Something Wicked: "Igor, more forelimbs!"
I rhapsodize about getting to invent settings from scratch, at Moon Design:
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There’s this about my writing career to date: I’ve always worked in worlds whose foundations were laid down by others, starting with Nexus the Infinite City, and moving on to the Secret War in Feng Shui, and then to the World of Darkness, and this and that. The few times I got to help build from scratch or take the lead in it…the project never got completed and released. So the chance to write a series of example campaigns and adventure hooks for Something Wicked is a new thing for me in my professional capacity, as opposed to being an individual GM inventing stuff purely for my own players.
Am I excited? I am!
The first part of the title of this post, by the way, comes from an early volume of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, in a sequence where he reviews the history of taxonomy schemes. As he notes, a bunch of the early ones were pretty much individual guys indulging their preoccupations with this or that feature of current and past life. One panel shows an early paleontologist working out his master plan for organizing species based on their forelimbs, and yelling to his assistant.
Now, in building new setting elements in existing worlds, we do ask ourselves questions like “Okay, what like this has been done before, and how do we make sure not to swipe from that and look all boring and derivative, and how do we make our stuff distinctive and interesting? What is there to do with this that others aren’t already doing, maybe better than we would?” There’s certainly room to innovate, and in fact it’s required to make one’s mark, but it’s always within the boundaries of having to fit with existing material and an overarching framework that others will be using after we’re done with the thing at hand.
In the case of Something Wicked, except for the Gloranthan bit, none of that applies, and it’s a blast for me. Ben and I quickly assembled a list of things we weren’t interested in doing because we feel they’ve been done more than adequately by others, and we hanker to do something that isn’t already in the literature.
Take cosmic horror. Mostly that’s represented in gaming by Lovecraftian material, and the huge majority of it is set in the 1920s-30s. There’s Delta Green for modern-day-ish action with governmental elements, and occasional exceptions like Our Lady of Sorrows, by Kevin Ross for Miskatonic River Press. So the field is wide open for me to do something contemporary, likely featuring some reasonably current speculative science, with people who have no particular power in the world, emphasizing the “right where you are sitting now, everything could change in your understanding and your boundaries would shrivel and blow away” aspect of the cosmic horror tradition.
Or take survival horror. I’m sure there’s someone there hungering for yet another zombie setting, but it isn’t Ben or me. All Flesh Must Be Eaten is a really, really good game, even the parts written by Ben. :) (Actually, we got acquainted on the basis of fan mail I sent him after running the adventure he did for the GM’s screen.) A bunch of other horror games have fine support for zombie action. We will too, but “no zombies” was just about our first setting decision. There’s so many thing that could bear survival attempt that have been touched only a little or not at all in gaming to pick from! Mega-eruptions? Alien invasions? Horrors from cyberspace in the modern day? (The Shadowrun adventure book Renraku Shutdown remains, to my taste, one of the niftiest horror books in gaming.) Mole men? Gamma ray burster? Dunno yet, but I want people who get to this chapter to think that they haven’t seen this much in gaming but have seen related ideas in the news and inspiring fiction, so that they have source material out in the world at large to help flesh it out.
Then there’s gothic horror. There isn’t a lot of gothic in gaming these days, except for the amazingly high-quality work from the gang at Paizo for Ustalav in the world of Golarion. Rule of Fear is a fantastic country guide, and the Carrion Crown adventure path is, well, I’m looking forward to running it myself. They just plain nail it six ways from Sunday, and keep it up volume after volume. The World of Darkness isn’t particularly gothic these days, and while there’s a strain of it in Exalted‘s Age of Sorrows, it hasn’t been emphasized much for a while, either. There are some interesting moody small-press games like Annalise that can get very gothic, but when it comes to laid-out settings that aren’t in fantasy worlds, nope, precious little competition.
Which is good for me, because I loves me some gothic. The challenge is finding ways to fit in the gothic emphases on the neglected and obscured in the midst of a moving, advancing, churning present. But then the contemporary moments of gothic writers of days gone by were also pretty dynamic in lots of ways, and they found ways to work in pockets of the corrupted and corrupting past, so I’m sure that we’ll come up with something fun and decadent and strange for Something Wicked.
