Aurelle-Plage: A Village Where Consent Is a Colour
Aurelle-Plage is a naturist village on a pine-backed stretch of the French Atlantic coast: six hundred residents in season and five hundred holiday guests spread across a beach, a pine wood, a cluster of white cabins, a bakery, a bar, a clinic, a tennis court, and an office in a converted boathouse. The village's whole law is three lines. No clothing inside the fence, with narrow exceptions for the textile boxes at the gates, the clinic, and the café kitchen. No cameras and no phones beyond those boxes, enforced with real fines. And be kind in the dunes: nudity is not an invitation; the courtesy is to look, smile, and move on.
What makes the village work is the Palier system — consent made visible on the wrist. Every guest is issued a silicone bracelet whose colour is registered against their name in the office ledger: green for conversation and company, blue for touch such as a massage or sun cream on a back, amber for flirtation and closeness up to being asked, red for intimacy with the person they choose, and black for village staff, who are never approached on the beach. Changing a band is a two-minute conversation at the office desk, and nobody is ever asked why.
Sunward Shores is a high-heat comedy-drama that refuses the swingers'-resort cliché. Aurelle is a real community with a bakery rota, a water committee, and a feud about the car park; the nudity is constant and therefore unremarkable, and the tension is entirely social. The dramatist's device is the bracelet wall in the office: five coloured rows and a coil of fishing line holding every guest's card, name, cabin, band, dates, and the single line the animateur writes after the first conversation.
The Bracelet Wall
The true map of the village, read every morning. Staff wear black and guests wear colour, and the animateur's own column is public to the staff and to no one else.
The Sunset Bell
A ship's bell on two posts at the top of the beach, rung at sunset and by anyone in an emergency. The Rassemblement announces the games, the bonfire, the weather, and tomorrow's outings. It is the only authority everyone obeys.
The Season Ledger
Eleven seasons of events, complaints, fines, and incidents — including last September's entry, which is three words long, on a page that has been pressed flat where someone closed the book hard.
The Opening Dilemma: A Camera in the Pines
Eros Fable has no authored openings. The engine builds the first turn from the scenario's world lore, its cast, and your character sheet, and it starts the adventure at a random moment within one week after the scenario's canonical date. In Aurelle that means the season is at full pitch: the beach is packed, the bar is booked, and the council votes on the north dunes at the end of the season.
The engine's opening standard — one present person, one explicit want, one withheld piece, a decision — lands on your first morning at the office desk. A guest reported a camera hidden in the pines three weeks ago and the council has said nothing about it. The animateur who held your office walked out last September and never came back, leaving his desk locked and an unopened padded envelope in the safe with his handwriting on the front and a camera card taped inside.
Protagonist Freedom & Attribute Guide
The default animateur is a suggestion. You may change name, gender, age, height, weight, and background freely, and every NPC in the village is written to pursue a protagonist of any gender; same-sex encounters are fully embraced whenever you initiate them. The four attributes below are the ones this season rewards.
You are the person six hundred people talk to. Charm is the two-minute bracelet conversation, the towel dispute defused at the bar, the guest who goes home calmer, and the council president who cannot quite put you off.
Perception reads the wall every morning for the band that changed too fast, the arrival whose name does not match last week's, and the guest who flinches when someone lifts a camera at the gate. It is how you find out who put the camera in the pines.
The job is physical: kayaks, volleyball, paddleboards, a whistle, a bell rope, a bicycle between the office and the dunes. Agility is being where the emergency is before the whistle stops echoing.
Sun, salt, heat, and six days a week at ten hours a day. Endurance is what keeps you gracious at the evening bell in the seventh week of a French summer, which is the week the village will remember.
The Cast of Aurelle-Plage
Warm, decisive, and certain that a community survives on arrangements. She hired you, chairs the sunset announcements more than she needs to, and has asked twice whether the office safe is in working order.
Blunt, funny, and permanently tired. She wears a green bracelet, tells you plainly that she does not mix with staff, and then leaves your coffee on the office step before every seven o'clock.
Gentle, chatty, and professionally discreet. He knows which council members have bad shoulders and which have bad marriages, and he changed the subject when the camera came up.
Eleven seasons in the same village, with a bound journal of weather, arrivals, and "interesting things". She offered to lend you her record of last September and already knows you will need it.
Cheerful, physical, and eager to be useful; he calls you boss with a grin. He has flinched twice when the previous animateur's name came up in conversation.
Loud, generous, and allergic to nonsense. Forty years at the beach café, four generations fed, and a tin behind the counter holding the old council minutes that explain the village's debt.
Direct, dry, and working in film with her camera locked in the textile box. She has been refused permission for her portrait book twice and blamed for the pines camera by two guests.
He registers under a different name every Thursday, pays cash, walks the north dunes, and is gone before the bell. He asked whether the office safe was still on the same wall, and then apologized.
Starting Possessions, Inventory & Economy
You begin with 900 Money: a season's staffing budget, a small relocation allowance, and the office float. The village's economy is seasonal and tight — rent, the federation licence, the pool loan, and the water rights all land on the council's ledger — and the animateur's job sits in the middle of it, running events that pay for themselves and enforcing fines that everyone resents.
- Staff Bracelet, Black — visible to every guest, approachable only by the rules, never removed inside the fence.
- The Bracelet Wall — five coloured rows and every guest's card. The true map of the village.
- The Season Ledger — eleven seasons of incidents, including last September's three-word entry.
- Beach Bell Key — opens the office, the equipment shed, and the case around the bell.
- Animateur's Sun Kit — cream, whistle, spare bracelets in all four colours, first aid, tide table, and a laminated copy of the rules.
- Unopened Envelope in the Safe — no postmark, no letter, one camera card taped inside.
- Village Bicycle — heavy, basketed, and louder than the beach bell in a headwind.
Bracelets, Dunes & the Adult World
Sunward Shores runs high heat, and the absence of clothing is the engine rather than the joke. The acts are named plainly: sun-oiling a guest on the beach and being told where to put the hands; a massage at the clinic that turns into fingers between thighs and a mouth on a bare shoulder; fucking in a cabin with the windows open because everyone knows anyway; the dunes at midnight and the particular etiquette of being heard; the bonfire where the village pairs off in the open and nobody pretends not to notice; a guest kneeling on the sand while her bracelet stays amber. Bodies are written honestly — sun cream, sand, salt, tan lines, the sweat of someone who has been naked in the heat all day — along with the ordinary comedy of a village with no pockets.
The beach is erotic from the first morning and touch is available within days through the bracelet system. The first full encounter lands in the first third, either with a guest who has been working up to it or at a bonfire. What must be earned is the private scene — Margot's band change, Nadia's journal, Iris's permission, Théo's confession — and the most intimate scene is reserved for after you have watched the camera cards and decided what the village is worth.
Consent here is negotiated out loud in two minutes at your own desk, and the world is uncensored: every kind of pairing happens at Aurelle, commonly and without comment, and the village's only rule is that it is asked for. Name the asking, the changing, and the no; write aftercare as sun cream and a shared plate of oysters.
