Storium!
So this looks interesting, and with content from one of my favourite artist/writers, as well as other names I recognise, such as:
Stephen Blackmoore
Nancy Holder
Leonard Balsera
Chuck Wendig
Kenneth Hite
Richard Dansky
Elizabeth Bear
Tobias Bucknell
Keith Baker
Seanan McGuire
And I think Ursula's self-effacing style is more likely to sell it to British and Australian friends and acquaintances.
Originally posted by ursulav at Storium!
So, I meant to post about this earlier, but it kinda got away from me. Fortunately, there's still time!
The online storytelling...game? system? interesting hybrid thingy? Storium is running a Kickstarter. They've been in beta for awhile, now they're gearing up to launch.
It's a nifty online role-playing game system, and I'm not sure how else to describe it. Think of the really good bits of a play-by-mail RPG, with an easy to use on-line interface, and with pre-made cards and worlds and whatnot, and the ability to write your own as well. My buddy Mur Lafferty is one of the people working on it, and I've been playing with her, and it's really very cool.
Because Mur's my buddy, and she loves me...or something...she convinced me to be one of the many (many many) authors who are signed up to make worlds for Storium. So I was all geared up to make a post about how I was a stretch goal, and the Weird Fruit world would be fleshed out and made available for all y'all to play around in and have adventures in and tell stories in and whatnot.
Then my stretch goal kinda funded overnight, so it took a little bit of the urgency off. Also I couldn't figure out how to explain it.
Actually, I still kinda can't.
But the guy running it, Stephen Hood, has been very nice about the fact that I am proposing a truly demented world. I mean, everybody else is doing swashbuckling fantasy or dark cyberpunk or whatever, and I'm like "So, you're a rodent in this jungle overrun by killer vegetables..."
"Playful," I believe is the word he came up with. Let's go with that.
So...err...yeah. Basically I'm grabbing a bunch of stuff I've cooked up over the years that always seemed like they SHOULD be part of something, and finally trying to weave them into a cohesive whole. (Finally, I know where Frog Tribe lives...!)
So the theory is that you play as one of a village of rodents in a very strange jungle, full of Squashbats and Manticorn and the deadly Dragonfruit. There'll be a good bit of existing art--I'm not building a world this big from scratch!--but I'll also be cooking up some new stuff as time permits.
Now, I have no idea whether anybody is going to want to play in this world. (Worst. Pitch. Ever.) I mean, I like it, and people buy the art, but does it have anything beyond the gimmick? Is anyone going to WANT to fight Dragonfruit or Cobrachini? Is a selection of rodent races of interest to anyone? I don't know. It may be I create this world and people are like "You're insane and that's too weird."
Or maybe people will be like "I have always wanted to slay Dragonfruit! And I always thought I'd make an awesome guinea pig!" I don't know! I have no idea what people like!
But hey, suppose you HAVE always wanted to slay Dragonfruit. Or other things. You have the chance. And If you're playing in the Weird Fruit world, you can totally make your own as well, so if you want your group of mouse adventurers to be set upon by Piranha Beans or whatever, do it! (Hell, you can ditch the mouse adventurers and all play as frogs. Or fruit. Or whatever. For all I know, you want to be a bunch of plucky vegetables slaying the rodent oppressors.) You get the basics of worldbuilding and a bunch of starter stuff, but you are not limited by whatever weirdnesses I've managed to come up with.
I mean, I can put in a card for the Radishes of Paradise, but if you want to go on the Quest of Seven Mountains to pluck the tailfeathers from the Glorious Radish of Paradise, you can and should and I think that's awesome.
Anyway, you don't actually need to pay money to get the Weird Fruit world into Storium, because it happened already, but there's a lot of other super neat worlds out there by authors who do amazing work. Go! Check 'em out!
And when it's live and I've got a world of demented vegetables and plucky rodent villagers, you should totally come and play around and make your own crazy killer-vegetable adventures. Let's tell a really strange story together!