Another Unofficial Far Shores Ramble
The response to the reset has been absolutely positive. That’s to say that, if there are any negative feelings lingering around on this subject other than the expected and totally understandable bite of losing your characters and game world, Cath and I are yet to hear them. That is not to sound dismissive, as we will quite happily sit down and discuss these things with anyone that has such things to voice. I take the fact that so far we’ve only received optimistic comments and encouragement to be a positive sign. Trust me, we’re feeling just as positive about this.
I’ve been watching the response and feedback coming in from my multi-monitored control hub secret lair hidden somewhere within the depths of central Lancaster, and I’ve wanted to give feedback to some of the questions and thoughts that have been floating around. However, rather than responding to individual comments, I thought I would compile a larger entry and address things more broadly.
CURRENT FAR SHORES
Current Far Shores characters.
I understand entirely what it’s like to have the rug swept out from under your feet with characters. I’ve played Current Far Shores and Old Far Shores with two characters, Kenji and Orrovu. Kenji died, Orrovu had to be retired into NPC-dom when I took over the position of Ref after John, and I can tell you honestly that Kenji’s death was much easier to cope with than Orrovu’s sudden retirement. I hold no rancour about having to stop playing - it was very important that Far Shores continue, and I loved the gameworld so much that I couldn’t just let it ebb away. But for a great deal of time, even with Orrovu existing as an NPC connected to character’s personal plots, I felt a pang of sadness from having to all-but abandon him. There had been a matter of days warning (I was told on a Tuesday that I was taking over Far Shores, with the next session being on a Saturday), and I had even been advised just to have the character go missing and not be found, certainly not to NPC him, just to cut all ties and let it rest.
That was by one of the former refs, at least. Another told me that it was important to keep him because a recognisable cast of NPCs enriches the gameworld, and I’m glad he told me that. I was able to draw Orrovu’s story to a close as supporting cast to other PCs. That is how he exists now, as supporting cast, and I’m happy that way. But the whole affair taught me a valuable lesson about closure. If I had taken the first advice I received and just had him drop off the face of the planet it wouldn’t have just been my character’s story that had been diminished. Other players with an investment in the character would have also suffered. I have no doubt in my mind that I made the right choice.
Closure is important. That’s true of everything, be in the end encounters of a linear, the tying off of someone’s plot, and, more so, the closure of a world. We refs aren’t here to tell the story of Eleanor Marius, for instance. The world and its inhabitants are the backdrop to the story of the player characters. They can be rich, they can be fully fleshed out and three-dimensional, and the more immersive that they can be, the better. But the PCs come first. It’s their story. That doesn’t mean that you could go out single-handedly slay the Imperial Family, as the refs are also there to mediate reality and realism and whilst you are big fish in the pond, there are also bigger fish and things that aren’t even fish. The Saturday LARP is a narrative in which the Player Characters are the main cast and their players are the intended audience.
Rest assured we have as much invested in your characters as you do. You’re not pieces on the board for us, but we have over the years established relationships with these characters. When we write linears and respond to downtimes, we are constantly mulling over how each character might tick. We soak in everything we see on linears when we are invisible to them, everything that’s said about them during XP feedback. They’re our main cast as much as they are yours. The plot we write, the scenarios we build, the encounters we run and the villains they face are all built so that the players (and the insanely creative monster team) can tell their story with them.
The world won’t end with ‘rocks fall, everyone dies’ (unless it does - I won’t lie to you, there are a few big red buttons in the world that players have skirted around which might have ended the world as we know it wholesale). We have plans, and I hope it all works. Think of what’s coming as the final book in this series. By the end of it, whatever that end might be, we’ll be sad to see our current cast go with no more stories to be told of them, but it should feel like a perfectly natural and right way for their stories to end.
Player death and lethality.
