Fifty Centuries: A Grand Experiment In Collaborative Storytelling
Posted 11th October 2008 at 11:15 PM by VectorSigma
Years ago, I ran a D&D campaign at the start of which we all sat down and designed nations and smushed them together on a map. It helped get the players involved at the start, and worked pretty well (even though some of 'em were slack-asses as time went on). That was my first dip into collaborative worldbuilding, and it was probably fifteen years ago.
The last long-term roleplaying campaign I ran was not D&D. It was a BESMd20 game, although that's neither here nor there. The campaign was called 'Low Disguises', and it was set in modern America.
The gist of the campaign goes like this: seven regular people get caught up in a weird government conspiracy, and along the way, get injected with crazy nano-retroviruses that reprogram their DNA and essentially give them superpowers. The viruses were designed based on the DNA of captured supernaturals, and each one was different (we find out later there's a certain amount of soul-snatching involved), so each PC morphed into a version of a different mythical creature (pixie, troll, ghoul, etc).
As the campaign continued, what began as a weird low-supers conspiracy game morphed into a more high-fantasy superhuman game, as the heroes took on the powers that be (both mortal and immortal), gathered armies, did all kinds of crazy stuff, and became 'baby' gods themselves. At the end of the campaign (three years later), the apocalypse has occurred and we leave our heroes as the new chief gods and goddesses of Earth, struggling to keep peace amongst the survivors (human and otherwise) and build a new civilization out of the old.
All well and good. Sometime right after the apotheosis of the PCs, we bandied about the idea of "how cool would it be to essentially push the timeline forward a bunch and run a D&D-style game in this world, where our old PCs - or interpretations thereof - would actually be the pantheon" etc. Everyone agreed it sounded awesome, and I agreed to eventually do it once we'd taken a break, played some other stuff, and enough time had passed to make everything feel fresh and wonderful again.
That time is almost here - it's just over the horizon. Our group played some one-shots, a couple of mini-campaigns, and we're getting ready to do a medium to long run of a Star Wars game. Once that's over, it's back to the world of 'Low Disguises' - five thousand years later.
That's a pretty long introduction to get to the meaty part...but the point is that, while we're doing Star Wars, we're going to do sort of a PBeM thing in the background. I want to let the players - as their old PCs-turned-gods - actually take the actions to shape this new world, a step at a time. Fifty centuries will pass in the interim, but we'll start at the beginning, when reality is pliable, and work our way to the end, as whole races are born, nations rise and fall, and the gods of the pantheon influence how magic-rich and/or technological the world will be. Naturally, the PC deities will sometimes be at cross purposes; and other lesser deities may challenge them as well, as time goes on.
I want this to be an opportunity for the whole group to take part in the worldbuilding aspect of our next D&D game, but do it in a way that feels organic. They can sponsor civilizations, create new species (which may end up being PC races when we do the D&D thing), shape the religion, rework the continents, all of that. A turn at a time.
I'm thinking the initial few turns will be closer together (in 'game-time'), a century or less apart. This will be the period in which they can do some serious mojo potentially, carving up continents and such. But, conversely, they're still inexperienced gods. They may find that by the time they know _how_ to do certain things, the world isn't as pliable as they'd thought. Later turns will be "further apart" as the gods grow more distant from the mortal minutiae, and they will have to act less directly.
Once we get rolling on this, and as things progress, I'll blog about it occasionally, and we'll see how things are going.
(NB: we did have a rule, by consensus, that when we get to the D&D portion of this, you're not allowed to play a cleric of yourself.
Actually, several of them are pretty charged about character concepts that involve being a paladin of one of the other players' deities, etc)
-----
TODAY'S QUESTION:
Any experience with collaborative worldbuilding above and beyond the usual?
The last long-term roleplaying campaign I ran was not D&D. It was a BESMd20 game, although that's neither here nor there. The campaign was called 'Low Disguises', and it was set in modern America.
The gist of the campaign goes like this: seven regular people get caught up in a weird government conspiracy, and along the way, get injected with crazy nano-retroviruses that reprogram their DNA and essentially give them superpowers. The viruses were designed based on the DNA of captured supernaturals, and each one was different (we find out later there's a certain amount of soul-snatching involved), so each PC morphed into a version of a different mythical creature (pixie, troll, ghoul, etc).
As the campaign continued, what began as a weird low-supers conspiracy game morphed into a more high-fantasy superhuman game, as the heroes took on the powers that be (both mortal and immortal), gathered armies, did all kinds of crazy stuff, and became 'baby' gods themselves. At the end of the campaign (three years later), the apocalypse has occurred and we leave our heroes as the new chief gods and goddesses of Earth, struggling to keep peace amongst the survivors (human and otherwise) and build a new civilization out of the old.
All well and good. Sometime right after the apotheosis of the PCs, we bandied about the idea of "how cool would it be to essentially push the timeline forward a bunch and run a D&D-style game in this world, where our old PCs - or interpretations thereof - would actually be the pantheon" etc. Everyone agreed it sounded awesome, and I agreed to eventually do it once we'd taken a break, played some other stuff, and enough time had passed to make everything feel fresh and wonderful again.
That time is almost here - it's just over the horizon. Our group played some one-shots, a couple of mini-campaigns, and we're getting ready to do a medium to long run of a Star Wars game. Once that's over, it's back to the world of 'Low Disguises' - five thousand years later.
