Lowell doesn't dress up to run games anymore, unfortunately.I’ve started tabletop playing again, although it’s via Google Hangouts rather than in person. My brother (whose excellent gaming and storytelling blog, Age of Ravens, you should check out) running a Changeling: The Lost campaign and it’s a great way to spend a little time with both him and my sister-in-law, along with meeting some new fellow players. I really love what he’s doing, which is using a system called Microscope in order to collaboratively generate the setting for the game, and it’s making me wonder about the possibilities of it for generating a shared world setting.
We went around the “table” first generating some high level concepts, such as vampires being very rare in this world, the existence of neon elementals, and some rule-specific stuff that kinda flew past my head, but which I’m understanding more as I keep going through the rules. The game’s set in Las Vegas, but successive rounds helped define the specifics of the world and some of the NPCs, like Wayne Newton: Werewolf Hunter or the Count, a bitter, twisted man who runs The Society for the Preservation of Vampires. Lowell’s blogged with more complete details here.
I really love this sort of session, because it’s so much fun to take someone else’s addition and riff on it. After the first round, the person starting each one had to come up with what’s called in Microscope terms a “lens,” something that each addition that round must reference. Ours were: guides, corruption, and alien abduction, and if you look at Lowell’s write-up, you may be able to trace where some of those items came from.
Interesting. I recently went looking for a new set of RPG rules to replace C&S rules I used to run. Never heard of Microscope, and it looks intriguing, though I’ve never heard of a set of rules that doesn’t use a GM (sounds more like a wargame than an RPG, though I spent a couple of years running/playing in a shared Champions setting which amounted to pretty much the same thing).
Rule set I’ve picked up is something called “The Burning Wheel.” Generic system (not for a specific setting except is is fantasy, though another book is out which adapts the system to scifi) and I’m trying to adapt it to use my old fantasy setting, though I may have to “crash” it and build upon the ruins (I’m speaking literally, not figuratively). Character generation is kind of complex (it’s the one weak point I’ve seen brought up in reviews) but the system seems clean and simple. Still reading it, but I’ve already picked up the other three books the Griffon had for it.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
You may also like...
Writers and Guilt
Writers are so good at beating themselves up for all sorts of reasons, some valid, some not so much. Here’s some encouragement for dealing with writerly quilt.
Art by Leeloo, Photo by CatA recent Locus Roundtable question led me to thinking about this. It starts with a confession: I read dictionaries, a habit since early, early years of Richard Scarry.
Not cover to cover, as you would a novel. Rather I pick them up, flip through the pages, pause to dip into them in search of new words to file away mentally. I relish new words so I’m always looking for them, especially sinewy and interesting new verbs, or nouns crusted with bits of morphological history.
I know I’m not alone in this — it’s a disease that many (though certainly not all, or even most, I think) writers (and some non-writers) share, and it’s not one its sufferers talk about much, because Good LORD how boring is that, reading the dictionary?
I have an American Heritage I’ll never part with, and beyond that the beloved Compact OED, three volumes and accompanying magnifying glass, that my brother Lowell got for me while I was in grad school and which will be with me till my dying days, I firmly well. And specialized dictionaries: a Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, a dictionary of foreign terms, another of fashion terms, and a glut of foreign language dictionaries, Russian, Hawaiian, Navaho, jostle for space on one on my most visited bookshelves.
Morphology — the history built into the syllables — fascinates me. That the proto Indo-European word “dwoh” (two) leads to words like double and duo and duplicate and duplicity (two-facedness) is just too cool. In my junior year of high school we had a vocabulary textbook that focused on roots – each section was several roots along with lengthy lists of words derived from them. I loved the idea that you could take a word apart and find its meaning built into it with the syllables of which it was made.
When I was in grad school, we had evenings of pot-luck suppers followed by play reading or rounds of the dictionary game (for which the aforementioned American Heritage was often employed). I will argue that playing word-games can be fun, but that playing it with clever writers can be intoxicating and exhilarating (note the shared root with “hilarity” there) and make you laugh so hard and long your face hurts. My all-time favorite remains the false definition for the word “nidor” – Naval acronym employed when inspecting submarines, stands for Nothing Is Damp Or Rusted.
Sometimes self-consciousness overtakes me. In high school a girl once asked me why I talked “so snobby,” an accusation that still pokes me on occasion. It’s a reason I like talking to other writers — no one views a previously unknown word as a hostile act but rather a gem that duplicates itself in the sharing. No one’s the poorer for talking to someone whose vocabulary stretches them.
Nothing jars on me quite so much as a word used in a half-right fashion, a square peg hammered down into that round hole and MADE to fit through sheer Humpty-Dumptyian insistence (an Alice in Wonderland reference that all we word-lovers know, go read the book if you never have, particularly if you’re a fantasy writer).
What about you? What are the words or word sources that you particularly love?
One Response
Interesting. I recently went looking for a new set of RPG rules to replace C&S rules I used to run. Never heard of Microscope, and it looks intriguing, though I’ve never heard of a set of rules that doesn’t use a GM (sounds more like a wargame than an RPG, though I spent a couple of years running/playing in a shared Champions setting which amounted to pretty much the same thing).
Rule set I’ve picked up is something called “The Burning Wheel.” Generic system (not for a specific setting except is is fantasy, though another book is out which adapts the system to scifi) and I’m trying to adapt it to use my old fantasy setting, though I may have to “crash” it and build upon the ruins (I’m speaking literally, not figuratively). Character generation is kind of complex (it’s the one weak point I’ve seen brought up in reviews) but the system seems clean and simple. Still reading it, but I’ve already picked up the other three books the Griffon had for it.