unWritten Continuum

I want my game book to have 3 actual plays. One for each Narrative Focus; dramatic, cinematic, and fantastic.

These are my ideas, tell me (again) what you think.

Dramatic,

I’d like to do some high fantasy, forgotten realms type setting, with characters that are dealing with diplomatic issues between two struggling nations or perhaps somethng that deals with a group of adventurers setting out to retrieve the great macguffin that will save the world. The story will be about the relationships that are built and fall apart during this process. mighty battles and death defying stunts will not be in the conflicts, those will be accepted cart blanche. The conflicts will be dealing with the relationships between the heroes and what happens on their journey… What happens when the musclebound barbarian goes into town and his lady love finds the wizard absolutely “charming.”

Cinematic

this game should be a starcraft like game. Imagine 3 societies against each other game. Each player represents a different society or faction.

Fantastic

The 3 bugs try to escape a mad scientists mad laboratory. I’m thinking modern day, in the mountains, we can have… wait, what if its mice, or ferrets, or rats… we’ll decide later, but you get the gist of the idea. Think “my life with master” meets “a bug’s life.” What do you think? Genius?

I hope this reaches the multitude of you.

I want the setting quesitions to create a situation that once complete you have a clear premise that…

“… it is designed to tell an incredibly powerful story from beginning to end…”

From Rob Donoghue’s blog I got this…

“… it is designed to tell an incredibly powerful story from beginning to end… Characters are striving to be human, and that is not a purely abstract idea. There are steps to go through, an arc to follow, and an endpoint which is poetically painful. Your presence drives men to destructive madness and blights the very earth. You have power, sure, but it is monstrous, and attempts to seek understanding or companionship run a decent chance of creating abominations that seek your destruction. In short - Hot.”

OK, so I want to get this reaction from the hero’s journey element in unWritten. But it isn’t worded in a way that supports this. And, because its settingless and premiseless I’m starting to wonder if it is possible…

Its time for me to answer the big 3.

1) What is your game about?

unWritten is about collaboratively creating the setting, the games premise, the characters, and a stories fiction which is contrained by the hero’s journey.

2) What do your characters do?

The characters… I’m not sure how to answer this question, because the game is settingless and premiseless the characters don’t have a specific focus until the players create these things…

3) What do the players do?

The players have two roles, the setting player and the acting player. The setting player frames scenes, plays the elements within it, and pushes conflicts based on the hero’s journey. The acting players interact with the scenes. At the end of each scene the role of the setting player moves to another player.

I’m trying to figure out how to build buzz for my game and Justin D. Jacobson designer of Passages asked in this thread why people aren’t buying his game. This is what i came up with based on the thread.

actual plays
theme = thematic purpose, how does it address its theme?
tag line (elevator pitch)
how is the game unique? What does it do?
situation generators?
use my blog!!!
keep price in the low $20’s, don’t go over $30.

Some of those are obvous, while others I struggle with. Like the tag line, or situation generators.

So any of you have any ideas of how to address these issues? can you come up with others I should consider?

[edit] There’s also this to consider.

I’ve had 3 playtests of unWritten in the past week. I’ve gotten great insights from all three, however, one of them was a terrible play experience.

The first one was with my son and girlfriend. My girlfriend is committed to hating RPG’s and my son compares everything to D&D… It was late, everyone was tired… it was terrible. But I figured out some things that I can do to streamline some of the more bulky processes, and I was able to identify somewhere in text where there was a problem… I didn’t fix it until I has some pretty indepth conversations with some friends from my regular gaming group that will be continuing.

The second was with my regular Saturday gaming group, Greg, Brendon, and I. The setting creation was amazing, however the play was lacking and I couldn’t figure out why until the third playtest…

The third playtest was with my other regular group, that as of today is no more… Bye Carla! Anyway, in this game we did a one shot and I realized that the hero’s journey mechanic wasn’t yet complete and there is one protagonist question that with a slight tweaking totally changes the answer it provieds. Which in both instances if they were implemented in my second game it would have made the game awesome!

I’ll post actual plays within a week.

So my girlfriend who “hates” gaming, my son who loves D&D and hack and slash games, and I starting developing a setting for an unWritten game we are going to start playing on Wednesday. This is the games premise…

An Inuit village struggles between tradition and joining the corporate fisheries that are taking their livelihood.

Now, we don’t know anything about the Inuit, corporate fisheries, or any struggles that may exist between them, but this, to me at least, seems really awesome. I can’t wait to start playing.

Well, I got most of my games. I didn’t get the heroquest game, and I chose to go for Shock! instead of shadowrun. Lets see how those turnout.

So I’ve started writing about unWritten on a couple of sites. Join the discussion if you can.

at NerdSoCal!

at story games!