Musing around

[aesmael]

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

On the way home from work I somehow had an idea for a role-playing campaign. The concept is rather simple: the villain has stolen the abstraction of narrative imperative and is using this to reshape global civilisation to her vision with the force of historical inevitability. The task faced by the player characters is to succeed in sufficiently extravagant and difficult endeavours that they convince the setting it is actually they who are its primary heroes and narrative drivers, this being the only way to wrest control of narrative imperative from the villain.

The idea is that in aggregate the population must bow to statistics and cannot escape the forces the villain wields, but individuals could be outliers. (at which point we stop pretending to make mathematical sense, but that's okay because we're using a setting where narrative is a force of nature)

Comments

[coniferous_you]

I have a friend who only ever designed meta role-playing games, which were kind of designed to appease his writer friends. One in particular that I recall is his desert that was filled in (i.e., built) by the words of storytellers. He would love this, which reminds me that we haven't spoken lately. That being said, I've never played his games - I was just a sounding board. I've come to associate role-playing with my youngest sister and I guess there was a phase where that made things off-limits and it never connected for me.

But I say do it with some people, and then post the storyline for your international readers!