Celebration and Dragons of the Yellow Sea
So a while back, in December 2005, I had posted "What makes a good celebration?" -- where I discussed the idea of making a good celebration and applying that to RPGs.
I now turn back to that in light of some of the revisiting of Ron Edward's GNS theory -- notably Chris Lehrich's "A GNS Question", plus some Story Games threads including complaints about jargon and Forge Glossary help; and also the Knife Fight threads (only open to members) on "GNS Theory in Wikipedia" and Ben Lehman's "To Understand Simulationism, Study Simulationism".
So partly as an extension of Chris Lehrich's excellent Ritual Discourse in RPGs, the concept of RPGs as celebration is one of the more interesting ideas to come out of the Forge, I think. I made a Celebration / Celebrationism entry in the Theory Topics wiki.
Construction vs. Deconstruction
One of the key points about my first post was the celebration shouldn't feel deconstructive. That is an important point for me. There is a big difference between a constructive work and a deconstructive work. For example, I would say that Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miracleman series were deconstructive of superheroes. Reading them, the reader was struck by the contrast with what the superhero conventions are -- they expose and criticize the tropes of the superhero comic genre. On the other hand, Kurt Busiek's Astro City is celebratory. It is still transformative of earlier superhero comics, but it works more by building on what is there and transforming it. It introduces new ideas wrapped in the symbolism of superheroes, using the older tropes to introduce new things rather than dwelling on the older tropes themselves.
So a good celebration is constructive -- it builds upon what is there. This doesn't leave the object of celebration untouched. You don't leave a wedding feeling the same way about the relationship. You don't leave a birthday feeling like you did about the previous year.
Dragons of the Yellow Sea
I would like the ongoing Dragons of the Yellow Sea campaign to be a celebration of Korean culture. This is tricky, because there is a lot of elements of 19th century Korea that we don't want to celebrate -- the Confucian repression of women by men, and of commoners by yangban; as well as the insularity that ultimately proved nearly self-destructive. For example, in a deconstructive mode, I could have some scathing things to say about how the story of Chunhyang has the appearance of celebrating women, but really is enforcing women's place as chattel.
I would prefer a constructive approach, though. I'd like to create a positive, pulpy page-turner -- which isn't necessarily historically accurate but still at least draws in and celebrates Korean culture. What does that mean? Well, to some degree it means learning aspects of culture. However, it is more than that. Teaching culture can easily be dry and critical, and the students learn facts that they internalize as facts about other people. In a celebration, however, you join in the thing that you are celebrating. You will internalize what you learn differently than if you treated it as something you are a part of.
Now, I'm not trying for a masterpiece -- just a pulpy adventure saga, but one that is distinctly Korean rather than just American pulp with a veneer of Korean history. This is still difficult, I think. Some of my thoughts on the matter have been:
Campaign Update
We just did the second session of the campaign on Friday. It's going pretty well, I think. There are brief session summaries out on the wiki. The first two episodes were a fairly self-contained adventure, where a royal investigator came searching for the culprit who had killed the crew of a ship bearing goods for the magistrate of Jeju, and taken off with the crew.
One of the techniques that went over pretty well was assigning of nicknames. Within the Korean sources that I've read, people are generally referred to by their family names -- not their given names. This can be confusing, though, since there will often be several people with the same nickname. It's common to refer to people by their position, but also common for people to have nicknames. So we assigned nicknames to each of our characters. During the first session -- which was after the character generation session and finishing touches to the characters by email -- each player described their character, and then everyone else discussed and assigned them a nickname. The nicknames were often distinctly not what the character assigned would want, like "Princess" Song.
We're still struggling a bit with the rules, in particular that people are having trouble deciding what their Aspects should be. It's getting better, just slowly.
I now turn back to that in light of some of the revisiting of Ron Edward's GNS theory -- notably Chris Lehrich's "A GNS Question", plus some Story Games threads including complaints about jargon and Forge Glossary help; and also the Knife Fight threads (only open to members) on "GNS Theory in Wikipedia" and Ben Lehman's "To Understand Simulationism, Study Simulationism".
So partly as an extension of Chris Lehrich's excellent Ritual Discourse in RPGs, the concept of RPGs as celebration is one of the more interesting ideas to come out of the Forge, I think. I made a Celebration / Celebrationism entry in the Theory Topics wiki.
Construction vs. Deconstruction
One of the key points about my first post was the celebration shouldn't feel deconstructive. That is an important point for me. There is a big difference between a constructive work and a deconstructive work. For example, I would say that Alan Moore's Watchmen and Miracleman series were deconstructive of superheroes. Reading them, the reader was struck by the contrast with what the superhero conventions are -- they expose and criticize the tropes of the superhero comic genre. On the other hand, Kurt Busiek's Astro City is celebratory. It is still transformative of earlier superhero comics, but it works more by building on what is there and transforming it. It introduces new ideas wrapped in the symbolism of superheroes, using the older tropes to introduce new things rather than dwelling on the older tropes themselves.
So a good celebration is constructive -- it builds upon what is there. This doesn't leave the object of celebration untouched. You don't leave a wedding feeling the same way about the relationship. You don't leave a birthday feeling like you did about the previous year.
Dragons of the Yellow Sea
I would like the ongoing Dragons of the Yellow Sea campaign to be a celebration of Korean culture. This is tricky, because there is a lot of elements of 19th century Korea that we don't want to celebrate -- the Confucian repression of women by men, and of commoners by yangban; as well as the insularity that ultimately proved nearly self-destructive. For example, in a deconstructive mode, I could have some scathing things to say about how the story of Chunhyang has the appearance of celebrating women, but really is enforcing women's place as chattel.
I would prefer a constructive approach, though. I'd like to create a positive, pulpy page-turner -- which isn't necessarily historically accurate but still at least draws in and celebrates Korean culture. What does that mean? Well, to some degree it means learning aspects of culture. However, it is more than that. Teaching culture can easily be dry and critical, and the students learn facts that they internalize as facts about other people. In a celebration, however, you join in the thing that you are celebrating. You will internalize what you learn differently than if you treated it as something you are a part of.
Now, I'm not trying for a masterpiece -- just a pulpy adventure saga, but one that is distinctly Korean rather than just American pulp with a veneer of Korean history. This is still difficult, I think. Some of my thoughts on the matter have been:
- Highlight issues of the times -- including class conflict between yangban and commoner, corruption of the central government, and the balance of foreign influence shifting from China to Japan.
- Rather than revenge, in stories, the betrayed tends to prove his/her worth by serving the cause all the more.
- Show different sides of Confucian ideals, positive and negative.
- Show a respect of poetry and romance as popular forms of the times.
Campaign Update
We just did the second session of the campaign on Friday. It's going pretty well, I think. There are brief session summaries out on the wiki. The first two episodes were a fairly self-contained adventure, where a royal investigator came searching for the culprit who had killed the crew of a ship bearing goods for the magistrate of Jeju, and taken off with the crew.
One of the techniques that went over pretty well was assigning of nicknames. Within the Korean sources that I've read, people are generally referred to by their family names -- not their given names. This can be confusing, though, since there will often be several people with the same nickname. It's common to refer to people by their position, but also common for people to have nicknames. So we assigned nicknames to each of our characters. During the first session -- which was after the character generation session and finishing touches to the characters by email -- each player described their character, and then everyone else discussed and assigned them a nickname. The nicknames were often distinctly not what the character assigned would want, like "Princess" Song.
We're still struggling a bit with the rules, in particular that people are having trouble deciding what their Aspects should be. It's getting better, just slowly.