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…
This part:
“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.”
Implies a specific character role in the game. If the group played a game set in a library, and all the characters are library patrons or employees in the modern, ordinary world, I don’t think having characters that are monstrous and blight the earth would be possible.
However, this part:
“There are steps to go through, an arc to follow, and an endpoint which is poetically painful.”
Is possible in many games that aren’t comedic (or at least only comedic). In a universal game, this is hard to emulate. Unless you have specific mechanics that facilitate narration that leads to these kinds of circumstances in play, which is usually because a game has some kind of built-in path or story structure that can lead to this, you’re not going to get this in every game.
Those things on Rob’s journal are very specific and I don’t think lend themselves to a ruleset that can emulate any kind of setting, lighthearted, serious, or whatever.
I understand, I was going more for the visceral reaction he got from it. Not specifically what “the life and times” of a monster.
What I like about the captions you quoted was the intensity.
Well yeah, intensity is great. See my post about characters in the top post for today (the top post for the day so far, at least).