told about their parents’ demise do not reflect reality. But Golightly, a small child, was probably not able to make that distinction.

So what happens when one story hits home harder then the rest? What happens if young Golightly becomes convinced, absolutely convinced, that their parents had died in a fire, or drowned at sea, or were bitten by a poisonous snake?

What impact would that lifelong belief have in a world filled with magic?

To answer these questions, I came up with the idea of Soul Scarring, an optional feature where you can give Golightly past childhood trauma that will magically impact their present.

Sounds fun, right?