unWritten Continuum

Last night Greg and I played unWritten in a setting that Greg is developing for a comic book he’s working on… 

We started the game by talking about what we wanted to play. I said I wanted to play something inspired by Mouse Guard, a great graphic novel found here. Greg mentions his comic that was inspired by Mouse Guard, best described as, “The Secret of NIMH meets I Am Legend.” That sounded perfect. We decided on two pre-game rules: 1) There is nothing mystical, though forms of technology can be “interpreted” by the rats as being magic. 2) There is no rat to human translations. The time frame of the game is such that the rats are cognitively equal to humans, but, they haven’t yet develop literacy or any means of reading human text. So, this is the background we are started from…

Humans genetically modified rats to the point that the rats could have human-like cognitive capabilities. A “by-product” of this was their increased size to about 2½ or 3 feet tall, when standing on their hind legs, and an increased life-span, about 50 years. The humans have mysteriously disappeared, leaving the world, as we know it today, to the rats. Except, the rats don’t know who the humans were, or what happened to them. The main preoccupation of the rats is finding sustenance and resources and maintaining their shelters safe. The rats have not yet developed any form of agriculture or manufacturing at this time. They purely live by scavenging the remains of the humans. And, finally, our protagonists will be the second generation of these rats that have lived since the humans have died.

Here are the three opening cues we came up with from the previous conversation:

Intelligent Rats in a (ours) post-human world.

Tribes at war over sustenance & resources.

Did the gods gift this to us or abandon us?

These are the two protagonists we created:

Greg’s protagonist

Name: Wind

Role: Guardian of High Places

Physical Trait: Agile

Drive: Aspiration; Protect the Others

Drive: Inclination; Run After Mysteries

My protagonist

Name: Watcher

Role: Seeker of New Skies (scout)

Mental Trait: Custodian of Earth and Air (shaman skills)

Drive: Aspiration; To Find the Answers of our Past

Drive: Inclination; Being Abandoned, retreat to the depths

Before we actually began, we agreed that our tribes rats lived in a sky scraper in downtown Los Angeles. Their tribe is called the “Storm Seekers.” And, that we would be using the cinematic rules (once known as quickplay rules).

I’ll post the actual play next…

Last night Greg and I played unWritten using the quickplay con rules. Damn, it was good. Brendon, I wish you were there. You would have loved it.

I realized that the quickplay rules really gave a cinematic feel to the game. While the standard rules give a longer, more drawn out, “literary” feel to the story. So, from now I’m going to call the two types of rules: The Cinematic rule set and the Literary rule set.

The difference in the rules is that in the cinematic rules you only answer one question per chapter, which works out to 6 questions. Whereas, in the literary rules you are answering 9 questions. This doesn’t mean you can’t have cinematic, high action scenes in a game using literary rules. By changing the amount of questions that are being asked changes the pacing of the story that is being told. 

So I was listening to my girlfriend talk last night. And it hit me. I want to play a game that is like “The Matrix” meets “THX.” Yeah, that terrible Lucas movie from the early 70’s that I never saw. 

Here’s the premise.

A group of people, that know they’re in a virtual world with their “meat bodies” plugged in some where try to see what if it would be possible to leave the matrix and live out their existence in their meat bodies. They don’t know that “before” people lived in their meat bodies all of the time. So, as they try to figure this out the system sends programs to try and stop them. However, these programs function like the robot cops from THX. They’re totally inept. In the end, some of them have to come to terms with the fact they aren’t people but programs, while others are able to escape. The ones that escape, well, they die. After who know how long of just sitting in a vat of their own excrement, they can’t live unattached from the system…

Well, maybe that doesn’t sound to good.

Well, not actually me. Paul Tevis started a play test of unWritten at Nerdly Beach Party, but they didn’t get a chance to finish it. Here is what he said… feed://afistfulofgames.blogspot.com/atom.xml

I finally got a play test report from Per and Pooka. It was awesome. They had good and bad things to say. I worked on both. My next play test copy should be out in about a week(?) I’ve been getting a lot of people contacting me about play testing it. I’m working on it, I’m working it.

Tonight I played unWritten with Josh R and Mark V. Dam it was good! I got a lot of great feedback, but the best thing I got out of it was Mark saying, “Every choice I was seemed natural. Nothing seemed contrived.” That’s not exactly what he said, but it’s close. So good. Now I need to make the little changes that, I believe, will make a big difference in the game. Like getting rid of crisis scenes. They don’t seem to play a part in the game anymore.Anyway. 

I just posted for some playtesters in the Forge and Story-Games…

I’ve been getting a few requests for playtesting unWritten. I’m excited about that. Soon I’ll have something ready for everybody.

So I’ve been editing and editing and editing my game. Like crazy. I write, then I edit, over and over. I’ll get it soon enough!

So, some fellas at Story-Games, inadvertently, challenged me to see if unWritten could produce a story akin to Modernist Literature. I’m going to playtest it this weekend. That will be my goal. Let’s see how unWritten handles that. I don’t think it can do free verse or poetry, but i do think it can do strange, mundane, and pessimistic.