Baroque, Perhaps Impossibly Complicated Idea

Digging through ancient emails I stumbled across this ancient idea for a forum campaign and since I have not seen anything quite as convoluted around I present it for consideration in case someone can draw inspiration and maybe actually get it or something like it off the ground.

For background, the original pitch:

Imagine, for a moment, we lived in an alternate universe, where I [had not immigrated] and ran a campaign [in 2004].

Now, this imaginary campaign was a lunatic Steampunk Buffy/Stargate crossover campaign set in Alta California (part of Imperial Mexico) circa 1990’s where they found a ‘stargate’ in the Mayan ruins, not Egypt, in a world with a sort of Slayerverse level of background weird using Deadlands as the ‘why’. It would have been D20 based using Monte Cookes WOD D20, Stargate D20 and Deadlands D20.

Ok, so my crazy notion is to run a thread on the gamers forum which would be the ‘pre game setup’ for the sequel campaign, or something like the ‘league’ threads that pop up now and then; creating the campaign retrospectively by tell the stories of the favourite bits from the first campaign.

The trick would be to pick the ‘original’ party – essentially an exercise in Fantasy RPG Game – choose your ideal player mix, ignoring geography and who was actually there at the time 🙂 – and then those players would form the core of the thread and *within* the thread would stick to the define alt-reality; the game happened, these are true tales of the past. Outside, whatever, but this sequel campaign start-up thread would be played as a window into the timeline where it really happened.

To frame this:
– the sequel campaign start-up – the actual forum game being played would have been 2009
– the original steampunk Alta-California Buffy/Stargate game should have happened in 2003-2004

The conceit was that it was the best game ever, with a team-of-heroes table, lots of legendary tales, etc.

Other context; this would have been played on a forum where there were a strong contingent of active readers – maybe two dozen – who would read nearly everything. This was the forum for our college games society, now long passed to dust. It had pedigree of numerous successful forum games, including the mighty League and curtailed League II, so we knew a game such as described here would have been ‘played’ but also ‘put on’ for the audience of forum readers. This would have been a bit of kayfaybe where everyone pretended to be in the know about this allegedly incredibly complex and awesome game.

There had been a previous forum … game? … kicking around – a manufactured history called Space Marine and Mage. I contacted one of the original players who reminded me “Space Marine and Mage was a collaboration between Thames Television (Wales) and Games Workshop’s Andy Chambers, aimed at crossing the divide between the BagPuss fandom and the emerging Grimdark movement. Only nine of the eleven produced episodes were ever aired in 1986 on regional channels in the Thames Television network. The only known copies of the aired episodes were VHS recordings made by Bob Monkhouse, an early adopter of this form of piracy. These and other tapes from his collection were surrendered to the Met Office on the back of an investigation arising from the content of those two unaired episodes. This creative and brave child of the 80’s Brit-Mania was killed in the crib by the indifference of executives at Thames and rumoured interference by the entertainer Rolf Harris, who later reassigned the art and animation team from SM&M to work on Morph shorts for his popular art show.”

As a broader group we also had experience with systemless IOU games – what I termed “adapted bullshit sessions” – pure ‘yes, and’ and what would today be termed ‘vibes’. Playing Mornington Crescent is not dissimilar.

I had none of the terminology to properly describe this at the time but now I would say it is some sort of forum game explicitly messing around with inducing hyperdiegesis – trying to conjure up a campaign that never existed in war-stories and oblique mentions about that campaign framed in the conversation around standing up the sequel to said campaign.

I think there is some bones of something interesting here – a sort of over-driven narrative game, where “yes, and” or “no, but” are couched in peoples faded memories of what actually happened during a previous campaign. The kayfabe of sticking with the story that this campaign definitely happened is the extra layer of complexity that I am unsure whether it makes the whole thing fun or just mires it in over-complicatedness.

Discussions about it at the time made some solid points:

Declaring all the elements too early – stargate, steampunk, buffy, deadlands – brought in too much constraint and ‘filled out’ the game too early. I am not sure whether I agreed with that – my hypothesis was that constraint breeds creativity – but maybe this was too much constraint from the get go.

One approach could have been just Baron Munchasen style write the first post and hope folk riff off it. That might be the way to go with a few people primed with the context to set an initial trajectory for the thing.

Another approach would have been to find a transcript of one of the early adventures complete with character descriptions as the spark.

Since this was the Best Game Ever every incredibly complicated and/or hard to pull off thing in TTRPGs was going to be worked in – things like characters having secrets they wilfully did not discover to preserve the fun, a system that ran perfectly, not instrusive but deep, a cast of beloved NPCs, passionate romances, spotlight-sharing narrative arcs.

All came to naught after about a month of poking at this because Penny Arcade published “Further Songs of Sorcelation” and the resulting ‘Wolfoids & Witchaloks” thread on the forum devoured all the creative bullshitting energies that were floating about. Better the wild forum thread in hand than the hypothetical … whatever this would have been.

I still feel I had an angle on something here; maybe someone with the vision and energy can steal the parts and forge them into something cool.