It has been a while since we’ve had player deaths in Far Shores that weren’t the result of PVP. This is both a good and a bad thing, good in that people can keep playing the characters they enjoy, but bad because the threat of death is invaluable. The world your characters inhabit is a dangerous one, and the foes you fight have as much chance as killing you as you do them. Even a gretchin encounter can prove to be deadly with the right combination (and that’s no joke! Throwing a minotaur in the encounter that would attack the players but not the gretchin had devastating results). Death is a very real threat, very present, and rest assured that on any given linear the refs know exactly what might kill you.
It’s been put better by others, in fact one of the players that suffered character death last linear, that whilst this isn’t strictly something sought after it, it is important. We did not want Sebastian, Gok’Rok or Koin to die, of course, but at the same time we take no pleasure from any player characters dying, young characters or old. There were no other characters in that player party that we’d replace those deaths with, because we don’t operate that way. We enjoy your characters and enjoy your investment, but the guys with the swords want to drive those swords into you as many times as possible and make you stop being alive, and we’re behind that.
It’s sad to see those three characters go. It’s sad to see any characters go, be it because they’re so low points that the player never really got a chance to explore them, or so long-spanning that they’ve become a fixture to the gameworld and impossible to envision it without. Any variation between those two extremes is no less tragic. But these deaths usually come with an impact. Look way back, those of you that can remember, to the heartbreaking death of Mahendrie Solon. Cionnaye, not nearly as powerful then as she is now, could only afford a low-level invisibility which meant she had to remain still and silent, forced to watch as Mahendrie Solon, her husband, and Maxwell Barrow, her guilty crush, were cut down by a lone ghoul. The monster party watched in utter silence as the ghoul retreated; Cionnaye broke cover and dashed to her husband’s body to find that there was naught left to save.
It’s safe to say that the deaths last linear had sufficient impact on others to make them poignant and long-lasting in the hearts of the other player characters, players and monsters alike. Bodgit lost his best friend in Gokrok, Alexander lost a long-lasting friend from background in Sebastian, and Koin’s body is going to be given a full ceremony thanks to Ouishi. Those deaths served to highlight a change in pace, I feel. This was the second time in the history of the current shard that any player has taken on a drow, and the first time there have been more than one. They are the agents of Corruption, the Big Bad of the setting, and they mean business. The fact that the deaths came at the announcement of the final chapters of the world also helped, I think, in a strange way: not so much in a ‘nothing is sacred’ manner, but more to highlight that the ante is most definitely being upped.
Is it worth rolling a new character now?
That decision is entirely yours to make. I appreciate as the end draws nigh in it might seem that it’s not worth making a new character, but I would say that the plot we have coming up is by its very definition world-effecting and there’s no reason why any young aspirant adventurers wouldn’t want to get involved. It means you might not hit the highest levels of your spell lists, say, or get full weapon masteries, but if you wanted to see this current incarnation of Far Shores through to its end, I would heartily recommend rolling a character. You might even possibly benefit from discussing with current players ideas for characters that might be small parts in their background - ‘So and so, who I went to school with’, for instance - to help your character get involved with the roleplay right off the bat.
That said, we’re not going to fall out with anyone who would sooner monster the remaining Far Shores and see it close from that side of the curtain. After all, I think it goes without saying that we’ll need all the spare hands we can get before too long!
NEW FAR SHORES
Will you release information about the new world ahead of time?
Yes, absolutely. You have to understand that Cath and I are currently bursting at the seams stopping ourselves from releasing information now. Snippets have been let loose into the world, but there’s a great deal that we’re sitting on, waiting for the right time. I’m utterly thrilled that the little chunks of information that I’ve sparingly given out have been so well received, because buddy, you aint seen nothing yet.
We will be giving this current world as long as it needs, but preliminarily it seems highly conceivable that we can have the world wrapped up by the first two Far Shores of third term. This seems like enough time for us to finish our plots, but we are not going to bind ourselves to that deadline until we can be certain that it will be sufficient. We are currently working on bits and pieces for, as Cath put it, ‘an advertising campaign of awesome.’
