The Story so Far
As a long running serialized narrative with multiple authors, the SRU isn’t what I would call easy to follow. Explaining the reading order usually requires a few disclaimers, several redactions, and a pocketful of apologies. As the years have gone by, I’ve sort of given up on the notion of a “reading order”. In my philosophy, if you’re up to read any of this, you already deserve a crown of stars and a gift certificate to White Castle.1
The most accessible description of the SRU’s development is that it officially began in April 2019, and was composed of the bones of three previous forum roleplays that ran, respectively, in Autumn 2015, Spring 2016, and Autumn 2016. The April 2019 game was the first to consciously weld elements from those previous games together and apply them to a version of the first two seasons of Scream the TV Series (which, by then, had been cancelled for three years) to create a unique, shared continuity.
Early in that process, this shared continuity was bolstered by a project I called The Story so Far. The three defunct forums were not only concluded and welded into the backstory of the 2019 game, but “novelized”, as full prose works. The defunct 2015 forum became “Volume I”, the Spring 2016 forum became “Volume II”, and the Autumn 2016 game became the shorter “Volume III”, which led directly into the April 2019 game…Scream: The Final Retreat.
The three volumes of The Story were written concurrently with the first five chapters of Final Retreat, mostly over the summer of 2019, to the point that active revelations within The Story began being adapted into Final Retreat in real time.
Besides The Final Retreat, our game began launching spin-off threads: games within the game, featuring characters from previous forums (preserved in The Story) starring in adventures of their own, all connected in some way to the drama unfurling in the so-called “main game”. Throughout 2019, we spawned three spin-offs: Lifting the Mask (starring a character from Volume I of The Story), Big Trouble in Little Lakewood (starring someone from Volume II), and Lakewood Losers (starring a character from a previous forum that we did not otherwise adapt into the continuity…it’s less confusing than it sounds).
By the time of our first hiatus in early 2020, the forum had four active story threads, all containing multiple chapters. Over the hiatus, I embarked on yet another continuity welding project, novelizing the first eight months of the game in a similar way to The Story, to iron out continuity errors that had cropped up over time.
Since 2021, the game has kept growing, most notably with the Big Trouble spin-off branching out seven different ways, to explore various chapters of our universe’s history. In 2023, we returned from a second hiatus, and I relaunched Lakewood: Year One, a prequel to our “main story”, set a year before Volume I and, in contrast to the short lived Year One from 2021, taking on an operatic scope, with over 100 characters populating George Washington High School.
In 2025, I finally figured I could wait no longer and began rewriting The Story so Far, in an effort to fully realize its promise as a novel set in the universe we had built. This project is a long time coming and, of course, will be a long time completing. Meanwhile, the game goes on, with characters loving, lying, laughing and dying generations apart from each other in the game’s active threads.
Somehow, we’re all still here. And not going anywhere anytime soon.
The Story so Far
The Lakewood Legendarium
- Where you can have a White Christmas. This makes sense if you do the reading. ↩︎