Trust and Communal Projects

I tend to come up with ideas every now and then that are predicated on trust, communication and human kindness. That's pretty much why I tend to abandon them once I realise that. But that's the wrong way to go about it. What I should be doing instead is developing and pitching those ideas under the assumption that there have to be people out there like me and people who would be able to help me (or engage with me to) make those ideas work. So this blog post is a way to put a few of those ideas out there. Bear with me and if something sounds cool, let me know!

The Communal Birthday Card

This one is a strange kind of idea. I'm not sure how I feel about birthday cards, but I know that I like getting things in the mail. Especially from somewhere further away and if it's at least a little personal or actually from a real person and not a business. How cool would it be to get an international birthday card on your birthday?

So the idea is that we get one or more birthday cards or cards of some kind. Someone does this, just a single person. And there's a registry of birthdays and addresses for everyone in the group. So when it's nearing someone's birthday (and keep in mind this doesn't have to be birthday specific, we could just do it for the heck of it) the card is signed by the original person and sent. And then the recipient sends it on to the next birthday boy or girl, having signed it themselves. And on and on it goes, through the mail system. It would be interesting to see how long it lasted and how many little notes and signatures it would get on it.

The Birthday Circle

I promise you not all my ideas are birthday related! This one is more of a gift thing though. The idea is that getting presents is cool. Everybody can agree with that one. This one is all about crowd-sourcing and funding a birthday present for yourself. A group of people, once again, all post their preferences for a gift keeping in mind an upper monetary limit set by the group. They probably wouldn't be very specific, more along the lines of categories and ideas. The rest of the group would, in secret I guess, discuss and figure out what to get the giftee. Then they would communally pay for it and have it delivered in time for their birthday. So the advantage is that you could recruit a group of cool people (which sounds self serving but it isn't if everybody does the same thing) and they're all out there plotting what to get you for your birthday and when it's other people's turn you get to brainstorm cool things to get people. It's the best of both worlds! And with an upper limit on the price, the individual contributions wouldn't be too great especially with a larger group.

The Book Swap

This one is pretty self explanatory but essentially let's swap books we like. Everybody puts their names in, it gets randomised, and you get a cool book from someone somewhere else! Send whatever you like, fiction non-fiction poetry cookbooks it doesn't really matter. All that matters is that you want to share it with someone else.

Unplayed Games - 2012

I know I'm not the only person who has plenty of unplayed RPGs. I buy them, I really do intend to buy them and then months (or years?!) later they're still sitting on my shelf.

So here's my proposition. Once a month or so, I'm going to schedule a one-shot session of one of my unplayed games. I'll put out an open invite and once I get enough people saying they'll play, we're good to go. Even better would be if I didn't always have to be the one running them. If you see something on this list and say "what? He's never played that?!" and you want to run it for me, you're my hero.

Here, for example, are some of the games I own that I have never played, just off the top of my head:

- Reign
- A Dirty World
- Mage: the Ascension
- Mage: the Sorcerer's Crusade
- Werewolf: the Wild West
- Werewolf: the Forsaken
- Vampire: the Masquerade
- Vampire: the Dark Ages
- Vampire: the Requiem (and Requiem for Rome)
- Changeling: the Dreaming
- Changeling: the Lost
- Promethean: the Created
- Hunter: the Reckoning
- Hunter: the Vigil
- Demon: the Fallen
- Wraith: the Oblivion
- Godlike
- Cyberpunk 203X (the one with the dolls)
- Shadowrun 4th Edition
- D6 Space/Adventure/Fantasy
- Buffy
- Sailor Moon
- Ghost Dog
- Tenchi Muyo
- Army of Darkness
- All Flesh Must be Eaten
- Witchcraft
- Terra Primate
- Freemarket
- Stargate SG-1
- Tibet
- Dreaming Cities
- Rifts
- Nobilis
- Ex Machina
- Mutants and Masterminds
- Runequest (Mongoose)
- Tribe 8
- Heavy Gear
- Jovian Chronicles
- Blue Planet
- Transhuman Space
- Eclipse Phase
- Exalted
- Legend of the Five Rings (2nd, 3rd, and Legend of the Burning Sands)
- Dust Devils
- carry
- Ganakagok
- Perfect
- A Taste for Murder

And the list goes on. I know there are maybe ten or twenty more.

Help me!

International Novel Writing Year

I'm a lazy person. I really am. I also have some ambitions that I never live up to. For example, I constantly say that I want to write but when the time comes I'll probably browse some forums and read some webcomics instead.

So I have created what I think will be a balm against this. Keep in mind that this thing is first and foremost for me. It might help you, but it's really made to help me. It's a tool.