We will ultimately be archiving the current Far Shores wiki and replacing it with a new world Wiki. The major difference between the current Wiki and the new Wiki is that, when I released the current wiki, I released it with the intention of gradually updating it with more information over time. That has left some unfortunate gaps where I’ve not gone back to write a page of this NPC or this organisation. The current wiki is being written ahead of time and should be as comprehensive a guide to the new world as we can possibly make it. There will still be no system mechanics on the page, but there’s going to be as much lore we can churn out.
As well as that, one of the objects I have on my desk is Maelstrom’s ‘Almanac of the Known World’. Whilst we can’t promise anything of quite the same production value, since the guys at Maelstrom are paid to run and we are not, we might well be looking at producing an IC document that will at least be released in .pdf format for an in character introduction.
What I can tell you is: this world is rich. We are putting a great deal of work into it, and I really think it’s going to pay off. You will get your teasers, you will get your snippets, and the new wiki should be available long before the first playtests to help you formulate your ideas.
What are you changing in New Far Shores?
We have carte blanche to change everything, but we are changing only what we feel we need to and what we’d benefit from. This will still recognisably be Far Shores, which, as a system, allows us to reinvent worlds from scratch. This world will be completely separate from all that has come before, however. Even little things like keeping names like ‘Kamiko’ and ‘The Shadow Dragon’ have been scrapped for the sake of making something original.
The word we keep using is ‘coherency’. This world will be a much more coherent one. We know our themes, our tone, and our audience. We’re stepping away from the slightly ‘four-colour fantasy’ of Current Far Shores and aiming for a more ‘dark heroic fantasy’ world. It’s all too easy to say ‘gritty’ in these circumstances, but that is a word I want to steer clear from. This is still going to be a world where a mage can quite happily throw a fireball and where strength feats knock your opponents flying further than what is strictly physically possible. This will be a world of heroes where Player Characters are slightly extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, so if we say ‘gritty’ in this context, it doesn’t mean ‘gritty’ as in ‘you are one hit per with a five second grace period’, more in terms of tone and atmosphere.
Mechanically, the swinging system will stay the same, though there might be some tweaks. The way you access your magical lists will be slightly different, as will be the range of who gets what. Some lists from Current Far Shores will return pretty much as you know them and love them. Some lists will be overhauled. Some lists might be cut altogether. This is due to the nature of the world that we are writing and the way that magic works. This wont be a world of ‘Concepts’, but will be a world with plenty of higher powers to choose from, and different connotations behind each of those powers.
One thing I have expressed is that we will be getting rid of the notion of ‘play what you want to play, we will fit your concept into our world.’ This comes back down, again, to coherency. There will be a selection of races available for play, as well as a selection of backgrounds. I can’t stress enough that there will be plenty there to suit what you want to play and who you want your character to be. If anything, I think constraint allows for a much richer development of character. The loosely defined social structures of the Houses in current Far Shores, as well as the era of peace that preceded playtime, means that there have been no boundaries for characters to squeeze up against and no conflicts for them to emerge from, and what is a character without either of those two things? New Far Shores will have defined and tangible cultures of various different flavours which should pretty much allow for each character concept to find a home. Even comparatively minor things such as better defined fashion and technology levels should help in enriching the coming world.
Without wanting to say a great deal, we will be looking at the structure of linear lives too. We’re not just changing the gameworld or the mechanics of it, but ways in which we can improve the way Far Shores as a Saturday live is run. The emphasis is going to be, in any change that we implement, encouragement of immersion and opportunity to roleplay. All the alterations we are making, we do so to improve your experience. These are changes for the better, with no decision made lightly. Everything we’re doing is being discussed thoroughly and something will only be passed if we can be sure that it will improve the nature of the game. Some elements will be experimental and if things aren’t working we can always revise it, but that’s what playtesting is for! There is nothing so far that we are even remotely dubious about. Seriously, you guys, this thing feels great. It’s going to be exciting, it’s going to be different, and it’s going to awesome. If there are any concerns floating out there about a lack of ideas for characters or a reluctance towards a slightly more seriously toned world, all I can say is: bear with us. Wait and see. We shall not disappoint.
