Story-ettes as a way of introducing your free RPG

[Rob Lang]

A confession: for some time I've been giving Chainsaw Aardvark (Jason), one of our wonderful moderators, considerable amounts of grief about him not finishing his RPG Dead and Back. What Jason has been doing is publishing story snippets in the form of and mini-stories. I rather like reading the self-contained views into the game world over my morning can of coke. With all the grief I've been giving poor old CA, I rather think he has a good idea by blogging this way regularly.

What do you think? A good way of setting out a free RPG or just a distraction? Perhaps a way to keep motivated?

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

I would say the blogging helped keep me writing.

The 100th post milestone was a big motivation to release another edition. Rob's urging helped, but the blog itself was probably a bit more important.

Intellectually, I know that only eight to ten people read the blog - between 150 and 200 views a month and about 13 items posted in that time. Still, there is a palpable sense that I'm letting down a lot of people if I don't force myself to write something, regardless of what mood I'm in. In fact, most other motivational strategies I've tried haven't worked all that well. For all my personal excitement and knowledge, working without deadlines wasn't producing much.

If I had a bigger and more active readership to trade comments with, that would probably help develop the setting. I can answer pretty much any inquiry about the world, I just don't always know what questions people want to ask.

The Anarchy Zones is intentionally a setting to be developed at least 50-50 in character vs encyclopedia. Individual game masters can chose which are biased and which are truthful to support their own themes. Part of the history a major the loss of information and communications as well. It is only in the FFS edition that I state where most of the major city states are. So the blog is also a rough draft of much of the material I want to include, and not just writing for the practice or gaining interest.

Now by no means do I think that stories would hurt other games. However, you should have some goal in mind for the project at large rather than simply adding fluff on a semi-weekly basis.

[Onix]

I've used the mini stories. I think it's a good way to get the story of a setting in manageable bites. A lot of people are intimidated by a lot of reading. I know there are those that can power through War and Peace in a weekend but the average mortal has difficulty with a whole book.

The short stories are bite sized and easy to digest while still giving insights into the story world. I will say this, they can be a little confusing because sometimes they can tell a very different story each time and the unifying meta story may not have been the first thing you read. In fact it probably isn't just because they're what you're using to introduce the story.

That may be a good thing if it prompts the reader to want to know more or it might scare them off. Readers are funny aren't they?

[NoobHealer]

I've always been fond of such a method because even more important than introducing me to the RPG... it shows me what I should expect from the game. Not mechanically, of course, but from a narrative point of view.

It's one thing to write have the line "This town worships the god of Cheese.", it's another story to bear witness to the ceremonies. I now have a vision of how the people are expected to act... whether they are comical or serious... and when I eventually run my own game, I will have a good idea of how I should run the people of the town.

These story-ettes help to set the tone of the game, the setting and often possible adventures. That has always been very helpful to me both as a player and GM.

[thedeadone]

I love writing "story-ettes" for the setting I'm working on. I end up with a large pile of Flash Fiction and longer pieces too. It keeps me motivate and inspired about the work and it's a nice way to take a break from it. I find it is also a great way to hone the setting as you work on it, what narrative you're looking to get out of it.

But I always felt that there isn't an audience for it as in that no-body wants to read it until they've already, in some way, bought into your game. Then it helps set expectations, provide tone and atmosphere etc.

[vulpinoid]

My ongoing Quincunx project is a comic and a roleplaying game. At this point, when I'm finished, I hope to introduce each chapter of the RPG with a 4 page comic...each of those comics building up to a complete story, and offering numerous perspective on the world being explored.