That's International Novel Writing Year, as inspired by a combination of factors but also intended partly as a response to National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo (I have the pretty sweet acronym thing of INoWriteYeah)

The whole goal of it is this:

Write a 50,000 word novel in 365 days

And that's it!

Now I've done the math on this. If you want to coast through on the bare minimum you need to write about 137 words a day. That's every day, for a year. This post is going to be more than that! You probably send more in text messages and emails and post more in status updates than that a day. But that's the constant working way.

If we up the word count a little and go to 200 words a day, it will only take eight and a half months. That's right, you'll get 115 days off in the year during which you don't have to do squat. You don't have a daily quota, you can just relax.

200 words isn't very much.

The whole point of it, for me, isn't to treat writing as some sudden burst of energy and creativity. You don't jump up and down shouting EUREKA! Instead, you simply put in the work every day and you slowly but steadily write something and in the process become better at writing. This is about forming a habit and about letting writing soak into your bones.

I'm probably going to start this December 1st.

Who's with me?

CHARNEL

CHARNEL



There is fire in the distant hills and ash in the sky and the sound of the drums of the raiders come thudding over the horizon at night.

There are cruel gods, dark gods, dead and dying gods and they care not for your mortal concerns.

The dead rise from the earth and they prowl and they bite and they kill.

You must protect your village against all of this.

CHARNEL is a roleplaying game about survival in the darkest of fantasy settings.

And it doesn't exist yet.

Autonomous Zone - What is it?

Autonomous Zone started out as a vague mental urge to explore the namesake setting of William Gibson's 'Bridge Trilogy', which is about life on the derelict and inhabited remains of a bridge in San Francisco. It is what is termed an autonomous zone (funnily enough) and what that means is that it operates outside of the reach or control of any existing government or governing body. They exist independently (or perhaps in parallel of) the conventional economy, supply chain and infrastructure. The concept of Autonomous Zone as a game is also highly inspired by the comic series DMZ written by Brian Wood which deals with a second civil war in America which comes to a stalemate and creates a demilitarized zone out of the island of Mahattan, and it looks at the lives of the people still living there and unwilling or unable to get out.

My intent with the game is to explore a variety of issues, or to at least use them to inspire interesting stories. Stories about community, want and need, supply and demand, the cost of being self-sufficient or relying on others, of living outside of what is deemed 'normal society' and a whole bunch of other things.

I'll admit, originally it was supposed to be a slick postcyberpunk future with all kinds of neat people like hitmen and couriers and such. It can still be that! But I realised that instead of making other people play around in my derivative setting based on someone else's work, I would open it up to explore the whole concept of an Autonomous Zone. A large part of the game will be creating the characters you are going to play and you cannot create those characters without creating the structures and networks they depend on for survival.

So at the end of the day your zone can be a derelict bridge, a self-contained aquatic habitat, a space station or a hippy commune in the desert. What's important is how and why it is autonomous.

The Bones

Here is, roughly, how my game will work. I've only got another day or two to work on it anyway and this seems alright to me. I think I personally would enjoy playing this.

First of all, you set up.

SETUP

1. Draw a map of the area in which you live. It can be a spaceship or it can be a station, the difference is negligible but you should consider it. Either way, you are alone but you are able to have a rather large space if you wish. Add a few notes if you like, make it personal.

2. Write a bio of your astronaut. This doesn't have to be an epic life story, but simply enough to give you some flesh to get some hooks into, enough to give you a person that you can inhabit. You can write it like your astronaut wrote it themself, like it's a personnel file, like it's some sort of wikipedia entry or (and this is my favourite idea) like a class project about their dad that your astronaut's kid wrote. Make sure to give them a name you like! Think about why your character is alone out here and took this job.

3. Find somewhere to post multiple documents, videos and possibly audio recordings online. Somewhere people will be able to view, comment and reply. They don't necessarily have to be in the same place but you could perhaps create a blog to keep all of the varied links together. People will (hopefully, if they enjoy this game and enjoy participating with people playing it) send you videos and messages, but don't read or view them before the end of the game. After all, it's only a single player thing so you shouldn't engage with the outside world. It breaks character!

4. Note down, somewhere (publicly or privately, your choice) the levels of your three gauges, which are Sanity, Health and Happiness. They all start at Level 10 but will fluctuate throughout the game.

And that's all the setup for now. Oh and you'll need a deck of cards that you can keep to yourself and not have disturbed.



The Game Proper

G is a simple enough game to play. It's divided up into 52 turns, each of which represents one week of time passing for your astronaut. Most of the turns will be relatively uneventful. They should not take you long either, although that depends on how long you take to write a journal entry or record a video or something like that. After all, you'll be doing it each turn. Each turn is divided into two parts. The first part is Stuff Happens and the second is Create Something.


