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Design and Theory
For once, I will post some remarks about design, in response to a post on Ben's LJ and the initiating Forge thread and a followup thread, which is simply the order in which I read them. In essence, there has been some discussion --- and I gather there has also been reaction, some of it violent, elsewhere on the web --- of half-baked games being ( Read more... ) -
My Goodness
My book is up to #30,003 on Amazon, which is very high for this sort of book, and you can now do the "search inside" thing. I have received fan email from several scholars, two of whom are actually sending me things by way of congratulations.
I don't really know what to say.
Wow!
Hope they don't all hate it when they read it, whoever they are, is all ( Read more... ) -
A GNS Question
John Kim's blog had a post about GNS and his interest or lack thereof these days. I have, as you know, been somewhat absent from this whole little mad field, myself, and I found myself thinking, "So what do I think about it these days?"
As I turn that over in my head, possibly profitably but possibly not, I have some questions for you. Please insert ( Read more... ) -
More stories
Enough about Ron's post as such. My point about stories, though...
Start here with this link and read several pages of this stuff. This is quite raw data, direct from the Kwakiutl when they still existed in a fairly solid way. A word of advice: don't allegorize -- this material is a great deal more difficult to interpret than it looks, and as you'll ( Read more... ) -
Spot That Thread!
On Malcolm Sheppard's blog, I found the following in a "looking back on 2006" post:
Anyway, we also got into "brain damage," which was Ron Edwards' borrowing of sociobiological rhetoric for gaming. Many gamers are giving Ron a pass on this as some kind of metaphor, but he's made it clear he believes it's literally true and I figure he's following a ( Read more... ) -
Mysteries
I just wanted to put this link here up, primarily for my reference. It's a thread from the Forge a couple years ago where I wrote a lot about how to run a mystery. Feel free to discuss it here, certainly, but I just wanted to have it somewhere I'd know where to find it. -
Making Cultures: Chapter 2
Chapter 2. Beginnings: Identity and the Sacred
Master Narratives
A master narrative (metanarrative, grand narrative) is, in short, a total or totalizing cultural narrative that lends authority and structure to the way people think about, know, and experience the world around them. The list I gave at the end of last chapter for the United States- ( Read more... ) -
Making Cultures: Chapter 1
Chapter 1. First Principles: Sacred and Profane
I notice that religion is relatively often added late to fantasy worlds. It also seems to have consistent institutional and mythological forms: priests with temples dedicated to particular gods in a pantheon. Sometimes there is a significant attempt to integrate these into the game-world; more ( Read more... ) -
Making Cultures: Start of a long series
Preface
Over the last few years, I have run into quite a number of discussions about how to design cultures for fantasy games. To me the most interesting of these have centered on questions like, “How do you design a fantasy culture so that it isn’t Eurocentric?” And I’ve posted bits and pieces of a personal response to such things, here and ( Read more... )