Apparently I've given up on the whole "research aid, look at me be scholarly" thing, and am just putting up RPG-related stuff now. That said, here's the playset I finished writing up recently for Jason Morningstar's excellent rpg Fiasco. It's set in my most recent pet obsession, Yokohama Japan, during the treaty port era when everything was crazy.
Google docs destroys all my pretty formatting, but it's what I have to work with here.
I present: A Fiasco in 1865 Yokohama
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Walkers in The Witchery Way (RPG)
So this isn't what the blog's theoretically for, but I've been working on an RPG recently and I needed somewhere to post it anyway--so here goes.
Link to the Google Doc
In terms of game-feel and mechanics it owes a lot to Polaris, In a Wicked Age, Don't Rest Your Head, Dread, Apocalypse World, and the endless discussions about RPGs with my various excellent and similarly obsessed friends. I'm going for simple rules--perhaps too simple?--but I think it fits the atmosphere I'm trying to create for the game. And I'm trying to fight my overwhelming urge to map every detail out a la' Shadowrun.
Story-wise, I took a lot from Native American mythology, but am going for an ambiguous hyphenation between that and a sort of Middle-Eastern "cradle-of-civilization" feel. The goal of the game is flexibility, both for characters and for the kind of story--characters shift from one thing to another, characters' goals and motives in the game can just as easily be played by someone else in the inverse, that sort of thing. I like the idea of characters that are very fluid in limited terms but never change for good, never advance or increase, but just keep making new mistakes.
EDIT: So, I changed the rules a bit and streamlined/fleshed out things (I hope) in response to the critiques from Gamechef and various of my friends who looked it over. I'm also adding a decent bestiary and GM repository, to make it easier to kick-start a game.
Link to the Google Doc
In terms of game-feel and mechanics it owes a lot to Polaris, In a Wicked Age, Don't Rest Your Head, Dread, Apocalypse World, and the endless discussions about RPGs with my various excellent and similarly obsessed friends. I'm going for simple rules--perhaps too simple?--but I think it fits the atmosphere I'm trying to create for the game. And I'm trying to fight my overwhelming urge to map every detail out a la' Shadowrun.
Story-wise, I took a lot from Native American mythology, but am going for an ambiguous hyphenation between that and a sort of Middle-Eastern "cradle-of-civilization" feel. The goal of the game is flexibility, both for characters and for the kind of story--characters shift from one thing to another, characters' goals and motives in the game can just as easily be played by someone else in the inverse, that sort of thing. I like the idea of characters that are very fluid in limited terms but never change for good, never advance or increase, but just keep making new mistakes.
EDIT: So, I changed the rules a bit and streamlined/fleshed out things (I hope) in response to the critiques from Gamechef and various of my friends who looked it over. I'm also adding a decent bestiary and GM repository, to make it easier to kick-start a game.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
So hi.
The theory of this blog, at the moment, is to make a research resource archive (tongue twister) targeted vaguely towards college and up and to give us a forum to kick around ideas.
"We" are three undergraduates studying American history, math (computability theory and reverse math), and neuroscience with a minor in computer science. So there should be a wide variety of topics floating around.
So, I'm vaguely obsessed with video/oral-history right now, partly due to work. My focus in history is mostly on urban history, particularly Chicago. There's a lot of great material in film and video on Chicago, most of it very underrated. Below are a couple of sites I've been hanging out on a lot lately and would recommend, particularly since they have a lot of information that would still be useful for broader research.
The HistoryMakers
An Chicago-based oral history archive composed of interviews with African Americas from around the country. It's broken up by categories (ScienceMaker, LawMaker, that kind of thing).
You have to register to use the site, because it's still in a testing phase, but they don't email you about it and you only have to answer a couple of questions about why you're interested. They have a lot more material online in written biographies than they do in interviews, but there's a lot more information in the interviews. What you see is what you get with this site, as they haven't yet opened up their physical archive yet.
The HistoryMakers
MediaBurn
So in the late 1960s the advent of portable video cameras sparked a movement of independent video makers in Chicago. Many of them were politically motivated, though a lot were also just about aesthetic creativity. MediaBurn is an archive of video clips made during that time, almost all by independent artists.
Incidentally, the site took its name from a counterculture event in which a guy drove a burning Cadillac through a mountain of televisions, a clip that is well worth watching. MediaBurn is run by a bunch of former members of the indie video movement, so it's very well-cared for. Chicago was having an interesting time, to say the least, during this period, and MediaBurn has some pretty unique information about that time.
MediaBurn
StoryCorps
StoryCorps is an interesting one--it's an oral history project that's basically open to anyone who wants to record a clip. It's based around two people who are close, say father and son or two best friends, doing an interview with each other. They give people who do the interviews a CD of it and broadcast segments on NPR as well as posting a lot of them on the site.
The clips tend to be short, and they range from poignant human-interest stuff to pretty historically interesting recollections, such as one man's witnessing of the Stonewall riot.
StoryCorps
National Visionary Leadership Project
It's not quite as thorough or wide in scope as The HistoryMakers, but it's similar in a lot of ways. They also have some content the HMs don't.
The Visionary Project
"We" are three undergraduates studying American history, math (computability theory and reverse math), and neuroscience with a minor in computer science. So there should be a wide variety of topics floating around.
So, I'm vaguely obsessed with video/oral-history right now, partly due to work. My focus in history is mostly on urban history, particularly Chicago. There's a lot of great material in film and video on Chicago, most of it very underrated. Below are a couple of sites I've been hanging out on a lot lately and would recommend, particularly since they have a lot of information that would still be useful for broader research.
The HistoryMakers
An Chicago-based oral history archive composed of interviews with African Americas from around the country. It's broken up by categories (ScienceMaker, LawMaker, that kind of thing).
You have to register to use the site, because it's still in a testing phase, but they don't email you about it and you only have to answer a couple of questions about why you're interested. They have a lot more material online in written biographies than they do in interviews, but there's a lot more information in the interviews. What you see is what you get with this site, as they haven't yet opened up their physical archive yet.
The HistoryMakers
MediaBurn
So in the late 1960s the advent of portable video cameras sparked a movement of independent video makers in Chicago. Many of them were politically motivated, though a lot were also just about aesthetic creativity. MediaBurn is an archive of video clips made during that time, almost all by independent artists.
Incidentally, the site took its name from a counterculture event in which a guy drove a burning Cadillac through a mountain of televisions, a clip that is well worth watching. MediaBurn is run by a bunch of former members of the indie video movement, so it's very well-cared for. Chicago was having an interesting time, to say the least, during this period, and MediaBurn has some pretty unique information about that time.
MediaBurn
StoryCorps
StoryCorps is an interesting one--it's an oral history project that's basically open to anyone who wants to record a clip. It's based around two people who are close, say father and son or two best friends, doing an interview with each other. They give people who do the interviews a CD of it and broadcast segments on NPR as well as posting a lot of them on the site.
The clips tend to be short, and they range from poignant human-interest stuff to pretty historically interesting recollections, such as one man's witnessing of the Stonewall riot.
StoryCorps
National Visionary Leadership Project
It's not quite as thorough or wide in scope as The HistoryMakers, but it's similar in a lot of ways. They also have some content the HMs don't.
The Visionary Project
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