That's a pretty long introduction to get to the meaty part...but the point is that, while we're doing Star Wars, we're going to do sort of a PBeM thing in the background. I want to let the players - as their old PCs-turned-gods - actually take the actions to shape this new world, a step at a time. Fifty centuries will pass in the interim, but we'll start at the beginning, when reality is pliable, and work our way to the end, as whole races are born, nations rise and fall, and the gods of the pantheon influence how magic-rich and/or technological the world will be. Naturally, the PC deities will sometimes be at cross purposes; and other lesser deities may challenge them as well, as time goes on.
I want this to be an opportunity for the whole group to take part in the worldbuilding aspect of our next D&D game, but do it in a way that feels organic. They can sponsor civilizations, create new species (which may end up being PC races when we do the D&D thing), shape the religion, rework the continents, all of that. A turn at a time.
I'm thinking the initial few turns will be closer together (in 'game-time'), a century or less apart. This will be the period in which they can do some serious mojo potentially, carving up continents and such. But, conversely, they're still inexperienced gods. They may find that by the time they know _how_ to do certain things, the world isn't as pliable as they'd thought. Later turns will be "further apart" as the gods grow more distant from the mortal minutiae, and they will have to act less directly.
Once we get rolling on this, and as things progress, I'll blog about it occasionally, and we'll see how things are going.
(NB: we did have a rule, by consensus, that when we get to the D&D portion of this, you're not allowed to play a cleric of yourself.
Actually, several of them are pretty charged about character concepts that involve being a paladin of one of the other players' deities, etc)-----
TODAY'S QUESTION:
Any experience with collaborative worldbuilding above and beyond the usual?
Total Comments 4
Comments
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Cool concept. Me likey a lot.
Question: It sounds to some extent that you'll actually be 'playing' those 50 centuries vice just telling a grand story about them. How are you going to play that period? I ask, because it seems that there will be conflicts, etc. so how will you resolve them?
I believe that there are rpgs for super, superpowerful characters. Have you considered using one of them?Posted 13th October 2008 at 12:32 PM by The Cartographist
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This group is pretty good with strictly-narrative stuff (ie, no dice - we barely used the dice at the end of the previous campaign with these PCs, as it had become more politics/intrigue at that point). So no 'game system' per se. But we do need a means to resolve conflict, no matter how much they trust me and we lean on GM fiat.
Basically I'm twiddling up a quick-and-dirty 'turnsheet' system that we can do in person, on paper, or over email. Every PC deity will have Influence and Power (numbered stats). Power is just personal power, to be used when going toe-to-toe with Faceless Chaos or Slaad Armies or whatever (same thing, I guess), and is of secondary importance. Influence is the currency of the micro-game, and reflects not only political connections, but the amount of worship they're receiving, souls collected, time spent, etc, all wrapped into one.
Each turn each player will tell me how much Influence they're spending to get X done (several actions). When there's a conflict between two PCs, the amount of Influence they're pouring into something will give me an idea of who comes out on top, and by how much.
So yeah, mostly narrative, mostly GM fiat. Remember, we're doing this in the background as we play a proper Star Wars campaign, so they can get their "normal game expectations" out of the way there.
Posted 13th October 2008 at 03:01 PM by VectorSigma -
So how will you be determining the amount of power and influence characters regain each turn? It seems like a very efficient and simple system for world building of this nature and I wouldn't mind adapting it - but I'm stuck on that part.Posted 28th October 2008 at 05:32 AM by Ace32 - A great deal of winging is involved - that's the short answer, and not terribly useful, I know.
Although the old PCs were all the same level, some of them were certainly more 'powerful' than others (that's just how rpgs work). But, in the interest of fairness, I'll set the Power for each Deity at the same level at the start of Fifty Centuries. Call it "10" or whatever (the number doesn't matter, we're only measuring against each other and preplotted NPC Deities, and that won't be for a while). Then again, for balance with Influence (below) maybe a couple of these guys need to be a tad higher at the start.
Influence is another matter. Some of the PCs did a lot of legwork, both on-camera and in downtime, to curry followers and influence (political, cultural) during the last game. They ought to be rewarded for that with an Influence bump at the start. But, of course, Influence is measuring several things, so the death-god guy - who didn't do a lot of political stuff on-camera - might still do okay in the Influence department, because he was explicitly collecting souls most of the time, while the others were not. It might just be best to call everyone even on both stats at the start, and let them go from there in the first few turns to make their deities look like they "ought to" look. Now that I think about it, I'm leaning that way - because we have a new player who wants to play along during this period (since she'll likely be playing in the aftermath), but wasn't around during the original campaign.
Each turn, each deity will get X amount of Influence - call it 100. This is the $200 you get for passing Go each turn, I suppose. If they take in-game actions (spending influence) to do things that I as GM think would increase their "income" in the short-, medium-, or long-term (spreading the faith, works of legend, etc), then their "income" may go up in future turns. The tradeoff is that they're not spending that Influence doing other things - spawning new races, rearranging archipelagos, and the like.
I'll make sure that once we start this in earnest (probably two weeks from now), I'll do another blog post on how I ended up doing the initial turnsheets.Posted 1st November 2008 at 02:19 AM by VectorSigma
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