robotnik2004 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
robotnik2004) wrote2008-05-28 04:02 pm
robotnik2004) wrote2008-05-28 04:02 pm
Entry tags:
Flying Contest
I opened up my LiveJournal client to write about something else this afternoon and found this mostly finished post from a year ago, I think. I'm so out of practice on these Games I'd Like To-style posts anyway, rather than delete it or let it languish until such time as I get around to cleaning it up, I'mo just pull the trigger and post as is:
(Post title is, as is so often the case, an inside joke amusing only to me and maybe my older sister.)
... I'm not very good at keeping up with the gaming fora / diaspora these days. ... given that I haven't gamed in nearly two years [no longer true, but that's another story], even keeping up as much as I do is probably kind of pathetic. Still, by some kind of osmosis I became aware that the Forge? Story Games? Somebody Else? recently held an alternate setting contest for indie rpgs. That is, a contest where people submitted alternate settings for existing games. Why this is a boss idea: indie scene has sometimes (not always) been suspicious of setting design, even as it valorizes system. But there's no intrinsic reason, imho, why the two great tastes of setting and indie games can't go together. So here are my entries to the contest. In the spirit of fair play, and of missing the point entirely, I've handicapped myself in three ways:
1. These settings are all for games I have neither played, read, nor even laid eyes on [also no longer true]. So I may in fact be totally off base about how they work or what they're about.
2. The contest ended a couple of months [now over a year] ago. (A kind of Arabian Muslims-vs.-Crusaders port for Polaris won.)
3. I didn't actually enter it.
Hot City
Does Cold City count as an indie game? Don't know, don't care. Secret monster hunting in grimy Cold War Berlin, with trust and betrayal mechanics borrowed from Paranoia and The Mountain Witch, is a kind of nifty that pushes all my buttons. If I was still in Boston, you better believe we'd have played this by now. You really oughtn't mess with a premise as splendid as this, but then, I've never met a laser I didn't want to shark. So my Cold City remix is Hot City: secret monster hunting in present-day Baghdad. Another war torn, occupied city. Another secret police force. Another set of monsters hiding in the shadows. Declare-esque Djinn, the ghosts of Saddam's terror palaces, CIA black science monstrosities. As in Cold City, the players are a kind of international police force, riven by prejudice and mistrust. Instead of coming from the powers occupying Germany, they could be Americans, Brits, Sunnis, and Shi'ites (some other mix? maybe Americans, Europeans, Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs)
Yes, the game would immediately thrust you into all sorts of uncomfortable moral and political places. But that's why I'd want to do it. Berlin 1950 is safe for us to play with in a way that Baghdad 2007 isn't. The passage of time insulates us from the Cold War quagmire, and no matter how grey of a Cold City game the morality gets, the Nazi shadow that is such a big part of the setting means there's almost always a baddie everyone can agree on. Hot City takes down those safety nets. I've actually wanted to run an Iraq game since the current war began. (With people I know and trust, of course, with people who buy into the premise ahead of time, with people who don't have cousins and sisters and buddies stationed overseas.) Because the war troubles me, and a game is a great way of researching and wrestling with questions that trouble me. (eg: Is rock music revolutionary or just a commodity? Is America a lunatic charnel house or the home of the free and the brave? Can gaming make people better friends or is it just for dysfunctional weirdos?) Polysemous game of clashing perspectives and agendas and moralities as a way exploring (if not making sense of) today's terrible war.
Zorcerer of Zeuss
Everybody has good things to say about![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chadu's Zorcerer of Zo. As with Cold City, I haven't read it, but I understand it's Chad's patented PDQ system applied to a kind of Oz-Narnia mashup. Just the thing for stories of asthmatic Edwardian urchins transported into swotty realms of monkey flying and Turkish delight. But here I propose swapping out L. Frank Baum or C.S. Lewis for the good doctor of anapestic tetrameter, Dr. Seuss.
The Seussiverse is both fun and frightening: excellent, uncharted territory for an atomic age fairy tale game. Picture non-Euclidean architecture (in fact, picture a Seussian dungeon crawl!), with furry sort-of-people playing brobdignagian musical instruments, probing hands on long jointed tickle-sticks, and wise old men sharing interconnected beards. Bring your whisper-ma-phone and your 500 hats. From the Desert of Drize to the Bungle-bung Bridge to the mythical city of Solla Sollew, there are wonders to explore and dangers to meet. Here the Yooks and the Zooks make endless war, there Floobooberbabooberbubs float serenely in Lake Floobooberbaboo. Wockets lurk in every pocket and Yertle stacks his minions towards the sky. Fear the Once-ler, don't step in the Oobleck, and avoid the clutches of Dr. T.
