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See, I find a joke I like, and I stick to it, so this post is called "City Of The Straits: This Time It's Remarkably Personal."
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graeae and I have been writing up the City Of The Straits materials - which have gone multimedia, worryingly enough - we've been talking a lot about our vision of this game. In a lot of ways, this feels like a totally new game, something we've never done before, and that's only partly because it is new, it is undone, and the future is as yet unwritten.
In other ways, it feels like a new game, because this is the first game we've ever run, in the last seven years of near-constant gaming, where we decided to actually grow some balls about how we created games. We have a lot of history of success, and we have a lot of history of failure, as well, though we believe that most of our failures were ideas that flew too high too soon. It would be a lie to say that those failures have not coloured how we've handled recent games, though we did not tippy-toe in and anxiously try to direct people in the direction of the plot. And it would be wrong to say that our successes didn't tell us what we did right, even when ideas failed.
This time, we're not going there. This time, we will remember what works and what doesn't, but we're not starting from that posture of defence: this time, we hold in our hands our successes and our joys. This is our game, and we are developing it as we find meet and fit. We are endowing it with themes of magic and pain and diversity and the world around us and wreckage and hope and blood and laughter and all the things that drive us as writers and as creators. We're dialing it up to eleven on every front, and we have finally realised something true about this game, which is the purpose of this post.
This game is our Great American Epic.
Part of it is that we're throwing out canon. There is no canon here. We're not interested in canon - we're interested in guidelines, but we're interested in what people do with those guidelines, not whether someone can play to a type defined by someone else or not.
Part of it is we're no longer interested in what other people think of what we do. If you don't like the fact that half the characters are black, or half are women, or that at least one character is Jewish, that the game is set in Detroit and that we expect that to colour how people create characters, we're not interested in having you in our game. We spent too many years bowing to the implied - and sometimes spoken - wishes of a vocal minority to keep characters white, pretty, and male to be interested in listening any longer.
Part of it is that as we've been talking over our own characters, the themes that keep coming to mind are the ones that make up any good American Epic. When you can look at your character concept and see the theme that drove Steinbeck to write The Grapes Of Wrath, or the personality that created organised crime in this country, or the myth that powers our collective belief in the fundamentals of "being American", you can't say that you're not going to play to that.
Neither of us is willing to play a half-crippled character to appease anyone else, whether an author or a player, ever again. We play what we want to, ever and anon.
This post, however, is not a declaration of war. It is not a statement of defiance for the sake of defiance. It is, instead, an invitation to our players, both the ones we know of and the ones who would potentially join it, to start thinking in the terms we've been thinking in: we want diversity, we want personality, we want no fear, and we want courage.
I can promise this: every time we've said we're doing things differently, we've done that. This time is no exception. Though the game is open for nothing other than PB and name holds we want to spark conversation, and to start sharing what we're thinking of, what we're looking for, and what we want. The wiki is here. Yes, we bought a domain name. The game itself will take place on IJ.
The quick recap:
- It's a game set in Detroit with an ethnically diverse cast of characters. App what you want to play. We want people to play to the setting, but even more than that, we want passion.
- Apps submitted before the wiki is completed and the game is opened will be sent back. We're trying out letting people see our creation process.
- We're interested in, first, last, and always, personalities that have powers, not powers that have personalities.
- We're interested in your thoughts. We know a lot of people are waiting to app - tell us what you're thinking, what you'd like to see, what sparks for you. We make no promises, but we can tell you that we're bringing together more ideas and concepts than we ever have, and we want to know what that makes you think of.
Talk to us.
As
graeae and I have been writing up the City Of The Straits materials - which have gone multimedia, worryingly enough - we've been talking a lot about our vision of this game. In a lot of ways, this feels like a totally new game, something we've never done before, and that's only partly because it is new, it is undone, and the future is as yet unwritten.In other ways, it feels like a new game, because this is the first game we've ever run, in the last seven years of near-constant gaming, where we decided to actually grow some balls about how we created games. We have a lot of history of success, and we have a lot of history of failure, as well, though we believe that most of our failures were ideas that flew too high too soon. It would be a lie to say that those failures have not coloured how we've handled recent games, though we did not tippy-toe in and anxiously try to direct people in the direction of the plot. And it would be wrong to say that our successes didn't tell us what we did right, even when ideas failed.
This time, we're not going there. This time, we will remember what works and what doesn't, but we're not starting from that posture of defence: this time, we hold in our hands our successes and our joys. This is our game, and we are developing it as we find meet and fit. We are endowing it with themes of magic and pain and diversity and the world around us and wreckage and hope and blood and laughter and all the things that drive us as writers and as creators. We're dialing it up to eleven on every front, and we have finally realised something true about this game, which is the purpose of this post.
This game is our Great American Epic.
Part of it is that we're throwing out canon. There is no canon here. We're not interested in canon - we're interested in guidelines, but we're interested in what people do with those guidelines, not whether someone can play to a type defined by someone else or not.
Part of it is we're no longer interested in what other people think of what we do. If you don't like the fact that half the characters are black, or half are women, or that at least one character is Jewish, that the game is set in Detroit and that we expect that to colour how people create characters, we're not interested in having you in our game. We spent too many years bowing to the implied - and sometimes spoken - wishes of a vocal minority to keep characters white, pretty, and male to be interested in listening any longer.
Part of it is that as we've been talking over our own characters, the themes that keep coming to mind are the ones that make up any good American Epic. When you can look at your character concept and see the theme that drove Steinbeck to write The Grapes Of Wrath, or the personality that created organised crime in this country, or the myth that powers our collective belief in the fundamentals of "being American", you can't say that you're not going to play to that.
Neither of us is willing to play a half-crippled character to appease anyone else, whether an author or a player, ever again. We play what we want to, ever and anon.
This post, however, is not a declaration of war. It is not a statement of defiance for the sake of defiance. It is, instead, an invitation to our players, both the ones we know of and the ones who would potentially join it, to start thinking in the terms we've been thinking in: we want diversity, we want personality, we want no fear, and we want courage.
I can promise this: every time we've said we're doing things differently, we've done that. This time is no exception. Though the game is open for nothing other than PB and name holds we want to spark conversation, and to start sharing what we're thinking of, what we're looking for, and what we want. The wiki is here. Yes, we bought a domain name. The game itself will take place on IJ.
The quick recap:
- It's a game set in Detroit with an ethnically diverse cast of characters. App what you want to play. We want people to play to the setting, but even more than that, we want passion.
- Apps submitted before the wiki is completed and the game is opened will be sent back. We're trying out letting people see our creation process.
- We're interested in, first, last, and always, personalities that have powers, not powers that have personalities.
- We're interested in your thoughts. We know a lot of people are waiting to app - tell us what you're thinking, what you'd like to see, what sparks for you. We make no promises, but we can tell you that we're bringing together more ideas and concepts than we ever have, and we want to know what that makes you think of.
Talk to us.
