Elden Poem was written using the in-game messaging system deployed in FromSoftware's hit game, Elden Ring. This dark fantasy social media network comprises runic stones placed on the ground, composed with a limited set of textual options using the "Tarnished's Wizened Finger" relic. The messages are etched in stone via pre-determined phrasal fragments that may be accompanied by ghostly traces left by the player character called "gestures. " In this work, Snelson plays a wandering bard - misusing the system to produce the most unlikely of scrawls: small poems scattered across the game's landscape. The book is a documentation of that performance in a prosody marked by the poetics of fandom. They are recorded here as movie captures, static images, and poetic texts, arranged in four parts spelling a newly coherent object. Like emoji keyboards and the OuLiPo, Elden Ring's messaging system presents constraint-based literary rules for collective invention. In a past life, these poems inhabited the gaming environment itself.

Subject to the ongoing erasure of message limits and time-based access, they've begun to dissolve, rendered as ephemeral as the hours one spends at play. Here, for a moment, "spellsword" meets "spells word," and the materialization of play inscribes a poetics of digital messaging. This is a noncommercial work of fan poetry and video game poetics scholarship. Freely available PDF editions printed on demand at cost. CC 0, Daniel Scott Snelson, 2022 Published by Hysterically Real http: //www.hystericallyreal.com.