Stay tuned, as they say.
=-=-=-=-=
There’s this about my writing career to date: I’ve always worked in worlds whose foundations were laid down by others, starting with Nexus the Infinite City, and moving on to the Secret War in Feng Shui, and then to the World of Darkness, and this and that. The few times I got to help build from scratch or take the lead in it…the project never got completed and released. So the chance to write a series of example campaigns and adventure hooks for Something Wicked is a new thing for me in my professional capacity, as opposed to being an individual GM inventing stuff purely for my own players.
Am I excited? I am!
The first part of the title of this post, by the way, comes from an early volume of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, in a sequence where he reviews the history of taxonomy schemes. As he notes, a bunch of the early ones were pretty much individual guys indulging their preoccupations with this or that feature of current and past life. One panel shows an early paleontologist working out his master plan for organizing species based on their forelimbs, and yelling to his assistant.
Now, in building new setting elements in existing worlds, we do ask ourselves questions like “Okay, what like this has been done before, and how do we make sure not to swipe from that and look all boring and derivative, and how do we make our stuff distinctive and interesting? What is there to do with this that others aren’t already doing, maybe better than we would?” There’s certainly room to innovate, and in fact it’s required to make one’s mark, but it’s always within the boundaries of having to fit with existing material and an overarching framework that others will be using after we’re done with the thing at hand.
In the case of Something Wicked, except for the Gloranthan bit, none of that applies, and it’s a blast for me. Ben and I quickly assembled a list of things we weren’t interested in doing because we feel they’ve been done more than adequately by others, and we hanker to do something that isn’t already in the literature.
Take cosmic horror. Mostly that’s represented in gaming by Lovecraftian material, and the huge majority of it is set in the 1920s-30s. There’s Delta Green for modern-day-ish action with governmental elements, and occasional exceptions like Our Lady of Sorrows, by Kevin Ross for Miskatonic River Press. So the field is wide open for me to do something contemporary, likely featuring some reasonably current speculative science, with people who have no particular power in the world, emphasizing the “right where you are sitting now, everything could change in your understanding and your boundaries would shrivel and blow away” aspect of the cosmic horror tradition.
Or take survival horror. I’m sure there’s someone there hungering for yet another zombie setting, but it isn’t Ben or me. All Flesh Must Be Eaten is a really, really good game, even the parts written by Ben. :) (Actually, we got acquainted on the basis of fan mail I sent him after running the adventure he did for the GM’s screen.) A bunch of other horror games have fine support for zombie action. We will too, but “no zombies” was just about our first setting decision. There’s so many thing that could bear survival attempt that have been touched only a little or not at all in gaming to pick from! Mega-eruptions? Alien invasions? Horrors from cyberspace in the modern day? (The Shadowrun adventure book Renraku Shutdown remains, to my taste, one of the niftiest horror books in gaming.) Mole men? Gamma ray burster? Dunno yet, but I want people who get to this chapter to think that they haven’t seen this much in gaming but have seen related ideas in the news and inspiring fiction, so that they have source material out in the world at large to help flesh it out.
Then there’s gothic horror. There isn’t a lot of gothic in gaming these days, except for the amazingly high-quality work from the gang at Paizo for Ustalav in the world of Golarion. Rule of Fear is a fantastic country guide, and the Carrion Crown adventure path is, well, I’m looking forward to running it myself. They just plain nail it six ways from Sunday, and keep it up volume after volume. The World of Darkness isn’t particularly gothic these days, and while there’s a strain of it in Exalted‘s Age of Sorrows, it hasn’t been emphasized much for a while, either. There are some interesting moody small-press games like Annalise that can get very gothic, but when it comes to laid-out settings that aren’t in fantasy worlds, nope, precious little competition.
Which is good for me, because I loves me some gothic. The challenge is finding ways to fit in the gothic emphases on the neglected and obscured in the midst of a moving, advancing, churning present. But then the contemporary moments of gothic writers of days gone by were also pretty dynamic in lots of ways, and they found ways to work in pockets of the corrupted and corrupting past, so I’m sure that we’ll come up with something fun and decadent and strange for Something Wicked.
Stay tuned, as they say.