The Dust Bowl

For eight years dust blew on the southern plains. It came in a yellowish-brown haze from the South and in rolling walls of black from the North. The simplest acts of life — breathing, eating a meal, taking a walk — were no longer simple. Children wore dust masks to and from school, women hung wet sheets over windows in a futile attempt to stop the dirt, farmers watched helplessly as their crops blew away.

This is utterly fascinating, and frankly, a bit terrifying. And it also raises an interesting set of considerations about how weather, geography, agriculture and policy can work together to create huge effects, socially, economically, and physically. As such, it makes for an instructive read for Gamesmasters and World Weavers. I have not yet played a game that involved the conditions of The Great Dust Bowl, but it is now firmly positioned in the Book of Possibilities.

Please to read: About The Dust Bowl

The Creative Enterprise

I think that at the bottom of RPGing generally is a desire to express one's creativity. That expression can take on a myriad of forms, including improvisational theater, artwork, story writing, rules creation, to name the ones that come to mind off the top of my head. I think it's one of the greatest art forms ever created. A game that incorporates so many other aspects of art. So our endeavour at LRPGSW has been to try to assess how to take our RPGs to the level of literary quality. What would be means by which this could be achieved. We are not saying that RPGs must be like literature, by the way, or follow any rules of literature - but only that whatever we produce will aspire to be at the same level of quality as great literature. That's the aim. As for how, we leave that to the members of the LRPGSW to figure out and hopefully achieve themselves.

To get to this mythic place I've proposed a number of means that I believe at the very least help to point in the right direction. Firstly reading great literature would be helpful. This includes those literary masterpieces that relate to the genre that the Gamesmaster and Players are interested in. For standard Fantasy RPGs that would include, most likely, "Lord of the Rings", "Conan the barbarian", "The Princes of Amber", "The Narnia Chronicles", and the like. If one wants to get fancy about it, you might include the source materials for the masters who created these works, which would of course include all works of Anglo-Saxon mythology, Arthurian Romances of the medieval age, and even the classic myths of the Greeks and other ancients. All of this makes for great source material, of course, but more importantly it infuses the Gamesmaster and Players with the mental space from which the concept of Adventure originated. That's got to be a good thing.

Other aspects that lend themselves toward a literary quality for world weaving might be to watch great films as well. Adventure films such as The Seven Samurai come to mind. Short, sweet, encapsulated stories that resemble in many ways incredibly well played RPG sessions. So one might gain inspiration in many pools.

There's also the possibility of focusing on the quality of one's world in the same way that a craftsman would focus on the quality of the work of art he is creating. With a commitment to quality one can achieve great things. But it takes work, perseverance, and an eye toward continuous improvement over time.

Well, these are some thoughts. Oh yes, another one might be taking one's world in different directions than simply role playing them. Perhaps the world's adventures might make a good book, or film, or play? Or work of art? Also to be considered.

The basic gist of it is that one can make their RPG experience a journey fully and completely through all the realms of art, and be a successful RPGer and artist, both.

Coming soon... art-video experiment #2: "Samauri Dreaming"

Terra Nova Blog

For those interested in the idea of a PhD in RolePlayingology here is a group of PhD researchers studying Massive Online Role Playing Games from a variety of academic angles.

Recent titles include:

Dec 03, 2006 The Trouble with "Addiction"
Dec 02, 2006 Games with a purpose
Dec 01, 2006 The History of Virtual Worlds
Nov 27, 2006 Meaning, Games, and Bureaucracy
Nov 26, 2006 Anshe reaches $1 Million
Nov 20, 2006 Endgames and Expansions

This is an academic bunch so the papers tend to be, well, a bit dry perhaps. However for those interested in academic perspectives on MORPGs this is a must read site.

moving pictures

Here is a vblog of my innermost thoughts on elthos in moving pictures. I do hope you enjoy this, rough-draftish as it may be. :)

Elthos RPG Progress Report

Elthos Development
Good news.