I’ve been watching the response and feedback coming in from my multi-monitored control hub secret lair hidden somewhere within the depths of central Lancaster, and I’ve wanted to give feedback to some of the questions and thoughts that have been floating around. However, rather than responding to individual comments, I thought I would compile a larger entry and address things more broadly.
CURRENT FAR SHORES
Current Far Shores characters.
I understand entirely what it’s like to have the rug swept out from under your feet with characters. I’ve played Current Far Shores and Old Far Shores with two characters, Kenji and Orrovu. Kenji died, Orrovu had to be retired into NPC-dom when I took over the position of Ref after John, and I can tell you honestly that Kenji’s death was much easier to cope with than Orrovu’s sudden retirement. I hold no rancour about having to stop playing - it was very important that Far Shores continue, and I loved the gameworld so much that I couldn’t just let it ebb away. But for a great deal of time, even with Orrovu existing as an NPC connected to character’s personal plots, I felt a pang of sadness from having to all-but abandon him. There had been a matter of days warning (I was told on a Tuesday that I was taking over Far Shores, with the next session being on a Saturday), and I had even been advised just to have the character go missing and not be found, certainly not to NPC him, just to cut all ties and let it rest.
That was by one of the former refs, at least. Another told me that it was important to keep him because a recognisable cast of NPCs enriches the gameworld, and I’m glad he told me that. I was able to draw Orrovu’s story to a close as supporting cast to other PCs. That is how he exists now, as supporting cast, and I’m happy that way. But the whole affair taught me a valuable lesson about closure. If I had taken the first advice I received and just had him drop off the face of the planet it wouldn’t have just been my character’s story that had been diminished. Other players with an investment in the character would have also suffered. I have no doubt in my mind that I made the right choice.
Closure is important. That’s true of everything, be in the end encounters of a linear, the tying off of someone’s plot, and, more so, the closure of a world. We refs aren’t here to tell the story of Eleanor Marius, for instance. The world and its inhabitants are the backdrop to the story of the player characters. They can be rich, they can be fully fleshed out and three-dimensional, and the more immersive that they can be, the better. But the PCs come first. It’s their story. That doesn’t mean that you could go out single-handedly slay the Imperial Family, as the refs are also there to mediate reality and realism and whilst you are big fish in the pond, there are also bigger fish and things that aren’t even fish. The Saturday LARP is a narrative in which the Player Characters are the main cast and their players are the intended audience.
Rest assured we have as much invested in your characters as you do. You’re not pieces on the board for us, but we have over the years established relationships with these characters. When we write linears and respond to downtimes, we are constantly mulling over how each character might tick. We soak in everything we see on linears when we are invisible to them, everything that’s said about them during XP feedback. They’re our main cast as much as they are yours. The plot we write, the scenarios we build, the encounters we run and the villains they face are all built so that the players (and the insanely creative monster team) can tell their story with them.
The world won’t end with ‘rocks fall, everyone dies’ (unless it does - I won’t lie to you, there are a few big red buttons in the world that players have skirted around which might have ended the world as we know it wholesale). We have plans, and I hope it all works. Think of what’s coming as the final book in this series. By the end of it, whatever that end might be, we’ll be sad to see our current cast go with no more stories to be told of them, but it should feel like a perfectly natural and right way for their stories to end.
Player death and lethality.
It has been a while since we’ve had player deaths in Far Shores that weren’t the result of PVP. This is both a good and a bad thing, good in that people can keep playing the characters they enjoy, but bad because the threat of death is invaluable. The world your characters inhabit is a dangerous one, and the foes you fight have as much chance as killing you as you do them. Even a gretchin encounter can prove to be deadly with the right combination (and that’s no joke! Throwing a minotaur in the encounter that would attack the players but not the gretchin had devastating results). Death is a very real threat, very present, and rest assured that on any given linear the refs know exactly what might kill you.
