Two Headed

A roleplaying game is a medium. Like oil colour, poetry, sculpture or prose. What is interesting is the results. Focusing on the method is at best an interesting side note and then only to a few.

Look at painting and wonder what brand the painter used, what size brush, which hand they held it in. What pen did the writer use? How many breaks did the sculptor take? Feel the tiredness wash over you, feel it fill up any space interesting thought could take

Theatre feels like a good comparison but it isnt. The rpg is the script, and no one cares how you make the script. The performance is the table and that's out of our hands

The performance is different

Confusion happens between them. A roleplaying game is not the table. I'm not interested in the table, you can have it.

Don't belabour the comparison, it's not perfect.

A game book is manipulative, it is psychology, it is magic. It can be a text book but then its a perfunctory item. A text book is the sum of its parts

the table is in conversation with the source text. the book should have the decency of being a generous partner.

The game book is one of two heads

The book is never neutral and can stand up to interrogation. It never just is. It is a statement. These are all obvious points and i forget them

On Advice on Advice

ive been thinking about writing advice a lot lately, remembering old articles from university, books i liked, things i carry with me. It's a difficult genre to do. Good writers are bad at explaining it, and people who are good at explaining it rarely have anything to say.

I don't like procedure. Procedure is a trap. Every writer has a different system so you can safely ignore any suggestion of a method. No one cares what pen you use, what desk you sit at, what font you pick, what program you use. Write it on napkins, buy a ridiculous leather book and a £300 fountain pen, just get on.

The only method is sit down, do the work. Or don't. 

Recharging your imagination can be work. Reading, mostly. Films and TV are a little useful but the time:value is not great. One good book can nourish you for months, most films are barely a snack.

Social media is not work. Communities is not work. Writing is work, preparing to write is work until it isn't. 

Don't be your own critic. Others will do that for you for free. 

Always always look at the back catalogue of anyone telling you what to do. Feel free to ignore me.

Be brave. Write the game you want to make and ignore everything else. Experiment with structure and form. If you want to have a 10,000 word read-aloud box of a diegetic novel in you adventure then do it. Have the entire adventure in one room. Tell me where that cup came from in such a way as being entirely impossible for anyone to find out through normal means. Don't eliminate yourself from the work in pursuit of an audience. This isn't penicillin, we can experiment with the formula. If you aren't then you're committing the cardinal sin of inflicting boredom

Be ugly. Never be afraid to look cheap and nasty. Similarly don't be scared of being too beautiful, too expensive, too much. But don't feel you have to be one or another for someone else's benefit

Finish it. Just finish it. Then make people pay for it. People who think you're making toys will pay it, they're used to it. People who know you're making art will pay it, they know what you're dealing with. You need to eat, you need to escape the cycle and breathe. 

Even if it is bad charge us for it we will buy it. 

Do not try to please anyone. Do not be dungeons and dragon. Be small, be specific, be interesting.

Nothing you do before writing matters. Sit down and write. Whatever got you to that position is what you need to do to keep on doing it.

Ignore assumptions, reevaluate accepted systems for how books are laid out or approached. And for the love of god look at things outside RPGs. All it takes is for someone to play boardgames, read history, read something not in appendix n, and they look like a genius innovator. We're not. None of us are.  We're looters who travelled further from the village.

Steal harder. Write an adventure that is a criminally close copy of a novel you've read. Transform it. You'll learn things.

Be inconsistent. Change everything, ignore everyone, write. Be only consistent in that you sit down and write. Even if you are bad at it, write. Write more, finish more, ignore audience ignore clicks and fame, people will recognise something special if you just keep doing it. 

Think: Eventually a body of work can't be ignored. The size might vary, but it speaks for itself. You don't want a mad success, steer clear of it. They are poison, full of switch-backs and madness. Slog in the dirt, write, finish. There isn't anything else, no way out.

I have more but it is 5:50am and I'm bad at it

Troikan Bumble-Logic

When running interplanar games reduce time and space to an abstract narrative tool. While the party stays in close spatial and temporal proximity to something, such as a town or an NPC, they will not change. However if the party hasn't seen a memorable NPC (etc.) for suitably long time then change them slightly, add something or take it away, alter their memory of the party (this has the side effect of aiding the forgetful GM by allowing them to claim their misremembering is canon).

Consider: Recurring NPC Shoutpurple, a prominent homeless person keyed in to the local goings on through his close ties with other homeless people. Has endeering delusions of grandeur and always invites the players in for formal tea in his upturned barrel he lives in.

Time has passed, players have either travelled a long way and or forgot about him. When they get back Shoutpurple is in charge of the secret police and heading a furious witch hunt. He still has delusions of grandeur and is incredibly polite to the players. One thing has changed and recontextualizes the others. This is not a transition in his or anyone else's eyes, he always was this.

We're putting on a fake mustache.

When re-shuffling people it's most satisfying to keep it small. Change their name slightly (Shoutpurple is Shoutyellow), or give them a job, have them forget the players, or re-use their image as someone completely different.

With places, push them forwards or back through the timeline, change the name, replace the inhabitants with flump-people.

Keep enough sense to move the game along and not confuse everyone terribly. Build up a catalogue of unique symbolic devices that will help place the players.

Consider: You use pigs as a device on Shoutpurple's secret police badges, they are nicknamed pigs. Pigs can recur as objects of oppression and violence. A person owning a pig could turn out to be the killer all along. Pig-in-boots is a notorious sapient-consumer and diabolist. Undermine the pattern occasionally like we do with the Christian symbolism we use so reflexively.

Have events play themselves out again and again. Consider all the Christian patterns used: death and rebirth, brother killing brother, and other things a more competent writer could tell you. Figure these events out by picking up on something the players respond well to. Maybe they throw Shoutyellow off a roof to end his reign of terror. Have that become a standard way to dispose of tyrants, have them go to a town where that is the standard method of executing shoplifters and so on.

We don't need a plan in mind when placing these narrative devices, just use them. They will either snowball and gather up meaning and weight or they will wither naturally. Using them too deliberately will make the game predictable and possibly eye-rolling. Imagine you put a Jesus analogue in every campaign you run. Yea, like that, don't do it.

This should be easy. Easier than tracking time and places and names would be. When the players decide to return to some interesting place they visited a year ago you don't need to know the exact details of what happened and what happened in the interim, you just need to reacquaint yourself with the feel of it and build something new. If they look up old friends maybe they are exactly as they left them, maybe they are gone, maybe they have changed beyond recognition. And change isn't permanent, they can go back.

Your world is plastic.

Finally, consider the meta-textual possibilities of building your own bank of devices. You end one campaign completely, you and your players start another. You introduce pigs, the players all laugh about that time with the pig where you threw it off the roof. You then either reinforce that or you undermine it and have them reassess it. If you've done well you have a pocket full of these things you can throw out that will communicate in a secret language you and your players have built up. The sense and logic of the world is a step removed from the surface; we are not looking for mundane links between places and things but symbolic. You and your players are magicians.