Guardians of Smoke
An Esoterrorists/Fulminata mashup, [redacted, as I may yet do something with this], but while I'm on the subject, can anyone tell me if the Guardians of Smoke are real?iuppiteroptmax's Fulminata (which I have read) features the Custatores Fumari (sp?) "Guardians of Smoke" as a kind of Roman secret police. Google reveals nothing, so I'm inclined to think it's a creation for the game, but I could have just spelled the Latin wrong.
Best Disney Princess Friends
This wasbluegargantua's idea, not mine, but it's awesome :Disney Princesses as setting/characters for the Best Friends rpg. Why don't they make eye contact?
My OCD requires me to come up with a fifth, but I'm sort of blanking. Sincechadu is a mensch, I'll give you a two-fer on his game, cribbed from a cool essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review: [http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2006/spring/heer-little-nemo-comicsland/]
Zorcerer of Zlumberland
As in Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay's comics masterpiece. A loose contemporary of Baum's Oz, Slumberland is at once darker and sharper in its funhouse reflection of the Gilded Age:
Slumberland even had slaves, a profession recently abolished in the daytime America. There were other signs that Slumberland was hardly an ideal egalitarian society, including the rough treatment meted out to African “jungle imps.” ... Unlike the daytime republic governed by President Theodore Roosevelt, Slumberland was ruled over by King Morpheus [Sandman crossover?], a Jove-like patriarch whose furrowed brow and Old Testament beard commanded respect.
Slumberland ... abounded with butterflies large enough to umbrella you during a rainstorm, a giant turkey that gobbled up houses for Thanksgiving, a glass princess who shattered if you kissed her too passionately, carriages that were pulled along by horse-sized rabbits, and airships that could carry you to Mars. ... The red planet turned out to be ruled by a ruthless capitalist who owned not just every square inch of property, but even the air. Polluted by industrial emissions, populated by genetically modified monstrosities, and papered over with gaudy ads, Mars was the ultimate corporate dystopia. The poor Martians had to pay for the privilege of breathing.
(Post title is, as is so often the case, an inside joke amusing only to me and maybe my older sister.)
... I'm not very good at keeping up with the gaming fora / diaspora these days. ... given that I haven't gamed in nearly two years [no longer true, but that's another story], even keeping up as much as I do is probably kind of pathetic. Still, by some kind of osmosis I became aware that the Forge? Story Games? Somebody Else? recently held an alternate setting contest for indie rpgs. That is, a contest where people submitted alternate settings for existing games. Why this is a boss idea: indie scene has sometimes (not always) been suspicious of setting design, even as it valorizes system. But there's no intrinsic reason, imho, why the two great tastes of setting and indie games can't go together. So here are my entries to the contest. In the spirit of fair play, and of missing the point entirely, I've handicapped myself in three ways:
1. These settings are all for games I have neither played, read, nor even laid eyes on [also no longer true]. So I may in fact be totally off base about how they work or what they're about.
2. The contest ended a couple of months [now over a year] ago. (A kind of Arabian Muslims-vs.-Crusaders port for Polaris won.)
3. I didn't actually enter it.
Hot City
Does Cold City count as an indie game? Don't know, don't care. Secret monster hunting in grimy Cold War Berlin, with trust and betrayal mechanics borrowed from Paranoia and The Mountain Witch, is a kind of nifty that pushes all my buttons. If I was still in Boston, you better believe we'd have played this by now. You really oughtn't mess with a premise as splendid as this, but then, I've never met a laser I didn't want to shark. So my Cold City remix is Hot City: secret monster hunting in present-day Baghdad. Another war torn, occupied city. Another secret police force. Another set of monsters hiding in the shadows. Declare-esque Djinn, the ghosts of Saddam's terror palaces, CIA black science monstrosities. As in Cold City, the players are a kind of international police force, riven by prejudice and mistrust. Instead of coming from the powers occupying Germany, they could be Americans, Brits, Sunnis, and Shi'ites (some other mix? maybe Americans, Europeans, Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs)
Yes, the game would immediately thrust you into all sorts of uncomfortable moral and political places. But that's why I'd want to do it. Berlin 1950 is safe for us to play with in a way that Baghdad 2007 isn't. The passage of time insulates us from the Cold War quagmire, and no matter how grey of a Cold City game the morality gets, the Nazi shadow that is such a big part of the setting means there's almost always a baddie everyone can agree on. Hot City takes down those safety nets. I've actually wanted to run an Iraq game since the current war began. (With people I know and trust, of course, with people who buy into the premise ahead of time, with people who don't have cousins and sisters and buddies stationed overseas.) Because the war troubles me, and a game is a great way of researching and wrestling with questions that trouble me. (eg: Is rock music revolutionary or just a commodity? Is America a lunatic charnel house or the home of the free and the brave? Can gaming make people better friends or is it just for dysfunctional weirdos?) Polysemous game of clashing perspectives and agendas and moralities as a way exploring (if not making sense of) today's terrible war.
