#4: This Blessed Plot, Part One

[ShannonA]

Article #4 in this series, "This Blessed Plot, Part One", is now available at http://www.skotos.net/articles/. Here's a little snippet:

"In Grand Theatres, there aren't monsters to kill or treasures to collect. There may be a few puzzles here or there, but for the most part the only thing that players can do is participate in stories; thus, active plots and interesting characters are the only things that keep players involved. This week I want to look at plots. In MUDs, they were a nice afterthought; in Grand Theatres, they're the core of gameplay."

Comments, questions, and discussions are quite welcome here.

Shannon

[stealthkat]

This is probably a really stupid question, but it's been in the back of my mind for a long time...so here goes:

With the ability to record your Alice client log, have you considered the possibility of taking a few of the plots and publishing some type of book on these games? The thing that keeps nagging me is that I always considered the AD&D campaigns I was involved in to be an excellent source for full fledged fantasy novels (since I play with someone who is a published fantasy novelist.) Your story on plots brought this to the forefront again. Of course, it could be a legal nightmare not worth the trouble, but then again...you never know till you really think about it.

Kathy

[ShannonA]

Originally posted by stealthkat:
With the ability to record your Alice client log, have you considered the possibility of taking a few of the plots and publishing some type of book on these games?

We've talked about doing novels based around our games. I expect we'll be doing that in the next few years, though I don't know if we'll start off with Castle Marrach or another, less constrained, game. However, these novels will most likely be about the backgrounds and StoryHost-plots of our games.

Making a book based upon actual happenings in the Castle is a lot trickier thing. As you note, there's legal issues.

We hope that a lot of the character-driven happenings will be preserved in journals, diaries, and even short stories produced by out players. Down the line we hope to make web pages available right here at Skotos, and we think that will help generate an even tighter community, as people can share their game experiences in this slightly different forum.

(And, for now, if you've got a Marrach web page, let us know at marrach-links@skotos.net, and we'll start putting together a list for an eventual page of links.)

Shannon