Stuff Happens

In this phase, you flip over the top card of the deck. When you do, you're looking at two things. First is the colour, second is the value of the card.

Red Cards represent an overall good week for your astronaut whereas Black Cards represent a negative and bad one.

The value of the card is how much it has effected the mood and disposition of your astronaut. Face cards have a value of 10, except under certain circumstances that I will explain.

Aces are Incidents and are also different.

If the card is neither an Ace nor a face card that meets certain conditions, you get a number of shifts based on the value of it. A shift is changing the value of one of your Gauges by 1. Whether this is up or down depends on the colour of the card. This means that if the card is red, you have Up-Shifts equal to the value of the card. If the card is Red and has a value of 8, for example, you may distribute 8 Up-Shifts among your gauges in any way you wish, each Up-Shift increasing the value of that particular gauge by 1. If the card is black, you have Down-Shifts and have to reduce your gauges equal to the value of the card.

The maximum value of each gauge is 10. If all of them are at 10 and you have Up-Shifts left, any extras are lost. If you have Up-Shifts and any of your gauges are below 10, you must use them on those gauges. You cannot deliberately assign them to a gauge that's at maximum.

The minimum value of each gauge is 0. If all of them are at 0 and you have any Down-Shifts left, any extras are lost. If all of them are at 0 and you have Down-Shifts left, any extras are lost. If you have Down-Shifts and any of your gauges are above 0, you must use them on those gauges. You cannot deliberately assign them to a gauge that's at minimum.

So that's what happens if you draw a non-face card. You spread the shifts amongst your gauges.

If you draw an Ace, you suffer an Incident. I'll go into some more detail about that in a moment.
If you draw a Jack and one of your gauges is below 5, you suffer an Incident. Otherwise it simply has a value of 10 and applies shifts as normal.
If you draw a Queen and two of your gauges are below 5, you suffer an Incident. Otherwise it simply has a value of 10 and applies shifts as normal.
If you draw a King and all three of your gauges are below 5, you suffer an Incident. Otherwise it simply has a value of 10.

When you suffer an Incident, you choose one of your gauges that has a value above 0 and you reduce it to 0 immediately. No other shifts happen this turn. When you Create Something, you must discuss and describe the Incident instead of or as well as whatever else.

Just to make it clear, the colour of an Ace makes no difference and if you meet the conditions for a Face Card causing an Incident, their colour doesn't matter anymore either.



Create Something

This part of the game is simple enough. You 'Create Something' and put it in a place that others can see it. You are creating the public record of your astronaut's one year mission. You may create what you wish, but here are some suggestions. Always remember to keep in mind the events of the turn, how your gauges have changed and how that has changed your astronaut. 10 is flying high, 0 is rock bottom, everything else is variable.

A Video: Record a video that's either some kind of 'video journal' or a message to someone back home. It doesn't have to be particularly long, just long enough for you to say what you want to say that day.

Designer's Intent Challenge: Record no fewer than 5 videos through the course of this game. It's a unique and interesting medium.

A Journal Entry: Write a journal entry in your astronaut's journal. Describe feelings, events that have happened, memories, thoughts. All sorts of things.

A Dream: Write about a dream you had (which of course you invent wholesale). Feel free to include outlandish elements, people from the astronaut's history, that kind of thing. Be creative with this one. It's a chance to step outside the normal logic of the game and to give some sort of insight into the concerns of the astronaut.



And uh, that's it. That's my game. That's how you play it.

Some questions for specific feedback:

- Would you enjoy playing this game?
- Is there enough 'management' or 'manipulation' of the gauges?
- Is it too arbitrary?

Turns

G uses a series of turns. More specifically a game runs for 52 turns, because there are 52 weeks in a year and, well, each turn is a week. That's why the year without human contact works for me, it's enough time to carve it up into a bunch of turns but not, y'know, ludicrously long.

It's my intent that a turn only takes a few minutes at most but that the player doesn't have to take any more than one at a time. So I could play this in a few hours or over the course of a week or I could take one turn every week for 52 weeks if I really wanted. There's no hurry or rush or schedule.

Each turn involves two things.

The first is that either something happens or nothing happens. That probably doesn't make sense. What I mean is that either it's an uneventful week and you're bored and lonely and all that stuff. Or it's a week where you're scared you're going to die and there are things going wrong, some sort of major problem. There should be enough boring weeks that you wish something would happen. The things that happen should be terrible enough that you wish for nothing again.

The second is that you produce something. You journal or you video or you record a dream you had or you do something of the sort. Each week you do this so by the end of the game you have 52 individual items that map and record and express the mental state of your astronaut.

The turns (and inherently the game) must guide and inspire these two elements of each turn while still allowing creative freedom.