Zorcerer of Zeuss
Everybody has good things to say about
chadu's Zorcerer of Zo. As with Cold City, I haven't read it, but I understand it's Chad's patented PDQ system applied to a kind of Oz-Narnia mashup. Just the thing for stories of asthmatic Edwardian urchins transported into swotty realms of monkey flying and Turkish delight. But here I propose swapping out L. Frank Baum or C.S. Lewis for the good doctor of anapestic tetrameter, Dr. Seuss.The Seussiverse is both fun and frightening: excellent, uncharted territory for an atomic age fairy tale game. Picture non-Euclidean architecture (in fact, picture a Seussian dungeon crawl!), with furry sort-of-people playing brobdignagian musical instruments, probing hands on long jointed tickle-sticks, and wise old men sharing interconnected beards. Bring your whisper-ma-phone and your 500 hats. From the Desert of Drize to the Bungle-bung Bridge to the mythical city of Solla Sollew, there are wonders to explore and dangers to meet. Here the Yooks and the Zooks make endless war, there Floobooberbabooberbubs float serenely in Lake Floobooberbaboo. Wockets lurk in every pocket and Yertle stacks his minions towards the sky. Fear the Once-ler, don't step in the Oobleck, and avoid the clutches of Dr. T.
Guardians of Smoke
An Esoterrorists/Fulminata mashup, [redacted, as I may yet do something with this], but while I'm on the subject, can anyone tell me if the Guardians of Smoke are real?
iuppiteroptmax's Fulminata (which I have read) features the Custatores Fumari (sp?) "Guardians of Smoke" as a kind of Roman secret police. Google reveals nothing, so I'm inclined to think it's a creation for the game, but I could have just spelled the Latin wrong.Best Disney Princess Friends
This was
bluegargantua's idea, not mine, but it's awesome :Disney Princesses as setting/characters for the Best Friends rpg. Why don't they make eye contact?My OCD requires me to come up with a fifth, but I'm sort of blanking. Since
chadu is a mensch, I'll give you a two-fer on his game, cribbed from a cool essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review: [http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2006/spring/heer-little-nemo-comicsland/]Zorcerer of Zlumberland
As in Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay's comics masterpiece. A loose contemporary of Baum's Oz, Slumberland is at once darker and sharper in its funhouse reflection of the Gilded Age:
Slumberland even had slaves, a profession recently abolished in the daytime America. There were other signs that Slumberland was hardly an ideal egalitarian society, including the rough treatment meted out to African “jungle imps.” ... Unlike the daytime republic governed by President Theodore Roosevelt, Slumberland was ruled over by King Morpheus [Sandman crossover?], a Jove-like patriarch whose furrowed brow and Old Testament beard commanded respect.
Slumberland ... abounded with butterflies large enough to umbrella you during a rainstorm, a giant turkey that gobbled up houses for Thanksgiving, a glass princess who shattered if you kissed her too passionately, carriages that were pulled along by horse-sized rabbits, and airships that could carry you to Mars. ... The red planet turned out to be ruled by a ruthless capitalist who owned not just every square inch of property, but even the air. Polluted by industrial emissions, populated by genetically modified monstrosities, and papered over with gaudy ads, Mars was the ultimate corporate dystopia. The poor Martians had to pay for the privilege of breathing.
no subject
Just wanted to say
(Anonymous) 2008-08-03 12:37 pm (UTC)(link)thanks much
(Anonymous) 2008-09-24 04:58 am (UTC)(link)