It’s been put better by others, in fact one of the players that suffered character death last linear, that whilst this isn’t strictly something sought after it, it is important. We did not want Sebastian, Gok’Rok or Koin to die, of course, but at the same time we take no pleasure from any player characters dying, young characters or old. There were no other characters in that player party that we’d replace those deaths with, because we don’t operate that way. We enjoy your characters and enjoy your investment, but the guys with the swords want to drive those swords into you as many times as possible and make you stop being alive, and we’re behind that.
It’s sad to see those three characters go. It’s sad to see any characters go, be it because they’re so low points that the player never really got a chance to explore them, or so long-spanning that they’ve become a fixture to the gameworld and impossible to envision it without. Any variation between those two extremes is no less tragic. But these deaths usually come with an impact. Look way back, those of you that can remember, to the heartbreaking death of Mahendrie Solon. Cionnaye, not nearly as powerful then as she is now, could only afford a low-level invisibility which meant she had to remain still and silent, forced to watch as Mahendrie Solon, her husband, and Maxwell Barrow, her guilty crush, were cut down by a lone ghoul. The monster party watched in utter silence as the ghoul retreated; Cionnaye broke cover and dashed to her husband’s body to find that there was naught left to save.
It’s safe to say that the deaths last linear had sufficient impact on others to make them poignant and long-lasting in the hearts of the other player characters, players and monsters alike. Bodgit lost his best friend in Gokrok, Alexander lost a long-lasting friend from background in Sebastian, and Koin’s body is going to be given a full ceremony thanks to Ouishi. Those deaths served to highlight a change in pace, I feel. This was the second time in the history of the current shard that any player has taken on a drow, and the first time there have been more than one. They are the agents of Corruption, the Big Bad of the setting, and they mean business. The fact that the deaths came at the announcement of the final chapters of the world also helped, I think, in a strange way: not so much in a ‘nothing is sacred’ manner, but more to highlight that the ante is most definitely being upped.
Is it worth rolling a new character now?
That decision is entirely yours to make. I appreciate as the end draws nigh in it might seem that it’s not worth making a new character, but I would say that the plot we have coming up is by its very definition world-effecting and there’s no reason why any young aspirant adventurers wouldn’t want to get involved. It means you might not hit the highest levels of your spell lists, say, or get full weapon masteries, but if you wanted to see this current incarnation of Far Shores through to its end, I would heartily recommend rolling a character. You might even possibly benefit from discussing with current players ideas for characters that might be small parts in their background - ‘So and so, who I went to school with’, for instance - to help your character get involved with the roleplay right off the bat.
That said, we’re not going to fall out with anyone who would sooner monster the remaining Far Shores and see it close from that side of the curtain. After all, I think it goes without saying that we’ll need all the spare hands we can get before too long!
NEW FAR SHORES
Will you release information about the new world ahead of time?
Yes, absolutely. You have to understand that Cath and I are currently bursting at the seams stopping ourselves from releasing information now. Snippets have been let loose into the world, but there’s a great deal that we’re sitting on, waiting for the right time. I’m utterly thrilled that the little chunks of information that I’ve sparingly given out have been so well received, because buddy, you aint seen nothing yet.
We will be giving this current world as long as it needs, but preliminarily it seems highly conceivable that we can have the world wrapped up by the first two Far Shores of third term. This seems like enough time for us to finish our plots, but we are not going to bind ourselves to that deadline until we can be certain that it will be sufficient. We are currently working on bits and pieces for, as Cath put it, ‘an advertising campaign of awesome.’