I have crafted the database and the class structures and designed a helpful utility that is saving me a rather enormous amount of programming and development time. So I do expect that I shall soon have a great little product to show which will work with the Elthos ODS rules hand-in-hand as a web application. It will be a no frills operation to start with, but will provide the basic set of useful functions, from rolling and storing characters to working out the attack vs. defense matrix for the players per encounter. So that’s handy stuff. Personally, I could not be more delighted with the project’s progress. I am far ahead of where I had hoped I’d be as of tonight. Of course, there’s still a long way ahead to get what I’m truly aiming for, but I’m happy to report steady progress is being made, and will tend to accelerate for me thanks to the Gen-Tool I created to give me a better shot at making my targets. Faster code, better code. Much faster. Much better. Special Thanks, David Kahn, for some really solid computer programming concepts along the way.

:)
Mark

LRPGSW Meeting Notes - Nov 8, 2006

Title: LRPGSW Meeting Notes Nov 8, 2006



Excerpt...

We then wandered into my current favorite topic, Shamanism and Gamesmastering. I kind of went around the mulberry bush on the topic, explaining what I mean by it and how it would apply to Role Playing Games. Is the Gamesmaster really a form of Shaman, taking the Players on a group journey through their 'OtherWorld' as their kind of Spirit Guide, I ask? If so then we speculated that the GM might make out for the OtherWorld him or herself to find the divine inner-stories with which to return and bring with them into the game; a kind of shaman's quest for GMing source material, perhaps? We also touched briefly on the psychoanalytic possibilities, and I explained a bit about how and why I created the Elthos Cosmological System – to aid in story telling by providing a comprehensive series of Symbolic-Shamanistic correspondences. So it is important for the Gamesmaster to understand the substance and meaning of their World, and the stories they wish to reveal from within it should be meaningful intrinsically, regardless of how the Players behave. Yet we agreed that Perfect Gamesmastering is an art whose time has not yet come. I proffered the idea of the Enlightened Gamesmaster, which I believe is alluded to but not quite achieved in 'The Glass Bead Game' by Herman Hesse, and believe is as possible as a Zen Monk is possible. It's simply something that has not yet been done. Yet Role Playing Games are really so new and the art has not yet had time to catch up with the comprehensive multi-faceted effort involved with running a Great RPG.

"Fire in the Head: Perilous Journies"

Quoted from Tom Cowan's book, "Fire in the Head"

The Grail represents a private, personal journey for enlightenment and power. It is fundamentally a shaman's quest, not the path for Catholic saints. Relying on visionary experience and miraculous/magical adventures with otherworldly beings of ambiguous morality, the seeker enters a world too loosely structured for the rigid dichotomies that were fast characterizing Christian thinking. The Grail world contains shape shifting powers, were friendly foes become foe-like friends. It is true the world of the unconscious, where the conscious mind's binary categories fail to explain reality. Black and white, good and bad, ally and enemy, sacred and profane, are not easily distinguished. The Grail is a cup, not a box. There are no separate corners for saints and sinners. On the contrary, the Grail, like its pagan antecedent, the Cauldron of Mystery, contains a heady, hallucinatory brew of seekers, fools, risk-takers, failures, and fighters. Its healing power satisfies each person in terms of what he or she needs most for self-discovery. If we dare to look into the round, spherical vessel of the Grail, we become, like its contents, stirred, mixed, and intermingled, losing our sense of separateness. For ultimately, that is the lesson of self-discovery; we are not separate, but part of the whole.

Thought provoking, even. While I differ with Tom on some metaphysical conclusions that he draws, from a Gamesmaster's point of view this all makes for fascinating source material. I see entire campaign worlds in this one paragraph. For this reason I recommend "Fire in the Head" for Gamesmasters. The ideas percolating through the work are fascinating indeed, believe about them what you may.