We will ultimately be archiving the current Far Shores wiki and replacing it with a new world Wiki. The major difference between the current Wiki and the new Wiki is that, when I released the current wiki, I released it with the intention of gradually updating it with more information over time. That has left some unfortunate gaps where I’ve not gone back to write a page of this NPC or this organisation. The current wiki is being written ahead of time and should be as comprehensive a guide to the new world as we can possibly make it. There will still be no system mechanics on the page, but there’s going to be as much lore we can churn out.
As well as that, one of the objects I have on my desk is Maelstrom’s ‘Almanac of the Known World’. Whilst we can’t promise anything of quite the same production value, since the guys at Maelstrom are paid to run and we are not, we might well be looking at producing an IC document that will at least be released in .pdf format for an in character introduction.
What I can tell you is: this world is rich. We are putting a great deal of work into it, and I really think it’s going to pay off. You will get your teasers, you will get your snippets, and the new wiki should be available long before the first playtests to help you formulate your ideas.
What are you changing in New Far Shores?
We have carte blanche to change everything, but we are changing only what we feel we need to and what we’d benefit from. This will still recognisably be Far Shores, which, as a system, allows us to reinvent worlds from scratch. This world will be completely separate from all that has come before, however. Even little things like keeping names like ‘Kamiko’ and ‘The Shadow Dragon’ have been scrapped for the sake of making something original.
The word we keep using is ‘coherency’. This world will be a much more coherent one. We know our themes, our tone, and our audience. We’re stepping away from the slightly ‘four-colour fantasy’ of Current Far Shores and aiming for a more ‘dark heroic fantasy’ world. It’s all too easy to say ‘gritty’ in these circumstances, but that is a word I want to steer clear from. This is still going to be a world where a mage can quite happily throw a fireball and where strength feats knock your opponents flying further than what is strictly physically possible. This will be a world of heroes where Player Characters are slightly extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, so if we say ‘gritty’ in this context, it doesn’t mean ‘gritty’ as in ‘you are one hit per with a five second grace period’, more in terms of tone and atmosphere.
Mechanically, the swinging system will stay the same, though there might be some tweaks. The way you access your magical lists will be slightly different, as will be the range of who gets what. Some lists from Current Far Shores will return pretty much as you know them and love them. Some lists will be overhauled. Some lists might be cut altogether. This is due to the nature of the world that we are writing and the way that magic works. This wont be a world of ‘Concepts’, but will be a world with plenty of higher powers to choose from, and different connotations behind each of those powers.
One thing I have expressed is that we will be getting rid of the notion of ‘play what you want to play, we will fit your concept into our world.’ This comes back down, again, to coherency. There will be a selection of races available for play, as well as a selection of backgrounds. I can’t stress enough that there will be plenty there to suit what you want to play and who you want your character to be. If anything, I think constraint allows for a much richer development of character. The loosely defined social structures of the Houses in current Far Shores, as well as the era of peace that preceded playtime, means that there have been no boundaries for characters to squeeze up against and no conflicts for them to emerge from, and what is a character without either of those two things? New Far Shores will have defined and tangible cultures of various different flavours which should pretty much allow for each character concept to find a home. Even comparatively minor things such as better defined fashion and technology levels should help in enriching the coming world.
Without wanting to say a great deal, we will be looking at the structure of linear lives too. We’re not just changing the gameworld or the mechanics of it, but ways in which we can improve the way Far Shores as a Saturday live is run. The emphasis is going to be, in any change that we implement, encouragement of immersion and opportunity to roleplay. All the alterations we are making, we do so to improve your experience. These are changes for the better, with no decision made lightly. Everything we’re doing is being discussed thoroughly and something will only be passed if we can be sure that it will improve the nature of the game. Some elements will be experimental and if things aren’t working we can always revise it, but that’s what playtesting is for! There is nothing so far that we are even remotely dubious about. Seriously, you guys, this thing feels great. It’s going to be exciting, it’s going to be different, and it’s going to awesome. If there are any concerns floating out there about a lack of ideas for characters or a reluctance towards a slightly more seriously toned world, all I can say is: bear with us. Wait and see. We shall not disappoint.